This is how the US ended up fascist.
The population continued to move to the left, the leftish party would only court the right. The further right party won.
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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novara used to be great on resonance fm but they've really been scraping the barrel the last couple of years with conspiracy fantasists and clowns like piker, whose methods they now seem to have adopted because populism
also this is a midterm government that it getting through the unpopular stuff and haven't wheeled out their election winning policies
It's still amazing that the labour government is refusing to court the left. Labour. What a weird fucking world.
For some bizarre reason they have decided that they need to appeal to reform voters as if they would ever vote for anyone else. Labour strategist are clearly terrible.
Sounds like the DNC in the US
And it's for the same reasons. They rely on rich donors, and don't want to alienate them by doing anything that might actually benefit people who work for a living.
appeal to rich voters
FTFY
Thoughts on these comments from Labour MPs? Source.
One MP [said] if Burnham "acts like a team player he'd be valuable". But they cautioned: "If he's a grandstanding dickhead the melodrama will be a pain in the arse."
Another MP:
the country would never forgive us for doing exactly what the Tories did in changing leaders
Re: the 2nd quote, I can definitely see it being a problem if Labour can't remind the electorate about Tory chaos (without being accused of hipocracy). Optimistically, Tory chaos rhetoric has two functions: alleviates "buyer's remorse" in people who voted Labour; and it throws more mud at the toxic Tory brand, driving their voters to Reform. If they can deploy it properly then they'll get another majority as the right's vote is split within constituencies, leaving the Labour candidate as the winner under our FPTP system.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
Systems often get hijacked.
IMO the issue is that Tony Blair so comprehensively changed politics that parties can't win elections in the UK anymore from a leftwing platform. The alternative is that the government/Starmer are sitting there being told that a leftward move is significantly more popular than their current platform, and that they are - suicidally - ignoring that evidence due to ideology.
How would one square the implicit suggestion that Starmer is taking bold ideological stances with the fact that the one thing everyone agrees about him is he lacks a clear ideology?
parties can’t win elections in the UK anymore from a leftwing platform
How would we know? Which party with more than a couple of percentage points of the vote has actually run an even slightly leftwing campaign since Blair and Brown? The only one I can think of is Corbyn, and he was sabotaged by his own MPs and the party apparatchiks who would (somewhat like the article) rather lose than allow anyone with even vaguely leftist policies to win.
We can't know for sure. My point was that logically they'd be following what their internal polling / researchers are telling them.
Yeah, I think it's more that they want those fat donor cheques and are doing contortions with polling data to come up with the policies those donors want.
It’s not as if the left was doing brilliantly during the Kinnock years. Or the Corbyn era.
I said this from the start, there was never any chance for Burnham to become a Labour MP as he is so clearly an automatic threat to Starmer. It's just like BoJo all over again, they can't be having anyone effective in the party, as that would ruin the fun.