Keir Starmer - and his miserable government

(11-03-2025 18:32 )skully Wrote:  It seems that whoever is in charge thinks that targeting the poor, sick and disabled is fine, they are evil, all of them. There will be blood on their hands.

Fully agree.

The backlash to these cuts has apparently got so bad for Labour, not just from the public, but also from Labour MP's, it's meant the official announcement for the cuts has been delayed till at least next week

(11-03-2025 19:29 )Tumble_Drier Wrote:  Well you didn't really think it was going to stop at robbing "rich" Pensioners, did you?

Nope

Its the classic government response, there is a crisis in X so we're going to do Y and Y happens to be the easy, short term, politically expedient approach that won't really make much of a difference in fact it will probably do a great deal of harm but the numbers look good

One of the big reasons Labour has lost a lot of support is that the budget & the winter fuel payments being moved to a means tested model has given the impression to voters that Labour aren't that different from the last 14 yrs of The Tories after all, which for a party that put the word "CHANGE" on its manifesto, with for some weird reason a picture of Starmer alone, thats not particularly good.

Now the proposed benefits cuts seek to lean into the very thing thats been hurting their standing with the public, is an interesting strategy.

Perhaps they look at yrs of the coalition government, all the negative press and backlash only for The Tories to improve their standing & win a majority as a signal that the silent majority, particularly the tory voters they needed to win & stay in power will reward them for being fiscally prudent

The social system is broken. Labour and the Tories have pretty much both admitted that.
But even then they have not told the full story as to how absolutely chronically dire the state of so many things are as per this linked post
https://www.babeshows.co.uk/showthread.p...pid2882223

The chosen 'solutions' have been established because of an emphasis on a set of ridiculous fiscal rules that the Chancellor has self imposed giving her no flexibility to do much other than cut, cut and cut again or alternatively mess around with NI contributions on employers in such a way it benefits neither the employer or the employee.
All so the government can loosely claim it is abiding by it's own fiscal rules.

Painful, difficult decisions are a fact of government life but the judgement calls made so far to my mind are wrong. Far better just to tell everyone straight.
'Look everything is a mess, we can't cut things any further on the basis that surgeries, hospitals, schools, universities, prisons, social care, border control, benefits, child maintenance, the courts, social services, councils and so, so much more are already in a parlous state.'
So phased income tax rises across the board on a sliding scale with the richest paying the largest increases and the poorest paying the smallest increases would seem a reasonably fair way forward.

The current policy agenda seems to me to be a degrading, dehumanising attack on the already vulnerable and an attack on the nature of the system that should be in place to protect them.
Really quite unedifying.

(12-03-2025 14:13 )southsidestu Wrote:  Perhaps they look at yrs of the coalition government, all the negative press and backlash only for The Tories to improve their standing & win a majority as a signal that the silent majority, particularly the tory voters they needed to win & stay in power will reward them for being fiscally prudent

What Tory voters?
There was no swing to Labour. They won because the Tories either didn't turn out, or voted Reform.

They're going against their own ideology. It's only the huge majority that's letting them get away with it, for now...

I'd go as far ton say if the Govt admit that if the welfare state is broken, there's a good chance that the political system will be broken too. I would not be too surprised if they end up taxing the Lottery it probably would be the only thing left that hasn't been taxed. Which means....

We are totally fucked up the Amazon. It seems to me their only real hope of balancing the books is to start chasing the big corporation tax dodgers big time.