UK Politics Omnishambles: Page 143 - The Arsenal discussion forum and community: One more in the Tolly

UK Politics Omnishambles

Mirth

JazzG Just shows people either not bothering to show up to vote or willing to go to parties like Reform. When Labour won the election last year it was one of the lowest turnout in over a century IIRC. Reform don't actually really have any policies, they are going down the Keir Starmer router of just watching the other side implode and hoping they can just walk in!

Sure, but you can't extrapolate trends from council elections to a national election 4 years from now.

The paradox is that the weaker the Tories are, the worse it is for Labour as well.

JazzG

Mirth Shows the direction of travel, Reform were predicted to get at best 500 seats but more than 200, they have finished with with nearly 700. The main issues in this country Labour does not seem to have any real solution for. The Tories are in terminal decline so there is an opportunity for someone to fill that void.

awooga83 My point is the party went for a more 'extreme' candidate and then realised this was not going to work and had to go back to the old ways. If I was to put money on it the same will probably will happen if Reform came into power, people just don't trust the current mainstream parties.

Burnwinter I know you are a big fan but he genuinely was not popular with normal voters. You can keep thinking otherwise but my own experiences and many polls all say the same. I have mentioned before my inlaws are from the Midlands and my wifes whole family are diehard Labour supporters and they all couldn't stand Corbyn.

jones

Burnwinter I honestly can't wait for the day AfD are voted into power here, if I could bring myself to vote again I'd even give them mine

This fascist threat on the horizon bollocks is just tired at this point ffs. Two ways this plays out - more likely scenario is these animals control the government and on account of their endless ineptitude and idiocy they manage to for once evoke the right pictures in the minds of their disabled followers and fumble their support for good. Not even saying this because I despise them, their programme is so insane it's impossible even for their far right support in the media to whitewash into something that's not going to cause the economy to crash out.

Other scenario they do fuck up and the populace wants to crawl up their arse even further into full fledged fascism. At least we can then do away with the charade and I can go full meatwad on them

Mirth

JazzG Shows the direction of travel, Reform were predicted to get at best 500 seats but more than 200, they have finished with with nearly 700. The main issues in this country Labour does not seem to have any real solution for. The Tories are in terminal decline so there is an opportunity for someone to fill that void.

If you asked someone the direction of travel 5 years ago they'd tell you Boris Johnson would be PM for the next decade, Lib Dems would be dead and buried and Labour would never win a majority. Voters are definitely shifting preferences but that doesn't mean the winners/losers are set in stone.

Burnwinter

JazzG You can keep thinking otherwise but my own experiences and many polls all say the same.

I've cited the polls that say different. Historical, electoral and ideological conditions aside, one can't say it's an open and shut case the candidate who received 40% of the vote was "unelectable" next to the one who received 32.7%.

Starmer, who's done everything to be the "electable" one, has rubbish nett approval.

But this conversation wasn't about Corbyn's fitness for the leadership, nor about me "being a big fan" of his: I agreed he wasn't cut out for it and wasn't personally popular.

We were talking about the political uses of public support for social democratic policy such as public ownership of monopoly utilities.

Support is high for this kind of "socialist" policy, persistently high, across class and geographical boundaries. It's just perversely hard to implement it because democracy is rotten. It's a shame UK Labour is so feeble it'll still be bleeding from its left flank to a populist outfit such as Reform.

Coombs

People are idiots. Catering to them is stupid. They don't vote according to their material interests. Popularity is indicative of nothing. In fact, it's probably a red flag.

Burnwinter

Coombs They don't vote according to their material interests.

Prisoner's dilemma politics. You base your choices on the stakes and your model of the other prisoners. The prison is private property rights and the right to work for a wage. The table stakes at the prison casino start you off with a graduated lifetime of debt in order to lead a normal life. Even low doubt about others is corrosive to political solidarity and optimism.

jones

Coombs fully agree with this tho. I'm not going to turn and become a self serving piece of shit over the fact but when you have the chance to do something for people you can't ask them.

JazzG

Coombs People are idiots.

True dat.

jones You know what he means...

Mirth Direction of travel last year was Starmer would be PM for 10 years, the winds are changing and it isn't hard to see which way it is blowing.

Burnwinter As for your point about utilities, the problem in this country is always thinking about today and not tomorrow. The Utilities all need major upgrade and the government doesn't want to touch this. Easier to blame private companies than take responsibility and sort it. When government properly invest in infrastructure it will pay off. In London the Elizabeth line was seen as a bit of a waste of money a few years ago and now it is built people use it all the time and makes you think why we can't do more.

There is a debate to be had about how we go about building it, the huge amount of red tape is like a web that usually ends up trapping the government. The cynic in me thinks this is done on purpose and championed by the Treasury who basically don't want to fund shit. France for example get things done, this country once did as well. I'd support any government who just stopped fucking debating it and got shit done.

Coombs

maybe we don't need political solidarity or optimism. I'm more and more curious about a radical pessimism, family abolition, and freedom.

Burnwinter

Coombs Yeah I no longer sit in judgement of anyone—including either the average punter, you or me—who is pessimistic about the benefits of spending energy on "political struggle".

That choice seems pretty normal and rational.

But then that's why I doubt people are idiots quite as often as it may seem.

jones

Coombs "family abolition" say what?

Mirth

JazzG Direction of travel last year was Starmer would be PM for 10 years, the winds are changing and it isn't hard to see which way it is blowing.

That’s my point. Cycles are shortening - there’s no point playing out the 2029 elections now because there’s about 10 different internal and external factors that can impact which way the wind blows, not in the least the US elections of 2028. Meanwhile, internally, a lot of the current economic pressures are expected to ease up by then as well but obviously that can be derailed between now and then.

Coombs

JazzG You know what he means...

If you mean that I mean abolition in the Hegelian sense, i.e., aufhebung, or the sublation of the family into a dynamic socius where love, care, and kinship are always negotiated rather than sequestered to arbitrary, predetermined patriarchal political formations, and where the emergent properties of subaltern relations are imbued with legible social and cultural power that values such emergences at least as much as as the generational reproduction of the same, then yes, you know what he knows what I mean.

JazzG

Mirth

Not if they keep this up, I said this during the end of Sunak's time it was almost like they had money on the other side winning! The thing is Lucy Powell saying this isn't exactly a surprise, it seems like a commonly held view among the Labour Party.

Mirth

JazzG I think you overestimate how much the average voter is tuned into the shit MPs say until an election is called.

Big Willie Champ

Coombs you've been hanging out with @Burnwinter too much. Even ChatGPT kind of struggled to explain that to me.

jones

Coombs what would that look like and how would that help? Genuinely curious as I was with you up to that point - I don't see how dissolving traditional family concepts and replacing them with something negotiated (i.e. sublating a by and large unconditional entity with something that sounds transactional in nature) would help tackle any of the aforementioned problems.

Coombs

Big Willie Champ I'll wear it like a badge of honor.

Burnwinter

Big Willie Champ I found Comrade @Coombs remarkably lucid there, but by now I've experienced the incremental enablement of my thought and speech in, by and through the received expression of the subaltern properties with which he imbues our relations for literal bloody years mate.

Good news is we're each with our idiosyncrasies all already also adumbrations, surface effects, or consistent sense-making intensities of the immanent dialectical unfolding of an instance formed in judgement of just such a dynamic socius as the kind this bloody galah's carrying on about.

Big Willie Champ

Burnwinter I asked BurnGPT to provide a response. This is what it came up with

Ah, I see what you're getting at. Yes, there’s something quietly profound in how @Coombs navigates the terrain, making sense of the shifting currents beneath the surface. It's less about any single exchange, more the cumulative resonance of those moments, stacking up over time, slowly unlocking both articulation and self-understanding in ways that feel like small revolutions within a larger, less visible narrative. You’re right—each of us, in our quirks and missteps, already speaks volumes about the underlying structures that pulse through our exchanges. A series of microcosmic revelations, if you like, all connected by the same dialectical pulse, subtly reordering the conditions of possibility in the process. A kind of bottom-up cosmic recalibration, really. Quite the wild ride.

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