Is a more left Labour government what people want?

Labour is almost pathologically incapable of getting it right. The election is a bloodbath, so what does Sir Keir Starmer do? Bring back a couple of uber-Blairites into the fold! The problem is that Labour think they’ll win voters back by “changing tactics” or going backwards (this is no longer the same world in which “New Labour” was such a success), and as a result of this bloody wishy-washy nonsense AND looking backwards 30+ years for answers to today’s problems, they’ve made Reform look competent enough to elect.

Whether Reform actually are or not can only be determined by time; they have no experience, but Labour had tons of experience and they still couldn’t pull their heads out of their arses.

Sorry - Right wing, and Just stop oil.

Because the Tories were equally useless.

@KatiePricesKnickerswell I guess I’m not most people then. Where I live we have high levels of immigration, I am also first generation. We have a big Islamic community so we definitely do give a shit about Palestine, not in an abstract way, but as many of our friends and my children’s school friends have family there.
SEND is also a very important issue to me.
I work in social care and see that the whole country would collapse literally without immigration. There are 4 African carers to every 1 white British one in many caring roles.
Recently we tried to recruit, every white British person could not give a shit about the role enough to even read the job description. They couldn’t even answer ‘why do you want the job?’
The whole country is divided. But I can only see things from my perspective, which is that we need to stop making excuses for some lazy British people and celebrate the immigrants who are actually paying taxes and keeping the country afloat.

Definitely and I suspect these are the choices people will be making come the next general election

Well they do have years of Tory mismanagement and pilfering to sort out, but I wouldn’t say this government are all that left-leaning.

Lifting children out of poverty should always be a priority in a civilised society, surely anyone with a modicum of decency would agree that the cap should never have been there in the first place. Personally I’d prefer the money for schools, NHS etc to come from corporation and top earner taxation, and bring public services into public ownership, not having us paying for a (shitty) service to give some greedy millionaire another big fat bonus, the money coming in goes back into the service.

Sorry - what is RW? And JSO? (probably being dumb but it is early)

There are other choices ... Lib Dems to the Left or Conservative to the Right

I think concerns about immigration is the scape goat for a more general sense of there being scarcity. Address the scarcity people won’t be so worried about immigration.

But on a pure facts basis we need urgently working adults to come to this country and pay tax or we need British people to have more babies. Probably both.
Otherwise the baby boomer pensions will be unaffordable. The state pension is a pyramid scheme, the younger generations have to pay tax to fund the older ones. So if we see a big reduction in people of younger generations then we’re in trouble.

I don’t currently want any type of Labour government

that doesn’t necessarily mean that I want Reform

Spot on.

The fake empathy for Gaza is just so they have a stick with which to beat the RW. It’s performative nonsense - akin to JSO and Greta Thunberg’s dumb antics.

Ps. Hold up a blank map of the Middle East, and ask them to point out where Gaza is….

@Alexandra2001 what happened under Blair is v important because it set the tone for what happened since.

He unwittingly flooded the country with a massive wave of immigration which he didn't count in and the scale of what he had done seeped through or rather swept through like a tsunami on public services .
This hammer blow happened just before the credit crisis which put us in a far weaker position . It was this that has subsequently pushed people's patience with any immigration at all.
So yes it's very important at the time it decimated so many services including maternity care becusee they couldn't cope extra primary classes has to be built over play grounds and so on

I think most younger adults (under 50!) want housing to be brought under control, cost of living to be meaningfully addressed, a sense of greater freedom rather than restriction. A sense that it isn’t all hopeless.

Some of this is about employers wanting a lot of work and a lot of control with very little reward. Some is more nebulas.

I don’t think it’s a left-right thing. Typically Labour have been good on public services but very controlling in terms of family life. For example they started all this attendance obsession. Previously it was only truancy not the odd family holiday that caused issues.

I would:

• bring in rent control
• make up to 10 days holiday from school approvable by the headteacher
• remove attendance from the rhetoric and inspection measures
• make unpaid parental leave, paid leave with government support/funding for small business.
• bring in the right to switch off that was promised but got watered down
• give everyone some one off public holidays (in lieu if you can’t take them)

Absolutely - and its why many feel that Labour sneer and look down at them - with some justification for feeling that way.

It's what some people want.

The other people want a more right wing one (or rather, they don't want a Labour government at all but want a more right wing party in charge).

Therein lies the problem.

Most people don’t give a shit about Palestine.
They don’t give a shit about Ukraine and that’s right next door to Poland.
SEND seems to be fashionable. How many posts are on the forum where DC has autism, ADHD etc? Wasn’t like this 10 years ago.
Climate change is not top of anyone’s agenda.
The country are voting in Reform on one topic only, anti-immigration.
No one wants immigration, pushing down wages. Surely Labour, the party of the working man, understand this?

People care about immigration, potholes, and the NHS.

Yup - throwing insults around doesn't help anything.

It makes the person doing it sound worse than the person on the receiving end.

On a brighter note, at 10.00, Starmer will share his new and bold vision for the UK! Reset no. 84…

Doubtless he will ask for more time, and say ‘I get it’ and ‘I hear you’ etc.

Enough, he’s done.

It does send the wrong message, the talk of child poverty is not the reality people see among families they know of personally on UC, yet most people know of a friend or relative who has told of having to wait hours for an ambulance or on an A&E trolley in pain so people resent that money being spent on families on UC (working or not) instead of fixing issues in our public services. They also resent having their own standard of living decimated to pay for it via frozen tax thresholds etc. Labour talking to us of an idea of maybe reducing our energy bills by £150 as what they will do for people not on UC among all this just makes people incredulous

The problem really is how divided we all are. Labour's popularity started to crater with Reeves' budget (but with Raynor in charge we could expect more of the same). Many among the middle class started to feel pissed off with them because of the endless taxing. Small businesses get especially hammered. Then there's all the people who can only think of 'no immigrants' = sunlit uplands. And everybody somehow wants more growth and more money, more public services but for less... We've become ungovernable frankly. Reform won't deliver. Getting rid of Starmer in favour of more left wing policies won't deliver. We're screwed.

Research shows time and again that most people want left wing policies like higher taxation for the wealthiest, better worker protections, nationalised utilities and national infrastructure... only they don't want them from a left-wing party. Which leaves labour in a bit of a fix🙄