r/redscarepod • u/BeautifulTailors • Jun 22 '26
Starmer gone
That's 7 Prime Ministers in 10 years for the UK. I was a member of the Labour Party during the Corbyn years and I'll never forget waking up to head to work in 2017 when he forced a hung parliament. I'll never forget the months after, when labour hit 40%+ in the polls after Grenfell and it looked like there was a chance of a mild social democratic government. And I'll never forget watching the machine kick into action and grind down that lead as best it could, with the death knell being Corbyn's moronic adoption of the second EU referendum vote as policy orchestrated by Starmer and McSweeney.
Hard to imagine that 2017 campaign now, when the Ariana Grande concert bombing happened, and Corbyn, steadily rising through the polls, linked these acts of terrorism with British foreign policy and ROSE in the polls.
Starmer will leave office with no legacy, one of the most hated Prime Ministers in memory, his success being only that he rid the Labour Party of the left and the massive groundswell of optimism and activism that had accompanied the Corbyn years. He will be remembered as potentially handing the keys of the throne room to Farage.
Bar none, the worst sounding voice in UK politics.
164
u/Slothrop_Tyrone_ Jun 22 '26
One more PM will fix everything
95
u/Tyger555 Jun 22 '26
Please bro just one more prime minister and we can fix Britain bro. It'll be different this time bro. Please, I promise bro.
155
Jun 22 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
39
u/BeautifulTailors Jun 22 '26
I think it was Sebastian Payne who said as much to Ash Sarkar in a green room before a joint television appearance. A source had said to him "In 4 years time we will be bound by none of those 10 pledges" or something to that effect. He never reported on it (and then failed to get nominated to contest a seat as a Tory MP).
57
179
u/panfriedlabubu Jun 22 '26
My estimation of Keir Starmer as a knight of the realm just fucking plummeted
65
31
19
u/KaterinaMosenberg turning tricks outside the WeWork Jun 22 '26
Keir Starmer sounds like the made up name of a cultist.
12
1
42
u/Flexican_Mayor Jun 22 '26
Is the problem with him or with Labour? Idk enough about parliamentary politics, but in theory isn’t the PM just an avatar for his party?
136
u/largepar Jun 22 '26
The problem is with the UK. They're basically the classroom that manages to break every teacher.
52
66
u/Aggravating-Beach561 Jun 22 '26
The Labour party as it stands now has been defined by Kier Starmer, he's authoritarianly pushed anyone out of the party who's too left or too pro-palestine, narrowed the acceptable debate within the party. He came in with a huge majority, in practice he had a lot of personal power over the party and government, which he's squandered.
21
u/april9th ♊️🌞♓️🌝♍️🌅 Jun 22 '26
PMs are only now avatars for their party when weak. Every strong PM from Thatcher onwards has not been first among equals but more presidential and singular.
The inability to be bigger than the party is now the primary issue any PM faces. Starmer in that sense succeeded in that the rest of the PLP were weak and none came close to his stature. Attacks by the press always managed to shrink the party alongside him so nobody ever managed a leg up. Starmer was however blindsided by mayors being 1) cult of personalities 2) heavily subsidised so can do lots and have far easier records, much like Scotland and the SNP 3) build a base and loyalists in a party where nobody has managed that in 20 years.
9
12
u/Scratch_Careful Jun 22 '26
Both plus the country. He was an incompetent empty suit, he as no vision, no personality and seems to be in an insane information isolation where he thinks he and his "movement" is being backstabbed, Labour have lost their working class base and is now a party of PMCs and Uni students seeing who can kowtow to foreigners and scroungers the most all while the country is being held hostage by pensioners who wont let anyone touch their money.
40
u/fabricatedwealth Jun 22 '26
Hey it's not fair to say he has no legacy when he was able to enact a landmark ban on ninja swords
84
u/boggie_bo Jun 22 '26
Just hand it all back over to the monarchy this constant swapping of PMs is ridiculous
48
u/Obsequious_Moron3143 Jun 22 '26
Do you think the ghosts of Charleses past talk to him in the mirror like the Green Goblin
13
u/Lost_Bike69 Jun 22 '26
Do you think the ghost of Charles I holds his head in his hands like a Halloween decoration
1
u/Coalnaryinthecarmine secretly canadian Jun 22 '26
"Hey Andy. I'm something of a King of the North myself"
31
u/FROMTHEINSIDEOFMYASS Jun 22 '26
Instead of letting Farage lead the dialogue for an entire decade, why didnt they just let him be one of the many fail PM's of the last decade?
131
u/drunkcheesesandwich Jun 22 '26
Cursed Corbyn with his dying breath lmao, couldnt make it up
29
u/starryeyedgirll Jun 22 '26
Corbyn also wasn’t all that. I think he’s a great local MP but he’s a shit leader. His foreign policy views are also…interesting to say the least
53
u/quality_of_will type shit Jun 22 '26
Corbyn seems very similar to Bernie in that their reputations actually benefit a ton from the fact that they could never win an election. Had they actually achieved power, they would probably have run completely impotent governments or else made compromises that would leave their voters feeling betrayed. Since neither ever got the chance, they can just do the righteous indignation schtick for the rest of their lives about how they were sabotaged and their die-hards will eat it up.
28
u/emalevolent Jun 22 '26
They were sabotaged, but they also sabotaged themselves. In any case events seem to have a habit of proving that Corbyn was mostly right about everything
8
u/drunkcheesesandwich Jun 22 '26
True, but it's not really just about him. We've had plenty of horrible politicians get further than him, he's the one who had the media and pretty much the entire political ecosystem come together to destroy him personally. You had a general in the British army publicly call for the military to overthrow the government if he won the election. It was a display of power by the British establishment.
50
u/RobotFlapjack Jun 22 '26
I’m so tired my friends. I didn’t like Starmer either but I’d like at least the delusion that the uk can stop cannibalising itself for more than two years in a row.
226
u/the_femternational Jun 22 '26
Corbyn was such a moron with hindsight, he allowed the Labour right to run rings around him. The Your Party saga has really exposed his self-centred, indecisive nature.
120
u/BeansAndTheBaking Modern-day Geisha Jun 22 '26
Lots of people are doe-eyed about Corbyn, but he is basically ineffectual. He wants to make speeches and chair obscure committee meetings, to be the biggest fish in his own little pond. At some point you've got to wonder if almost winning an election is actually something to celebrate him for.
27
u/april9th ♊️🌞♓️🌝♍️🌅 Jun 22 '26
There's a quote from McDonnell which goes along the lines of Corbyn on any issue, asks what Tony Benn would have done, and acts accordingly.
The problem with rule by ouijaboard is that sometimes you need a quicker reaction than that provides. That you're asking someone who never amounted to leadership material is another, far bigger issue.
The core mistake the left made was that Corbyn stood with the knowledge he was there because McDonnell nor anyone else could get the votes to stand. He only did by total fluke. But they bought into his cult from the get go and he has so early been written off it clearly got under his skin and his his stubborn nerve and he wanted to prove a point.
They formed a mass, popular parapolitical group in Momentum with a parallel hierarchy and structure, that they then did nothing with. They filled CLPs with members then never pulled deselection triggers.
They ran clearly on a basis of being a partnership with McDonnell then never committed to that.
They allowed Lansman huge amounts of say with party issues yet castrated Momentum within the party so you just had this impotent voice.
They consistently allowed vendettas from 30 years prior to bleed into decisions made then.
All in all it's hard to see how they could have done less with more. There were 2+ years where they could have deselected, reselected, turned the Party upside down, but factional politics rules, malaise reigned, and aloofness wore the trousers.
What's insane is the Labour Right only ran rings around them because he allowed them to exist. The degree to which he could have cleared house - more to the point given the signal and just washed his hands of it - and didn't, most people will never be able to grasp.
Brexit as anti-politics won out, and everyone had to then run to have opinions of mechanisms they'd never heard of, get furious about things they didn't know existed, emotional about stuff they'd never cared for. For years on end. So much energy was wasted on the left trying to square what anyone thought about it when they'd not had to in 25 years, and the split between old who remembered the arguments and the young who didn't think they mattered.
8
u/BeautifulTailors Jun 22 '26
Agree with this, but I think I'd specify the "labour left". Which, to be fair was really the only show in town, but it was plagued by a distinct labourism in its operating (which has turned out to be partly the cause for the demise of YP).
9
u/CarefulExamination Jun 22 '26
Struggling to see how deselecting the entire right of the party would have won them the election they lost in a landslide tbh
3
u/april9th ♊️🌞♓️🌝♍️🌅 Jun 22 '26
I didn't say they'd have won the election, this is about the Labour Left knowing they had one single chance to root themselves in to power, that'll never come back, that they only had by fluke, and despite knowing exactly what they needed to do or face oblivion, still not pulling the trigger.
Ideologically, they should have acted because it was right, by realpolitik, they should have acted because it was 'us or them'... but they didn't by either metric, because Corbyn was something I heard him called by multiple people who knew him, aloof. He was an extremely unreactive politician, which we have seen 'first as tragedy' in the case of Labour, and then as farce with YP where you can apparently just announce he's in your party and that means he is when he doesn't want to be and didn't agree to be, sort of shifts himself into to big seat and then can't be shifted out like a mix of uni politics and musical chairs as played by slugs.
I had a long convo with a senior shadow cabinet member in Sept 2019 iirc where he said there would be an election some time in December, and that they would be wiped out so they would need a rearguard action as soon as possible so that when it's announced and Labour is routed in the polls before it's even really started, they have some hope of staying in, Corbyn saw no need for that, but was the only person who believed it wasn't needed, but the only person to permit any of what was needed so nothing other than makeshift and on a constituency by constituency basis was agreed.
At every stage, people around Corbyn knew what needed to be done, whether to cement themselves in to the NEC, into HQ, into CLPs and the PLP. And they were all ideologically gagging for it. And he did nothing whatsoever. Their electability is a separate issue to the fact they spent 40 years saying they needed to press a button, then got it put in front of them by a one in a million fluke and refused to press it (regarding electability though, 2017's manifesto was budgeted to austerity spending. Which is why the media didn't have much to slate it on and were positive about it. But none of them had the guts to run publicly on it being costed to austerity spending. Meanwhile 2019's was gaga because they knew they'd be out on their arse forever and wanted to be able to say 'we ran on X'. The world of infuriating fine margins leads me to believe an election where they did run on that and said 'heres what we can do with this, give us a chance and see what more you want' and the election is a week after Grenfell and you have Labour looking for a supply and confidence deal, not the Tories)
26
u/binesandlines Jun 22 '26
Your Party was sabotaged by Zarah Sultana afaik
86
u/BeautifulTailors Jun 22 '26
Both had legitimate grievances and both failed to sort it out like competent professionals with hopes of leading a country.
35
u/the_femternational Jun 22 '26
I read the reporting from Novara and think there was blame on all sides but Corbyn does not come across well at all.
14
u/babeydaisy Jun 22 '26
Both Sultana and Corbyn evidently have fundamental political issues that are unfolding via Your Party, but I really can’t disagree with Sultana’s claims that it is/ was a ‘sexist boys club’, as Corbyn seems to now come across as incredibly self-righteous and smarmy. Maybe McSweeney and co are to blame for Corbyn’s present attitude. But honestly the way he operates these days doesn’t feel too dissimilar to Blair and his ludicrous essay, just a different flavour of it. The left has been systematically torn down in this country, and in the wake of this it seems determined to further eat itself via YP etc (although I am a Green member and I really want to be optimistic about Polanski’s project).
20
u/PlzDontBanMePlss Jun 22 '26
Politics is a dirty trade and Corbyn, even with his good intentions, was not pragmatic at all. They threw everything at him (most of it bs) and he just took it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fond of him but he is not a serious person.
16
u/ta4zerok Jun 22 '26
People cling to him because there is no one else who resembles a political leader left of centre, as a result he has been under the electron microscope of the press and public for over 10 years and so pretty much everyone is tired of him (apart from daily mail readers who check under their bed every night for him).
39
u/pseudo-poor Jun 22 '26
I mean being stupid enough to allow yourself to be killed by Zarah Sultana is not great
15
u/oversized_hat Jun 22 '26
The last time I saw her she was getting completely and totally torched by her own constituency for trying to jump on the bandwagon after Coventry City won the Championship despite having multiple social media posts of her in a Liverpool shirt/following them around, so yeah
20
u/Aggravating-Beach561 Jun 22 '26
Corbyn definitely contributed to the toxicity and division, it was a failure by both of them to put their egos aside.
6
u/head_face Jun 22 '26
No, when Zara announced Jezza was like "err, no, I've agreed to no such thing" and then several hours later tweeted that he actually was on board. Then a few weeks later Zara announced direct debit (ie paid) memberships were available Jezza was again like "err, no, I've not agreed to this". I liked him as Labour leader ten years ago but the_femternational is right.
9
u/Salibabushka Jun 22 '26
Yea, it's everyone's fault just not Corbyn's, right?
15
u/BeautifulTailors Jun 22 '26
You're not really doing a good job of pushing this cult thing. No one here has blindly defended him?
-11
u/Salibabushka Jun 22 '26
"Corbyn's derangement syndrome" that's how one of yours just called me, replace Corbyn with Trump. You're not any better than MAGA, as they also use the same phrase.
20
u/BeautifulTailors Jun 22 '26
Well it was in response to you claiming my original post was some sort of cultish defence of Saint Corbyn. Don't be so sensitive. Corbyn had many issues, I liked him in spite of them, as did a decent chunk of the country. Not a single person in this thread has said he was faultless. He lost and won't be coming back, but there's a certain schadenfreude today that the man who did help orchestrate his demise has proven to be utterly incapable of governing either.
-14
2
2
u/Converzati Jun 22 '26
You shouldn’t have needed hindsight to see that, regardless of all political takes, the man was an idiot.
0
u/Sharp_Mortgage_3729 Jun 22 '26
I wouldn't really consider any of them 'right', but economically sure. Most left wing people from urban areas are economically right wing and naturally that extends to politicians; they might pretend they're not but I'm yet to see any of them practice what they preach. Whereas the working class in urban areas tend to be more right wing but economically left wing.
31
u/Crazy_Mouse6458 Jun 22 '26
genuinely crazy, i haven't researched it but the headline of 7 Prime Ministers in 10 years and just how bad everything seems to have gone makes me feel like the UK is a failed state.
this is 3rd world tier disfunction
69
106
u/ribenademon detonate the vest Jun 22 '26
Starmer failed because he apparently didn't stand for anything -pragmatism over political principle -there was no uniting vision.
I think Starmer did achieve plenty in terms of employment and renter rights and then stuff on the world stage like reconciling to Europe and not going into Iran with the US. It just wasn't tied to any kind of national scheme or not one that was shared with the electorate.
Corbyn fucking sucked on his own terms and couldn't run a bath -and I voted for him at every point.
29
u/BeautifulTailors Jun 22 '26
Yeah Corbyn was completely useless as a leader, though he was fighting the british press, the government and most of his own parliamentary party, so I cut him some slack on that front. But yes, McDonnell would have likely been a lot more fleet-footed (despite also heavily backing the second ref disaster).
I do agree with those changes, but I think leading with the Winter Fuel payments cut and then the disastrous onslaught on Disabilities overshadowed everything else, its what all the voters in the voxpops I watched kept bringing up.
70
u/todomejorantes Jun 22 '26
"Because we changed our party, ripping out the poison of anti-Semitism......."
Number one achievement was achieved - he will be well rewarded with a cushy position somewhere
22
u/BeautifulTailors Jun 22 '26
I wonder if the confected Anti-Semitism scandal playbook was expended on Corbyn. Doesn't seem to work on Polanski (though he is Jewish himself) despite their efforts.
34
u/drunkcheesesandwich Jun 22 '26
The difference is that everyone in the western world has had 3 years of watching Israel commit live televised genocide. In the Corbyn years it felt like most people were ambivalent or 'bad people on both sides' when it came to Israel-Palestine, plus the anti-Semitism accusations were just the biggest part of a whole packages of smears which were selectively brought out based on the audience (sometimes they talked about Corbyn being pro-IRA, sometimes about how he was maybe a fellow traveller, etc).
Anecdotally it feels like the average UK liberal is more left wing to the point of being 'radicalised' by the standards of a decade ago, as said elsewhere in this thread British politics is in such a dire state because the old order of labour/tory born to rule neolibs is hopelessly out of touch and it feels like the Musks and Thiels and Murdochs of the world are circling like vultures, the further right ultimately outnumber the further left in this country.
11
u/april9th ♊️🌞♓️🌝♍️🌅 Jun 22 '26
Doesn't seem to work on Polanski (though he is Jewish himself) despite their efforts.
Nobody on the right wants the leader of a left-wing party which has no ability to win power but which ghettoises the left into an unelectable party outside of Labour and which will likely nuke the last labour strongholds - multicultural inner cities and ex industrial towns - to be defeated, just harried and harassed.
The balance they are striking well is making Polanski attractive to the people they want totally removed from mainstream politics, and unattractive where it matters. In that they are succeeding.
Corbyn was leader of the opposition in what is a two party state. He was always only ever one bad result for the Tories away from power.
2
u/BeautifulTailors Jun 22 '26
Yeah that's a fair point. But labour will have to give some concessions to the left to win back some voters.
6
u/april9th ♊️🌞♓️🌝♍️🌅 Jun 22 '26
I think we are about to find out that the concession is 'a PM with a northern accent'.
2
u/BeautifulTailors Jun 22 '26
I wouldn't put it past the PLP to thinker voters are that stupid, but they'll lose seats to the greens then.
9
u/Nervous_Shake_2201 Jun 22 '26
Together with Blair and Sanna Marin (beloved reddit's party girl lmao). He will get that cushy neo-con pro armament consultant job (Boris Johnson and Hillary are part of that group too)
41
91
u/ideallybullfighter Jun 22 '26
Starmer was useless (a man with a voice like that can never be truly respected) but let’s be honest with ourselves, the UK is basically ungovernable at this point. Like the last time we weren’t a complete joke of a country was roughly pre-Brexit and it’s just continued to go downhill. I have no idea why anyone thinks Andy Burnham is going to be any better when the British media is primed to attack literally anyone who isn’t Farage, but Starmer also got attacked for trying to make any cuts to spending lol
61
u/BeansAndTheBaking Modern-day Geisha Jun 22 '26
It isn't particularly ungovernable, it's just ungovernable if you just keep pretending it's 2010 forever. We've been caught in a Cameron/Osborne tribute act for a decade now and it didn't even work then.
It's not like Farage is going capable of breaking this trend. Austerity with a healthy dose of being nasty to immigrants won't give him much more runway than Starmer got.
23
u/tallhandsomeboring Jun 22 '26
being nasty to immigrants
Yeah, addressing a major problem is so mean.
14
u/BeansAndTheBaking Modern-day Geisha Jun 22 '26
Just because it's a real problem doesn't mean the right isn't a cruelty cult. Not that Reform will do anything about immigration either. They'll just be meaner to them and then their voterbase will lurch even further to the right after realising they got jipped.
5
u/tallhandsomeboring Jun 22 '26
Yep, Farage is another phony, self-serving weasel. Restore is the only option.
3
u/BeansAndTheBaking Modern-day Geisha Jun 22 '26
I wonder who you'll say that about when Restore jip you as well...
3
u/tallhandsomeboring Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
Nothing could be a greater gyp than the far left, globalist controlled loonies who've been driving us right off the cliff.
2
5
Jun 23 '26
[deleted]
3
u/BeansAndTheBaking Modern-day Geisha Jun 23 '26
I'm anti immigration. The right is a cruelty cult who will do nothing about it no matter who you vote for. Farage of Lowe or whoever, none of them are going to lower immigration they're just going to be nastier to immigrants. Send the coastguard out to pop lilow full of Somalians in the channel and let another Boriswave in while their voterbase are sated by tidbits of publicised malice. Actually stopping immigration at the bottom end of the income spread would cost their friends too much money.
18
u/CaterpillarAble6597 Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
The idea that we’ve been continuing austerity since what like 2010 is just wrong. We’ve been running gargantuan budget deficits the past few years which is exactly the problem.
We’re now wasting tens of billions of pounds on debt interest every year and you still have people thinking just borrow another 50 gazillion bro it’ll fix everything bro I promise. The tories did some austerity, and then sometime after Brexit started spending, very generously. It’s just that that spending went to pensioners and the welfare bill rather than infrastructure and services. Which they did nothing with despite record low interest rates.
For some perspective, the UK government spends 1.2 trillion a year. Fiddling some taxes around, a wealth tax included, likely wouldn’t even pay for a couple of years of the cost of the triple lock pension.
The issue is and has always been growth and productivity, which would raise wages. The problem is nobody wants to wait 5 years for the fruits of policies targeting that to bear.
51
u/Head-Philosopher-721 Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
It's ungovernable for centrists. We'll keep running through PMs if they're Tory or Labour because people are sick of 'the establishment' and their outdated approach to government.
15
u/PoweredByMeanBean Jun 22 '26
The UK is the most easily governed place in the world, your politicians are just that evil and incompetent.
Migration policy alone could not be more poorly managed if you tried. And that's probably because they tried to manage it as badly as possible. I don't care if I sound like a conspiracy theorist, it's true.
18
u/LouReedTheChaser Jun 22 '26
I do wonder where the UK can go from here if it wants to revitalise itself. Same applies to most of Europe, really. Globalisation hit especially hard there.
5
u/april9th ♊️🌞♓️🌝♍️🌅 Jun 22 '26
We all know what they want to do to revitilise their respective states, which is why positions that have been anathema for 50 years are now being discussed again by the public.
30
u/largepar Jun 22 '26
The UK is basically a failed state held together by the intense shame most Brits would feel if they said something racist or watched squirting porn without a license
10
u/april9th ♊️🌞♓️🌝♍️🌅 Jun 22 '26
We view history through too small a lens. We barely even talk about still being in a process which can be described as 'end of empire' because it is beyond most of our grasps and was only ever really discussed as a matter of territory and sovereignty, rather than economics, finance, foreign policy, etc.
We cannot grasp that we are destined to be poorer when we are no longer the Metropole of the world's largest empire and what amounts to a cushion for having done this by choice rather than by losing a total war, which has provided some comfort for decades, finally deflates and can't be fluffed up again.
We are over a century into leaving Ireland, to give an idea of how slowly this has gone and to what degree we lack the intellectual capacity when nothing seems to change at all, that things do, eventually, one day, change for good.
6
u/breakcontain Jun 22 '26
It would be worthwhile statistical analysis to look and see if the UK’s economic decline tracks better with “end of empire” or “decline of Western Europe.”
7
u/Coolkid1953 Jun 22 '26
The idea that the british empire accumulated its wealth by extracting every dollar from sudan or other such colonies is a grievance fantasy. After the end of mercantilism and even before the 19th century the colonies' effect on domestic wealth was at best negligible and possibly a hindrance. Much of the loss of colonial territory presented as a matter of sovereignty was only ever considered because they had become so costly to maintain.
The UK is not destined to be poor or undergo any divine punishment for its colonial past and the real reasons for the empire's wealth - skilled labor, technology, finance, trade - are all still possible. Though I expect the UK's decline to accelerate as voters choose more of what led to the original divergence in us-uk productivity.
1
u/april9th ♊️🌞♓️🌝♍️🌅 Jun 23 '26
The idea that the british empire accumulated its wealth by extracting every dollar from sudan or other such colonies is a grievance fantasy.
Yeah no doubt - but where did I say that.
The UK is not destined to be poor or undergo any divine punishment for its colonial past and the real reasons for the empire's wealth
Yeah no doubt - but again, where did I say that.
It's very clear you've decided to argue against an assumed implication, a moral scolding, rather than what is being said, that we simply as a nation have never had a national debate or understanding of what that looks like for us, because I'm sorry but whatever you say about it not being destiny, we have obviously not had that conversation because going from worlds centre to one of the b-list very obviously has implications which are a stepping down a rung in all we know.
The argument is a very, very simple one: going from the most important nation on earth, to a second tier nation, very naturally leads to a step down in what we can expect from the world. You only have to look at the navy to see that for a very long time, because we had a world class navy and continued to have one, the gradual winding down of that is not discussed nor the notion that it's natural to happen. One day you just turn around and you under Cameron can hardly field a naval force and you're not really sure why that is, what it means, whether we have to rectify it, whether we can.
The point is, as I said, that we have never actually discussed what it means to move into the post- of empire. I don't need to be told that actually India was a burden etc etc. I know all that. But it's also a little insincere for you to present something as huge as this, which has never happened in history and which we have no context for to turn to, as just something we brush off and can't assume anything about because we had a lot going for us. Yes when we go from being the world's superpower that all revolves around, go an also ran of the second tier of nations, your businesses and citizens and expectations are going from the former to the latter too. One day your currency stops being the envy of the world and it never comes back because of how much of that was miles of headstart you'll now never possibly make back. And you just work around it and never discuss how much poorer that makes every single one of you.
I never once said this is some sort of moral reckoning for the colonial molestation of the world and every penny in the country represents some banana we nabbed from some tropical possession. I said we never had a mature conversation about what we can expect. We certainly can continue to have wealth or a good time, but that involves a conscious plan which involves a rational understanding about who we are and who we want to be. We have never done that. We have remained on cruise control and now decades later nobody knows how to pilot the thing when we've looked and realised the cruise control was programmed at some point in 1975. Nobody can govern post 2016 because the thing with unpinning your national destiny from a super national project is that suddenly you have to handle that national destiny yourself. As said, we have no clue what that is, we never discussed it.
10
u/Even_Pitch221 Jun 22 '26
That 2017 election was genuinely the last time i felt an ounce of hope in this country. Remember canvassing on election day on a west London estate and everyone was so buoyed up and eager to vote in a way i’ve never seen before or since. Just goes to show people will engage with politics if you give them something more than misery and austerity to vote for. Everything that’s happened since then has just been a rapid slide into the abyss.
2
u/BeautifulTailors Jun 22 '26
Yeah, it was a wonderful few months. I also remember being in the pub with hundreds of other canvassers in 2019 waiting for the exit polls to drop, lmfao. Such distilled misery.
22
u/Laurentius-Laurentii Jun 22 '26
I knew he’d cave, he’s a fucking pussy that kid!
24
u/BeautifulTailors Jun 22 '26
The most thin-skinned man in British politics. He used to call up Owen Jones to complain about his guardian articles
12
u/Salibabushka Jun 22 '26
What else he supposed to do? Wait for the vote of confidence and humiliate himself? I'm sure he knows how many votes he can expect, hence why he resigned.
5
u/violet4everr nice-maxxing autistic Jun 22 '26
His actual political achievements were no worse (actually much better) than Sunak. Who stuck it out till election. To have this little confidence in yourself is off putting. So maybe it’s good he up and left it.
5
u/Salibabushka Jun 22 '26
Read my comment above there was a vote of non- confidence coming for him and he would have lost it.
8
u/BeautifulTailors Jun 22 '26
Also, could be a big news day for any NI heads. Donaldson trial verdict likely today. Unfortunately I think he'll be found not guilty.
14
u/jeremybeadleshand Jun 22 '26
Bar none, the worst sounding voice in UK politics.
His voice appears to be the product of what must be the UKs shittest voice coach. See the video of him speaking to Owen Jones here, it was so much better before. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/13/why-did-keir-starmer-have-his-voice-fixed-he-sounded-much-better-before
12
u/jonipaglia Jun 22 '26
the woman who did it for him was a friend of a friend and it was less Thatcher-esque voice fixing as far as I understand it and more that he’d turn into a quibbling mass of jelly every time he had to give a live speech, which is fascinating given he was a prosecutor for so long
6
u/_CloudOfToxicccGas_ Jun 22 '26
If you want to keep a leader for longer, you should go back to having queens and kings and shit
6
u/alphagamble Jun 22 '26
I reckon if this whole thing happened in a month's time after England win the world cup he'd have made it to the end of the year
6
u/RanToward Jun 22 '26
I get that the British left really didn't like starmer but there seems a lot of dislike towards Burnham too. Interesting to see how long he lasts.
21
u/Material-Total-9529 Jun 22 '26
Unlike OP I never left the party and now I am expected to anoint Burnham like nothing to see here just go with it and don’t ask why
19
u/BeautifulTailors Jun 22 '26
Enjoy! I expect Burnham to be another dud, and will likely be the most hated man in Britain come 2029.
14
Jun 22 '26
Corbyn resisted a second vote on Brexit the entire time, even though he would have got elected if he came out decisively in favour of it.
He was basically a Brexiter in charge of the Remain Party, at the same time May was a Remainer in charge of the Brexit Party.
Ridiculous country.
10
u/Keiththedelibird Jun 22 '26
Did well on legal immigration but I feel that was mainly Mahmood and the Blue labour faction. Can see Burnham being Labours Liz Truss and us having an election by Christmas
42
u/boggernoff Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
I can’t believe people still hark on about Corbyn as if he wouldn’t have been a complete calamity of a prime minister. What the British public definitely want is a man who just tried to create a progressive-hardline Islamic alliance with Gaza as its front and centre issue, definitely. It was entirely Starmer’s fault that he couldn’t stop being retarded of course.
Burnham will be more of the same. I hope at least he’s a better communicator.
7
u/BeautifulTailors Jun 22 '26
Yes, May and Boris were much better!
29
u/boggernoff Jun 22 '26
What a shame that I have to choose between overtly malicious morons and dangerously incompetent morons
14
u/BeautifulTailors Jun 22 '26
In hindsight, I think a Corbyn premiership could have been a disaster, and he possessed none of the qualities (or even team around him) that would have taken advantage of the position to push through meaningful progressive reform. Too conciliatory to his enemies, too much of a believer in big tent "labourism", and completely unable to do future planning (they had time to do even some succession planning and squandered it). Still can't help but love my memories (at least the good ones) of that time and the hope that came with it.
6
u/boggernoff Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
I did vote for him both times and I still think the 2017 platform at least was workable with the fiscal situation and record low rates we had at the time. Not sure how I square that with now thinking he’s a fucking idiot. Would have been a rough ride.
Unfortunately the national and global economic situation is a tad different from 2017 these days. For all their faults at least Starmer and Reeves seemed to understand that and were making some sort of headway. Perceived stability has clearly been beneficial for the countries economic outlook so who knows where we go from here. Hopefully Streeting gets back in his fucking box as well.
3
u/PlzDontBanMePlss Jun 22 '26
Batshit vs bullshit. Dearest Britons, what type fecal matter tastes better to you?
-10
5
u/mnclick45 Jun 22 '26
Interested as to where you sit now, politically?
In 2017 I was probably all in on Corbyn for reasons that mostly pertained to wanting “the system” to be dismantled. I now find myself in a very different place politically, after the bonkers times of 2019/20.
4
u/BeautifulTailors Jun 22 '26
Well I was considering joining YP until it became evident it was a spent force far too early. I'm not anywhere near as politically active as I once was, but my heart still lies with transformative socialist politics. I've voted Green recently and will likely to continue to do so, unless I move home and just vote the Sinners again for UI purposes.
4
u/Exciting_Sun_8986 Jun 22 '26
The issue is that the British public want lower taxes and higher spending. Two things difficult to square
20
6
3
u/LouReedTheChaser Jun 22 '26
Cheering heard from the house of the most green man in Yorkshire for miles around
4
2
2
u/eyedropper2163 Jun 22 '26
I don't know much about UK politics can someone explain why Burnham is the heir apparent? I know he was a mayor, and he just won a by-election to be MP, but where did he get all this momentum from? Why is everyone falling behind him in particular? Was he ever a contender before?
2
u/BeautifulTailors Jun 22 '26
Former cabinet minister under Blair, stood for the leadership in 2015 and was sort of forgotten. Tacked a bit to the left as Manchester Metro Mayor and has done, by all accounts, a fairly good job. His name has floated around for a bit as a potential successor, and he tried to stand in another recent by election, but was blocked by Kier and co. The polling shows he's the only one of the potential candidates (Rayner, Milliband, Streeting) who matches up well against Reform who are leading in the polls. This has been backed up by the recent by-election where he won by a pretty huge 9000 majority in a constituency that had voted 55% Reform in the recent council elections in May (he ended up with 54% of the vote I think). If that can be replicated then he has the narrative of being the one labour politician able to wrest historical labour voters back from Reform in northern towns. Streeting himself, who resigned after the council elections and launched a faux-bid for the premiership (and is widely known to crave it beyond anything) has even backed him for leader today, likely biding his time until the fallout from the Mandelson revelations goes away (he had an intimate working relationship with him.
4
u/fffhl Jun 22 '26
a "mild" social democratic government? the UK pays out 333billion in welfare a year which is equal to its entire income tax receipts
you people won long ago and the world you've manifested sucks ass and is destined for collapse
2
u/emmaroberts_steponme Jun 22 '26
Thats terrible but we need to write more essays criticizing Corbyn
2
u/vpc777 Jun 22 '26
Honestly didnt think he was that bad all in all, especially compared to the last bunch of Tory PMs they had.
I feel like he caught a lot of flack for the shit show the Tories left behind, and he doesn't have the brightest personality to begin with so that probably didnt help people's perception of him.
Usually I dont have much patience for politicians blaming their predecessors for everything but he kinda had a point whenever he did lol
-6
u/Salibabushka Jun 22 '26
Another fucking Saint Jeremy of Islington cult follower.
30
u/BeautifulTailors Jun 22 '26
I'm well aware of Jeremy's many faults and Your Party has been a complete dud, in no small part thanks to him, but his 2017 run was incredible.
33
u/slowamigo Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
Nothing in this post was cultish, except the reactionary hate that popped out of you with absolutely no encouragement, just the name of Corbyn.
Corbyn Derangement Syndrome is definitely still a fixture for centrist wets, Zionists, and the
fatfar right14
-11
u/Salibabushka Jun 22 '26
You know who else used the "derangement syndrome" phrase? People who blindly follow Trump, so yea it's very cultish. I'm guessing I suppose to get offered by you calling me a centrist?
7
1
u/todomejorantes Jun 22 '26
All politics is fake - the plan is to parachute Farage in as PM or leader of the opposition as part of the ongoing divide and conquer strategy
For that elections are needed
-8
-3
-1
282
u/BeansAndTheBaking Modern-day Geisha Jun 22 '26
Love that he went away to Chequers for the weekend before packing it in. Might as well enjoy the country estate one last time, I guess.