Is a more left Labour government what people want?

No

Labour always have to stay just left of centre to be in power, look at what’s happened when the party have moved further to the left

we do not go too right either and I don’t believe we will at the next election but the result is a wake up call that maybe one day we will

In an ideal world we would fund everything, but everything has limits in reality. In real terms lifting the cap has been funded by cuts in education and healthcare. Some of our teams for children with disabilities have had to effectively close their wait lists, so children with really complex needs are not receiving the same support they did a few years ago. Same with SEN provision, the wait time for EHCP's in our borough has doubled since the start of this parliament.

It's like that programme they did years ago, they got a very idealistic panel to make budget decisions
"Should we fund this treatment to extend the life of 1 mum with young children, it costs X". Panel was 'yes, of course we should'
The presenter -"great, thanks. You now need to call these 30 people whose cataract surgery will now be cancelled and tell them they won't get chance to see their grandchildren as the money has been spent on a young mum'.
Panel 'oh no, they need that surgery'
Presenter 'oh OK,so you want to cancel the young mums treatment'
Panel - arghhhhhhhh

So you like the 2 child cap? What public service do you think should be cut to fund it? A real answer please, not the usual trope of 'cut waste and tax big business', as if that was a novel concept which hadn't been thought of and tried.

As we can't raise much more tax, there is a point when taxing more ends up getting less, due to impact on business, spending etc,I think its called the laffer curve.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2324yp7ygyo

Too long to summarise.

They constantly interfere in markets that are best left alone.

Tourist tax. Some vague fluff to help people with the cost of living crisis. All doomed.
Let the markets decide.

The trouble with "personal accountability" is that it doesn't put food on the table or buy shoes or pay for school trips. The two child cap means children suffer because some voters don't agree with their parents' choices or care that their parents have fallen on hard times.

I dunno. I always feel a bit repulsed by people who advocate for the two child benefit cap. That kind of mealy mouthed unkindness feels alien.

ETA you forgot to mention the exception extended to women whose third child was conceived through rape (unless it was her husband/partner who raped her in which case sorry, no money).

And I don’t think welfare should be cut, especially with the rising cost of food and energy bills

Yes. It’s what I want. I want proper Labour, not Tory Lite. But I guess now Reform have done so well in the locals, Labour are going to swing more to the right?

Yes, I didn't expect them to wave a magic wand and make it all perfect overnight. But I also didn't expect them to make things much worse than they already were.

There is a level of personal accountability when having children. Many of us can't afford more children so we don't have them. IMHO the only exceptions to the 2 child cap should be in the case of multiple births (which generally cannot be predicted) and adoption.

If that money was so easy to get from corporations etc, don't you think every government would have done it already.

I do agree with you re the private involvement in healthcare though. I remember working in PFI hospital built under the previous labour government, which was showing major faults within a few weeks of openning, with bits falling off walks and ceilings, lifts breaking, whole wards closed due to leaks etc

Because the cost is disproportionately high to the number impacted, and I feel the money could have more fairly been spent in a way which benefits all children.

A more left-wing Labour is certainly what I want, but a lot of people seem to want Reform which is why they are getting so many votes.

Governments really don't ignore their advisers. Why would they waste all that time and money? Ministers aren't experts in their fields, they receive guidelines and make policy decisions based on various factors. You make it sound like the incoming government was presented with a blueprint for success and they laughed and tore it up.

But Labour totally ignore the expert advisors! The expert advisors came up with a plan for growth prior to the Labour budgets. Things like moving to scrap stamp duty and scrapping the triple lock, all of which was totally ignored by RR. Too unpopular politically for them I’d imagine.

I mean when I think about the highly trained civil servants and expert advisers working for the government, it never ceases to amaze me that random posters in MN think they might have forgotten about the absolute basics.

It's not the sole factor, but a major one that Labour seems to think doesn't apply to them.

@MadderthanMorris Of course it's about quality of migration. I don't think its about origin of migration. Quality is quality, and welcomed from everywhere surely? But we opened the door to unskilled migrants in huge numbers. It was absolute lunacy and it was the beginning of the rot setting in that Farage has exploited. He was pushing on an open door.

If Labour get numbers down to 50k a year, I should think a lot of people will consider that a win. Whether it will be enough to save them, who knows. But there is also a huge problem with our black economy, we just don't know who is here we don't have the administrative procedures in place to keep tabs on people effectively. In Germany, if you move districts you have to give notice when you leave one and have a short amount of time to declare yourself in the next, we could do with some of that ourselves. That's not some Nazi 'papieren, bitte' authoritarianism, it's common sense. We work on a muddle through mentality that might have worked in the 1920s when people were more deferential to authority but its wide open to abuse now and has been abused.

In a nutshell, my opinion is that immigration is too high, it's been too high for a very long time and we have not been sufficiently choosy in who we have allowed in (which every country has the right to be) so it's not only about bringing the numbers down, it's about getting to grips with those who are here who have no right to be. Until we shut down our black economy and stop allowing people access to our state infrastructure when they are unable to prove who they are and why they are here, things will not change. And Farage will keep on marching to No.10 and deliver us proper fascism. I would really rather that didn't happen.

Well, bollocks or not - Reform and its supporters have the wind behind them…

Bollocks. Just your circles, not mine

And objectively immigration didn’t come up as a major issue in opinion polls

I can see how there could be that viewpoint. I miss the old days of relative stability!

@hairbearbunches

Yes. Prior to 2004, when net migration ran at around 50k and was mostly highly skilled workers from the original EEC countries. That was the sweet spot. Blair completely ballsed it up.

So it's about the quality of migration and where it's from, as much as the numbers?

OK, another question: If this number is achieved by 2029, will you celebrate what a fantastic job this Labour government has done and encourage everybody to vote for them?

We have enlarged the population by more than 10 million in the last 2 decades, that's 500,000 a year mainly from net migration (official numbers, and I dispute them) and there was no corresponding uplift in infrastructure. Numbers falling doesn't mean services get better if they were already beyond stretched to begin with.

That makes no sense, because "better" and "stretched" are relative terms, not absolute binary ones. If services were stretched to begin with, and the reason was immigration, then exacerbating that reason by a factor of 78% should have stretched them so much more dramatically still, really far beyond breaking point - and removing that extra 78% should then bring them back from "catastrophic" to just "bad" again.

But like Brexit, it doesn't matter how much evidence gathers that the blame was put in the wrong place and the "solution" isn't solving anything. The people spouting this stuff will just stick their heads down and remain impervious to it.

I take on board your point about farage. Personally, don't like the man, don't like his politics and agree, he's out to feather his own nest. I was referring to the guardian type of propaganda, where the working classes are denigrated as just not very bright, taken in by bullshitters, and if only they could listen harder to their intellectually superior peers, then none of this could happen.

He looked as sick as a parrot when the result was announced - as did Johnson!

I don't think there's a propaganda trap. People weren't happy, we were in the middle of ideological austerity and Farage, guided by Russian* influence offered a false vision of the future. It doesn't have to be either or. Farage and the far right exploited people for their own gain.

• Obviously, since there is nothing the empire building Putin wants to see more than a weakened and destabilised Europe.

@MadderthanMorris Of course net migration has fallen in the last two years. We had two exceptional scenarios prior to that - offering safe haven to Ukrainians and significant numbers of Hong Kongese who were also given visas, which pushed the numbers up over a million. We're now back to the levels we were at that weren't acceptable before that happened.

And can you give a reason why, based on actual evidence and reasoning why that would be the sweet spot at which immigration benefits the economy, rather than just because that's the number it was at in some previous year chosen at random?

Yes. Prior to 2004, when net migration ran at around 50k and was mostly highly skilled workers from the original EEC countries. That was the sweet spot. Blair completely ballsed it up.

We have enlarged the population by more than 10 million in the last 2 decades, that's 500,000 a year mainly from net migration (official numbers, and I dispute them) and there was no corresponding uplift in infrastructure. Numbers falling doesn't mean services get better if they were already beyond stretched to begin with.

Yes he didn’t expect the vote to go the way it did.

It's my feeling that Brexit was more about Cameron's desire to be the PM who finally put the issue to bed and mended the decades long rift in the Tory party over Europe.

Oh dear, you've fell into the propaganda trap then. It was bugger all to do with farage et al, people used their vote to object to what was happening in their neighbourhoods, to their jobs, in their diminishing access to affordable housing. The populists read the room and offered a solution. Of course it was a naff one, and delivered nothing but I can Absolutely understand why people chose that option. Point being, you're very out of touch to insist that immigration wasn't a concern twenty odd years ago.