Starmer Must Go

[BisiBodi]

I made a lengthy post yesterday (on this thread: www.mumsnet.com/talk/politics/5333405-changes-to-immigration-rules-announced-by-starmer?page=2 @ 17:43 if you want to read it) regarding the horrendous "island of strangers" speech by Starmer
Today, Kier Starmer has decided to say that immigration has done "incalculable damage" to the country. My despair and fury over this, and the general direction of labour, warrants its own thread.

Starmer claimed in writing that immigrants have put too much pressure on housing and public services (they don't, and he previously said they don't). He added that the immigration system is “almost designed to permit abuse” and that it risks “pulling the country apart”. He said that he wanted to close a “squalid chapter” in our country’s history (of too much immigration in the last few years), and then he seemed to quote the Rivers of Blood speech and said that without significantly reducing immigration the UK risks becoming “an island of strangers".

He's doing this because he's proposing new laws to make immigration harder and bring net migration down (except they definitely won't). Stuff like increasing it to 10 years before you can apply for indefinite leave to remain (10 years!!), introducing English language tests (in a post that suggests Welsh doesn't exist), reducing social care visas (the system would collapse in a day), being tougher on overseas students and reducing the time they can stay after graduation (if you reduce their numbers at all then Universities will be bankrupt immediately), new ID cards, reduce (oh sorry, "clarify") the amount ECHR article 8 can be used to justify people staying on human rights grounds, etc.

When someone pointed out that high migration helps economies and low hurts them, and that this is true in the EU right now and all over the world, Starmer didn't think so. He said that immigration has been high in the UK but the economy has been stagnant, so there can't be any link. Yes Keir, but the economy was stagnant during A PANDEMIC AND ENERGY CRISIS AND COST OF LIVING CRISIS AND EXPENSIVE NEW WARS AND GLOBAL MARKET TRUMP TURMOIL. If the immigrants hadn't kept us level, your "stagnant" economy would have plummeted like a rock. You cannot possibly be presenting that as X=Y in a total vacuum.

This kind of xenophobia doesn't need explaining, but it's worth saying why it won't work and will lose Labour a lot of votes:

• Conservative and Reform voters do NOT change their vote to Labour ever, so this pandering is worthless. But Labour can lose votes to the Greens and LDs at a high rate. Nearly ALL the Reform votes come from former Conservatives.
• Public concern about immigration is low and goes up and down exactly with how much the press is currently going on about it (see the graph) so is not worth alienating your voter base about
• And it is alienating voters, because you've heard this kind of rhetoric before but it was from the actual NF and BNP
• The Mail's headline today was still attacking Labour because it is impossible to ever go far enough for them, or for Reform voters. Nothing is ever enough.

So, Labour saying "Reform are right actually" won't bring a single voter over to Labour, but it sure will lose you a few. Or, er, a lot. People are resigning their Labour membership and sounding furious. I haven't seen a single event trigger this much outrage from the public (and Labour MPs) in quite a while. Starmer has hugely damaged himself. Germany's far-right AfD are praising him, that's the level it's at.

I already left for the Greens, but today has me going even further. I think it's now worth the potential chaos to get rid of Starmer's version of Labour. In a timely article today, Nesrine Malik called our current elections "hostage politics". You MUST vote Labour or the Tories will get in. Now you MUST vote Labour or Reform will get in.

I don't respond well to threats. Never have. I tend to escalate. And I'm bored of their crap: more cuts, keeping first-past-the-post even though Labour members want PR, refusing to talk about rejoining the EU even though Labour members (and the majority of the country) want full rejoin, this xenophobic shit which goes against everything Starmer said about immigration when he was running for leader (but then he's broken every pledge from that time), the anti-trans bollocks, coming for the disabled PIP and saying all benefits are too high and that people are taking advantage of handouts and all the rest.

Fuck these guys. There's pragmatic politics where you compromise, and then there's this literal far-right shit that means you personally HAVE to be comfortable with saying it in public. It's about the soul of the PM and the party. Today is way over the line of sensible cross-party anything.

And I'm done with hostage politics. What, so we keep Labour in for 8 more years of... this? Of the same or more cuts? I'm rapidly approaching the point where smashing this Labour party so that they never try to be centre- / far-right again would do more good than the short-term harm.

Voters didn't show unwavering support for Labour at the last election, they showed that they will be extremely flexible and vote for whoever can win in their area. If Labour become unpopular in the polls, that will be someone else and not them. Labour's lead is incredibly fragile and changeable and today's performance is EXACTLY how they lose it and deserve to lose it. Yes, some young men went to Reform before the election... and twice as many young women went to the Greens. Labour's share fell 21% in 18-24 year olds. You cannot gain a single Reform vote by going right. It will never be far-right enough.
Saying that Reform are correct and using their rhetoric in speeches and changing your policies to theirs is NOT how you defeat them, or run a country.

Replace Starmer, quickly. At the very least.

And so what is the purpose of this thread, other than to vent into an online echo-chamber? I think it's a request to a call to action. It's a call out to everyone who currently resides - whether you like it or not - in a Labour controlled constituency and has a labour MP.

You can easily find out the details, together with links to their speeches and/or voting records, from service such as They Work For You.
Check the details of your MP, and especially their stance on immigration and other matters important to you, then email them.

Yes, indeed, we've have incompetence for a couple of decades or more. Brown made a number of mistakes, as did Sunak. It's as if they've no common sense and no one "advising" them of the entirely foreseeable consequences which they try to claim were unforeseeable. Personally, I think some of their civil service advisors are seriously incompetent. Let's face, the cabinet ministers aren't dreaming up these policies themselves - they're being "fed" options by their permanent secretaries who are likewise being fed options by other civil servants beneath them. I actually quite liked Phil Hammond who got dubbed "Spreadsheet Phil" because he wanted to check things out for himself - I think we need more of that rather than cabinet ministers rubber stamping policy changes without actually understanding the full impact of what they're agreeing to!

Indeed, maybe not the threshold as such, but they manage perfectly well to use tax records to determine eligibility for child benefit (£60k previously £50k), so they could dust off the same rules and apply them for winter fuel allowance.

(And better still, state pension too, at a much higher income level of something like £100k, the threshold at which working parents lose their free childcare, so again, there's the system/structure already set up for £100k income threshold too).

They need to get wiser at using existing data readily available for means testing and eligibility testing etc so that they can just tap into existing systems. Trouble is, of course, they're politicians, so they'll create yet another set of new complicated nonsensical rules that costs billions to set up and operate.

Keep it simple, keep it cheap to operate.

I agree with you and if I were to define myself, I'd say this fits: economically lean left, socially lean right. This applies to many of us, especially the ' old, traditional'Labour voters. The very wide divide between us and the liberal elite Labour voters, is more of a gulf nowadays so I suspect they won't be happy if starmer redirects his policies to appeal more to the old guard. If this were to happen, I imagine most will jump ship to lib dem/ greens.

Yes, I think this speaks to a large proportion of the population. I am being pushed to the right due social, cultural and national security issues but I am very much on left with everything else. Unfortunately the former is the most important to me at the moment.

Starmer doesn’t really fit anywhere in that he’ll push hard on various things, ignore concerns but only panic when careers and votes look rocky.

As for where people fit I’d say pressure will keep increasing until laws are changed and there’s a big policy shift. The article sounds very Times but it sounds like they’re missing the extent of dissatisfaction within the electorate. I suppose Labour can aim for this place still and see if it helps.

It’s a difficult situation to be left or left of centre when growth isn’t really happening. Far too much money is poured into the NHS for poor returns. We need to review this urgently because any growth income is immediately swallowed up. Yet we want infrastructure, prisons, holding units for immigrants, military expansion, better education, support for universities, the welfare state in all its breadth and triple lock pensions! We cannot afford all of this. This is causing Starmer and co issues because they consider borrowing is maxed out. Our DC will be paying for profligate spending on ill thought through policies.

So when the majority of people want to rejoin the EU, we should, but when the majority of people want much less immigration, then we shouldn't?

Make it make sense.

Far too much money is poured into the NHS for poor returns. We need to review this urgently because any growth income is immediately swallowed up.

It won’t happen because it would be political suicide. I’m not sure what you mean about poor returns, what would good ones look like to you? There’s clearly money available from somewhere - Addenbrookes is currently building a new children’s hospital.

@BIossomtoes They rob Peter to pay Paul. Depends on the finance deal in each nhs trust but building is capital. Our issue is running the nhs every year. Return on money spent needs to be a positive for growth. We have failed to achieve this.

That's party politics for you though isn't it, people don't agree on what are the most important issues of the day!

So what would good health outcomes look like to you? I’m genuinely interested. To be fair, I think Addenbrookes is an outlier, it seems to be awash with money possibly due to some fairly hefty endowments over the decades.

Strange how people only seem to care about what the majority wants when it chimes with their own beliefs.

Let them. For too long they've been willing stooges in the massive distraction that is the culture wars, fighting over definitions, diversity and 'lived experiences' while the rich gleefully pillage our bank balances.

Is it a co-incidence that many of them aren't short of a few bob themselves?

There is a huge difference between vetted immigration with visas and illegal immigrants with no background checks. I think the word “immigration” is too loosely used. There are plenty of working immigrants who have spent thousands of pounds on visas, NHS access etc who are upset about the amount of boat people coming over too.

Maybe they need to get real then because they’re a much bigger population than irregular arrivals on boats. If they’re getting upset it’s sheer hypocrisy.

@BIossomtoes I don’t actually think we can get good outcomes via the NHS as it is now. We need far less effort in keeping the elderly and very sick alive in hospital. People used to die at home with care at the end but so many people have a horrid time for months/years for no good reason. We are not hard nosed enough about who can access care. All immigrants to be in an insurance scheme might help. In fact everyone should be in an insurance scheme. Far too many people try to access health care for things they could treat themselves and services are clogged up. We abuse it so we get poor outcomes. It’s inevitable.

That’s how you perceive the problem. You still haven’t explained what good outcomes look like. People used to die at home because they had families (almost always women) to look after them. That’s no longer the case, women now are working because they have no choice, they can’t just drop everything to be amateur nurses. Romanticising the past isn’t the solution.

Women working because they have no choice? Generalising much?

What about women who are working because they want independence and because they want to work?

It really says something that I find myself with more in common with Tory voters nowadays, than my liberal counterparts! Obviously the wealth and class disparity is still glaringly there, but we can come to some agreement on the social/ cultural issues at least!

Does it matter why they work? They’re still not going to provide 24/7 nursing for their relatives, are they?

It matters because women do what they want to do. Maybe in the past they did look after the elderly, but was this really what they wanted? You are seeing things in a very reactionary manner. You presume they want to stay home and care for their family and they only work because they have to.

Maybe you need to examine your need to see the role of women in society.

I presume nothing of the sort. Kindly don’t tell me what I think.

You seem a bit confused, it’s not me telling you what you are thinking, you are telling all of us what you are thinking by writing it down.

How to derail a thread in one easy lesson.

The best path is not necessarily the shortest.

A thread can meander and that’s not a bad thing.