Blair took the realistic route: Socialism does not work, let's have a market economy create wealth that can then be used to finance social programs. A flavour a social democracy.
I think a reason Corbyn was so popular among the young is that enough time has passed so that this generation has no idea what socialist countries in Europe were actually like.
Brownites sound good but say nothing specific...often the specific stuff is bad too. I agree with you in that there is a route in the centre, but Labour aren't. The party is fundamentally broken. Starmer isn't it, Reeves isn't a leader, Streeting is a joke. Obviously, they have moved to the centre on immigration and crime but...the party are just mad, and it doesn't seem authentic at all (Starmer was a human rights lawyer, getting rid of ECHR is the only course...you would have to be an idiot to believe he would do that, it just isn't credible).
The ambiguity of Labour is causing part of these problems. For example, their position of ambiguity on healthcare...clearly, it is broken...but they decide to be ambiguous (again, classic Brown) so their polling numbers stay up. There needs to be some kind of cross-party move towards reform but it is impossible when one side just wants to score points as the "protector of the NHS" (and it will end up with Labour winning, then finding out they are neck deep in trouble trying to do reforms that don't work...it will never be fixed).
Yes, that's a good point, but not only the right. All the traditionally Labour constituencies in the North (bit not only) which voted for Brexit did so largely because of immigration.
Immigration control is not traditionally right wing only. The left has also been in favour of control and restrictions in order to protect workers' wages.
Immigration raises wages; more people = better economy. That's why every other Anglo country is doing better than them. And has food that isn't brown slop.
That's why businesses have been keen and workers have had enough.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-immigration-doesnt-red...
In particular Australia’s population is 1/3rd immigrants. Australia’s minimum and median wages are both significantly higher than the UK. Does that mean there are so many immigrants they’re taking each others jobs instead?
Things do not work out so great if immigration isn't balanced.
In the UK there has been a huge influx of unskilled or low skilled workers from Eastern Europe that has put a big dampener on wages at the low end of the spectrum.
One of the reasons the UK has a productivity issue is that cheap labour.
They also find that skilled immigration systems don’t always work, because all immigrants tend to be unusually highly educated anyway, but also significantly downskill the jobs they choose after arriving. So you’d expect them to always compete with low end natives, but in fact they don’t because they mainly compete with other immigrants instead. And “compete” isn’t how labor works anyway, since all workers are also customers.
> because all immigrants tend to be unusually highly educated anyway
That's obviously not true.
Blair won outright majorities in the three elections he lead Labour in
We'd all like public services that do everything for everyone but few of us would be willing to pay what that would actually cost and many of us literally couldn't afford it. Meanwhile expectations of government services are rising and in many areas demographics are against us. If you rule out reform of government services then you don't have a lot of options left to square a lot of circles.
It's important to consider that "reform" is not the same as "cutting standards". For example if we could redistribute the available resources for health and social care to focus more on prevention than cure then many problems might be detected and dealt with earlier resulting in lower overall costs and crucially also better outcomes for patients. Of course there is so much firefighting happening in the NHS now that it's hard to see how any radical reform could happen without a huge injection of both cash and trained medical staff over a period longer than a single electoral cycle and that makes it a political problem as much as an economic or healthcare one.
Most of these reforms have included injecting private sector and internal markets into the system.
You may agree or disagree with these reforms, but it's difficult to argue that they don't incur overhead. Outsourced contracts need administration, legal frameworks; private parties take profit or else they wouldn't exist.
I'd argue it is likely that most of the extra funding is seeping out through these reforms, plus the legacy of not nationalising the whole health system - GP surgeries, pharmacy, generic drug manufacturing - when the NHS was formed.
I agree with you on the prevention aspect. but my thought is that a more joined up system including GPs, pharmacy and especially social care, would manage a lot of lifestyle related issues much better.
There are probably a lot of real costs in our current healthcare system that never make it onto the books as well. For example in many parts of the country it is impossible for an adult to register with a dentist as an NHS patient right now. There are zero dental practices within a reasonable distance of many people willing to accept new NHS patients. That appears to be because the deal governments currently offer to NHS dentists makes no sense financially so it's hard to blame the dentists. But the effect is the same - many of those people are not getting regular dental check ups and preventative or early treatments. The ones who are went private and paid themselves.
That's money going into private healthcare not from the tax man but from the individual patient but that still means the individual patient no longer has that money to be able to afford higher taxes that could better fund the NHS. Unfortunately the lack of huge public outcry as this frog has been boiled only proves that a government strategy of slowly eroding even essential healthcare provision to encourage privatisation by the back door can be effective.
Given how far we've gone into a low wage and poor rights economy I don't think a hard left leadership would have been that bad, especially as it would have been tempered by the rest anyway. However, I don't like Corbyn's extreme passivism.
What do you call nationalising companies and handing control to the workers? (It's in the manifesto)
That's my point: people, especially the young, don't even recognise it when described under a microscopically thin veneer. That's very worrying.
They didn't hide it, either. McDonnell did say clearly that he was a Marxist [1] and Corbyn is a socialist in the very Soviet sense.
[1] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2018/05/how-john-mcdon...
Somehow we managed state owned railways and utilities for basically the entire Cold War without ever once feeling tempted to join the Warsaw Pact, and the Royal Mail was a government agency for nearly 400 years...
And of course there's also the little thing about McDonnell and Corbyn being Marxist and socialist.
Again, too many people still seem not to be willing to see what's not even hidden. History should really be compulsory over the whole of secondary school.
Consider the following: if you consider communism to be a bad thing which people should be vigilant against, arguments to the effect that the defining feature of communism is having rail decisions made by employees of a state railway company rather than the boards of Abellio and Arriva[1] probably aren't going to help. Firstly because there's a wee bit more to communism than that, and secondly because the consensus of British rail users is that decision making concerning our railways is currently crap.
There are plenty of decent arguments that Labour's 2019 nationalisation plans wouldn't solve the fundamental problems of those services, but the idea that it's basically Marxist-Leninism isn't one of them.
[1]incidentally entities which are wholly owned by governments, just not the British one
Firstly that involving workers in the ownership and running of a company is a successful model that is working in German for example. Focus on short term shareholder value is not good for employees or the company.
You are posting on a site that has a large percentage of people working in start-ups. Comments like your kind of goes completely against the audience.
Secondary, I've heard McDonnell describe himself as a Marxist. but he is also a politician. Unlike Corbyn he was the one to (incorrectly in my view) seek compromise and common ground with people who were seeking to undermine him. He was the key player in getting Labour to adopt a policy of second referendum, something that an ideological Marxist would certainly not go anywhere near, let alone drive.
There's no actual Marxist I know that would go anywhere near the EU.
Personally I don't believe Marxism to imply state control, or public ownership to mean state ownership.
I'd also see ownership models to include workers and customers. e.g. as a seasonal reference Building and Loan from It's a Wonderful Life.
Of course not everyone sees it that way.
Yes a large portion of readers probably works in startups, the pinnacle of market and financial capitalism and should in all logic despise Corbyn and McDonnell... although that's irrelevant to the discussion.
McDonnell and Corbyn indeed are life long euroseptics and very satisfied with Brexit, which made it even more ridiculous to see so many students cheering them.
There is a confusion here between the situation we have and how we address it.
My water supply - water being that thing that falls from the sky on to the top of my house, and humans die if we don't have any within 3 days - is owned by a Hong Kong investment fund that is incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
If you asked the person on the street then they would say that this ownership model is radical, and public ownership of water is conservative.
However, if you instead ask them to comment on taking water ownership from a private company into the public domain , they'd say that was radical.
The issue is that we've moved so far in terms of financialisation of nearly every aspect of our lives, that any attempt to address that will be seen as radical.
"Tax the rich!" Is great when you are not rich, and most young people are not (yet) rich. Coming out of uni saddled with debt and doing entry level jobs etc, it is easy to just think selfishly and say "The rich should pay for more! Not me!"
Eventually you run out of other people's money though.
This is completely backwards, they have the MOST skin in the game. They are the ones that are going not going to have things we take/took for granted like: living and working in the EU or being able to enjoy a pension.
I have received over the past several years a number of stupid tax cuts and energy bailouts that have had precisely zero effect on my family’s well-being or future prospects. Except now I can’t get a fucking doctor’s appointment, the local church is setting up a “warm bank” so that me neighbours don’t die, and my kids will have to pay tens of thousands of pounds for education.
Tax the rich.
The Tories haven't got to worry about having self-styled radical socialists on the ballot but have had exactly the same problems: candidates that appeal most to the Tory selectorate like Iain Duncan Smith and Liz Truss are neither in touch with the public mood nor competent.
Not sure that a presidential system with a public vote would necessarily do better though. The public loved Johnson and liked May at first.
Corbyn had popular support but, like Miliband, relied relatively heavily on unions...and one union at that: Unite (and btw, his popular support was always overstated hugely...in late 2019, you had a sizeable minority who thought he would walk it, he was massively popular in the Westminster bubble...this is despite him being regarded as a totally odious figure under Blair when he was a backbencher).
The Tories have never had this issue because their electorate is relatively diffuse, and MPs have been quite willing to stab their leader in the back at the first sign of trouble.
Blair (like Thatcher) was an accident. I agree with your point but the Tories have been generally able to produce more effective leaders with their constitution.