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OgsyedIE 24 minutes ago [-]
Whilst the value of the pound and NHS backlog did slowly improve under Starmer, my favourite part of his term was the 2024 interview where he described himself as not dreaming or having internal thoughts.
I don't expect huge improvements under Burnham but I hope for at least some police manpower numbers to recover. There have been intermittent stories of planning, FSA and trading standards personnel being threatened by armed gangs in the last few years which is an indicator of some new severe gaps in state capacity.
I know you probably didn't mean it that way - but people with aphantasia are often very creative, and visionary despite.
mmahemoff 10 minutes ago [-]
Aphantasia doesn’t preclude having dreams or internal dialogue/thought.
rapsey 15 minutes ago [-]
Well that sure as hell does not describe starmer.
MichaelZuo 9 minutes ago [-]
Well the bigger issue is that none of the major parties in the UK have any kind of sensible list of priorities, that they can actually whip the MPs to stick to.
So governance is, at best, semi random…
bluescrn 40 minutes ago [-]
And he'll be just as powerless to solve any of the big problems as the last half a dozen PMs.
gadders 23 minutes ago [-]
Well Starmer had a massive majority and could have got whatever was needed passed to sort out public finances, but his MPs rebelled (or he chickened out).
marysol5 11 minutes ago [-]
And were being dealt with quite well by Starmer, but that wasn't good enough somehow
markus_zhang 11 minutes ago [-]
Just a symptom of late Capitalism. They are all like this one but with different flavor.
rapsey 30 minutes ago [-]
A completely pointless exercise for all involved. Rearranging deck chairs of the titanic that is the labour party.
stirlo 25 minutes ago [-]
The issue isn’t the Labour Party it’s the entire country. Brexit has been a disaster, energy costs are through the roof, housing is becoming more costly, and there’s been no real economic growth in a decade.
But no one wants suffer the temporary pain to make the reforms needed to change it. They just want to grumble and say the current leader isn’t any good before moving onto the next one, rather than admitting they might need to actually accept some change in the country.
roenxi 13 minutes ago [-]
There shouldn't be any temporary pain from bringing energy costs down or letting the economy grow (on a per-capita basis I suppose, politicians do tend to try and cheat with migration). It would be good for everyone, or at worst neutral with wildly rare exceptions who are worse off. Which does make it a bit of a mystery why the UK and a number of other Western polities put up such a determined struggle against the two.
JumpCrisscross 22 minutes ago [-]
> no one wants suffer the temporary pain to make the reforms needed to change it
If you could get one bill through Parliament, what would it do?
pjc50 7 minutes ago [-]
Most of the real power is in the budget, which is technically a bill, but I would 100% go for "change the voting system". Almost anything except D'Hondt is better than FPTP; for simplicity, we could just copy the Scottish Parliament's use of AMS.
I would also insert a trapdoor that future changes to the voting system would require the approval of >50% of eligible voters, including non-voters. Yes, I know Parliament cannot bind its successors and all that, but at least I can make it look bad to change it again.
Does this solve any of the immediate problems? No. Does it solve the dysfunctionality since 2008? I think so, especially given that polling these days looks like five parties getting 20% of the vote each. Labour themselves came to power on 38% of the vote.
4 minutes ago [-]
dabeeeenster 13 minutes ago [-]
Rejoin the EU, single market, customs union, drop sterling and take the Euro. This would almost certainly start a civil war in the UK (I am not being dramatic) but its what is needed.
Brexit was -8% GDP, according to Bank of England.
pjc50 6 minutes ago [-]
This wouldn't start a civil war. Many of the Brexit voters are already dead and most of the rest are retired.
ulfw 5 minutes ago [-]
Yea no will never happen.
Only way into the EU is way you described. Full on Schengen, EUR, no more special UK exceptions etc. Will never fly.
PunchyHamster 8 minutes ago [-]
Oh, no, we don't want you, keep your mess to yourself instead of making it EU's
barrkel 11 minutes ago [-]
Repeal Town and Country Planning Act 1947
Y_Y 15 minutes ago [-]
Disband the UK
pjc50 5 minutes ago [-]
People are desperate for change! It's just that due to a misinformation fuelled online (and traditional media!) environment, nobody can agree what that is.
rapsey 19 minutes ago [-]
Disagree. Every one of the issues you mentioned is a direct result of labour/tory uniparty ideology. Netzero, endless migrants, insane taxation and so on.
cassianoleal 24 minutes ago [-]
There is one thing that might be in his power: to stop censoring and arresting people protesting against genocide.
Edit: lol thanks HN for the usual downvote! :) I love this place!
OgsyedIE 19 minutes ago [-]
I'm opposed too but there's little recognizance of the poor position the UK is in. Under the current decline of Britain's economic foundations, having enough diesel and gas to keep the lights on and the lorries running depends on imports from the US, which could well be banned overnight if the president - any president - feels they need to crack the whip.
Opposing the Oval Office means shortages in the supermarkets, gas power stations turning off and a bond crash that makes the DWP lack the liquidity to service all of the monthly state pension payments, besides a great many other problems.
gadders 23 minutes ago [-]
...or any topic really. More people on the right than the left are being jailed for hurty words.
JumpCrisscross 20 minutes ago [-]
Getting constantly distracted by foreign-policy items 90% of voters barely care about is how the UK wound up in this mess.
marysol5 11 minutes ago [-]
You mean Palestine Action specifically, because the leadership of that group are violent terrorists.
It's weird how you people never notice that NOBODY else is "arrested"
OgsyedIE 8 minutes ago [-]
Over 2,000 middle aged women have been arrested as terrorists on the basis of holding protest signs though, it's been widely reported.
mytailorisrich 54 seconds ago [-]
They did that on purpose, though: Palestine Action has been banned on the basis of being a "terror organisation", this means that supporting them is a criminal offence. Knowing that, they purposedly propested by holding signs saying that they support Palestine Action... and therefore were arrested as expected (and really the police has no choice in such cases not to undermine the rule of law).
Note what the Court of Appeal said when ruling that the ban on terror grounds was legal:
[It was] "a fundamental mistake to overlook the fact that Palestine Action overtly promotes unlawful violence amounting to terrorism. It is not - as claimed - a direct action civil disobedience protest group like the suffragettes, operating transparently in the open. It is a covert organisation which operates with secret cells to avoid the detection and prosecution of those using violence to destroy property and cause injury. " [1]
Burnham (for those who are unaware) can be best described as a Tony Blair B-side, and is most notable from his previous stint in government for his role in the Private Finance Initiative disaster, eg:
Why undemocratic? I thought parliamentary elections in UK worked like in most of Europe: you vote for a party, not a candidate.
At least here, it already happened, to have the PM resigning and then someone else from the party to pick up the role and that’s legally sound.
mytailorisrich 15 minutes ago [-]
Agree with your first sentence but he is described as being on the very left side of the party and, if he becomes PM, it will be with the support of the left wing, not the blairites.
marysol5 10 minutes ago [-]
Then we will have a hot-minute before they're utterly hating him and demanding he goes too
postepowanieadm 5 minutes ago [-]
Will he last longer than a cabbage?
throwaway27448 28 minutes ago [-]
Same problems, different face.
bmsleight_ 39 minutes ago [-]
The power of having a parliamentary system. Combined with the power of 77,462 residents of Makerfield.
Love the UK - we can be brutal if MPs want a leader .
DarkNova6 9 minutes ago [-]
Starmer was the UK version of Joe Biden. He was the right guy to get Labor back on track and sort out the financial disaster left by the Tories. But he couldn't build a convincing vision of the future.
But replacing it with another guy that has no mandate is a fatal mistake. What Labor needed was an internal contest to fight for the best ideas, even if the winner was already pre-determined. A single local poll can't possibly decide the future of the country.
But perhaps the idea is to trigger a re-election because a "continue as usual" will be fatal for Labour and the country.
ulfw 8 minutes ago [-]
No need to get used to him. Won't last long either.
roenxi 30 minutes ago [-]
I'm not entirely certain of the electoral details, but the UK Labour party is neck-and-neck with the UK Conservatives for falling from being a top-2 party [0]. This type of decisive reform may be sufficient to keep them out of 3rd place, so it is worth a try. The voters could take to it.
The collapse of the ancient Conservative party to behind not one but two crank astroturf right-wing parties is something to behold.
cryo32 14 minutes ago [-]
Might as well just hand Farage the next general election at this rate. The last decade has been personality cult after personality cult. We had the start of stability and have thrown chaos in again. Just what the opposition want.
PaulHoule 12 minutes ago [-]
You mean Starmer has a personality?
8 minutes ago [-]
poly2it 8 minutes ago [-]
Just one more minister, I promise you, just one more and all politics will resolve. Come on, just one more and it will fix everything. Please just one more. One more minister and we can fix the whole problem.
I don't expect huge improvements under Burnham but I hope for at least some police manpower numbers to recover. There have been intermittent stories of planning, FSA and trading standards personnel being threatened by armed gangs in the last few years which is an indicator of some new severe gaps in state capacity.
So governance is, at best, semi random…
But no one wants suffer the temporary pain to make the reforms needed to change it. They just want to grumble and say the current leader isn’t any good before moving onto the next one, rather than admitting they might need to actually accept some change in the country.
If you could get one bill through Parliament, what would it do?
I would also insert a trapdoor that future changes to the voting system would require the approval of >50% of eligible voters, including non-voters. Yes, I know Parliament cannot bind its successors and all that, but at least I can make it look bad to change it again.
Does this solve any of the immediate problems? No. Does it solve the dysfunctionality since 2008? I think so, especially given that polling these days looks like five parties getting 20% of the vote each. Labour themselves came to power on 38% of the vote.
Brexit was -8% GDP, according to Bank of England.
Only way into the EU is way you described. Full on Schengen, EUR, no more special UK exceptions etc. Will never fly.
Edit: lol thanks HN for the usual downvote! :) I love this place!
Opposing the Oval Office means shortages in the supermarkets, gas power stations turning off and a bond crash that makes the DWP lack the liquidity to service all of the monthly state pension payments, besides a great many other problems.
It's weird how you people never notice that NOBODY else is "arrested"
Note what the Court of Appeal said when ruling that the ban on terror grounds was legal:
[It was] "a fundamental mistake to overlook the fact that Palestine Action overtly promotes unlawful violence amounting to terrorism. It is not - as claimed - a direct action civil disobedience protest group like the suffragettes, operating transparently in the open. It is a covert organisation which operates with secret cells to avoid the detection and prosecution of those using violence to destroy property and cause injury. " [1]
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gy927jx88o
Burnham (for those who are unaware) can be best described as a Tony Blair B-side, and is most notable from his previous stint in government for his role in the Private Finance Initiative disaster, eg:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jun/28/labour-debt-peter...
At least here, it already happened, to have the PM resigning and then someone else from the party to pick up the role and that’s legally sound.
Love the UK - we can be brutal if MPs want a leader .
But replacing it with another guy that has no mandate is a fatal mistake. What Labor needed was an internal contest to fight for the best ideas, even if the winner was already pre-determined. A single local poll can't possibly decide the future of the country.
But perhaps the idea is to trigger a re-election because a "continue as usual" will be fatal for Labour and the country.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_U...
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/one-more-lane-bro-one-more-la...