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Comment by drcongo | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if you're trolling or not, but it's hard to say really, given that their current stance is to just agree with tory policies and not really have any of their own. It's more the fact that any socialist policies they did have prior to Starmer have gone.

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Pretty obvious what the scam is here. Starmer lied to the membership to become leader, has ruthlessly purged the left including the former leader, and now plans to sit tight doing and saying nothing, hoping the Tories self-destruct as they occasionally are want to. Meanwhile Labour will suck-up to the right-wing press in the hope that Murdoch et al will decide not to destroy them on a whim as they did the previous iteration, enough to sneak the next election. Net result, the 40% of the population who voted for a left-wing party in 2017 will have no representation for the next decade minimum. Again. Great democracy we have, brilliant stuff. Signed, extremely bitter former Labour member.

Getting a little too off topic and political for HN, but...

I think the trouble here is that the only way Labour could win is by aggressively moving towards the centre, which as you describe they are doing. Loosing Scotland to the SNP has completely cut them off at the knees.

What we really need is complete electoral reform and moving to a proportional representational system. Exactly as you describe we no longer have a simple left and right to our politics, Brexit proved that. It will be painful while the main parties shrink and smaller parties grow but I believe the outcome would be a more effective and representative government. Trouble is neither main party could push it though as it would result in them having less power, that's a hard sell.

Yes, proportional representation would be nice, and might solve some of the UK's many problems. But it isn't going to happen in my lifetime. They won, we lost, and as a result living standards are going continue to get worse for most people in this country for the foreseeable. That's really the whole story.

I've not gone back and checked the results, and done the maths, however:

I did read that each time Labour got in government, it would have occurred irrespective of the parties the Scottish MPs represented. That because the swing within England was so great as to make the Scottish votes an irrelevance (England being about 10x the population of Scotland).

Genuinely curious. I'm not very familiar with UK politics and I was always under the impression that Labour was more left wing than Lib-Dem and Conservative so I was surprised to read that description of them.

Ah, very fair question then - I think even a lot of actual UK voters have the same impression too, largely down to the whims of a few billionaires who own all the newspapers in the country and essentially get to decide who wins. As long as Labour policies are a threat to their money, they'll be presented as dangerous lefties to the public hence, as @flooow pointed out above, their current strategy of just trying not to be noticed at all.

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