What is the point of labour ?

[Salt n Vinegar]

If private schools are abolished, it's not even as if the wealthier wouldn't still have huge advantages.  They'd still be able to buy homes in the catchment areas for the schools with better grounds/facilities and they'd still be able to buy in additional tutor support and/or afford summer schools etc.

I've yet to meet anyone who thinks that the quality of the state system wouldn't be improved if all of our politicians had to send their kids to the same schools as all their constituents.

[GHF-23]

 

Not for me Clive

 

[O'Kelly Isley III]

I see Scottish Labour are up to their old tricks ahead of Thursday.  North Lanarkshire Council has suddenly reversed their recent decision to close a raft of leisure facilities, followed by broadsides against the SG from Anas Sarwar and Labour council leader Jim Logue.

Here's my take.  Starmer has ordered this reverse ferret as the optics for Labour look awful for voters about to go to the polls in a neighbouring constituency.  Then after the bye-election, well who knows....

[Salt n Vinegar]

4 minutes ago, O'Kelly Isley III said:

I see Scottish Labour are up to their old tricks ahead of Thursday.  North Lanarkshire Council has suddenly reversed their recent decision to close a raft of leisure facilities, followed by broadsides against the SG from Anas Sarwar and Labour council leader Jim Logue.

Here's my take.  Starmer has ordered this reverse ferret as the optics for Labour look awful for voters about to go to the polls in a neighbouring constituency.  Then after the bye-election, well who knows....

Have Labour said where the saving in the council budget will come from instead?

(Asking for a cynic.)

[O'Kelly Isley III]

4 hours ago, Salt n Vinegar said:

Have Labour said where the saving in the council budget will come from instead?

(Asking for a cynic.)

There won't be a saving if the decision is reversed post-Thursday.

[Granny Danger]

52 minutes ago, O'Kelly Isley III said:

There won't be a saving if the decision is reversed post-Thursday.

Aye, it’s a ‘Starmer promise’, a term that will find its way into the daily lexicon over the coming years.

 

[Dunning1874]

So we have a Tory conference when they are truly letting the fascist mask slip. Full on Enoch Powell rhetoric on immigration, utterly hateful and unrepentant attacks on the LGBT+ community, a total crackdown on any dissent, openly promoting and indulging far right conspiracy theories.

The Labour response, from the Shadow Home Secretary no less?

WHY AREN'T YOU BEING EVEN MORE AUTHORITARIAN?!

As the last 3 years have shown, a Labour Party that only attacks from the Tories from the right by trying to outmanoeuvre them on law & order definitely doesn't enable the Tories to get even worse.

Edited October 4, 2023 by Dunning1874

[StellarHibee]

I think it's clear to anybody who isn't a complete idiot that both parties fully intent to drag the UK even further down an authoritarian path. They are setting up their stalls in such a way that it doesn't really matter who wins the next election, as the plan will be secured either way.

[coprolite]

On 29/09/2023 at 13:44, orfc said:

Hurray, a full house of nats not reading the content

Labour are not removing private schools charity status, but they will slap VAT on fees which does the same thing but with less red tape

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/sep/28/rishi-sunak-attacks-labour-plan-for-vat-on-private-school-fees

Not sure how VAT on the fees will be less red tape. Education services are currently exempt from VAT. Not all education services are currently provided by private schools.

The legislation and admin involved in deciding whether, for example a private sixth form college should be treated more like the local FE college or more like Eton, is going to be every bit as tricky as a bit of primary legislation that prevents private education and associated services qualifying for charitable status. 

For me, this isn't a fiscal issue. It's about fairness and privilege and not having the state support structural, intergenerational inequality. That is, it's largely symbolic. Keir Thatcher does not want to oppose inequality. 

[Crùbag]

15 hours ago, StellarHibee said:

I think it's clear to anybody who isn't a complete idiot that both parties fully intent to drag the UK even further down an authoritarian path. They are setting up their stalls in such a way that it doesn't really matter who wins the next election, as the plan will be secured either way.

The Tories have gone full loony Ukip and Sir Kid Starver still can't bring the Labour party to offer any alternative. UK politics is being pulled further to the right with the Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum of Tory/ Labour scratching each others backs while lying in Rupert Murdoch's bed.

[AndyM]

14 hours ago, Crùbag said:

The Tories have gone full loony Ukip and Sir Kid Starver still can't bring the Labour party to offer any alternative. UK politics is being pulled further to the right with the Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum of Tory/ Labour scratching each others backs while lying in Rupert Murdoch's bed.

All we are waiting on is the Murdoch press doing a volte face and backing Labour. It's so predictable.

The toxic old turd won't back the Tories as he knows they will lose next time out. But nothing will change when Labour go in. 

[Granny Danger]

Warning: this might turn into a tl;dr.

For all our faults I’ve always thought the UK was miles ahead of the USA with regards to the two party system.

In the US money is king and without it you have no chance of being elected.  As a result you have a fairly right wing party (Democrats) and a very right wing [recently nutjob] party (Republicans) and no one else has a look in.

I fear we are reaching a tipping point in the UK where we end up the same thanks to Starmer.  Right of centre policies and a reliance on funding from big business.*

Scotland will have an option with a tough, tough path to achieving an alternative reality; Wales less so; and NI will become an irrelevance unless they start lobbing bombs at each other again.

So any pretence of a Parliamentary democracy’ that offers real choice goes from an unlikely reality to an illusion.

 

* I always thought it would be a good thing if the Trade Union movement withheld its funding from Labour but I’m now convinced that big business is waiting in the wings to fill the void and thereby exacerbate the Tory/Labour and Republican/Democrat synchronicity.

 

[BFTD]

On 04/10/2023 at 02:45, StellarHibee said:

I think it's clear to anybody who isn't a complete idiot that both parties fully intent to drag the UK even further down an authoritarian path. They are setting up their stalls in such a way that it doesn't really matter who wins the next election, as the plan will be secured either way.

The reality seems more depressing to me - Labour have decided that the bulk of the UK's electorate want authoritarianism, and if that's the case then they might as well make a bit of money out of it rather than just allow the Conservatives to have all the fun.

The worst part is that they might be right. The Conservatives aren't unpopular because they're goose-stepping towards fascism, but because the wrong people are suffering. If they can hurt the poor, the foreign, and the marginalised even more than everyone else, they'll pick up support from their base again.

[aDONisSheep]

Starmer writing an op-ed in the Sun.  What a spineless knvt he is.  

[GHF-23]

On 03/10/2023 at 22:04, Dunning1874 said:

So we have a Tory conference when they are truly letting the fascist mask slip. Full on Enoch Powell rhetoric on immigration, utterly hateful and unrepentant attacks on the LGBT+ community, a total crackdown on any dissent, openly promoting and indulging far right conspiracy theories.

The Labour response, from the Shadow Home Secretary no less?

WHY AREN'T YOU BEING EVEN MORE AUTHORITARIAN?!

As the last 3 years have shown, a Labour Party that only attacks from the Tories from the right by trying to outmanoeuvre them on law & order definitely doesn't enable the Tories to get even worse.

 

On 04/10/2023 at 02:45, StellarHibee said:

I think it's clear to anybody who isn't a complete idiot that both parties fully intent to drag the UK even further down an authoritarian path. They are setting up their stalls in such a way that it doesn't really matter who wins the next election, as the plan will be secured either way.

It's become a bit of a cliche now at least in certain social media circles but it's genuinely now a choice between one party rubbing its hands together shouting "Yes, we get to build the society from Children of Men" and another solemnly hanging its head and saying "unfortunately we have no choice but to build the society from Children of Men".

13 hours ago, Granny Danger said:

 

So any pretence of a Parliamentary democracy’ that offers real choice goes from an unlikely reality to an illusion.

It's one of the many reasons that the UK can't really be described as a democratic society.

[Wee-Bey]

It's been like this for a long while though, Corbyn was an aberration and moves have been made and rules changed to ensure something like that doesn't happen again.

America at least still functions as a two party state, there's clear daylight between its liberal and conservative wings on a range of issues across the board, despite both being corporate owned.

I don't think you can claim the UK is like that.

[GHF-23]

1 hour ago, Ziggy Sobotka said:

It's been like this for a long while though, Corbyn was an aberration and moves have been made and rules changed to ensure something like that doesn't happen again.

America at least still functions as a two party state, there's clear daylight between its liberal and conservative wings on a range of issues across the board, despite both being corporate owned.

I don't think you can claim the UK is like that.

Yeah, the Corbyn thing was instructive. Essentially there's two groups which either set or moderate political opinion, despite being widely hated - the right wing press and (as much as I hate to use the term) "the liberal elite". The Times and the Sun in particular very much set the agenda for public discourse amongst large elements of the middle and working class respectively, and obviously we don't need to go in to probable prime ministers making deferring to NewsCorp as one of their top priorities. The second group - civil servants, guardian columnists etc - see themselves as fairly right on, maybe even lefty figures, but the Overton window has moved so far that they're now essentially Cameronian Tories in most social and economic areas; and they are particularly worried about any mass movement be it Brexit or Corbyn's labour.

Together this creates a "sensible" vision of politics that to most switched on people seems insane. The most obvious recent example of that was the school's concrete situation, where a labour bod said something along the lines of "we will do whatever needs to be done, so long as it doesn't cost too much money", when very obviously the actually sensible thing to do is say "we will do whatever needs done to fix or replace all the schools." We are starting to see more of an awareness in the press that the country is essentially fucked and doesn't work for anyone, but even then there's a lack of understanding of how we got here and what their involvement was. 

On the US thing, I'm always pretty astounded when people in the UK think they live somewhere meaningfully better. Yes they have problems which we can't even comprehend like medical bankruptcy and gun crime, but the power of state and city governments means there are areas which look far far better in terms of public services than the UK (public transportation aside - although this is obviously shit here as well). I'm biased in this, as my wife is from Portland, but in terms of things which improve quality of life like parks, arts programs etc it's night and day. As an example, at least at my local college, classes that aren't directly tied to qualifications and employment have pretty much disappeared, while at least in the area my in-laws stay the local arts centre has classes in everything you could imagine on a pay what you want basis. Now obviously there's a big homelessness problem in Portland as well due to the cost of housing (amongst other things), but as someone who lives in a country with the worst drug deaths in Europe and a state which allowed 300K+ people to die through austerity I don't really think it's my place to judge. 

[Granny Danger]

2 hours ago, Ziggy Sobotka said:

It's been like this for a long while though, Corbyn was an aberration and moves have been made and rules changed to ensure something like that doesn't happen again.

America at least still functions as a two party state, there's clear daylight between its liberal and conservative wings on a range of issues across the board, despite both being corporate owned.

I don't think you can claim the UK is like that.

Are you drunk?  I hope so because the alternative is worse!

[Wee-Bey]

15 minutes ago, Granny Danger said:

Are you drunk?  I hope so because the alternative is worse!

I think you've been out in the sun too long old man.

The original statement is both objectively and factually correct.

[Granny Danger]

8 minutes ago, Ziggy Sobotka said:

I think you've been out in the sun too long old man.

The original statement is both objectively and factually correct.

Clear daylight between the corporate whores who won’t seriously advocate for gun control and the corporate whores who will oppose gun control.

You can substitute gun control for tax reform, wealth redistribution, creating corporate responsibility, police accountability, building walls on the southern border, prison reform,  humane treatment of illegal immigrants, etc.