#Tory vs Labour

[easterneyenews]

Sunak and Starmer launch ‘personal attacks’ in final debate

PRIME MINISTER Rishi Sunak and Labour leader Keir Starmer went head-to-head on Wednesday (26) in their last debate before an election next week, with both launching highly personal attacks over their and their parties’ credibility.With Sunak’s Tories trailing Labour by around 20 points in the polls, the prime minister went on the attack, accusing Starmer of not being straight with the country on migration, tax and women’s rights, and urging voters not to “surrender” to the Labour.Starmer responded that Sunak was too rich to understand the concerns of most ordinary Britons. A snap YouGov poll said the debate had been a tie, with both on 50%.

[guttersvoice]

saw someone tag one of those posts about how great it is that canada and australia have had big left leans in their voters and gotten their left parties into power with something along the lines of 'you next uk' and i had to sit sadly for a moment like. damn idk how to break this to you

[ailedhoo]

Credit to @notthertenews

[veradragonjedi]

I don't know who to vote for either. The Greens are transphobes, the LibDems are... Like That.

We're utterly lost.

It's all well and good to critique the UK government, but when you say shit like "fuck the UK," and then Don't give us a better option other than just Don't Fucking Vote, it doesn't help anyone at all. The citizens are still stranded here. We can't just bloody leave.

[voxpeople]

In Short: Post Office Pledges Give Tories Lead in Polls by 100%

A recent poll shows that pledges made by the Conservative party and leader Rish! Sunak to ensure justice for those effected by the Post Office Horizon scandal now sees them with an unassailable lead of 100% over Labour.

This comes in stark contrast to their declining popularity and public outrage in the party after numerous scandals and shortcomings since being returned to office in 2019.

These numbers show newfound overwhelming public approval in the current government and the Conservatives now look to retain and even improve their majority in this year's general election.

[ayeforscotland]

You mentioned that you don't think the UK is working for anyone in it. Does this include England?

(Not intended as a "gotcha," I'm from elsewhere in the world and would genuinely like to learn more about the situation/your opinion.)

It absolutely does include England.

England doesn’t have its own Parliament because it’s all seen as being at ‘UK level’ so communities and constituencies get ignored.

England’s lack of decentralisation makes it harder for other parties to gain a foothold in any sort of local politics as everything is funnelled through the two party system of Tories vs Labour.

The UK breaking up wouldn’t be an end to cooperation between the countries here. At the moment the two parties can point fingers and blame the dastardly SNP or Plaid Cymru for agitating the balance of politics.

If the UK weren’t to exist, England would hopefully get to have a moment of self-reflection and decide what country it wants to be.

[sophie-frm-mars]

Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher's greatest success, shifted the image of the labour party into the chic neoliberal image obsessed world of PR politics where symbolism and focus groups reign supreme. Electoral politics has been a bourgeois world of distraction and suppression of working class radicalism since its inception, but the move that Blair brought to UK politics shifted the divide from crusty socialists vs radical free enterprise finance perverts to a blurry divide barely legible within the framework of capital, so that the finance perverts became the wallpaper and radicalism was simply no longer in the room.

Starmer, in reincarnating Blair's ghost on a landslide victory that a huge amount of the population feel no enthusiasm for and at best relief that he's not technically the Tories ant more if they haven't been paying much attention to his policies, is reaffirming that the division is not between differently coloured ties you decide on at the ballot box but (as it has always really been) between the ruling class and the working class. He is positioning himself ready to do the most by the book straightforward statesman ship possible, which is to say to mediate class tensions in favour of the ruling class. His victory should only be a reminder that 99% of politics is outside the polling station and now is the time to get organized.

Socialists still involved in the machine of elite politics like Corbyn should absolutely make a socialist party that can catch labour defecters in the same way that Reform will inevitably catch tory ones as the next 5 years go on. If that goes well, there may be a chance that our votes are meaningful in 2029, but if not it'll just be the game liberals want it to be, a game of keeping The Bad Party out. It is more important not to be the bad one than it is to ever do anything good.

But if we think about 2029 elections, 2034, 2039 and so on, assuming that the GEs happen when they're scheduled (🤷‍♀️) then we so quickly run into a world devastated by climate change that we realise spending any of our energy thinking about electoralism over organising is a waste.

The party who nakedly despise the working class are no longer in power, the party who have to pretend not to despise the working class are in. You still can't ask them for anything, you have to take it. Now is the time for strikes, protests, and parallel community structures refusing to delegate responsibility to the state to push harder and harder and harder still

[esoanem]

Zarah Sultana (one of the most prominent left wing figures currently in the Labour party, and currently suspended for supporting moves to remove the two-child benefit cap) has announced she's forming a new party with Jeremy Corbyn - the former Labour leader

Looks like an actual left wing party may be back on the menu!

But now the splitting is back in favour of the right (Tory + Reform Vs Labour + Corbyn-Sultana + Lib Dem + Green)

Hopefully this may lead to some movement against first past the post again though

[bossbutch]

saw a post about "shinigami eyes" being available on firefox mobile and its been hyped up for a number of years so what the hell.

of the 256 blogs im following, id expect it to mark them All or at least most of them green (ie Trans Safe) , but it only got 25 of em

no obvious rhyme or reason to Who, either. like mogs and bryn are green but not autumn, rock is green but not dizzy, viv is green but neph and vs arent, will but not cyan, mecka and One of embers blogs are green but sammy and another ember blog arent. (all of these ppl are in the same social circles)

well maybe its the red names that are more important, right. i dont see any on my dash so i checked wikipedia. the labour party is marked red, and so is UKIP, but not the tories or any other british party. nixon, reagan and trump are the only us presidents marked. stalin is marked red and so is shining path, no other MLs (or "MLs") marked. al-qaeda and hamas are red

media wise, game grumps, critikal and markiplier are green (????). no marks for anyone on the simpsons, family guy or south park. One Guy on snl is red. the crying game as a movie is marked red (the only non-person/organization i saw marked), one of the writers on rocky horror is too. the rest of the Famously Transphobic Media i checked was totally unmarked in their credits (ace ventura, psycho, silence of the lambs, persona 3, etc)

this doesnt seem like a useful tool. seems kinda Fail actually. its too scattershot to be informational, so is the point that you get, a morale boost from seeing something you dont like, like BBC or NYT, be marked red? and your Posting Allies marked green??

[wiliband]

I genuinely want to have a conversation with anyone who thinks Labour is the same as the tories because if you compare ministers it’s a fucking joke

Take for one example Ed Miliband vs. Jacob Rees-Mogg as energy secretary, if you genuinely for a moment try to convince me they are the same in regards to policy, attitude or background you are kidding yourself.

[102ki]

"tories vs labour" cmon the real competition is blyth vs sunderland

[thedreadvampy]

"oh voting isn't going to change the world" "oh you gotta vote otherwise you're literally destroying the world"

shut up man it can be both.

voting is not gonna address the amount of fucked we are. voting also takes a max of like 20 minutes to get done once every few years and allows you to marginally improve important things like who's likely to get fed or who gets healthcare.

it's also the only direct leverage we have over governments so you HAVE to be willing to say "if you do X I will not vote for you" and then follow through.

like nah we're not going to unfuck anything by voting for Reactionary Neoliberal Conservative Party 2 vs Reactionary Neoliberal Conservative Party 1. the change is superficial and managed - as they say, if voting changed anything it would be illegal. but superficial change still saves lives and slows down the pace of harm. and again it takes TWENTY MINUTES. do it and get back to actual organising.

don't vote Labour in the UK though cause their manifesto is packed full of eugenics, 'back to work scu?' rhetoric, erosion of workers rights, a promise to act on the (debunked) Cass report, intention to continue to Tory attacks on migrants communities, and a bunch of promises to increase police powers. polls (for all they're worth) are predicting both a Labour sweep AND a joint vote share for the Big 2 (Labour and the Tories) which is lower than it's been since WW1.

Let's FOLLOW THROUGH on that polling. Vote Green, vote Independent, vote for whatever candidate is best in your constituency, don't vote for Reform or the Tories obviously, vote Labour if your candidate has a good voting record on key issues, but vote freely and do vote

because even if, like me, you think every party likely to form a government are shit eating bigots with a near religious belief in hierarchy and their own superiority, your abstention will be ignored, low turnout will be written off as disinterest, but if we can tip the vote share away from the parties who believe they're entitled to our vote whatever happens, we do force them to have to listen. If the vote share tips towards Reform, they'll get more loudly racist. If it tips heavily towards the Greens, the SNP, Plaid, and left wing independents, we're sending the message that no actually the left vote cannot be taken for granted, and we will hold them accountable for scrubbing leftist and progressive politics off the menu. We have to demonstrate that Labour aren't owed lefty votes on brand recognition regardless of their politics

remember, we are voting for a parliament of representatives, not a president. if your vote sends your seat to the Greens but the Tories win an overall majority (or, more likely, a coalition, because a majority is looking unlikely although it HAS LOOKED UNLIKELY BEFORE), you still have a dissenting voice and vote in parliament. whereas if you vote Labour and Labour win an overall majority, they will whip your candidate to vote with the government even on policies everyone hates 🤷‍♀️ the value of the parliamentary system should be in political diversity, but we have a bipartite system which kind of fucks that. voting for change may man voting for a big enough and coherent enough lefty bloc in parliament to swing votes and stop policy.

[sourcreammachine]

i ran the uk election under the Alternative Vote and it was even more disproportional. even though individual seats reflect the ranked-choice majority vote, the nationwide picture does not

if the combined lab+lib+green vote controls more than ~48.5% of the total, then the largest of those three will take the seat. that’s less than 50% because while most reform voters wouldn’t, some would rank labour ahead of the tories

some seats do travel from labour & liberals to the tories due to the reform vote. reform lose two of five of their seats because liberal and most labour voters would put the tories ahead of reform

labour is 25% bigger, and the liberals are the second largest party with Ed Davey as leader of the opposition. pmqs would be knight vs knight like gladiatorial combat

the greens manage to take a bonus seat in wight east. three of the five independent socialists lose out to moderates uniting behind labour - only corbyn and hussain are strong enough to survive

like they were in wales (and in 1997), the tories are evicted from scotland to become england-only. also, they’re extinct in the northwest and west country. surrey entrenches itself as the capital of liberal land. huge tories such as hunt and badenoch herself are defeated, though sunak and jenrick survive

in NI, the dup survives the attacks from alliance and the tuv, which get no seats. it does still lose out to the uup in south antrim. in east derry, the only seat i had to simulate fully in a spreadsheet because the results were so close, i believe sinn féin would flip it from the dup, though there are only a few hundred votes between them. so on aggregate the unionists gain one seat from neutrals but lose one to republicans - meaning unionists remain the same but republicans gain one

this uses data from the real first-past-the-post election, meaning how people would actually vote under AV is not shown. that explains how labour wins two thirds here; that would never happen in a real AV election as voters would be much more willing put other parties first. if anything, this would cause the liberals to surge even more against labour and the tories

AV promotes majoritarian disproportionality just like FPTP. it does prevent minoritarian disproportionalities in individual seats but not nationwide. pluralist democracy requires a pluralist system such as STV or listing.

[underatedwords]

tories out, thank fuck. but the percentage share of the vote labour got, vs the huge majority of seats is crazy.

[ayeforscotland]

Hey Aye! I was wondering if you could give a bit of a run down on the election? Is the situation in Scotland more SNP vs Labour?

There’s not as many Tories to oust so Labour are aiming to ride the natural wave and flip as many SNP seats as possible.

They’ll succeed in quite a few places I imagine, this SNP will no doubt take a hit. But I don’t think it’s remotely from a policy perspective, it’s more a natural UK-wide shift to Labour because the Tories have fucked it so bad so ‘the other big party’ is the change that we ‘ever so clearly need’.

What we’ve got to be careful of in the 6-12 aftermath of the election is political despair when Labour don’t make any progressive change, and the media flips from praising the newest PM to hammering the government.

That’s when far-right parties like Reform UK will try to recruit as many people as possible.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Disability

I've probably mentioned this in passing, but it deserves a little bit more attention, particularly given that it's been giving me fibro flares and migraine flares on and off since it turned up on the UK news. I know that the US is busy combusting and that takes most of the news cycles, so I don't expect it to be common knowledge. Still feels like a thing, though.

So despite the fact that the Tories' austerity policies have been reducing our quality of life for something like fifteen years now, the new-ish Labour government has decided that the only thing that will fill the huge hole the Tories left in the budget is - you guessed it - yet more austerity. And Labour is starting to live up to its name in a pretty horrific way - sort of a "work will make you free" kind of way. Because the deepest cuts are to benefits - specifically, disability benefits.

First, we have something called Personal Independence Payments - a stipend to help pay for the extra things that disabled people need to be ... well, independent. That's looking like being cut to ribbons and possibly being taken off the table completely. Because the disabled don't deserve the dignity of being able to leave the fucking house, apparently.

Then ... well. We have disability payments for people who can't work - or can't work enough to support themselves - and we have what used to be Job Seekers' Allowance, for people who need to survive while they look for work. One's going to get cut. The other's going to get increased. The one getting the increase? Is the one for the folks looking for work. So that means that people who literally cannot work are going to have less money to live, because the government wants to force them to push themselves beyond their ability and get a job.

Now, keep in mind that a lot of people, whether they're disabled or not, are still having to rely on benefits just to survive. It's that bad. I figure those are off the table, as means-testing gets stingier and stingier. Worse yet, there's murmurings that the means-testing process should be farmed off to AI, same as they want initial diagnoses to be on the NHS. Either way, it seems designed to deny the disabled any kind of accommodation or support.

The problem with this ... well, there are so many problems with this that I cannot go into them all in any depth. It doesn't do the disabled any good to get a job that they can't do because so many companies will not make reasonable accommodations for their employees - like, say, working from home. The job market is a mess right now and even people who aren't disabled are having a bitch of a time finding work, and in a choice between someone who requires accommodations and one who doesn't, who do you think employers are going to pick? Most of all, the entire government seems to be putting the blame on us. They talk about obesity - okay, but keep in mind that Brexit fucked us so hard that unhealthy high-calorie food is often all people can afford, and we are worked so hard by employers that we seldom have time and energy to properly exercise as well as seeing to needs like eating, sleeping, and household chores. They talk about mental health issues like it's our fault for not "sucking it up and coping" - I'm sorry, but have they not seen what's been done to us the last couple of decades? How much worse they're making it? And the absolute kicker - saying that there's no valid reason why so many more people should be disabled now than in, say, 2020.

DID YOU FORGET LONG COVID WAS A THING, YOU ASSHOLES?!? Remember Johnson saying "let the bodies pile high in their thousands" when trying to lock down for as little time as possible? The number of people who refused to wear masks, or refused to wear them properly if they did? The anti-vax movement that seems to have sprung up here? Hell, the NHS won't pay for yearly Covid boosters, and they all seem to forget that Covid is still here! If you let something that causes a long-term to permanent condition become endemic in a population, and then don't take steps to deal with it like you do, say, influenza? The number of people with disabilities goes up.

Now, I'm fortunate. I don't have to worry about rent. I am employed. I can afford to take reduced hours, and was allowed to work from home (I mean, fine, I had to fight for it for like a year, but I got it). But two things. The first and most meaningful is this: I know how lucky I am, and how many people are not. This is going to kill people. They are going to overwork themselves, neglect their health - physical, mental, or both - and they are going to die. Maybe it'll be directly caused by the job. Maybe it'll be by choice because people can't take it anymore. Maybe it'll be through neglect because they still can't afford what they need. But people will die. The last time benefits got fucked with this hard, people died. This will be no different. And of course it gets me because it feels like the entire country is saying, "Well, they're disabled; we don't care if they die because they can't contribute to the economy and are a burden to everybody". And if you think I'm exaggerating? Consider that this is coming in the wake of laws permitting euthanasia, and from a service that not five years ago was assigning Do Not Resuscitate orders on Covid patients with autism without anyone's consent.

But it's more than that - it's more than me being a social justice barbarian in general. I'm lucky now. What happens if I'm not? What if I lose my job - how am I going to get another one that I can even remotely do in this economic climate? What if my condition gets worse and I can't work at all, and some AI doctor won't believe me? How do I function when the government of the country I'm stuck in thinks I'm a waste of oxygen?

...I spent so long thinking I was a waste of oxygen when I was physically healthy! It took so much mess, and years of therapy, and slightly fewer years of meds, to get me to a place where I didn't think I was a waste of oxygen anymore! Then I got the fibro and I had to use those coping mechanisms all over again, and I still have bad days sometimes! Now I have an entire government telling me it doesn't care if I suffer, it doesn't care if I die, and in fact it would be better if I did because that'll mean I'll never be a burden on the state. Never mind that a lot of that is my money, given to the government through my taxes.

So I'm stressed and I'm angry and I'm miserable and I'm frustrated and I hurt too much to punch things. But I want to. Oh, how I want to. Faces would be nice. Kier Starmer and Wes Streeting would be a good start. Fuck them for making the depression and misery a disabled person faces every day so much worse by justifying all our fears about being burdens to those around us. Fuck them for stripping our dignity and threatening our lives for budget cuts. Fuck them for caring about corporations and money more than the people they were elected to serve. Fuck them for their lack of compassion. And fuck them twice for doing it so they can free up some budget money to give to the military because some orange jackass in another country doesn't think we're spending enough on defense.

Oh, and on the assisted dying bill? Fuck them three times running for voting down the qualification that requires a doctor ask a patient why someone wants to die. AAAAAAAAAAAA!