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 ?

Because you disagree with it you don’t think they thought it through?
FWIW I think the threshold is too low too - but I’m not arrogant enough to think they haven’t worked through the various scenarios and decided that this is the one to go with.

Half the country might not like them, but Starmer is still more popular than any Tory hopeful, it seems.

Labour might not be doing well but spare a thought for the Tories:

https://x.com/jessicaelgot/status/1841096877418107172
New Ipsos poll finds two thirds of voters (64%) do not care who becomes Tory leader. It includes almost a third (32%) of those who voted Conservative in July. Starmer leads Badenoch by 25 points, Cleverly by 21 points, Jenrick by 22 points, and Tugendhat by 22 points.

Starmer still more popular than them.
Hopefully it will all settle down post budget.

X post 😂

I do thanks, and have made a good living out of it. How about you?

Fine. Then I’d expect you would understand that there are often meetings where little seems to be achieved. And actually, unions haven’t said they’ll strike next year, they’ve said they’ll expect pay to keep up with inflation, so they’ll expect another rise. It’s only if negotiations fail that strikes are balloted on.
I’d also expect you to understand about waiting for what is actually planned/offered rather than making judgements beforehand.

Guardian is far from left wing, liberal leaning maybe. Hated Corbyn, doesn’t like Starmer much either.

My day job is "tax". It's not arrogant to think that they havn't thought it through. There have been numerous examples of politicians and civil servants not thinking things through and then being "surprised" by what they call unforeseen consequences that literally anyone with half a brain could easily have foreseen. It's a constant theme throughout tax and benefit policy!

One of the classics was Dawn Primarolo (Paymaster General) speaking in Parliament (on record in Hansard) defending Gordon Browns corporation tax reduction for small limited companies saying she didn't think that sole traders would convert to limited companies "just to save tax"!! What planet are these people on? In the event, hundreds of thousands sole traders converted to limited companies to save tax!! Duh!

It's far more likely that whoever came up with the policy didn't actually crunch the numbers as to the likely effect of people badly hit by the policy! Or someone did, but the person who made the decision glibly ignored the figures!

Interesting that you pick a Labour example and not Liz Truss…
Your agenda is clear.

OP I can feel your frustration but you need to understand what most of the British media actually is. It isn't part of a balanced and rational conversation about who would make the best government and how they should govern. It's a propaganda machine for serving the ruling class and destroying any possibility of meaningful change.

As such, its attitude toward the Labour party is completely consistent and predictable. If they select a radical leader or propose radical policies, it's blue murder about the evils of socialism and how they will destroy civilization as we know it. If they select a centrist leader or propose compromise with the right - and the Tories have made themselves unelectable - they will be allowed a spell in government to keep the seats warm for as long as it takes to reset the electorate's memory and restore the "natural party of government" to their birthright. But along the way it will be made quite clear that there's no point in them because they're "just like the Tories anyway".

Understand this, and everything makes complete sense. It is, incidentally, why the common argument about how Labour must move to the centre to make themselves electable, the UK is too conservative for anything else yada yada, is so much hot air. Nobody in any position of power on the right (governmental, media or anything else) has any genuine intention of compromising with Labour or the left and allowing them into the fold. The only reason Starmer could get his version of "Labour" this far is (a) because it had been neutered to the point that the establishment had nothing to be afraid of, and (b) because it's easier to kill once inside the cage.

Agree. Excellent points !

That KS kicked out many (obviously not all) of the lefties and massively weakened the left's position in the party is simply fact, as can be evidenced by innumerable actions he took as leader. It's not a matter of "according to" anyone. Whether the party is essentially Conservative mark 2 is more open to question, but it's hardly an uncommon opinion or one or confined to the left.

The idea that Momentum will take over in the event of his demise is nonsense, and could only be suggested by someone with no idea about anything in Labour party politics of the last five years. The whole structure and procedure of the party has been altered to make that impossible.

But that's OK because we've got a nice sensible centrist Labour party and the left back in their box, which is just what people wanted, right?

Well I don’t think ‘people’ if you mean the electorate wanted a left wing party in power did they ? Precisely why Starmer changed things.
Tbh the plotting went on during Corbyn’s time and Starmer’s. Neither were squeaky clean. When you've got alleged stalinists like Seumas Milne directing policy in the background it’s not a good look.

Haven't RTFT, but the House of Commons Library released its official analysis of the 2024 election last week. The introduction states that Labour won 34% of the vote across the UK. "It received a lower vote share than any party forming a post–war majority government."

CBP-10009.pdf (parliament.uk)

With that in mind, it's hardly surprising that a fair number of people are moaning, because presumably, they didn't want Labour to win? Personally, I don't think there was a viable alternative.

Well I don’t think ‘people’ if you mean the electorate wanted a left wing party in power did they?

There's no way of knowing, because the wasn't a left wing option, with a realistic chance of winning under First Past The Post, for people to choose from. But fewer people voted Labour in 2024 than voted for their left wing incarnation in either 2017 or 2019, and a lower percentage of the electorate voted for them than in 2017.

Tbh the plotting went on during Corbyn’s time and Starmer’s. Neither were squeaky clean. When you've got alleged stalinists like Seumas Milne directing policy in the background it’s not a good look.

Alleged schmalleged. Yet most of Labour's policies under Corbyn, when presented separately from the man himself, were found to be widely popular (and more have been vindicated by history now that people are waking up to the abject failure of austerity). The Labour party is (or rather, was) a broad church, and Starmer gained the leadership by proposing to maintain its general policy platform while presenting it with electorate-friendly professionalism. He'd barely gotten his arse on the seat before he proceeded to abandon everything he had claimed to support, expelled Corbyn for stating facts about the antisemitism crisis and rid the party of most of the voices that might otherwise now be developing and arguing those policies.

Which is fine, if you're happy with things the way they are.

That sounds very much like someone trying to justify why the electorate don’t want a government that’s too left leaning by drawing on a conspiracy theory!

Perhaps people just don’t want us to move too far left. Perhaps those on the left who believe they are right and have the moral high ground are in fact wrong. Perhaps it is true after all that all politicians are ultimately self-serving…

Perhaps any or all of those things. But the post of mine you quoted was not about the electorate, it was about the media.

It's because Keir has just pissed off the only generation with enough time on their hands to post useless meme shite. The rest of the country and slogging their guts out left poor by 14 years of Tory neglect.

And this:

'OP I can feel your frustration but you need to understand what most of the British media actually is. It isn't part of a balanced and rational conversation about who would make the best government and how they should govern. It's a propaganda machine for serving the ruling class and destroying any possibility of meaningful change.

As such, its attitude toward the Labour party is completely consistent and predictable. If they select a radical leader or propose radical policies, it's blue murder about the evils of socialism and how they will destroy civilization as we know it. If they select a centrist leader or propose compromise with the right - and the Tories have made themselves unelectable - they will be allowed a spell in government to keep the seats warm for as long as it takes to reset the electorate's memory and restore the "natural party of government" to their birthright. But along the way it will be made quite clear that there's no point in them because they're "just like the Tories anyway".

Understand this, and everything makes complete sense. It is, incidentally, why the common argument about how Labour must move to the centre to make themselves electable, the UK is too conservative for anything else yada yada, is so much hot air. Nobody in any position of power on the right (governmental, media or anything else) has any genuine intention of compromising with Labour or the left and allowing them into the fold. The only reason Starmer could get his version of "Labour" this far is (a) because it had been neutered to the point that the establishment had nothing to be afraid of, and (b) because it's easier to kill once inside the cage.'

@taxguru If they'd have set it at the same £60k threshold they use for child benefit clawback, they'll have had a lot more support and relatively few OAPs would have been badly affected.

You think an individual pensioner with an income of just under 60k needs help with their fuel bills?

This just about sums it up.

There's way too much criticism of a government barely in power for 3 months - far more likely to be Tory bots or a Russian troll farm

I don't agree with this.

It sums it up for your aunts. It doesn't "sum it up" for all pensioners.

@Blanketyre you're kind of missing the point of means testing.

Labour aren't means testing it.