One of my brothers mates from Uni, Joe, is married to Wes Streeting.
They bought a couple of the spare tickets I had for Pulp in Sheffield a few years back. Had a couple of drinks with them before the gig and again after (also with the Sheffield MP (Louise something?) who was transport secretary for a bit at start of this parliament, though had no idea who she was at time).
No idea if any of this makes him a good PM.
Nothing to do with Streeting/Labour but I went to school with Keeler’s son. He’s spent a large part of the time since then working to get his mum’s name cleared.
Haigh. Louise that is
Looked like she was going to be a decent transport minister and I was pleased there was a Sheffield representative in the role, then it turned out she'd done a fake insurance claim for a £300 mobile phone ten years ago and she was never seen again.
I know it's kind of the point, but this sort of activity is on a really different scale to the Tories.
If they offered to buy you a drink for sorting the tickets I sincerely hope you turned it down, otherwise I am firmly in Team: Art
Tickets were sold on at face value.
And I recall buying a round in a pub opposite the arena after the gig, which for half dozen people or so cost about the same as a pint in London.
If there is a leadership election my understanding is it goes to the membership. The membership that returned Corbyn and is currently frothing that Labour is to centerist. If she runs she'll be well in with a shout. If she wins we're all fucked.
Stick with the current guy for me.
People who would never vote Labour are often full of suggestions as to how Labour should become more electable, and it's almost always "be more Tory"
And that after voting for ever more dissolute Tories.
1) I have in the past voted for each of the 3 main parties.
2) The only times in my lifetime Labour have been electable, i.e. got elected, is with candidates who occupy the middle ground
3) The time before that the unions were in charge and no one had an electricity for half the week
You come across as more than median RW for this place, and if you can vote for all 3 then it shows they've all been further Right than is healthy. So it's very self-fulfilling.
But I don't blame you so much as the media, if that helps.
I don't have a problem with people making an honest choice about what is best for the society in which they live. Unless their judgement of that involves 'reform', in which case they are a fucking idiot who shouldn't be in charge of a pencil.
Personally I find the propoganda that pushes people into a view that nodody should pay for something they don't use, and using the cost of everything (and not appreciating it's value) as a tool to diminish social capital is bonkers. So at the point that I'm ill I should fund a private health service, I want to go and visit my brother on the south coast, so I should build a road to there? Utter fucking madness. Our wealth and prosperity is built on the access to infrastructure and services that we collectively fund, and our standard of living intrinsically linked to the social and structural environment in which we live. If someone wants you to live in a shack, and have to pay a third party provider for every breath, they haven't got your best interests at heart.
The view of the current government (which I have to hold my nose over, because it's not where I would want to be politically) is competent stable and moderate, and the perception in which it is held is entirely framed by those forces who would diminish us. What would the previous conservatives governments have looked like subjected to the same scrutiny? What do reform actually look like, if you have more than a one eyed view about them? The notion that exploitative on demand pricing, or a market that uses every excuse to push up prices (and slow to respond to a reduced cost base), that has taken control of our social capital to exploit it, but does not invest in our future capital, without any joined up thinking, as the answer to any of our day to day problems is not supported by logical analysis.
Stamers government is attempting to be beyond criticism (which is why a lot of the arguments to undermine it are so thin). I don't much like it, but it's the most socially inclusive option in the current atmosphere of febrile fascism - designed to divide on every issue. At least it's fixing some of the things that have been very broken, like the roads.
We are going to have to think objectively, and gather together on a social level to resist those who would harm us, or we are fucked.
Think your post was good! What bothers me is what needs to happen to move away from the environment you describe above?
The EU digital soverignty initiatives that are being funded, and holding corporate oligarchy to account (and to provide individuals real independence from that), is a good start.
We are so lucky to be able to pull together as a society, but also with other like minded societies with complinmentary values, to resist the opression of fascist organisations making us impotent and dependent on them.
Oh.
Don't know anything of Streeting's policy ideas, but based on knowledge of what he's talked about previously and the groups he talks to, he's definitely on the right of the party. My fear would be that he takes the Starmer policies and tries to polish him. They aren't too far apart politically, and I can't see how a polished turd is much better than a tarnished turd.
The reasons n Burnham is so favoured is that he has a strong record of success in his current role and would, possibly, be more willing to make investments where necessary. Starmer is a decent man, but he's a woeful politician with a non-functional political antennae. Elected with a massive majority (albeit a very low vote share - the most disproportionate election result in history), he could really have made a difference.
Instead we got an absolute cluster fuck of shit policies in the vital first three months, most of which rolled back pretty quickly. Perhaps the thought was to get the bad news out early in the lifecycle of the parliament, but all he achieved was a record slump in approval ratings.
Streeting has a better public persona, but does he anything else to offer? Labour has actually done some good things so far, but its all been buried in shit. Blair had a similar majority and look what he achieved in the first year; the difference is that Blair knew he had a large enough majority to include left wingers in both the party and cabinet. As for Starmer, he goes for the purge. His last reshuffle actually brought in more MPs from the right of the party than previously, so he's terrified of any input from the centre and left.
As a result we have economic policies that are not much different from the Tories. The trains are being nationalised (although with so much football I've not really kept up; are the companies that own and lease out the trains also being done away with? or is it nationalisation of only the operating companies, in which case it's a half-arsed measure). The nationalisation of British Steel makes sense in the current geopolitical environment, and the Tories may have done the same (although Farage would let it go bust of course).
The biggest issue that is shared with the Tories is immigration of course. Interestingly, Labour lost only a sliver of support to Reform in the local elections, with most of the votes going to the Greens, so there's no votes to be had from ever more hardline policies. Reform's biggest vote gains came from those who previously did not vote; clearly the idiots have finally worked out that if enough of them vote they can make a difference, even in a shitty, FPTP quasi-democracy.
If Streeting stands I'm far from certain that I'd vote for him. A polished turd will not go on to restore Labour's poll position. I'm all for Burnham, but that route is currently blocked. If Streeting wins then I think it's curtains for Labour in the next election, Burnham would at least stand a chance, but Starmer blocking him from standing in the recent by-election has scuppered him. Although Labour lost to the Greens, with Burnham as the candidate they probably would have won.
As for Rayner, no. No chance with a recent tax scandal; it is expected of the Tories (although it did lead to the downfall of the chancellor who lasted ten minutes whose name I've forgotten), but Labour are held to higher standards. If it's a three-way fight then I suspect Starmer wins. Labour uses preferential voting for elections, and Streeting voters would seem more likely to have Starmer as second choice, as are Raynor voters, so Starmer would likely win on the second count. In the last ballot I went for Nandy first and Starmer second and didn't put a number against Rebecca Wrong Daly. Raynor may stand as the candidate of the left, but she wouldn't have my vote. I'm not sure I'd even vote given the three choices to be honest.
Tinkering at the edges will do nothing to address underlying issues in the economy. We need vast investment in infrastructure and there are no plans to do this. During COVID I said that we should have issued COVID bonds similar to the WWII bonds that were perpetual, paying small interest and gradually inflating away (Osborne paid the last of the WWII bonds in the 2010s).
In addition, the BoE needs to stop selling off the pile of bonds it accumulated following the 2008 crash through QE. We are the only major economy who is releasing this debt to the open market and it is costing the treasury enormously. This debt was issued and bought by the BoE when interest rates were historically low, and therefore the bond prices were high (inverse relationship between price and yield on bonds). As the BoE sells these bonds at far higher interest rates, they lose a lot of money as the price is far lower. Some calculations out these loses in the order of £50bn and counting.
These costs come out of the treasury and form part of the deficit. It also pulls cash from the economy and forces up interest rates. They should have been rolled over to perpetual bonds when rates were low; inflation would already have reduced their value by around 15-20% and at interest rates of around 1% you can only think we missed a massive opportunity to invest in crumbling infrastructure.
Anyway, maybe Streeting will prove a pleasant surprise.
They didn't have electricity under the Tories either, and the Heath dash for growth led to 27% inflation. But, it's easy to skirt over the fact that the economy has consistently grown more strongly under Labour than the Tories, and public debt has been lower at the end of Labour governments than those of the Tories. The Tory economic competence story is a myth.
Personally I think it's a madness to try to destabilise a functioning government at this point in it's tenure. It will be interesting when, many years from now, we learn which malign foreign power was behind it.
I don't think there's a foreign power behind this one. Starmer is a technocrat who has struggled hugely in the top job. Let's be fair: he only won the election because he was the least bad option for many voters. He is no Blair, and had no vision for what his government would be. Blair made some blunders, but he introduced radical policies in his first year: minimum wage, BoE independence and large increases in education funding. What did Starmer do? Tried to remove winter fuel payments from pensioners. Whatever your opinion on the payments, it was very poor politics. Get your big wins out there and bury the bad news in the shit. Starmer has been his own worst enemy.
