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Tories slammed for anti-democratic election changes after shock London Mayor poll
(leftfootforward.org)
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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At this point does it really matter whether the next government (or mayor) is Labour or Tory?
I can't tell them apart on any major policy. They have "stylistic" differences but there's now nothing of substance that differs.
What's left is politics of personality. And more austerity.
If from someone's vantage point they can't tell the difference between Labour and the Tories, I'd question their vantage point. If one stands far enough off to the left, then boring centrist moderates and radical right-wing extremists may both be quite far away from where you're standing and perhaps end up looking almost close to one another - that's an optical illusion caused by perspective though, rather than a statement of reality. (For completeness: I'm neither a Labour nor Tory voter but I can still pretty clearly tell the difference!)
Also this is about the mayoral election, and Sadiq Khan has charted a course in office that's quite distinct from Labour nationally - for my money, he's by far the best senior Labour politician active at the moment.
Your analogy is only an analogy. Certainly, on issues I consider important Tories and Labour hold the same positions at the moment. For instance, many people are in utter poverty in this country. We have friends who both work and have to make decisions about whether they pay their extortionate rent or feed their kids. No one in the UK should have to put up with that.
And what do we hear from Labour? Nothing about rent comtrols, nothing about free school meals, nothing about raising the minimum wage to a genuinely living wage, nothing about taxing the excessively wealthy (or anything about redistributing wealth in fact). All we hear from Labour is that they will - like the Tories - “Grow the economy”. I’m sure you heard Rachel Reeves caught out on LBC recently by having her former words about the need to tax the wealthy.
Labour - with SIR Keir - are part of the Establishment and exist to make sure that the excessively wealthy and those with inherited wealth maintain their power and economic position.
That’s not an “optical illusion”, that’s looking at things very clearly in broad daylight. Perhaps your “moderate” postion where you can accept a country where half a million children live in destitution/extreme poverty is the vantage point that needs to be examined.
Fully agree that Labour under Starmer have shifted to become a moderate establishment party. That is good, because the Tories post-2016 - and especially in the Johnson/Truss/Sunak years - have become an aggressive radical anti-establishment party. At various points in the last few years, the Tories have gone to war with most of the pillars of the establishment: the legal profession, the BBC, the Bank of England, business, the civil service, parliamentary democracy, and of course most prominently our long-standing relationship with our closest neighbours, friends and trading partners.
I will be very glad to have a moderate establishment PM in office to clean up the mess that the last several years of radical anti-establishment PMs have left behind.
Ho ho ho! Next you’ll be telling me Trump is the anti-Establishment candidate in the US.
I use the traditional definition of Establishmemt: all the structures and processes that are used to maintain the political power of inherited wealth in this country. John Gibbs, the cultural writer, describes it as the “Norman Continuity Empire” where 1200 aristocratic familes close to William the Conqueror. The aims of the Tories is to best represent that Establishment and the aims of Labour is to help prevent the redistribution of that wealth.
I can tell that you like to see yourself as a moderate but knowing that half-a-million children live in extreme poverty (a Westminster calculation) and NOT sorting it out is a crime against those children. Starmer, for example, says that he will maintain the 2-child cap on child benefit at the same time as promising the excessively wealthy that he wont tax them. Both parties and all leaders (with possible exception of Greens) agree on that. And it’s not a moderate position.
Edited: added the word NOT
Yes. Trump is the archetypal anti-establishment candidate. He wants to burn down the existing order and recreate it in his own image. I think you're conflating 'anti-establishment' and 'left-wing'. Radicals exist on the left and the right - and in their (establishment) targets and their methods, they often end up having rather a lot in common.
It's not that uncommon to come across people like Claire Fox (whose career took her from the Revolutionary Communist Party to the Brexit Party) or George Galloway (who went from the anti-Blair left of the Labour Party to endorsing Nigel Farage and Brexit). There was a recent Economist article about the number of recent books by ostensibly right-wing US Republicans that peddle anti-capitalist narratives more commonly found on the left; you see this too in the tendency of US Republicans in recent years to pick fights with large corporations (such as Ron DeSantis's 'war on Disney') and Boris Johnson's famous 'fuck business' declaration during the Brexit negotiations.
When a politician starts to define themself as against 'the establishment' (instead of as for something), it's too easy to find themselves sharing a bed with a host of other characters you might have assumed they would find unsavoury.
We’ll just have to disagree about this. What you misread (which is exactly what Trump and the right-wing Tories over here want you to do) is that they want to tear down the structures of power and wealth. They really don’t. They might want to gain advantage within the Establishment but none of them want to see it brought down. It’s purely rhetoric. Look at Truss as an example. She bent the knee. They all bend the knee. Starmer has literally kneeled down and been knighted.
Sorry but I think you're dramatically misreading the politics of our country if you think people like Johnson, Truss, Braverman etc are fans of the status quo. They are not. They pretty evidently loathe Britain as it is and their every action in government has been aimed at tearing down the status quo and creating some radical right-wing conservative dystopia in it's place. Truss was the single most radical, anti-establishment prime minister of my lifetime, even more so than Thatcher, and we're profoundly fortunate that she was removed from office before she could do more harm.
The post-2016 Tories have vandalised so much of the fabric of modern establishment Britain - the NHS, the BBC, the courts, the professions, the universities, the civil service, the police, our rights and civil liberties, our reputation in the world, our place in the European Union. It beggars belief that anyone could think that these people are supporters of that very same establishment that they have been so busy tearing down.