Half the country seems to be anti Starmer, anti Rayner, anti Labour, so…

[Lenelovich]

If they’re so bad, who’d genuinely do a better job and why has the honeymoon been so short ?
Most of the Tory leadership candidates are guilty of much worse plus the UK is in an absolute state unless you live in Tunbridge Wells or Guildford so logically they really should not be having another turn.
Farage hasn’t got a clue and most of his plans, although popular, in reality are economically unviable and would bankrupt the country.
Leaves Ed Davey and the Lib Dems who like Labour are on the whole untried and untested but relatively untainted.
Any ideas ? Or is this criticism just a SM thing and most folk are willing to give them a chance ?

Is there any money to fund big projects ? That’s the point.
My feeling is that whatever he does he’s fucked.

You don't have to worry about stories planted by Russian agents etc. You can just ask Starmer about his plans.

He admits to the bribes, but thinks those are ok because Tories take those too

But wasn't that one of the reasons for replacing the Tories with him?.

He is open about removing the heating help for pensioners.

So sure about keeping the two child benefit cap that he is suspending MPs for suggesting it is removed.

The Tories introduced the cap of course, but they are not claiming to be the party of the ordinary people are they and people voted them out to get a better government.

I said the cap was a travesty when it was introduced. It might work better if when your job disappeared and you found yourself without an income the extra children could be handed over to the DWP for euthanasia.

Or maybe since you don't know if you're going to be made redundant everyone should be banned from having more than two no matter how wealthy.

I’m a floating voter and have voted for both the main parties before. I’m annoyed that Starmer seems to guzzle up fun freebies like a Tory (also annoying when the tories did it) but if he stops, and the Budget is genuinely fair (I think WFA threshold should be more in line with £20k pa income and below) then I’ll probably have forgotten about it by the time the next GE comes up.

Since Labour voters seem to want a wealth tax, I’m not sure why Reeves didn’t suggest that before clobbering pensioners heating bills. That said, I don’t mind rich pensioners’ bills being clobbered.

I think that people were so fed up of the sleaze and everything associated with the Tory party, that Labour, the only other party that is or was potentially electable, seemed like the holy grail.

Maybe they’re harking back to the Labour Party of yore, when they were the party of working people. Now, many regard them as Tory lite. Given that the percentage of voters was low, there are still going to be more who aren’t supporters, but nevertheless they are now in power.

The backlash after Covid and all the waste of money, resources, appalling behaviour and infighting, meant that people hoped this would be the start of a new era. They’ve discovered their heroes have feet of clay. Starmer himself isn’t that popular, or charismatic and has made some pretty elementary errors overall.

Half the country? You mean all the people who didn't vote Labour? No shit.

Like I say he can’t win.
Improving the infrastructure costs multiple billions that we allegedly haven’t got.
The media will skewer him if they’re seen to be spending too much even if it benefits ordinary people. ‘Same old labour bankrupting us’ will be the headlines.
Alternatively, carry on penny pinching and it’s red tories letting grannies freeze.
They really are fucked because Starmer failed to get the media behind him like Blair. Biggest thing that embarrassed New Labour in the early days was Bernie Ecclestone.

Well quite.

who’d genuinely do a better job

It was a constant theme on here during elections that so many felt all the options were bloody poor.

Governments get criticized - they all do.

Labour have a huge majority - if they take unpopular decisions now they have the votes to get them though parliament and by next election 4-5 years time it will all be old news. People being unhappy about unpopular moves and vocal about that unhappiness shouldn't be the huge surprise it is to some on here.

They inherited a mess - short and long term- but unlike New Labour don't seem to have been as prepared to deal with it immediately (very likely a perception issue) - so in comparison look slow and some posters on here during election time thought changes would be fast.

They have also made some missteps - all parties do -which hostile press are all over.

What is new to me is the posters and even politicians on radio moaning about being in the sitting government and getting their polices criticized (often by people directly affected) and acting like this is some special attack on them rather than normal and expected procedure - as no government can keep everyone happy and there are always self interests to balance.

Maybe people are finally waking up to the reality that beneath all the promises that all politicians are slippery self serving power hungry liars.

Is there any money to fund big projects ? That’s the point.
My feeling is that whatever he does he’s fucked.

"There's no money there's no money" that's what Thatcher cried.

Fourty years later there's somehow still "no money"
All that's changed in fourty years is that our country has massively deteriorated, while the gap between the wealthy and the ordinary has grown exponentially. Go figure.

Way under half the country voted for them so why the surprise that half the country are anti them.

@SmileyHappyPeopleInTheSun I agree with most of your post.

@Circumferences exactly. Where has the money gone ? How many years of austerity and there’s still no money.

As I have pointed out on other threads 80% of adults in this country didn't vote Labour so they were never popular in the first place.

Starmer is being attacked by both the Labour left and the Conservatives.

Which was always going to happen.

That's how it works.

It's also why the Conservatives have been so great at winning the majority of elections despite most people wanting policies to the left of mainstream Conservative political thinking: because until recently they've historically been pretty united about getting power. The left of the Labour party has always been more concerned with being 'morally correct' even if it means doing it from the back benches in perpetuity.

I would argue that this is more like in the last 15 years since the banking crisis. We now have the situation that we have the highest taxes since ww2 coupled with the worse public services I can remember (and the highest electricity prices in the world to boot). This is all down to poor leadership. The state takes more than ever but is spent on the wrong things plus 5mplus people on out of work benefits.

Austerity lost the country lots of money. It was always a false economy. Hopefully Starmer's government will take heed.

But the truth is fairly obvious. Austerity has failed. Recent estimates from the New Economics Foundation (NEF) - using numbers produced by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) – confirm this (Stirling, 2019).

They find that the cumulative effect of austerity has been to shrink the economy by £100bn today compared to what it would have been without the cuts: that is worth around £3,600 per family in 2019/20 alone.

And, then there is the staggering social cost of the cuts.
Crime is up. Life expectancy has stopped rising but inequalities are growing again. Over a million people a year are now using foodbanks.

Homelessness has more than doubled. And poverty has started to rise once again: one-in-three children and around one in five pensioners have now dropped below the poverty line (DWP, 2019).

In the deluge of statistics, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that these are real people, families and communities, who rely on government support to get by, and who have been devastated by austerity.

https://www.ippr.org/articles/austerity-there-is-an-alternative-and-the-uk-can-afford-to-deliver-it

You're going to completely ignore the improvements in healthcare, education and early years under Blair and Brown?

Keir Starmer should be removed following a vote of no confidence and a new Labour leader established, as per the democratic process. It’s a bit futile to hypothetically open up the contest to other parties, since Labour would be unlikely to call a snap election a few weeks into the job.

Anyone else got the popcorn ready for the budget to be announced, something tells me it will be ‘for the many - not the few’. Get your piggy banks out and the hammer ready…

To be fair to guildford itself, they have a lib dem mp. So maybe that's an option.

And is what you’re seeing playing out ‘morally correct’? Or just more corruption and bribery? This time dressed in designer suits and glasses that were ‘gifted’ to a PM who earns over 400k a year.

That's a good viewpoint. Austerity was more tangible between 2009 and 2013. Since then it has been 'fiscal drag' which most people do not notice as much.

It wasn’t that long ago that Liz Truss crashed the economy, never mind the rest. People have short memories. Though I do think that the right wing media was always going to go to town on Labour. What a world we live in.

It's all bullshit isn't it.
Austerity is a political choice, not a necessity.
There's fuck loads of money.
Other countries managed to get through 2008 and COVID without anywhere near the austerity our governments have inflicted and apparently, continue to inflict.

It's just all bullshit. It's like a war on your own people for no reason.

I think because the change of government was in July and the 'silly season' for little stories came upon us, the issues and criticism of the government is more than would otherwise have been the case.