General British politics discussion thread

So you state that it's "just wrong" to state that Britain is a right wing country whilst simultaneously stating that "Research has shown that once certain left wing policies are removed from Labour, they're quite popular on their own merit." You're sort of defeating your own argument there.

You are, of course, entirely right. New Labour under Blair became Tory lite and in government implemented a lot of right wing Thatcherite neo-liberalist style policies. In fairness they did manage to implement some stuff from the left (minimum wage). Starmer is doing exactly the same with Labour 2024. As recently as March Reeves was pitching her reforms and herself as Labour's version of Thatcher.

On Starmer you seek "expertise, sound judgment and competence" which is interesting as Starmer has never spent a day in government and has only been an MP for 9 years. Nevertheless you're entitled to assume he may have those qualities. Yet the vast majority of UK voters don't. Boris Johnson brought the best result for the tories in a generation and most people interested in politics knew he was a buffoon. Your average voter has little interest in politics and ain't a good judge of character or competence.

"Ireland was going to be ejected from the EU any day now" - Well I certainly don't remember that.

To claim that the tory media have no effect on UK elections is naive to say the least. Prior to the 1997 election Blair travelled to Australia grovelling for Murdoch's support. In 2020 when Starmer was running for the Labour leadership he stated this in reference to The Sun: "I certainly won’t be giving any interviews to The Sun during the course of this campaign". In 2023 this became "I'm very happy to work with The Sun, to write for The Sun, to do interviews for The Sun"

Won't change a thing - the British are a nation of subjects not citizens - they want to be governed by Toffs.

The Tories have never once announced that they want to dismantle the NHS and yet they have been doing so since 30 years ago and the British public still believe that the Tories are safe hands to administer the NHS.

The British are not just subjects, they are victims of their own mentality.

You only have to look at the pair trooping to the food bank and declaring undying loyalty to the Tories.

My parents are cut from the very same cloth and I guarantee that they will vote Tory this time just like they have for thirty years. I suspect my Dad was once Labour voter but that died once he was bought off with shares from his employer British Telecom.

Johnson is not "unaccountably popular". As of March 2024, 70% of voters had an unfavourable opinion of Johnson, as comparied with 71% for Sunak. This made him more disliked than Nigel Farage (64%) and Jeremy Corbyn (65%). The only Tory who was even more unfavourable regarded was Liz Truss (81%).

There's a vocal segment on the Tory right who think fondly back to the dear, dead days of 2019 when right-wing batshittery could get an 80-seat majority, and they credit Boris Johnson for that. They talk about his return a lot. But they are wildly out of touch with the reality of public opinion in Britain. Johnson turned himself into electoral poison.

No. To regain power, the Tories need to move back towards the centre of British politics.

And I don't think they are going to do this to a sufficient degree in just one term. After they are whipped to a puree next month Sunak will resign and they will have to choose a new leader. Much depends on the makeup of the much-reduced Tory parliamentary party, which of course we can't know yet, but if history is anything to go by they are going to start out by hewing to the right, and only after they have cycled through one or two leaders from the right of the party wihout acheiving much traction will it dawn on them what they need to do. And I suspect by then they won't have enought time left to do it convincingly before the 2029 general election.

Tl;dr: I expect the Tories to suffer a crushing defeat in this election; the kind that leaves a party reeling; the kind that you don't recover from in just one term. Labour are a reasonable bet for at least two terms of government and, while anything might happen, at this point we have no reason to expect that either the election due in 2029 or the one after that will be accelated by any significant amount.

That was deliberate Tory mismanagement, and the brief period of Blair was no respite since they continued the privatisation by stealth.

The NHS is still one of the most efficient public health services in the world and a reversal of the deliberate mismanagement would solve a lot. God help the poor British public if the Tories ever achieve their ambition of a full private health system.

That's the plan, have them begging for an insurance based alternative. **** fools.

@ancapailldorcha Nobody else has copied it though. Europe (outside Ireland) seems to run
on insurance-based systems. That said, the idea of the NHS is a nice one
but it's impractical in a country with an ageing population which
resents increased taxation.

The NHS is still widely regarded as one of the greatest forward thinking and progressive institutions that Britain has ever created and bear in mind, it isn't even 80 years old.

That doesn't mean that either the NHS or our own national health service couldn't do with some serious study and reforms though. They absolutely can because they've been slowly getting cut to shreds over the years by vested interests that want to see them destroyed.

However the alternative, if the neo-liberal/right wing get their way, would be a bloody nightmare for both Britain and us. It wouldn't take long for our health services to end up resembling the nightmare that is the American system. That was the system Mary Harney was in favour of when she was responsible for ushering in the HSE in the first place and getting rid of the previous Health Board system 20 years ago. Luckily she didn't entirely get her way, but she was instrumental in creating the disastrous lumbering bureaucratic monster that the HSE is today.

Frankly we'd be better off going back to the health boards system we had in the first place.

Certainly both systems can do with some serious overhauls. But what their opposers want to place in their stead isn't the answer.

Harney was health minister in 2004. The HSE became a reality in 2005. She was very much at the head of it.

That doesn't let Martin or FF off the hook.