Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

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Labour has been "Blairite" ("centrist pro-capital," or just say neoliberal) since the SDP sabotage and the endless, worthless reign of Kinnock. This happened at the same time the New Democrats were stomping the Rainbow Coalition into the ground to finalize the transformation of the US Democrats into the exact same thing.

UK Labour has been a "centrist, pro-capital party" for probably your entire life (or at least most of it.) The only reason Corbyn even ended up in front is that a bunch of centrists nominated him as a joke candidate, and they hadn't been paying attention when Ed Miliband had changed the voting rules and accidentally made Labour a democratic party. Of course the membership voted for Corbyn, everybody else was garbage.

Same reason why Trump won the Republican primary in the US - the Tea Party had forced the voting process to be democratic. Unlike the Democratic party, which doesn't even have a vaguely democratic process, culminating in them having absolutely no process in the last election. I still insist that if Sanders had run as a Republican in 2016, he would have been president.

The last time Labour wasn't like this we had waiting lists to get a telephone!

That telephone monopoly was privatised - and later dragged their heels on rolling out broadband because ISDN was so profitable, causing untold damage to the UK tech economy as the country fell behind on connectivity.

It’s a great parable of badly-managed state-run monopoly vs badly-managed privatised monopoly.

If the Tory government hadn’t reserved the market for cable TV exclusively for two US companies, NTL and Telewest, BT would have rolled out fibre to the home in 1990.

I don’t think I blame BT for not wanting to invest in a market it was barred from making a profit in. This is the result of heavy handed local regulation strangling a national incumbent for the sake of foreign interests.

At any point other competitors could have made the same investment but didn’t want to either until relatively recently.

Well one of these things happened and the other one was a hypothetical? It seems very wishful thinking to assume it just would've happen if the politics of the 70s had some how limped into the 80s

To be fair that wasn't because it was so long ago, just all the telephone operators were on strike:)

>and they hadn't been paying attention when Ed Miliband had changed the voting rules and accidentally made Labour a democratic party.

Great line.

I think it's fair to say that both conservatives and labour have simply been riding on Margaret Thatchers coattails for the last 3 decades. If any of them have come up with any great original ideas of their own i haven't noticed.

On the subject of democracy it has been very inconvenient recently for both parties. This is where kier starmer comes shining through. In every other area he's bumbling, indecisive and unambitious to name just a few of his traits. But when it comes to maintaining control of his party he's masterful (well, uncharacteristically competent anyway) . He took full advantage of his opposition years to purge the Corbynites from his party. He had the time, it's not like he was doing much opposition. He recently took advantage of a scandal to rid himself of his more leftist and popular deputy Angela Rayner and did a cabinet reshuffle, buying himself more time.

It's noteworthy that the only single occasion that he took any firm and decisive action was in suppressing the right wing riots and prosecuting all the instigators in a truly impressive display of efficiency from the law enforcement and judiciary.

I agree with your analysis of the Democrats. It's hard to manufacture consensus while ignoring your electorate. Especially when you have such an outspoken rival like trump. Starmers opposition is so pathetically bad that he looks ok by comparison.

Fortunately, the status quo was bravely rescued by the Guardian's non-fact-based yet effective discovery of Corbyn's antisemitism. Gotta love such center-left newspapers.

That was the point I stopped buying the Guardian, I'd like to say it was ideological but the fact is it became boring, they only had about four versions of the line against him which writers would rotate - there's only so many times you can read the same thing.

Well Corbyns been hard at work proving them right. At least people should be pondering how making palestine a cornerstone of his political ideology would meaningfully help Britain. Unrelated but it's something George Galloway should think about. I accidently listened to about 30 seconds of him talking and he seems to be a captivating speaker.

Anyway what sunk corbyn wasn't his anti semitism, that was the excuse, but his socialism, which isn't at all what New Labour is about. Starmer is a centrist, which stems from his policy of having no position on anything. He is rightfully mistrustful of the left wing of his party. They would have lost in the elections.

Of course it was his actual old-school social democrat values that did him in - can't have that in a party called Labour. But the look wouldn't have been right, so an absurd excuse was found.

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