Labour Supporters - Do you think it would help if KS was replaced?

[Mrsmunchofmunchington]

I am a life long labour voter. Like many I am incredibly disappointed, in fact I’m devastated by the direction of the current government.

Something needs to change in a pretty radical way or we are opening the door to Deform.

I’m torn between thinking the last thing we need is another revolving door at no 10 but I have lost any confidence that KS is able to lead us out of the mess the tories left us in.

Would it be a good thing to change leaders if this was possible and if so who should it be?

@SkipAd ,The government in this country is not one person.
But Political Parties and Governments need Leadership.
Without strong leadership you get the ambitious MPs fighting amongst themselves. Their ambitions become more important to them than running the country and the result is stalemate.

I used to like KS but he’s massively gone down in my estimation. No party speaks for me anymore - weirdly the Tories are probably the party that would most benefit our family directly but I am so opposed to their ethos.
No idea who should lead.

Those lost opportunities in sophisticated industries as in the Guardian article up thread contrasted with the fawning over old technology workers on the Underground.
Terminally stupid just to ensure they have votes.

It seems this week senior firing is Starmer's political advisor, he didn't even make to being defended at PMQs!

Exactly. Labour are just stuck in 1970s class wars. They have no comprehension of business or the 21st century.

@LidlAmaretto I think your comment about all these new MPs is a very valid point. It’s been said that having a huge majority and many new MPs is not the breeze it might appear to be. It certainly used to be more possible to whip MPs and voting dissent was rare. Now it’s common and both main parties have suffered from an inability to get backbenchers and ministers fully on board. Neither is it just communication. It’s a fundamental problem of what MPs see as their role.

Go back to Tony Blair’s Labour and you could see (initially) most MPs were buying in to new Labour. Like them or loathe them, Mandelson and Campbell did keep the train on the rails. Many dissenters were effectively sidelined. Now there’s so many MPs who don’t agree with the Labour policy at all snd are not going to shut up.

We have also too many MPs who haven’t got beyond student and opposition politics. They don’t understand that lawmaking is now what they do. It’s not a job purely about talking to a few people in your constituency and totally ignoring others, most of whom didn’t vote for you. MPs have a duty to represent everyone, not just the “vulnerable” or their mates. They have to consider the economy and wider issues. Many cannot do this and are stuck in a very limited economic view so simply aren’t good enough to be ministers.

This is why legislation fails. The ministers don’t know how to see policies through to be effective legislation. Most Labour MPs have no intention of agreeing to policies of growth. They mostly went to hammer those who produce growth. It’s politics vs economic common sense and politics gets in the way. They won’t care about jobs going, lack of employment and lack of graduate jobs as long as their left leaning credentials remain intact.

I’ve read that only 5% of the population had a good enough understanding of the economy to see what Brexit could do. It feels thst those 95% are sitting in Parliament. The government has struggled to move from opposition rhetoric to making the hard decisions now required. Opposition doesn’t make laws and opposing everything is easy. Starmer is poor and not a natural leader as a politician. Labour hasn’t got anyone who is better as a leader so for the moment, it’s up to Starmer to keep trying but he will never be free of the back bench revolts.

Neither is there much obvious success. How many homes built or started? Very quiet on those stats. Where is nhs change? More money but same old incompetences surfacing. Growth policies getting nowhere because they sabotaged growth by fiscal policies. Never mind being on the take and costing up to Mandelson - again. Starmer needs to be pushing on but is a hostage to the backbenchers. It won’t end happily.

He has more issues than just the press.

Quite. The best way to stop the press from writing constantly about your stupid decisions in government is to stop making so many stupid decisions in government.

🎯

I have rarely read so much common sense political analysis! The sensible folk are clearly out in force.

I agree with @LastToBePickedand @CoreyFloodon their analysis of why Labour got in this mess. Starmer and McSweeney spent so long planning how to get into government but had no plan on how to implement their policies. They now have multiple problems. I don’t think Reeves has been very impressive and the guarantee not to increase NI was stupid. Even the Tories said they’d reverse the 1p cut.
Most of the new intake of MPs are ex councillors who spent years struggling against Tory cuts and all they want is a way to reverse them without looking at the financial implications. Covid cut the links between MPs and the party-they all seem to think they are independent representatives of their local area rather than being elected on a Labour ticket. They need to see it has to be a mixture of the two.
I do think financially Labour have been a mess, but I don’t see how any government could improve it. They need to have their Business minister and support start ups and SMEs.
On a new leader, I don’t think Starmer should be replaced now. Who would it be? The only people who seem to have the competence to challenge the status quo are Wes Streeting and Shabana Mahmood. I think Mahmood has been impressive so far.
Comms is a problem but not the only problem. They do need to push everything positive they are doing so it’s seen. The media is mostly right wing and won’t mention it. But they also need to improve comms with their MPs so they can get behind the government.
Andy Burnham is good in Manchester but he wasn’t any use when he was a minister

When they were first voted in, I think we all felt optimistic that things would get better.

The country needed the new government to be calm, measured, treat us like grown ups. They should have completely gone the other way and thrown some bones to small business/ start ups/ farmers. Given people some HOPE and some aspiration. It’s been all stick and no carrot. You can’t have growth with no optimism.

They haven’t thrown any one group a bone. It’s no wonder we all feel disillusioned.

I'm the same. If the old One Nation Conservative party returned without the Brexiteers I'd probably bloody vote for them for the first time in my life. If Rishi Sunak was back in charge Id vote for them tbh

Leave aside how horrible those messages were on their own terms, and what it says about the culture in which people feel they can talk like that, it never fails to amaze me how unbelievably stupid people are in writing stuff like this down.

Like do people not think "if this ever got out I'll probably be sacked and bring the party into disrepute?" before they type?

I think in many areas they came in with a clear plan but it's not stuff they can turnaround quickly. So many problems just can't be fixed overnight. New legislation takes time to get through and even longer to have an impact.

Cost of living is still a huge issue but there's only so much that the government can do to impact that.

Impact on growth (even if they were doing all the right things...) takes time.

I think they've made things unnecessarily harder for themselves. But I also think "what would real impact on people's day to day lives would a government doing all the right things have had by now?" - probably not that much more in practice?

Which is comes back to why comms is so important because they really needed people to be able to have faith that things are heading in the right direction and they've completely failed on that front.

We have also too many MPs who haven’t got beyond student and opposition politics. They don’t understand that lawmaking is now what they do. It’s not a job purely about talking to a few people in your constituency and totally ignoring others, most of whom didn’t vote for you. MPs have a duty to represent everyone, not just the “vulnerable” or their mates
I agree. Labour have always had a problem with ideologues who get caught up in their own purity spiral and ' didnt get into politics to do blah blah'. Some of them would rather Labour be in opposition than in government and having to look at reality rather than 'tax the rich' as a policy.

I think in many areas they came in with a clear plan but it's not stuff they can turnaround quickly. So many problems just can't be fixed overnight. New legislation takes time to get through and even longer to have an impact
If they'd taken their time and thought more things through, talked to the backbenchers and didnt rush in there would be fewer problems now. The WFA is unreasonable. Why didn't they just take their time and look at ways to take it away sensibly- tapered it or made it taxable? Now they've just ended up with having to give it to pensioners who have incomes higher than the average wage, hardly saving any money at all. Why not take their time on welfare? I agreed with the first Doctors pay settlement but it sounds like they were had, and the unions have smelt blood so are just going to keep coming back for more. Just like their backbenchers who will now push and push on any kind of welfare reform after they had to u turn on ill thought out and rushed policy.

@LastToBePicked You could have a government with a lot more positive things to say! Housing starts? What are they? Very low so not mentioned. Lots of companies expending and feeling confident? None are. CEOs are speaking out about rising costs. They don’t have coherent policies for growth, they just want to tax and few companies want to come here. High energy costs prevent this. Angela Rayner was just about to alter employment rights. Yet more reason for compounded to not come here. It’s all ideology and lack of business sense. Most of them aren’t up
yo the job. Shouting from the opposition benches doesn’t prepare for government. Most haven’t been experienced business leaders and it shows. It’s poor.

@LidlAmaretto as I said earlier I have no idea why they tried to take away the WFP, it made no sense at all either practically or strategically.

@TizerorFizz - just to take housing as it's an area I know a bit about professionally - I think most who work in this area think they're doing broadly the right things, but even with an a different plan, nothing you can do in this space happens quickly. You can't just magic up huge numbers of housing starts overnight. The impact takes time. It's also heavily dependent on factors outside the government's control.

So it circles back to comms again - they can keep saying "1.5m homes" and "build baby build!" but they are setting expectations they were never going to be able to meet.

KS was careful to "under-promise and over-deliver", but he's taken it too far, to the extent that he dares not mention anything Labour is doing right at all. We need to hear more about things like the Workers' Rights Bill.

I don't want fascist Farage and his party of millionaires (they are all millionaires, yet they claim to represent working people), and I never want the Conservatives again after Boris Johnson, and Labour is the closest thing we have to "adults in charge".

Haven't RTFT so apologies if this has been covered already. The UK is fucked, no matter which party is in power and who is PM unless and until it rejoins the EU. Even then there will be many years decades of distrust and division before this disastrous period of UK history will be consigned to the history bins.

Just my two cents.

Being in the EU isn't helping France though is it? They are in dire straights

The Workers Rights Bill will be a disaster for workers unfortunately (but predictably). So maybe that's why it's being kept low key.

I’m not sure how a workers rights bill which gives workers more rights can be a disaster for workers.

Because it reduces flexibility for employees and employers. And discourages employers to take on new staff if they get full rights from day one. Why take the chance on a new employee. It will be detrimental to young people starting out and possibly disabled people as employers won't want to take the risk of giving them a chance.

Onerous employment rights will also mean that employers move to other countries with less strict "rights". Which means the jobs go.

I think the balance is currently absolutely fine. Shame Labour can't stop tinkering.