steeznson comments on Labour Would Rather Lose Elections Than Give an Inch to the Left

UK Politics

5,747 readers

871 active

154 users here now

General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

founded 3 years ago

moderators

[–] steeznson@lemmy.world 1 point 9 months ago (4 children)

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?

permalink

fedilink

source

hideshow 4 child comments

[–] phutatorius@lemmy.zip 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

hideshow 2 child comments

[–] steeznson@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

We can't know for sure. My point was that logically they'd be following what their internal polling / researchers are telling them.

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

hideshow 1 child comment

[–] phutatorius@lemmy.zip 1 point 9 months ago

Yeah, I think it's more that they want those fat donor cheques and are doing contortions with polling data to come up with the policies those donors want.