My question is really whether Keir Starmer is a real Labour leader or not I suppose. To my mind, I’ve seen him break every promise he made during the leadership election. I’ve heard him say there are too many foreigners in the NHS. I’ve heard him speak out against climate activists and anti-racism campaigners. I’ve heard him say he wants to be tougher than the Tories on crime and immigration. I’ve not really heard him support striking workers, for example, but I have seen him accept an award from the Spectator as well as attend an awards ceremony and write for The Sun.
I’ve heard him parrot the government, Tory party and right-wing media guff about Brexit. It looks and feels like he’ll engage with the right but not with the left. Either because he doesn’t feel like he has to because we’ll vote Labour anyway, or because he actually believes the stuff he’s saying. Neither of things are good, let’s be honest.
You and others may have no issue with him saying the sort of stuff listed above, hoping he’ll deliver something different if and when he’s Prime Minister. People seem to think he has to do the stuff listed above to try and appeal to those ‘floating voters’ and there is some truth in that. But I don’t really have that sort of faith in him. I have to be honest.
To my mind there was absolutely huge movement under the last leader. Starmer and his team, rather than tapping into it - to the youth engagement, to the organisation of the left, the huge membership - have set about dismantling it.
A massive amount has changed since the GE and leadership election. Pandemic, war, energy crisis, massive inflation, trade down, GDP not recovering, three Tory PM's 2.5 years, strikes, NHS wrecked (even more), the exit of labour/ workers etc etc. Priorities or headlines after or during that lot have to change, and change by an extremely large amount otherwise you look far too rigid and not prioritising the biggest problems we have at the minute. Let's see what the manifesto says, what the priorities are then, and let's see what he does in relation to the manifesto before we decide what promises he has broken. He's not been in power for 1 second yet, all his job is at the moment is to provide a viable alternative to this current **** show, which he is seemingly doing very well (as the polls say).
When did he say "there are too many foreigners in the NHS"?
I've never heard him say that, and certainly don't expect him to have said it in isolation (the same way the far right or Tories do, and how they mean it), and every time he speaks there's a reason or some context.
Any time I've heard him talking he's been saying we should be training up more of our own nurses and paying them better, and there's nothing wrong with either of those statements, and a large majority of people (and people in red wall seats) would agree with those statements. If we recruit and train the max we can, and still have gaps, then yes of course bring foreign nurses in. The big problem is this major reliance on overseas recruitment of a specialist job should not be the default or a high percentage, we need to fix the problem of what is leading to that requirement. It's not like this is a temporary job either, we have always needed nurses, and we will always need them.
We need to make being a nurse (or working in any sort of care) much more appealing, so we can drive up recruitment here. All we've seen over the last 12 years is the Tories taking the **** out of them, taking advantage of their good nature. Then to cap this off-handed them a mess of a pandemic to deal with, and a clap wasn't going to fix it. No matter what anyone thought about Blair (the last Labour leader to win in nearly 50 years), the NHS was in a much better position when he left, than what it is now.
There were big moments under the last leader, but not big enough, which is why he lost
by 55 seats. Then he lost the next one by 163 seats, which is a massive move away.
The current guy has the biggest movement to labour that I've probably ever seen, and I don't see many going the other way.
Think about anyone who has voted Labour in the last 30 years. The problem with moving to a left version of labour, is you run out of voters to the left, and inevitably lose voters on the right of Labour, who have voted labour in the last 30 years. It's not possible to win if you lose the voters on the right of where labour have been in the last 30 years. This is even harder after a far-right movement like brexit, and it's far too soon to be even thinking about reversing that massive **** up.
Labour could of course narrow the band of the political compass they cover, to be less central but all this does is give up seats, and would miss out on the opportunity to get rid of some absolute Tory/ Tory Right clowns, and it will make it harder for them to come back. These seats would likely get filled by more moderate people, and if they didn't they would lose again and again.
We (Labour) need to give them an absolute kicking of monumental proportions, so they don't try this crap again. Brexit let a load of further right Tory MP's (tossers) come to the forte, and we need to put them back in their box. We need clowns like BJ, JRM, Dorries etc out of their seats, so even when labour do lose in the future, its losing to a less far-right party.
If Labour hold power for two terms we could see the centre moving further to the left, and could end up with a situation where they hold power for a long time, like under Blair, which anyone should happily take after what we would have had from 2010-2025. Yes, that might not be ideal, but ideal doesn't exist, not now.