UK Politics

Can you actually tell me a single major policy where Labour fundamentally disagrees with the Tories?

• Great British Energy. A fully state-owned energy supplier that will invest in renewable energy. Like, really, just try to imagine those words coming out of a Tory's mouth and said Tory not immediately imploding.

• Reform of the Gender Recognition Act. It's not a huge reform, but it's an improvement on the existing process and is clearly a fundamental disagreement with the Tories, given that Rishi Sunak is still considering banning minors from socially transitioning (despite being told it would be illegal for the government to do this.)

• Workers rights. While the latest version of their policy isn't as good as the original, I believe most of the proposals are still in place, including: full employment rights from day 1 (currently from 2 years); sector-wide collective bargaining and minimum wages; unions have the right to recruit in all workplaces. The main policy they've rowed back on is creating a single class of worker, leaving only the genuinely self-employed as self-employed (ie, actual owners of small businesses).

These are just the first three that come to mind. There's a handful of other things, like renters' rights and housebuilding/planning reform where both Labour and the Tories say they're going to do something about it, but Labour seem more likely to actually do it. Labour were also talking about reforming the House of Lords at one point, and while they've been quiet about it lately, what they haven't done is officially announce they're not doing it. The Labour Party also supports electoral reform, they just haven't succeeded in getting the leadership to commit to it (this could genuinely be a strategy on Starmer's part to avoid having it weaponised against him.)

Another clear fundamental difference between Labour and the Tories is Labour haven't given any indication that they want to leave the European Court of Human Rights. So, you know, there's that.

I'm not going to say that Labour and Keir Starmer haven't been massively disappointing lately, because they really, really have. The shift to the right has pissed me off and a part of me wants to vote for the Lib Dems or Greens just out of spite (whether I do this definitely depends on just how safe my currently Conservative seat looks at general election time. A 15k majority is certainly not as safe as it was 4 years ago.) But Labour do still have a handful of really good policies that are clearly superior to anything the Tories have to offer.

They definitely have not been very good at publicising these policies (the document about their workers rights policy has been on their website for like 2 years now, and it's gotten next to no media attention), and it's hard to say whether it's the result of Labour deliberately making themselves a small target, or the right wing media just refusing to talk about any of the things Labour wants to do that the majority of people would actually like.

None of the parties have released their manifestos yet, and I'm not sure we'll see them until a general election is announced. I don't think we can conclusively say what Labour's policies will look like compared to the Tories until the manifestos are out there.