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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

The way we elect a prime minister (i.e. we don't) plays a large part here I think. Parties themselves select the leader.

Johnson, Corbyn, Truss, Sunak - all voted in by relatively small numbers of people (e.g. 80k in the case of Truss IIRC), yet they are somehow the leader of the party and potentially even PM.

This is where labour shat the bed I think with Corbyn - totally obvious that he would be terrible as a PM yet the favourite of the popular vote of self-selected labour party, who of course are too extreme to represent the common person on the street.

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No, Labour isn't a popular vote. It is a popular vote AND a union vote (and the PLP, although they have never mattered in practice, they tried to oust Corbyn three times iirc...didn't work).

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.

Corbyn and McDonnell were essentially communists and therefore unelectable.

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.

The problem with Blair was that he lost the right on EU/immigration and lost the left on everything else.

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).

> The problem with Blair was that he lost the right on EU/immigration and lost the left on everything else

Yes, that's a good point, but it's not only the right. All the traditionally Labour constituencies in the North (but 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.

Their wages are low because they're British and live in a failing country.

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.

No, immigration has kept unskilled workers' wages low.

That's why businesses have been keen and workers have had enough.

That's not specific to the UK, and is the usual effect of large immigration.

Immigration doesn’t lower wages. Telling people this usually doesn’t convince them because they just want an excuse to complain about immigrants, but nevertheless it’s true.

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?

There's a very big assumption in your claim, which is that immigration is balanced among 'social classes', skills, jobs,etc. In that case, indeed overall demand grows along with overall supply. Australia has an immigration system aimed at achieving that.

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.

The papers I linked are empirical evidence, not assumptions. There’s two specifically on the UK that find no evidence of this.

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.

"Negative effect at low-end of spectrum", which is what I wrote...

> because all immigrants tend to be unusually highly educated anyway

That's obviously not true.

> Blair ... lost the right on EU/immigration and lost the left on everything else

Blair won three sizeable outright majorities in the three elections he lead Labour in

You can say a lot of things about Blair, but “Lost” isn’t one of them.

At this point UK government services don’t need reform, they need funding. Austerity has absolutely crippled everything.

The problem with that argument is where the money comes from. If you look at government tax take relative to GDP we aren't paying in much less tax than at any other time in most of our living memories. If anything it is the other way around.

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.

The NHS has been in continuous reform. Thatcher / Blair / Brown / Lansley / Hunt.

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.

I expect you're right about all of this. The famous "joined up thinking" at a national scale across a whole government is frequently what is missing. Sometimes it's missing within "only" one area such as health and social care but that area alone is already huge and almost unbelievably complicated to run.

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.

The NHS is the largest employer in Europe. 1.7 million employees for 141,000 beds. I believe it is fundamentally irreformable, but clearly it needs reform.

The vast majority of healthcare is provided to outpatients so numbers of staff to beds is a fucking weird ratio to look at.

You’re absolutely correct, the largest bureaucracy in Europe definitely doesn’t waste any money. What ratio would be less fucking weird?

They weren't essentially communists, that is taking the Tory press talking point. They were further left than any other recent popular politicians. Left in the form of worker rights, unionism that sort of thing, not communism.

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.

Not at all. They even wrote it in their manifesto.

What do you call nationalising companies and handing control to the workers? (It's in the 2019 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...

I guess I'm communist then. I want the railways to be nationalised.

I'm the first person to criticise McDonnell and Corbyn's radical postures, but the idea that Labour's manifesto proposal to renationalise the railways, Royal Mail and some utilities is communism is utterly laughable.

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...

Nationalisation with control handed to the workers.

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.

Edit: they had hinted it very strongly but did not mention it in the 2017 manifesto apart from calling to promote coops. But in the 2019 manifesto it is explicitly written that nationalised utilities would be "run by service-users and workers".

McDonnell is a Marxist and so, obviously, he wanted a Marxist economic policy in which nationalisation does not mean state capitalism but really indeed workers in charge of the means of production.

I'm not sure the italicised bit conveys quite the sinister undertones you intended.

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

OK, if you refuse to acknowledge the plain and obvious. Politics should not turn into bigotry.

You are missing a few things here.

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.

Youre both wrong. under marxism public utilites would be owned and run by the workers i.e. the people in total, not just the workers who happen to work at the utility. this is because union ownership of public utilites is a recipie for failue and cannot be compared to successful for profit coops

I think you are conflating socialism with statism.

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.

In English "run by the workers" have a very different meaning from "involving the workers". So your point is a strawman.

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 are indeed life long euroseptics and very satisfied with Brexit, which made it even more ridiculous to see so many students cheering them.

> What do you call nationalising companies and handing control to the workers? (It's in the manifesto)

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.

The young like it because they don't have much skin in the game.

"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.

> The young like it because they don't have much skin in the game.

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.

Well if you're pro-EU, Corbyn is also a poor choice...

As a (lamentably) no longer young and (luckily) fairly rich person in London, “tax the rich” is a fucking brilliant idea.

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 Labour vote was a popular vote, it just happened to include union members and 'registered supporters' who weren't party members (but would have had the same outcome in 2015 without them). The electoral college system was abandoned by Miliband, and Starmer has given up trying to bring it back in some form.

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.

It would have been better for everyone if Corbyn had stayed a back bencher.

We might have even averted Brexit

Just imagine the chaos we’d have had with Ed Miliband. It’s been strong and stable ever since then.

That bacon sandwich has a lot to answer for.

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