Wow. Latest Hartlepool polling...

I think it is legitimate to criticise Starmer and the Leadership for their choice of candidate, not because he isn't a great candidate and would have been a great MP, but because he was not going to appeal to the electorate in Hartlepool at the moment. It is legitimate to question overruling the local party when you lose.

The criticisms are legitimate and valid points to raise, but we don't know that Starmer and co were wrong. What is the evidence that a different candidate, a more brexity one would have won? I don't think there was much chance of any candidate winning. So perhaps Starmer was looking at a bigger picture, the tone he wants to set for the long game.

What is that tone?

Well, we know the NHS is one thing. The candidate was a great fit for that.

We know he is trying to move the Party on from fighting a Brexit battle that is now lost. Many might not see it that way, but actually, appointing someone who was a Remainer to a Brexit seat is a way of demonstrating that, as would appointing a Brexiter to contest a Remainy seat. Tactically it might not be great, but as part of a bigger strategy, time will tell.

Although moving on from Brexit, Starmer knows it is going to be a disaster and we will need to move back closer to Europe and the Single Market, which 11.3m Leave voters and 16.1m Remain voters wanted to prioritise anyway, even in 2016, according to the surveys. So showing you are aiming for compromise, to bring sides together, not continue the divide, might also be good strategy and this was a first step.

I don't know, it could simply be a really naive choice. Starmer is extremely intelligent and from a legal angle, brilliant when putting together a strategy on how to win either a prosecution or a defence.

But this is politics and he is not a career politician, he is not immersed in that world of intrigue and he hasn't actually been an MP for long. So he is inexperienced in Westminster politics and inexperienced as a political leader. He clearly never had the burning ambition to be a politician or PM all his life like someone like Tony Blair did. He just wanted to use his talents to do good, as we can see with some of his human rights pro bono cases.

To be a great leader you have to be a performer, he doesn't look like one yet. A barrister has to be a performer of sorts, mind you. His stark contrast with Johnson might be a huge advantage in time. Building gravitas in the eyes of the public, getting them to appreciate your seriousness, takes time.

To be a great leader, you need to be a great strategist, which is long term. The Tories have always been good tactically, but they have been strategically impressive these last 10 years. They used and destroyed the Lib-Dems. They have taken a grip on the BBC and other news media, have grip on the FPTP system and boundary changes and rewriting of the rules and conventions of the game itself and they have a grip on the part of the electorate who, with the triple lock on pensions, are largely immune from economic consequences and are frightened of progress anyway.

Starmer has been leader for a year. It was too soon to judge Corbyn, it's too soon to judge Starmer. Corbyn had the added hampering of most of the PLP not getting behind him (or even undermining him). Starmer has had a flaming pandemic and national lockdown as an added and probably greater obstacle, not least because it has given some natural bumps in popularity (and cover) for Johnson.
 
Redwurzel said:
Lefty - Unrestricted immigration (from EU) and other immigration I am sure was an issue in some people's voting - I did not include because the posts before me had put in
Click to expand...
That's another fallacy - immigration was never unrestricted.
 
Corbyn was never a leader and probably never wanted to be. His left wing policies did invigorate the young and those previously dissatisfied with mainstream politics, but a more able leader would have ensured that this emboldened the party. Corbyn took over a relatively united professional party and left behind an incoherent mess.
 
As with #3, people had no idea of how EU payments worked and what their value to the UK was. I read the other day that we're now spending more (~£400M per week) on borders than we spent on the EU (~£350M per week, as per the big red bus).

That £400m per week works out at £20.8bn per year in extra security at our borders per year since leaving the EU which could employ an extra 500,000 UK border officers. (the equivalent of everyone living on Teesside)

The real figure is a fixed sum of £705m (see below) most of which is a long term investment, not a weekly sum!

www.gov.uk

£705 million investment for GB-EU border

Unprecedented £705 million investment will fund new infrastructure, jobs and technology at GB-EU border.
www.gov.uk www.gov.uk

Possibly the Remain media are misleading their readers if they say £400m per week, readers who are always highly intelligent, totally balanced and never gulliable.
 
NYb - there is unrestricted immigration between EU states - free movement of labour is a core EEC/EU principle. In the EEC a person needed a work visa but in the EU I don't think a visa was even required. Numbers to be begin moving from country were not big at first and there were few issues. People were alo moving from similiar standard of living countries say UK to Spain, Italy to the UK. As the EU expanded as former communist countries joined the differences in wages were very big. say in the UK £250 per week against £50 per week in Eastern Europe, so the financial incentive to move was big. There was also more job opportunities in the UK, especially in the South East of England and other hot job spots. I believe there were temporary EU rules to say countries could restrict immigration for a period of years to allow a transistion. The UK and Sweden did not use this option unlike the rest of Western Europe, so the UK became the main destination for new immigrants. This was great for say restaurant owners and builders in London that at a constant supply of people from Eastern Europe, but made live harder for people in the provinces to find work or put some downward pressure on wages. Wages failed to keep up with the cost of living in many parts of the UK nand more and more people turned to food banks etc. Without the extra supply of labour the price of wages would have had to rise i.e employers pay more to get the staff. Many of those that came to the UK contributed in a positive way, working hard and paying taxes, but the scale of immigration was greater at one point than ever seen say in the USA at its peak there say in 1900.

The economics have changed now and the former £50 per week in Eastern Europe is more like £150 and job opportunities are just as high in Eastern Europe as the UK. Parts of Eastern Europe now have a higher GDP per person than the left behind areas of the UK. There is now a much smaller monetary incentive to come to the UK to work. To be fair to the EU decison makers they recognised the problems of movement of large numbers of workers over a relatively short period and thus introduced transition rules which the UK Governments of the Blair, Brown and Cameron era ignored. Anybody who questioned this was called a racist.
 
Otto42 said:
Corbyn took over a relatively united professional party and left behind an incoherent mess.
Click to expand...

Simply not true. When Corbyn won the leadership the party was skint. And Ed Miliband was trying to change the way trade union funding worked to make it even more skint. If that election had resulted in a hung parliament, and we'd gone back to the polls in the same year Labour wouldn't have been able to afford to campaign.

Besides the financial side of it, the party had just fought an election where the leader wrote his policies on a gravestone for some mad reason, and been wiped out in Scotland. The only policy was asking energy companies to put customers on their best tarriff. For five years the party had accepted responsibility for the global financial crisis and signed up to austerity.

Obviously you don't have to like Corbyn, but we shouldn't forget what a state the party was in before him.
 
Redwurzel said:
That £400m per week works out at £20.8bn per year in extra security at our borders per year since leaving the EU which could employ an extra 500,000 UK border officers.
Click to expand...
I can't find the source so I can't give you the exact breakdown but it was more to do with the total cost of implementing borders.

It included the extra costs for customs declarations & inspections, for instance, not just the government costs for border infrastructure.

I'll try to dig it out.
 
Scrote

I have quoted the UK Government's own figures from their own website - are you sure its not £400m per week not per year. I agree even £400m is a major cost, though I would guess some is to upgrade border controls for all people coming to the UK not just from the EU. For example equipment that can read smart phones for vaccination certficates which could be a big development.

On the EU administration it always annoyed me how the European Parliament moved every so often (6 months?) from Brussels to Strasbourg and the extra costs it created. I believe it happened because France wanted a major EEC building/function. I had to study EEC law many years ago which included the structure of the EEC. I gather the work is still split between the 2 locations.

NYB - you are a bit naughty not including free movement of labour from EU country to EU country as immigration. We were never quite a United States of Europe.
 
Redwurzel said:
Scrote

I have quoted the UK Government's own figures from their own website - are you sure its not £400m per week not per year. I agree even £400m is a major cost, though I would guess some is to upgrade border controls for all people coming to the UK not just from the EU. For example equipment that can read smart phones for vaccination certficates which could be a big development.

On the EU administration it always annoyed me how the European Parliament moved every so often (6 months?) from Brussels to Strasbourg and the extra costs it created. I believe it happened because France wanted a major EEC building/function. I had to study EEC law many years ago which included the structure of the EEC. I gather the work is still split between the 2 locations.

NYB - you are a bit naughty not including free movement of labour from EU country to EU country as immigration. We were never quite a United States of Europe.
Click to expand...
There have been a number of estimates bandied about from £10 to 15 billion a year, which is primarily business costs associated with the extra bureaucracy.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top