General British politics discussion thread

I presume shakey start comment refers to Labour forming the UK government? I took a snapshot of the graph in the wikipedia link since May 2024 (nearly two years ago!). The yellow line is the SNP and the red line is Labour

Labour continue to dig their own hole here - Robbins was sacked for following the rules

New Labour Advert about reform just dropped, cannot wait to hear the howls from reform about this.

The thing is, none of what was said in that ad will be of any concern to Reform voters because that's what they are in favour of. But I suppose it isn't aimed at them anyway.

Bizarrely, a lot of those Reform voters live in run down areas that don't even have many immigrants. Imagine blaming immigrants for everything and you scarcely even see one from day to day.

Perhaps. But that ad isn't going to change the minds of people like that.

This is a problem when you have a set of the voting public who vote for a certain type of politics because they think that the other side are lying when they warn of the consequences of voting a certain way. And when it comes to pass that what the other side were saying is actually a fact, they'll then pivot to the narrative that the bad shit that's happening must be the fault of the other side somehow.

In the first couple of weeks after Labour got in, I had a some conversations with a few Tory voters who were complaining about the state of the UK. I pointed out that it was that way because of 12 years of Tory misrule. They then tried to make it that it was "left wing" policies that the Conservative Party followed that had the country in a mess. So, magically, in their heads it was "the left" that was at fault for the UK's woes. At least one of them was pushing for Nigel because he felt that there were too many brown people walking down his street.

You can't reach people like that. Not with reasoning, not with logical argumentation and certainly not with ads.

Pity they weren't doing this for last year's locals instead of Keir's dismal Enoch Powell 'island of strangers' cosplay.

I admit it's good. I actually thought it was more like something the Greens would come up with.

Well, that's not only a "better" explanation, it's the only explanation. There's no controversy about this.

Labour is now pretty much a soft Neoliberal entity, much like most of the western world's governments in modern times, while the Cons are lurching further and further into hard right territory in order to try and compete with the far right Reform, whom they're bleeding support to.

Gone are the days of Labour being a left wing party though. That damage was already well set in with Blair (and look what he's become) and it's being further eroded by Starmer's lot.

As for standing for something, Starmer himself stands for nothing and his Labour Party reflect that. I think he's been one of the most ineffectual PM's in my lifetime because of it. Now, is he as bad as Boris Johnson or Lettuce Liz or indeed any Conservative leader from Cameron onwards? No, of course not and nobody serious would venture into such territory. But it's clear that this Labour Party has been an absolute shambles so far and the low satisfaction of the UK public with them clearly show that.

Annihilating the Labour Left was actually a terrible mistake. Like them or loathe them, whether you agreed with them or strongly disagreed, they were passionate in what they believed in, actually stood for something and gave the party a sense of identity (whilst co-existing with other more moderate factions).

Labour becoming a pro-Israel and anti-immigration party under Starmer and his cabinet is shocking stuff - it would be like the Tories trying to rebrand themselves as left wing, without explicitly using the term.

As for Starmer, nobody has a clue what the guy stands for or what he believes in. He actually does seem to be firmly in the Zionist wing of the party though and not just there for performative or opportunistic reasons. Probably the one really good thing he has done is falling out with Trump, but it won't help him or the party (nobody likes Trump at this point).

You are all over the place - Labour did win the majority of the seats in Scotland at the last UK wide election (along with the swing to Labour across Britain). What were the numbers for the previous elections? Current polling does not look good for Labour at all. You do realise that the election on the 7th May is not a UK wide election but an election to the Scottish parliament where Labour are struggling to become the third largest party.