British Politics

Starmer is centre right. Supports privatisation, including parts of the NHS; pro PFI instead of borrowing to invest, etc.

You’re to the right of him.

Libs are classic centrists.

what a ****ing surprise"

right wing piece of shite

idk who this **** thinks he is. He was never more than a good communicator of other people’s generally bad ideas. Success went to his head with its effects even undiminished by high profile failures.

Another very good example of why we need to dismantle private education. Its pupils have cost the country very, very dearly over the decades.

he thinks he is is till a very significant political figure

and he is right. He is still infecting everything and played a huge part in 'changed labour'.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

The SNP's current leader and deputy leader are both centre right politicians. They won't be driving anyone leftwards, maybe in rhetoric they will among the Westminster group but as ever follow their actions not their words.

Agree. His gov throwing out 'racist' whenever anyone was concerned about immigration, and supporting an EU project that focussed on allowing easy flow of cheap labour rather than levelling up every country to have a similar living standard etc is the root of so many problems.

I am hoping this gov have enough nous not to throw 'racist' whenever someone raises immigration concerns and actually do something/enough to throttle reform.

So I kind of agree with Blair here, which I hate.

The whole solution for worldwide immigration and asylum problems is for the US to open its borders again, which would also see its economy skyrocket, having positive effects elsewhere. But that isn't going to happen.

I don't think immigration levels are really a problem here, or wouldn't be if the tax revenues it brings in were spent on housing, infrastructure and public services including services to help arrivals integrate. I do hear native Brits complaining that immigrants stick to themselves and don't mix but that's hardly surprising considering they're given **** all support in the community and are expected just to "get on with it", and I take solace in native Brits wanting to mix.

Most Western countries have 10 to 15% deplorable racists but I don't think the level of hatred here is higher than anywhere else.

Again, I mostly agree. I don't see immigration as a problem as long as there is investment in the areas affected.

I do see a problem with Reform and Farage exploiting it tho.

Just looking at the result of my own constituency here and the swings last week were massive.

Labour were previously 3rd with a 14.1% vote share, behind the SNP and the Conservatives. They won the seat taking 43.7% of the vote share, more than the SNP and Conservatives combined (they were 81% combined at the last election and are down to 42%). They also almost tripled the number of actual votes they received as well.

To the privileged, equality feels like oppression.

Party leaders getting arrested will do that, I guess. But the exposure suffered by any party in government tends to be damaging, and the SNP in Scotland are getting the same adverse reaction as the Conservatives in England. (Though in the SNP's case, trying to put a convicted double rapist in a women's prison, and being quite ridiculously unable to answer the question as to what sex the double rapist actually is, may not help, and this problem arose largely because PR in Scotland allowed the Green tail to wag the SNP dog.)

this is amazing start to finish. i know half an hour is a lot to ask but do it

bonus points if you can timestamp where he tells us that he gave it to them hard and fast, and where he calls himself a c word

Quoting my own post here as there's a timely article in the New Statesment today. The whole article is decent but I've bolded the appropriate part that applies to the above post.

The SNP’s uncivil war

Scores are being settled inside the party after its electoral humiliation by Scottish Labour.

By Chris Deerin

It was only in May that John Swinney launched his bid to become SNP leader with the words: “I want to unite the SNP and unite Scotland for independence.”

Both are currently looking like forlorn ambitions. The party’s rout in the general election, where it was reduced from 48 seats to a mere nine, has taken independence off the agenda. And that dreadful result has been followed by a vicious bloodletting, including calls for Swinney’s resignation. The air is thick with the sound of scores being publicly settled.

The SNP is not a happy place. Alex Neil, the former Scottish health secretary, demanded Swinney step down before the party conference in the autumn, to be replaced by a team of Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes and Westminster leader Stephen Flynn. “They would be a great joint ticket,” said Neil.

If, Neil aside, calls for Swinney to be removed remain muted, that is because he has only been in post for a few months. Given the hand he was dealt – plummeting poll ratings, a police investigation and a mediocre record in government – the SNP was always going to face a tough outcome on 4 July.

But still, the result was much poorer than expected. Scottish Labour has surged to the front of Scottish politics, winning 37 of the country’s 57 seats, up from just one in 2019. The momentum is now with leader Anas Sarwar ahead of the campaign for Holyrood in 2026.

Further, the SNP have effectively been expelled from the central belt, which is Scotland’s main population centre. It now holds no Westminster seats in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Fife or Ayrshire. It lost, too, in Stirling and Falkirk. This is hardly a promising platform on which to retain power in Edinburgh. And by then it will have been in office for almost two decades.

Another problem facing Swinney is his closeness to Nicola Sturgeon. The nature of her leadership, her departure and the state in which she left the SNP is a source of intense anger for many.

Nor has Sturgeon managed her post-leadership phase well. Rather than step back and stay quiet, she has launched herself into the public eye, even as the police probe into party funds has continued, with her husband, former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, charged with embezzlement.

It’s clear that Sturgeon made a mistake in agreeing to appear as an analyst on ITV’s election night coverage, alongside George Osborne and Ed Balls. She seemed out of place and defensive, responding weakly as seat after seat fell to the SNP’s opponents. Her unwillingness to accept her central role in the party’s decline is an increasing source of contention.

There needs to be a reckoning, whether Sturgeon wants one or not. In an open letter to party members this week, Jim Sillars, the respected former SNP deputy leader, described her as “Stalin’s wee sister”. He wrote that “July was inevitable given how the Sturgeon/Swinney era misled the movement, lost its common sense in government, promoted marginal issues as national priorities while the real priorities of the people such as education, housing, NHS, infrastructure, were notable only for the staggering level of incompetence with which they were dealt with.

Sillars added: “Whether the leadership has the grace to repent is of no matter. It is a busted flush. The people have no regard for them.”

Ousted MP Joanna Cherry, a high-profile critic of Sturgeon, was equally scathing following her defeat. “People who really want independence feel we dropped the ball,” she said. “People who don’t want independence but voted for us because we had competence and governed with integrity feel we’ve lost our competence and there’s a question mark over our integrity.” Swinney, she added, “has not steadied the ship: the ship has gone down.”

That central issue of independence is now the SNP’s biggest problem. In the aftermath of defeat, Swinney admitted his party would have to urgently rethink how it was selling the plan to Scots – it would “need to take time to consider and to reflect on how we deliver our commitment to independence”.

The problem is, though, that Scots simply aren’t buying right now. Their priorities, as elsewhere in the UK, are the economy and the NHS. Talk of a bright new future under independence sounds more outlandish than ever – it is irrelevant to voters’ current needs.

The challenge facing Swinney and his team is a big one, and perhaps insurmountable. Amid the loud chorus of internal discontent, and with many significant names gone after the general election, they must somehow build a case for 2026 that acknowledges their failures, continues to promote independence in some form, and offers an agenda that can attract back those voters who have defected to Labour.

The earliest opportunity will come in the autumn, when Swinney will set out his first programme for government. Forbes told me recently that the core of this will be “less writing, more doing”. Private finance, she said, would have to be the answer in areas such as net zero and affordable housing. High levels of inactivity in the jobs market will be tackled. There will also be a heightened focus on growing tech start-ups, and it will be made easier for domestic and foreign investors to enter the Scottish economy.

None of this solves the independence conundrum, of course. The SNP’s core belief is currently a political burden. The party can’t stop talking about it, but it risks seeming ever more remote from an electorate that believes now is not the time.

Finding a way to reconcile all this would tax any political operator. In such difficult conditions, with a party in open revolt around him, the odds are long that Swinney can find the answer. In truth, it’s not even clear there is one.

Figures

Average (white) working class person is economically centre left and also a social conservative. It is interesting none of the major parties are particularly appealing to that. Perhaps Reform will shift leftwards economically but probably Farage is too much of a Thatcherite.

i learned today that if you subtract the London generated GDP per capita from ENG'S GDP per capita, you're left w the equivalent of the GDP per capita of Mississippi

for those not familiar w the U.S. state of Mississippi, that ain't good

That stat just shows how well the US is doing rather than UK doing particularly badly.

It's some of both, as anyone who's spent time inside and outside London knows.

One visiting American described London as a first class capital city attached to a third rate country.

So this is the ever unctuous Graham Brady's replacement as chair of the 1922 Committee.

Serial expense claim fiddling and outmoded right wing ideas. Sounds perfectly in-tune with backbenchers.

Labour's vote share is now more efficiently distributed. And Corbyn lost in 2017, despite May running the worst general-election campaign in British history. Corbyn failed as leader, and was always going to fail. He wasn't cut out for the job and he didn't even like it, because he couldn't stand the interviews, or the decisions required of him. He can only function in his North London posh-Stalinist niche where everyone thinks he's lovely and flatters him in the manner to which he is accustomed. Corbyn then lost catastrophically in 2019, because by that time the wider public had found out who he was and what he was like, and they were very much not in favour.