UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
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It's only a small victory, but I have some mild hope that it might kick Labour's arse into doing something more.
It's somewhat analogous to how many hoped that Mamdani's victory might shock the Democrats into actually listening to the strong demand for something other than the shit they've been peddling (though, much like the Democrats, the power structures within the Labour party are so entrenched that I wouldn't be surprised if they'd sooner let the entire party die than move the party even slightly left)
Something important to highlight is that because the UK uses First-Past-The-Post voting, both the Greens and Reform are severely underrepresented relative to their vote share. In the 2024 general election: Labour got 63% of seats, with 34% of the total vote Reform got 1% of seats with 14% of the vote Greens got 1% of seats with 6.4% of the vote.
Voters on both the left and right of Labour are pissed off at their refusal to do basically anything meaningful with their huge parliamentary majority. They've been making it easy for Reform's racist, reactionary rhetoric to gain even more footing — some have been saying that if Labour keeps this up, it'll become likely that the Prime Minister Keir Starmer will lose his job to Reform's Nigel Farage.
And then Labour make it worse by trying to copy the racist rhetoric, which validates Reform's claims of "the immigrants are why [jobs are shit/food prices are high/housing is fucked]", whilst also transparently being wet farts everything they do — so anyone who wants a scapegoat to blame are just going to be pushed further to Reform.
Most Reform politicians are disgusting bigots, but at this point, I probably respect them more than I do the top brass of Labour — at least Reform stands for something.
The best thing Labour could do to bolster their chances against Reform is to invest in progressive policies, because even if we could wave a magic wand and every immigrant in the UK was magically vanished, there would still be a severe housing crisis. Immigration isn't the problem — chronic underinvestment and privatisation of the country is.
I apologise — That got a bit longer than I expected. It was pretty cathartic to write though
I don't think Mamdani and such has been about moving the existing Democrats to the left. I think it's about proving leftist policies elect people and so it opens the door for new people to replace centrists both running within the party and independents. Existing Democrat cadres would emulate that only as last resort. Leftist policies are both populat and they work in taking money from the owner class and distributing it to people who work for a living. If the owner class lets too much of it getting traction within one of their parties, they risk the policies sticking and people demanding implementation. Which means loss of profit and wealth, which woud diminish their power in society, which could trigger more wealth loss, and so on - in a feedback loop. This is why they can't let their representatives flirt with leftist politics too much. Which is why I don't think the Mamdanis and Polanskis of the world are going for moving existing parties left. Rather they'd be replacing (some of) them. Not saying a move to the left in existing parties can't or won't happen but it'd be difficult and it'd happen after they've lost enough to force it.
Please don't apologize, the insight is much appreciated.
I try to keep up a bit with you guys because I'ma huge panelshow fan, and so I learn a bit from the fringes that way, but it's definitely hard for me to get nuance and detail, so things like this are nice. :)
Middle class politics enjoyers seem to have this detached take that Green are going to push Labour to the left. You don't get it. Labour are fucking dead. Green are the new Labour.
Good analysis