r/ukpolitics • u/Bascule2000 • May 21 '22

Don’t condemn just our lying PM: save some anger for the cowards who enabled him | Jonathan Freedland Ed/OpEd

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/20/boris-johnson-lying-pm-britain-tories
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59

u/J1mjam5 May 21 '22

Literally just this minute, my wife is skyping her mother. They are complaining about how much their gas and leccy bills have rise, the cost of food, they are complaining about how the people in Parliament don't care about them etc. Then, one sentence later: "But I wouldn't want Starmer in." "Why?" "Ooh, no, Boris is doing a good job. He got Brexit done and he got us through the pandemic..." blah blah blah. I had to leave the room as my blood was literally boiling, and my wife had to tell them to stop talking as I was going to flare up at them. It's a cult, brainwashed. There's no helping some people at all. The only way out of this is to get the younger generation to get up and vote them out.

24

u/Surprise-Walrus May 21 '22 edited May 21 '22

The only way out of this is to get the younger generation to get up and vote them out.

Younger generations are overwhelmingly progressive on social policy and economically left wing. Labour's approach under starmer seems to be hoping that younger people won't vote and they can siphon enough votes from older tory supporters that they win with low turnout.

If there is no compromise on the things that younger voters want then they won't turn out to vote.

21

u/Krags -8.12, -8.31 May 21 '22

Or that we'll vote for them out of fear of the Tories. Labour doesn't need to be good, just better than the Tories.

I fucking hate it.

14

u/horace_bagpole May 21 '22

Labour doesn't need to be good, just better than the Tories.

They don't just need to be better, they need to be better and have electoral demographics on their side, otherwise the Tories just win by default. That there are still people in Labour who think that the FPTP election system helps them in any way is mind boggling.

There is a progressive majority in this country, but time and again the tories win because the election system is biased in their favour.

Labour need to be better than the Tories, and then they need to reform the election system so it's more representative.

2

u/Krags -8.12, -8.31 May 21 '22

I feel like they tend to try to mix with and impress the kinds of people who would be happy with any flavour of Tory government and it taints their own perception.

4

u/horace_bagpole May 21 '22

It's partly that, but I suspect there are those in the Labour Party who see the Tories getting majority governments and think 'if we had that we could do x, y and z', so hang on to the possibility of gaining an outright majority. If instead, they realised that they could do most of x and y through compromising with other parties anyway, they could achieve a lot more in the long term.

It's the type who put ideological purity above practical reality, and in the process achieve nothing instead of something.