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.

novara used to be great on resonance fm but they've really been scraping the barrel the last couple of years with conspiracy fantasists and clowns like piker, whose methods they now seem to have adopted because populism

also this is a midterm government that it getting through the unpopular stuff and haven't wheeled out their election winning policies

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.

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.

Systems often get hijacked.

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.

No. They used to be, but rebranded in the 90s to New Labour and changed one of their founding principles of seeking common ownership of the means of production, thereby no longer being a leftist party.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clause_IV

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Labour

They follow what is referred to as the Third Way. Not socialism, but capitalism light. This was established under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown from 1997 to 2010 and has continued under Keir Starmer since 2024.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premiership_of_Keir_Starmer

Starmer's third way is a bit different from Blair's. They pretend to be socialist at times, unlike Blair, and have returned to the old name of just Labour instead of New Labour. Some nationalisation has happened, but this is more becuase of necessity and political pragmatism than leftist principles. They're a duplicitous party, which performs token amounts of progressivism and bigs it up in their marketing while simultaneously taking a conservative stance the majority of the time. Put simply, they're a right wing party which pretends to be left to gain the public's support.

Hmmmm they kinda motioned they were for a long time. Personally they just had different messaging whilst keeping people down. But then when a socialist that lived in a council house came along they didn’t like him. They actually really like businessmen and keeping people in poverty the people in poverty think labour look after them.

Or MSZP in Hungary. The SZ was supposed to mean szocialista (socialist), best we got were Blairite/Clintonite shit imported. That party was so bad the far-right called health care privatization "communism" in response to them.