+1 to pretty much everything Toby and Will said earlier, and to what SpiderMonkey said about climate policy. And a lot of what Sean and some others have said.
The 2019 election was essentially just a rerun of the 2016 Brexit referendum - Stone
No it really wasn't.
There are, literally, millions of people out here, myself included, who despise absolutely everything imaginable about Brexit.
And yet wouldn't vote for Jeremy Corbyn if he was the last man on the planet.
Not because I think he's a terrible person or anything, I'm sure if I had a chat with him we'd agree about quite a lot.
Like many on here, I share quite a lot of the aims of the left. Just that is emphatically not how to go about achieving those aims.
If there had been
anything vagely sensible on offer from the left over the last 10 years, Brexit wouldn't have happened and we wouldn't have had 14 years of Tory government.
I will be voting for Labour at this election.
Precisely because it has woken up since 2019 and is now actually electable (and because it isn't trying to follow the absurd 2017 manifesto).
And to get the Tories out before they drift any further to the right (if reelected, they'd almost certainly kick Rishi out quickly, put someone even more to the right in power, and take us out of the ECHR - which would be even more disastrous than Brexit already is).
But anyone expecting Keir Starmer to attempt to usher in some kind of socialist utopia is going to be in for a bit of a shock. Or they had better be, or else he certainly won't be elected again as he'll have bankrupted the country. The Tories are in a complete shambles at the moment, as their only policy for the last 15 years has been Brexit. And it's been a complete disaster and they all know it. That won't last though. If Labour go too far to the left, they'll be a one term government.
As others have said, the UK is in a totally shite situation financially. Anyone pretending on the right that they can cut loads of taxes, or anyone on the left pretending that they can spend loads of money - in both cases, by government borrowing - just haven't been paying attention to the real world. Any government trying to do that is just going to be shut down by the bond markets, as Liz Truss painfully found out. People just won't lend any government money at low interest rates if they think they aren't financially credible.
The UK has debt of 2.6 trillion pounds. That's 98% of GDP. That is not a good position to be in, and it's vastly worse than it was a decade ago, largely thanks to the stupidity of the Boris years and the (obviously popular) furlough scheme. The Tory government managed to spend more money on the pandemic than any other country in Europe, and yet far more people died (per capita obviously). Throwing money at people is popular in the short term (one of the many problems with 4 year election cycles, not that I've got a better suggestion), but it's disastrous longer term.
A lot of what the left said about "austerity" in the Cameron years was nonsense. The Tories were right to try and bring down government debt. And they didn't even get started. They didn't even manage to get the deficit (ie: how much the debt goes up each year) down to zero. Let alone get started on the debt. So, that much the Tories (before Boris and the populists got to power) were traditionally right about.
Where the Tories are wrong, is
what to cut spending on. ie: they invariably screw poor people at the expense of the rich (ie: their focus was, ridiculously, to cut things like inheritance tax for millionaires whilst screwing the poor).
In short, the UK has been living well beyond it's means for way too long. And there's going to have to be a many decades long, painful wake up call. Which has been made much harder by making ourselves poorer by leaving the EU. Sure we have our own currency, so if the government chooses to, it can essentially print money. But that just makes everyone poorer by spiking inflation.
Keir Starmer knows all this, which is why he isn't making any big spending commitments. And therefore why he's credible and electable.
But all that negative stuff, doesn't mean you can't have a fairly radical government that completely shakes things up and changes a lot.
It just means that you need to have sensible conversations about what you're going to cut, if you want to spend more on something. And what (quite a lot IMO) you can improve without much financial outlay at all.
I've said it before on here, but to me, the number one problem for why so many of the country are living miserable lives, is the cost of housing. And that the government can start doing something about by simply getting out of the way. ie: Essentially make a bonfire out of most of the planning regulations in this country. You can't build anything anywhere in the UK. Environmentalism has been weaponised by every NIMBY out there, to block anything being built. That needs to end.
And again, one of the reasons I'll be voting Labour, is that the above is pretty much what Keir Starmer has said he will do. Obviously, I'll believe it when I see it, as there'll be lots of opposition. But the UK needs new towns, it needs new cities, it needs vast amounts of new housing. And at the very least, Keir Starmer appears to be making the right noises in that direction.
I don't think most of the older generation quite get how big a deal this is for the younger generation. Go talk to some peole at uni these days. There's a distinct split. Between people who's parents own homes. And those whose parents don't. With the latter (unless they're in the top 0.1% that are going to work in Merchent banks etc) essentially knowing they're going to lead miserable lives paying ridiculous rents and never having any hope of owning a house.
Just ripping up planning regulations would be a very good start on the long tortuous path to improving this situation.
Not Social housing (govermnets are shite at running housing), unions begging for scraps, or most of the rest of what the left tends to spend far too much time obsessed with.
If a Labour government focused on something realistic, like sorting out housing, then maybe they might actually improve the lives of the less well off in the UK.
Obviously, there's lots of other things I'd like to see, from drug policy to prisons - which are probably less likely to happen, but there's all sorts of things that could significantly change the UK for the better that don't (net) cost lots of money.
But at some point the UK needs to wake up and realise it's a small country on the edge of Europe. That whilst it currently has the sixth largest GDP in the world, in a few decades we'll be well outside the top ten and heading further down. We're a country full of old sick people, being paid for by a diminishing supply of people of working age, made worse by Brexit stopping the huge supply of keen working age people from Europe. One of the few things the UK has going for it is the fact that lots of people want to come here, primarily because of the language. And because currently there's lots of work here. But Brexit has screwed a lot of that up.
We should be sharing the financial burden of all sorts of things with other like minded countries across Europe - from satellites to fighter jets. We simply can't afford to keep waving our willies around on the world stage any more - unless it's part of larger groups of countries, whether that be the EU or NATO.
So, I'd be rejoining the customs union and various other EU institutions, and I think Labour is currently being a bit timid around this (for perhaps understandable political reasons, but hopefully in time that will change as by all the polling I've seen, the vast majority now think Brexit was a mistake).
And this isn't likely to happen, but as I've said before on here, in an ideal world, I'd want to see income tax come down, and wealth tax (particularly as people die) go up. Sean argued previously that you couldn't generate much income from inheritance tax. I disagree. I'm not suggesting the following is a good (politically at least) idea to do in one go - but if the goverment simply inherited and sold into the market, every property once it's owner or joint owners had died. That would rather obviously generate a lot of money. And would create a lot fairer society at a stroke.
The UK has over the last 25 years become an aristocracy again, just with a larger number of people owning the land. It's about time that changed. It would obviously need doing a lot more carefully than just slapping a 100% inheritance tax on all property, so that you don't crash the housing market.
But one thing I'd love to see is the government having a target for house price inflation. That's essentially either 0%, or something slightly negative. Obviously, like with interest rates, there's a lot of things that affect house prices in the short term. But over a longer period, essentially house prices are dictated by government policy. Build more houses, change planning regulations, remove the incentives for large swathes of the population to invest their retirement savings in property, change inheritance tax so people can't pass property on to the next generation etc etc. There's all sorts of things that can be done and should be done along these lines IMO. I'm not daft enough to expect much of it to actually happen - for the time being all governments in the UK seem to have decided (probably rightly) that rising house prices wins elections, as most voters own houses. At some point though, that equation will change. To me it would be better to start the change earlier, rather than waiting until there's enough anger in the younger generation to generate a much more radical government policy than changes to IHT.
