For those thinking negatively of a return of a New Labour style government (but perhaps hopefully without an illegal random war tacked onto it to shitsmear its legacy forever) I just think thats immature and lacking perspective. The 'left wing revolution' is an Always Online minority, and it pays to remember that in the context of getting ANY leftwing policies into power and through. New Labour genuinely improved this country immensely, and if thats 'not good enough', you're not being honest with your own position of wanting to unseat the Tories.
How it immature and lacking perspective to look at things beyond a single term in office? Yes, a New Labour government would improve things somewhat for a few years. You know what happens after? A right-wing government gets in and tears that all down. Nothing actually progresses and it's more likely-than-not that we end up worse off than we did at the start. It happened in the 80s, it happened in 2010, it happened in America and it'll happen again.
People who wanted us out of Europe didn't just sit on their arses voting for the Tories every five years, and when they did do something the Tories didn't write them off as a fringe cult that's not to be listened to.
Mediocre is still substantially better than downright awful. If your not voting labour (or whatever relevant anti-tory party) in a first past the post system your not getting good nor mediocre. That's the whole point, until we get proportional representation no-one should be any under illusion about what would happen. The worst thing is that there's nothing stopping for voting for someone else once a none fascist adjacent part is in power. It's not an either situation at all.
People voted for the Brexit Party in a first past the post system and they... got Brexit. They got their example of perfect, yet on the left it's medicore or literally nothing else because the only thing that ever matters is "getting the Tories out." If that's the only principle you believe in then, fine, you might just get that. But right now we need to believe in something more because time is running the fuck out.
Deeply unserious stuff. Unless the Tories rolled back the national minimum wage when I wasn't looking.
Nah, they just fucked the economy to the extent that millions are starving, all whilst making damn sure not to increase the minimum wage to something that's actually livable in modern times. Oh, and they encouraged both the gig economy and zero hour contracts to make the minimum wage meaningless for many people anyway. Then, to top it all off, they're taking us out of the only real institution stopping us from reverting our labour laws back to the Victorian age.
So, yeah. The minimum wage might still exist but that means very little to the starving children and destitute adults that fill this country right now. It's why things tend to matter longer than a single political term, because the world is ever-changing and what works for one day will likely not work for all the days after.
They have all these things because they're motivated by different things than the left, and are much better at voting together even when they disagree. What's that old saw from Bill Clinton? "Democrats want to fall in love; Republicans just fall in line." Witness 99% of the Republican party getting behind Trump even though they think he's a fucking idiot, because he won.
Well I don't care about falling in love. I've held my nose to a degree with every vote I've ever taken whether it was for the Green Party, Labour or even Jo Swinson's Liberal Democrats, the latter of which I held my nose so hard I nearly died from hypoxia.
I want to win.
But what I'm saying here is that the reason Republicans 'just fall in line' is because they know that, if the Republicans do get in, they won't just ignore any and all alternative views that aren't the most mediocre, milquetoast implementations of right-wing policies. Trump has such a cult around him because he 1) promised to do horrible extremist things and 2) actually did those horrible extremist things, even if they were sometimes completely ineffective. He's an idiot but he's an idiot who got the Republicans majority power in the highest court of the land for generations to come.
Similarly, Brexit happened because David Cameron actually took the one instance where his voters didn't "just fall in line," seriously. It would have been so much better for this country if he had done things the Labour way and written off those who voted against the notion of simply "getting Labour out," as unprincipled cultists or something like that.
And, yes, I want to win as well. But I'm sick of treating politics like the World Cup where 'winning' only really matters for the 4 years before you lose again. I've seen first hand what that thinking gets us and it's, well, what we have now. Call me immature but as part of Generation Z I want to see progress
now, not in the fantasy scenario where Labour is somehow safe enough politically to consider implementing any policies beyond the mediocre.
