The UK: The Keir Starmer years - RESIGNED

I found this quite an interesting insight into Labour’s current situation. Despite the clickbaity title it’s a more wide-ranging discussion of their first year in government.

 
No, it should be universal, as most benefits should. Means testing creates winners and losers and weird cliff edges, as well as the psychological factor of "why are they getting something I'm not"
 
Totally agree with Jark on that one. The idea of Chelsea retirees getting state benefits is insane.

Increasing tax to fund this also creates cliff edges and "losers" moaning about being on the wrong side of a bracket, just in a different way. And wasting tax increases on this would eat into our ability to fund far more critical things with tax rises in the future. Tax increases can't be infinite.
 
I mean, to be clear, I support taxing then more than they get from a state pension, I just feel that's preferable to means testing their pension
 
If you actually get them to pay more tax when they’re earning/ living off their parents’ millions, then you don’t NEED to worry about means testing anyone.
 
ZenGiraffe said:
Would you take their pension away too?
Click to expand...

YES AND THEIR NHS HEALTHCARE AND THEIR HOMES AND THEIR CHILDREN AND THEIR SOULS

No in seriousness. Pensions are a different thing in my head. They're at least partly linked to whether you have worked or not, and so in my head it's less of a state benefit and more a reward for having been a working member of society. If that includes retired investment bankers, fine.

The fuel fund was always trying to achieve a different aim; helping our more vulnerable population meet the most basic cost of living. That is not your retired investment bankers.
 
I feel I could make a decent argument that the winter fuel allowance should be seen as a healthcare need but regardless, I just fundamentally believe that the relationship between citizen and state is better the less caveats and qualifications there are to what the state provides.

UBI NOW!
 
  • Like
Reactions: GNL
That argument is so easily flipped though. The next stage is the rich asking why we should caveat and qualify who pays how much into the state.

If we're going down the healthcare route, why should we distinguish by age even? Even your working class 30-year-old single parent needs heat in the winter months; so should they not also get the allowance?
 
Shoat said:
That argument is so easily flipped though. The next stage is the rich asking why we should caveat and qualify who pays how much into the state.

If we're going down the healthcare route, why should we distinguish by age even? Even your working class 30-year-old single parent needs heat in the winter months; so should they not also get the allowance?
Click to expand...
In Scotland at least, social housing has a higher required temperature for pensioners as opposed to younger people in living areas, from memory, 21 degrees compared to 18.
 
www.theguardian.com

Spending review fails to impress former Labour supporters in West Yorkshire town

Plans to spend more on housing are met with scepticism in Morley and resentment over winter fuel payments remains
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

Moore – once a Labour voter but no longer – who lives in a detached house nearby, said he “got by alright” without the winter fuel payment this winter but “any money for OAPs is great”.

He said the reversal was too little too late for his support of the government though. “They’ve made the biggest mistake of their lives.”

His wife, Maggie, had stronger words. “Labour want kicking in the head,” she said.

She was not pleased to hear there would be more investment in homes, believing the government would use them “to house all the immigrants”. “It’s alright moving them out of hotels but where to? They’ll be put into a house that our people need.”
Click to expand...

:manson:
 
A moment of appreciation for Peston on ITV which provides the level of analysis (with graphs) we should expect for these sort of events
 
The British government will call you a terrorist if you attack property, if you attack capital. State sanctioned violence can kill hundreds of thousands but you're the terrorist if you throw some red paint.
 
They won’t, but his chief of staff looks to be getting a lot of heat for this.

www.theguardian.com

Starmer aide Morgan McSweeney under fire after Labour welfare rebellion

Backbenchers feel PM’s chief of staff missed strength of feeling over cuts – and there are deeper tensions at play
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

Rachel Reeves was known to be pushing hard for the more draconian elements of the cuts too, but I think they’ll keep her on at least until next year. If nothing else she’s a useful hate-sponge for all the really unpopular non Foreign policy related stuff. Plus no fucker in their right mind would want her job.
 
I just don’t know why any of them even get up and work in the morning. I suppose no one is paying these useless ghouls the salaries they get in the private sector.
 
They really fucked this up didn't they. The effort to move the country away from the right over years and years and this is what they got. It takes a lot to lose that much momentum so quickly.
 
ZenGiraffe said:
I worry that they'd only replace Reeves with STREETING
Click to expand...
Oh, health is what he wanted and he's staying until the NHS is sold and trans people are erased from all NHS documentation. THEN he'll be the leader and chancellor of the rebranded RLP (Reform Labour Party).
 
Longform Starmer interview featuring a couple of notable mea culpas.

observer.co.uk

The private trials of Keir Starmer | The Observer

The prime minister reveals the quiet grief and inner determination of his first year in office – and why he ‘deeply regrets’ his ‘island of strangers’ sp...
observer.co.uk observer.co.uk

After a year in power, has being prime minister proved harder than he expected?“

It was more that the damage left behind by the last government was genuinely worse than I had imagined,” he says, cautiously. “We had to do a lot of tough stuff early.” Even so, Starmer recognizes that people had also expected more than just “tough stuff” from a new government. He accepts his gloomy speech in the Downing Street garden last summer, where he warned “things will get worse before they get better”, was a mistake. It “squeezed the hope out”, he says. “We were so determined to show how bad it was that we forgot people wanted something to look forward to as well.”
Click to expand...


The prime minister’s words included a long section on the importance of having “fair rules” that “give shape to our values” and hold diverse nations such as Britain together. But then he went on to warn that without such rules, “we risk becoming an island of strangers”. To many ears, that sounded a lot like Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech half a century earlier, when he said Britain’s white population would be “strangers in their own country”.

The left denounced his speech as “shameful” and warned Starmer was dancing to the populist Reform UK party’s tune. Starmer insists none of that is true: the speech was simply a mistake. “I wouldn’t have used those words if I had known they were, or even would be interpreted as an echo of Powell,” he says. “I had no idea – and my speechwriters didn’t know either,” he says. “But that particular phrase – no – it wasn’t right. I’ll give you the honest truth: I deeply regret using it.”
Click to expand...
 
So he's basically tone deaf then, got it. Admitting it doesn't make it better. Problem is you don't get that momentum back. And clawing back a generation of voters from Reform ain't going to be easy as he might think.
 
Morgan McSweeney is surely on his way out (thankfully). Between the welfare reforms and island of strangers speech which he had a hand in, it's convenient this is all coming out now.
 
Who the FUCK does their marketing? :D

Maybe I should apply for a job, I don’t know the first thing about policy marketing and I don’t have any press contacts but I couldn’t possibly do any WORSE
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Users who are viewing this thread

Total: 1 (members: 0, guests: 1)
Back
Top Bottom