Why are Labour MPs so out of touch with what the public want?

[greypinkspoon]

I voted Labour and haven’t been overly impressed with him. But I also can’t think of anything worse than changing leader right now and see how this uncertainty is affecting markets. Why can’t these Labour MPs see the harm they are creating? What is it they actually want? Because I don’t think these Labour MPs have a clue. They are just scared to lose their jobs!

He's got to go in my view. The council election results spoke for themselves. They've lost Wales and they lost seats in Scotland too. Just go.

This with bells on.

Mass immigration (or at least immigration at the current level) cannot simply be stopped. If we stopped people coming to the UK we are going to have to accept that a lot of services will not be delivered. This includes things like healthcare, social care, cleaning etc. There simply are not enough people of working age in the UK to do the jobs to provide these services.

Even with the current immigration levels there are already a massive number of unfilled vacancies for things like nurses, healthcare assistants, cleaners etc. Stop people coming to this country and we need to accept one of the consequences of that will be that services get even worse.

It's the 10-20 million people coming to the country that have increased pressure on services in the first place. Why are people blind to this.

The public isn't an homogeneous mass. We all want different things and what we want changes through our lives.

It seemed years ago that people thought election time was the time to vote for the party most aligned to your beliefs and what you wanted. Then people let the winning party get on with that for four years.

That has changed.

I work in specialist recruitment. Do you believe that if there were less people coming into the country, I would need less specialist HCA’s for SENd schools?

Because I can tell you two things:

1. that’s not true

2. we employ for that role from a largely overseas background

Why arent you training and employing British people?

What happens, is we advertise for the vacancies we have, and “British people” do not apply for them.

I don’t advertise specifically for overseas staff, that is quite obviously discrimination. There is a marked difference in application rates.

But I’m not dragging British people into work kicking and screaming.

The work is there if they want it. And generally speaking, they don’t.

Over the last 50 years as the percentage of people in the workplace who were born abroad has increased by the exact same percentage as the number of people coming to the country. The same with unemployment.

Could it be said that the pressure is coming from failure to invest in services, not failure of immigrants to service themselves and the population as a whole?

But that is part of the issue, we need to keep adding more and more and more people like a giant Ponzi scheme. Then we need to keep building more and more housing. Then we need the health service to grow to treat all these people. Then we need to ensure there are the jobs for all the people. At some point surely we reach a peak population that we can sustain before everything goes to pot.

I always laugh when people start quoting how wonderful countries like Denmark and Norway are and how they get it all right. Denmark has a population of 6 million to our 70 million. Way easier to look after such a small population rather than one over 10 times the size but not 10 times the land area. Norway has a sovereign wealth fund, funded by drilling oil.

You used to have to prove you couldn't find appropriately experienced and qualified people in Britain before you recruited from overseas (or outside the EU).

It was called the Resident Labour Market Test.

The Tories abolished the test in 2021.

If that is what they want, they need to campaign on that ticket. When Jeremy Corbyn did that there was a huge swing to the Conservatives.

They seem to have lost sight of the fact that they were elected because those same voters saw Keir Starmer as a sensible (if uninspiring) safe pair of hands. These voters would never have voted for an Angela Rayner or an Ed Milliband.

Voters have seen what happens when ideologues introduce insane economic policies. They do not like it.

The banking system underpins everything. We are not a communist state with government banking! No one with a grain of common sense would want that. Banking is needed as we discovered when it went wrong!

that sums it up nicely - the problem is lots of the population want the moon on a stick and it isn’t possible due to previous gvts action's over the last 45 years and lack of long term planning and certainly following on from a fairly big decline in GDP post Brexit. Covid of course didn’t help either . . I blame the FPTP system for this - every party has to have an eye on the next election at all times and it is detrimental to planning. Labour and Starmer were always going to be on a hiding to nothing and trying to make small forward moves based on shirt buttons. It’s very very easy for other parties too to carp from the cheap seats and make unrealistic and uncosted policy suggestions without having to actually implement them - I vote Lib Dem but doubt anything much different would have happened with them to current gvt- although may have pressed quicker for rejoining EU or an EEA type arrangement . Personally I think with lots of party’s in the game now we have to brink in PR - or Labour/lib dems and greens have to have discussions , find some red lines and have an alliance because I’m pretty sure this is what the Tory’s/Reform will do

They are out of touch with the people who voted reform and I am glad of that

Even if they represent the majority? Do you not believe in democracy?

I would like to see a leader who is less willing to copy Reform policies. The Reform leaders are all pretending, anyway. I believe they just want to get rich.

Well, the MPs who want Starmer to resign are in touch with the public who want Starmer to resign.

And the MPs who want Starmer to stay are in touch with all the people who are sick and tired of all the leadership haggling

Part of the so-called Boriswave no doubt.

As to the original question the OP raised, it is not just Labour MPs who are out of touch.

Labour hasxalways been a coalition of people who hate each other no matter how often they call each other ' comrades'

What is needed is to slash spending and put the money into encouraging business and infrastructure. But slashing spending means benefits, pensions,public service employees taking a hit - that’ll go down well -but as things stand at the moment they will lose the next election anyway so it would be nice if they put the country first, not their jobs, and got on with doing that.

The public wants stability.

The public wants fairness.

The public wants representation.

The public needs Wes Streeting.

Let's make this happen.

Here's my reason

Yes Wes

They don’t represent the majority - of people that voted only 27% voted Reform and if you add in the Tory’s that makes 47% - more voted for centre/centre left than didn’t