Its hard to fathom for me, true that I was raised in a labour strong-hold; but the decimation of industry, housing and the selling of previously nationalised infrastructure has had long reaching and devastating consequences for a large contingent of the population.
But people keep voting them into office, literally the worst of all alternatives. (except maybe UKIP/Brexit/Reform which is the same party that keeps rebranding)
Of course not, and his excuse will be "the Tories will use that to paint us as anti-children", when in reality, the surveillance state is older and more engrained than any party.
The Tories have ruined the country, but I wish people stopped seeing them as pure evil against the pure good that is Labour, which is far from the case. They're all rotten in their own way, and it's not them pulling the pervasive surveillance strings. I wouldn't know who is for certain, but it's a combination of being in the Five Eyes, our friendship with the USA, the very favourable media, and the cultural fact that British people have been OK with total surveillance for decades.
We all lose.
That's why "starmer is a red tory" doesn't jibe with me, Blair is also a "red tory" and is/was painted as such; but he won by a landslide on that.
The media was so against Corbyn, progress away from conservative ideology will be long and it requires people to show determination to move away. Even if it's little by little.
Even now there are millions of people convinced that this is better just as there are millions still convinced that Brexit was worthwhile.
As HL Mencken said, Democracy is the theory that common people know what they want and they deserve to get it good and hard. The UK really did have an alternative and they chose to be ruled by psychopathic, greedy incompetent old Etonians.
If you want somebody to blame you need to look at the British media barons. Lord Rothermere, etc. They were the ones who manipulated two rather pathetic warring tribes into existence and played them both like puppets against each other.
The alternative that possibly could have happened was a sanely negotiated Brexit, which would have been fine (lots of countries aren’t in the EU but have extensive trade relations etc.) but no brexit wasn’t really going to happen at the time.
You'd think the head of the Remain campaign might deserve a little blame? Totally blameless for their failure apparently. The actual strategy of the campaign is never even discussed. It's just "how dare Corbyn cause Brexit! The Fiend!" How about all the other names and faces leading the Remain campaign? Cameron, Osborne? Nope. He gets more blame than fucking Farage.
I have no respect for anyone that pushes this shit. It's just disgusting post-factual factional lying crap. Stop it.
Corbyn is a long way from blame for brexit, but he was part of the lunacy.
No need to go "what about Osborne or Cameron?" I know they're tw*ts and nowhere in my comment I went to defend those reprehensible pillocks, nor I placed all the blame at Corbyn's feet.
Again, you're taking it a bit personal here, for some reason.
However, politics do exist beyond elections. Strikes have again become common, which could build up to larger campaigns and even a general strike. The organised working class can force even a Tory government to act or face the beginning of revolution.
And the post 2019 Conservative Party effectively is UKIP - they were thoroughly infiltrated and most of the old school tories left the party
I would prefer UKIP victory - it would be brief, exciting and painfull, and a lesson that lasts. Like this isn't a slower burn with greater total damage.
I think for the last 50 years, possibly excepting one Labour leader, the wider electorate have seen Labour as literally the worst of all alternatives. That's why the Conservatives are consistently voted in.
The problem isn't really either of our two terrible main political parties though, it's the absence of any realistic competition. If there were an obviously better alternative I believe that despite any historical affiliations voters today on all sides would leap to it. We've had that 50 years to find an alternative and there's still nothing palatable waiting in the wings.
Why this is, I think is more debatable. Maybe the answer is PR, maybe we need to pay MPs more in line with historic rates in real terms (and more than some recent software dev grads), maybe it's something else. But it's pretty clear to me that as much as people don't want the Conservatives, they really don't want Labour either.
Which, given the UK's insane voting system, is very unlikely.
> the UK's insane voting system
Rather predictably this means the number of votes a party gets has no relation to the number of seats they get in parliament. Since the number of seats per party is far more important for the political course than who gets elected for each party this is undesirable.
This gives weird results like the Scottish nationalist party getting 3.9% of the vote and 48 seats, while the libdems got 11.6% of the vote and 11 seats.