Liberals
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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IMO the issue is that Tony Blair so comprehensively changed politics that parties can't win elections in the UK anymore from a leftwing platform. The alternative is that the government/Starmer are sitting there being told that a leftward move is significantly more popular than their current platform, and that they are - suicidally - ignoring that evidence due to ideology.
How would one square the implicit suggestion that Starmer is taking bold ideological stances with the fact that the one thing everyone agrees about him is he lacks a clear ideology?
parties can’t win elections in the UK anymore from a leftwing platform
How would we know? Which party with more than a couple of percentage points of the vote has actually run an even slightly leftwing campaign since Blair and Brown? The only one I can think of is Corbyn, and he was sabotaged by his own MPs and the party apparatchiks who would (somewhat like the article) rather lose than allow anyone with even vaguely leftist policies to win.
We can't know for sure. My point was that logically they'd be following what their internal polling / researchers are telling them.
It’s not as if the left was doing brilliantly during the Kinnock years. Or the Corbyn era.
I said this from the start, there was never any chance for Burnham to become a Labour MP as he is so clearly an automatic threat to Starmer. It's just like BoJo all over again, they can't be having anyone effective in the party, as that would ruin the fun.
It's still amazing that the labour government is refusing to court the left. Labour. What a weird fucking world.
For some bizarre reason they have decided that they need to appeal to reform voters as if they would ever vote for anyone else. Labour strategist are clearly terrible.
Sounds like the DNC in the US
And it's for the same reasons. They rely on rich donors, and don't want to alienate them by doing anything that might actually benefit people who work for a living.
appeal to rich voters
FTFY
This is how the US ended up fascist.
The population continued to move to the left, the leftish party would only court the right. The further right party won.
Evidently the whole population didn't move left because he won his second term with a popular majority.
I can understand parties triangulate because the center are where most of the reliable voters are. As you go further out both left and right it gets harder to maintain an electoral c coalition.
Only if you live in reality and not inside your own head.
Only if you make the assumption of a unimodal distribution of voters does that logic hold.
And that assumption clearly hasn't held. It's a convenient but wrong assumption that voters follow a left to right distribution centered on a mean. But it's not realistic and never has been.
People are complex and their motivations are complex, which results in a peaky, multidimensional distribution along separate often orthogonal axis.
If you try and target a "center of mass" in this scenario, you'll often hit a void of policy positions no one particularly likes, empty space.
It's like if 50 percent of voter want to go to Brussels, and 50 percent want to go to Paris and you propose Rancourt as a compromise solution, you get no one's vote because no one asked for that.
But... doesn't that multimodal distribution of topics/ethics still resolve to a unimodal Red/Blue vote in the end? In the end, it was an overall red-shift no?
No. When looking at a shadow of a bird flying, you can't understand how the bird is really moving.
In this case, the "centre-left" isn't engaging on the issues that people face day to day. The right parties engage with them, but give fascist solutions. The fact that the problem is acknowledged attracts some people. Others it pushes to not vote. It looks like the population is moving right, but it actually that the electorate isn't representable by the options available.
The fact that the problem is acknowledged attracts some people.
The "problems" the fascists claim to address are often fabricated by, or exacerbated by, the very same fascists. Small boats: irrelevant. Sharia-law-controlled no-go zones: fiction. Immigrants taking yer jerbs: a malicious lie. And the underlying reality is that all those "issues" are racist dogwhistles.
It's a fallacy to assert that gullible, low-information, brainwashed voters believe what they do because of legitimate grievances. They parrot what they're told, and don't have the critical thinking abilities needed to realise that they're being manipulated.
Fascists don't get in by telling the truth on behalf of underserved groups. That's their narrative, but like all fascist narratives, it's a self-serving lie.
Trump addressed the cost of living in his campaign. Some people voted for him because he said he'd do something about it.
He'll make the problem worse, but he won votes because he talked about it.
but it actually that the electorate isn’t representable by the options available.
Bring on direct democracy. If our representives don't represent us, we should get rid of the position.
Personally I'd like better representation.
The problem with direct democracy is that you can't expect everyone to be knowledgeable on every topic whilst they go on living their normal life. A full time representative can spend time researching, or having advisors research. In theory they could be better informed than the public.
They're not, but in theory they could be.
No elected representative can ever be knowledgeable on every subject that they have to address. Most legislators are trained as lawyers because lawyers have to be good at faking it.
No, it's because lawyers can be expected to know how laws work. You kind of want that from someone who writes laws.
Which actually points to how the EU is structured. The unelected bureaucrats of the European Commission are in fact lawyers selected by each of the member states, they are selected on merit for their skill and they write the proposed EU regulations. These are then voted on by the democratically elected representatives of the European Parliament. The goal being to have professionals write functional laws but ultimately have them put in force through democratic means.
Still, the major problem with the EU is the way represntatives behave and are voted for. People all too easily neglect voting in the EU, or vote for joke/sensationalist parties that are even less likely to actually represent the people.
Frankly, I think for better or worse a direct democracy would do away with these issues. People might not know about every matter, but they'll certainly feel the consequence - and they won't be able to hide behind their representative screwing things up, it will be their own fault. They'll learn soon enough and there'll be much more accountability all round.
But in practice they aren't. In practice a represntative is swayed by people with money to go against the people they represent.
There would be little to no opportunity for that in a direct democracy. Lobbyists can't bribe everyone, it wouldn't be cost effective. Meanwhile people will have no choice but to educate themselves, as they'll feel the effects of their votes directly and won't be able to hide behind the (sometime inevitable) betrayal of the person they voted for. Even if people are lied to and convinced to vote another way, there's a huge difference between "You lied to me and didn't do what you said you'd do" and "You lied to me and got me to do something I didn't want to do", and generally there should be more accountability.
You'd be at the whim of every social media fad. Musk and Bezos would set the agenda even more than today.
Hard disagree.
But you can clearly sense that the bird is flapping, because that is the one feature from the handful that is represented strongest in the shadow.
The working poor worried about their jobs is a frequent point every election and xenophobia is a cultural trait that has only recently been carpeted over these last few decades.
Both sides did try to appeal to this either in a "we'll guarantee your livelihood with taxes and welfare" or "we'll guarantee your livelihood by (aggressively) reducing foreign labour". The messages were there, but the media spun one narrative far better and the masses readily swallowed it, giving in to their latent fears. To me, that's a clear right-shift
I think that still fits in with what @wewbull@feddit.uk is saying. There is a right shift in votes because of extensive promotion by the media, which acknowledges the problem but offers a fascist solution, which is picked up by some voters. However other voters are disenfranchised and end up not voting. The overall shift in votes is to the right but the population itself is not right wing, the votes are not representative of the population because those who disagree don't vote for alternatives and instead don't vote at all.
There's also a relentless propaganda effort to convince voters to abstain from voting unless there's a party that exactly matches their views in every aspect of the party's manifesto. If they fail one narrow single-issue purity test, of if their leader looks funny while eating a sandwich: game over.
If both the major parties are wrong on an issue, I ask which one is more likely to do a U-turn. You can never have everything in a democracy. But then, in an authoritarian system, you'll probably get nothing but a boot in the face. Some people might think those are somehow equivalent. I don't.
Oh that's fair, I didn't really consider the ones who did not vote
...because you were looking at the shadow.
I'm getting real tired of your damn shadow puppets, Plato :-)
Fair. :-)
The purpose of a system is what it does.
Systems often get hijacked.
Thoughts on these comments from Labour MPs? Source.
One MP [said] if Burnham "acts like a team player he'd be valuable". But they cautioned: "If he's a grandstanding dickhead the melodrama will be a pain in the arse."
Another MP:
the country would never forgive us for doing exactly what the Tories did in changing leaders
Re: the 2nd quote, I can definitely see it being a problem if Labour can't remind the electorate about Tory chaos (without being accused of hipocracy). Optimistically, Tory chaos rhetoric has two functions: alleviates "buyer's remorse" in people who voted Labour; and it throws more mud at the toxic Tory brand, driving their voters to Reform. If they can deploy it properly then they'll get another majority as the right's vote is split within constituencies, leaving the Labour candidate as the winner under our FPTP system.