To conclude Starmer's Labour is no longer in any way "left"?

I suppose I must have done since the evidence is there. 🙄

Wow, you wrote that and then pressed post.

That's me told.

We don’t have UK election threads yet. We’re all waiting for Sunak to call it.

I find the shoe-horning of foreign wars into every UK election thread quite tiresome too but I just scroll past.

DramaLlamaBangBang
The whole thing depresses me to be honest. We've got a situation where profits from public services and key essential services are privatised (probably to the pockets of people who have the right political connections) and any losses or debts are nationalised.

On a thread recently people were furious at the idea of average families having help with their mortgage if they hit hard times because "why should the state buy you an asset" but seemed to be conveniently ignorant that housing benefit, so taxpayer money, is buying the rich property empires.

Other threads about workers, in a range of jobs, wanting appropriate terms and conditions are met with people arguing that it's wrong to want decent terms because other people have a worse deal.

I'm coming to the conclusion that a substantial minority of the British public are ignorant and would vote against their own interests if it avoided someone else having something nice. It's a breeding ground for right wing populism.

Good point. I'm sick of the guilt tripping, derailing, hectoring and wilful misinterpretation of posts that dare to challenge them, and they evidently aren't going to stop being aggressive and trying to twist threads to what they believe and expect everyone else to.

My new policy is to ignore them and their posts @ilovesooty. I don’t suppose they’ll get tired of trying to derail threads but we don’t have to let them.

It's good to know that you're happy to condemn imprisoned women (likely already with a history of abuse) to potentially having to share a cell with an intact male sex offender. Or leave rape victims without support, due to groups being single gender, not single sex. Or women having to share hospital wards with intact males (and then being told for a year after they were raped by one that they couldn't have been as no males were on the ward).

And I've seen no vote scolding from anyone other than staunch Labour supporters.

You clearly didn't mean about choosing priorities, as you then went on to condemn others' choices!

Also, talking about what's important to us isn't trying to shift towards our narrative; all we're doing is talking about what's important to us. Like you talk about what is or isn't important to you. It's a chat forum, that's how it works...

the world has moved on, nobody is interested in huge levels of state control, nationalised industries and all the rest of the old labour ideas.

This isn't true. Im a london based senior finance professional. I do understand economics. I do not understand why anyone expects anything other than rampant profiteering when you take services like water & railways where its not possible for true competition to actually exist and the consumer doesn't really have any choice.

I specifically said "have whatever priorities you like" if you bothered to read.

I said that women's sex based rights aren't top priority for much of the electorate.

Scolding is coming from those who are aggressively GC, telling those people who who aren't that they're not prioritising properly, and trying to shift every political thread to their preferred agenda. I'm sick and tired of it and I know I'm not alone.

The problem is, the country has already been asset stripped. Many years ago. Shares in those assets are now propping up virtually all pension schemes, including public sector pensions. How in earth is the government going to get enough money to buy back all those shares, then still have enough money to run the services themselves and also have enough money to shove billions into public sector pension schemes? It's just not there. You can't just take people's shares off them without paying them the going rate for them.

Yup. I'm just pointing out that Starmer now needs to include it in his Manifesto and put his money where his mouth is. I wouldn't consider that to be a particularly far left thing to do, it just makes good economic and societal sense for the country,

I never thought I'd say it but bring back Blair. No PM is perfect and Blair had his faults but we probably didn't really appreciate just what a mover and shaker he was.

And Things Can Only Get Better was a damn good signature tune, it really hit the spot!

I apologise, I didn’t know whether railways were devolved or not.

Women's sex-based rights are vitally important to many people. You're entitled to disagree, but you don't get to say people are prioritising wrongly / badly.

I'm sick of being vote scolded by people who clearly don't understand the bigger picture, but there you go. 🤷‍♀️

Have whatever priorities you want. I'm just sick of the priorities of those who can't see beyond self ID being shoehorned into every political thread and it would appear I'm not alone in that

We are each entitled to decide for ourselves what our priorities are. Some of us are even clever enough to decide that there can be more than one priority among all the options.

You may find it tiresome, but i am horrified that the mutilation of children in the name of a crank ideology beloved of charlatans is allowed in a civilised country.

You may find it tiresome, but women's spaces are important to me and certainly will be to every woman if they are lost and women discover exactly what that means.

Of course the cost of living is important but so is how women live. Znd it really is tiresome that politicians never give it due consideration when deciding what their priorities are.

Lee Anderson in terms of disparaging middle classes.

I agree it was in The Sun but it gets covered in The Guardian where people who identify as middle class liberals see themselves mocked or derided as if their views are somehow fringe luxuries .

The NHS is stuffed full of middle class liberal employees who already feel like punching bags.

It's probably my own sensitivity showing but I feel like my own party ( member here) doesn't value me.

I'm looking forward to some sober able government and I couldn't give two figs if he's not "entertaining".

The less entertaining the better.

I don't agree that "nobody wants nationalised industries", the best decision they could make would be to renationalise all UK public services and utilities, such as energy, water, roads and transport. privatisation is heinous, public services should be government owned taxpayer funded, for the people and not about profit for fat cats. That's what's got us into this current mess
I agree with this.
I'd like to see a labour manifesto that makes it clear that taxpayers' money is going to he used to run public services for normal people, in the interests of normal people and providing value for taxpayers.
If taxpayer money is going to private, profit making companies to run basic public services then all the taxes from normal people are not being spent delivering decent public services. They're taking money from normal people to line the pockets of the rich.

I'd like a labour manifesto that will protect working conditions, guard against challenges to human rights, and is generally a nice centre left party that wants businesses to do well and public services to run for normal people.

Whatever Starmer's weaknesses, he's a better option than allowing the country to be asset stripped by their mates.

Is the Labour Party and the Conservative Party are two cheeks of the same arse then the Green Party must be the fart emerging from the anus.

I think that's really unfair. What has he actually said in the article that is insulting to NHS workers? The consultant quoted who accuses him of directing dismissive comments at experienced HCPs must have read a different article from the one I read, as I didn't see that at all. And I don't really they're holding middle-class voters in contempt, but Streeting is more likely assuming they won't be reading The Sun, where the article was published, and therefore playing to his audience. It may be annoying as a 'middle-class lefty' to see that term being used disparagingly, but if Labour just do more to appeal to the people they already know they appeal to then they aren't going to get more seats. It will just be like Corbyn's era with lots of crowing about vote shares and loss of actual seats.

And I see nothing whatsover in the article to align Streeting to bloody Lee Anderson! That's quite a reach.

I don't think they are. Many have gone to the Greens, who are pretty hard Left. Momentum itself is ridden with infighting. The Left have always been there but when Labour win, most of the time they manage to keep a lid on them.

The non dom thing is a good example if why Labour aren't talking about their policies. The non dom status thing was earmarked by Labour to raise taxes for infrastructure planning etc, which now cannot be used, because the Tories have stolen the policy and used it for tax breaks. The pre school tooth brushing. Widely mocked until exactly the same proposal was made by Andrea Leadsome. I think Starmer has spoken about closer alignment with EU rules on trade, which the Tories can't steal, because they will poke the Reform bear. He has also spoken about constitutional reform, which I feel is important. I dont believe he is going to be some kind of Messiah, but I do believe that when the only alternative is a Tory government being rewarded for the disaster they have caused, voting Labour is the only way. You need to live in the world as it is, not in the world as you would like it to be. I feel some on the Hard Left would love Starmer's Labour to lose, so they can carry on agitating and activating instead of governing, and maybe try and get a Hard Left leader back again. They have no chance if Starmer wins.

To be honest, after some of the right wing lunacy of the the Tories and the left wing lunacy of Corbyn, I'd welcome some centrist politics

You and me both

Unfortunately the Corbynista/Momentum headbangers haven't gone anywhere; they'll try to keep them out of sight for now, but once the party's elected they'll be stampeding all over the place once again

their main selling point seems to be that they aren’t the Conservatives.

That is their only selling point most of the time. One has to ask one’s self - what sort of party is so ineffectual that people have no idea what they stand for, except for the old we’re not the nasty tories trust us we’ll get those rich people just you wait. Pitiful.