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‘I hate tree huggers’: How Starmer apparently exploded over Labour’s green policy
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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UK Politics
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Is there a particular mechanism are you worried about in that regard? Off the top of my head there's the Overton window type stuff and just the elimination of the leftist voice that has historically come from labour. I'm more scared of the tories figuring their shit out and realising that all they have to do is not say the quiet part out loud to be electable again, which is kind of independent of starmer.
After years of being a Labour member and stepping back and taking a good look at things, I now can’t help but see Labour as controlled opposition (and more or less just one aspect of the same political party - much like the bipartisan USA system).
I think it’s always been this way, though. Perhaps the great gains for democracy and socialism in Britain have always happened as a result of the ruling class seeing revolution abroad and knowing they need to concede at home. Perhaps, Labour has always been the mechanism for that.
I heard David Lammy on LBC yesterday doing his best impression of a Tory being outraged that someone dared to throw orange confetti at a wedding. And I felt I really have little in common with him.
I guess concessions are better than nothing. But I have a similar feeling about alienation from Starmer labour. I was, at least in principal, in favour of moderation of policy to get more electoral success. I'm getting a "not like that" illustration of why I was wrong in real time.
I'm not sure that in this period of history we're going to see that. I think the big gains for working people happened first at the start of the 20th Century (universal vote) and 1945 (Welfare State). These things happened around the same times across the West. I tend to think that they were a response to the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the fear of Western countries welcoming the Soviet armies after 1945. Since then we've seen reversals of social gains. Certainly since 1980s neoliberalism economic policies ruthlessly pursued by governments of the Left and Right.
Out of interest did you join the party with the wave of others in order to vote for Jeremy Corbyn or were you a member of the party for years before this?
Long before Corbyn. I'd believed that a Labour govt - even if centre-right - was better for people than anything else. After the Blair years, I'd say that a Labour government relocates some funding towards the most obvious extremes of poverty but other than that carried on the neoliberal agenda it inherited from Thatcher and Major.
I worked in education and the last Labour government continued Tory policies, introduced forms of privatised funding (PfI) and enabled Michael Gove's "reforms". Some of the worst aspects of education - the various "National Strategies" were implemented under Labour and gave the Right some great ideas.
There really isn't much difference in policies between the main parties. Just differences in "style". You pick your team and defend them whatever. It's another form of what James O'Brien calls elsewhere the "Footballification" of politics.