A year of Starmer What do you think?

I doubt people will be concerned about TWAW when they vote

Doodledog I agree

Gossamerbeynon1945

Until Starmer ditches his TWAW opinion he will lose a lot of women voters. Does he really believe this statement? He needs to get a grip.

Yes, and this is very true too. I despair, really.

The problem with selling benefit policies to those just above the threshold is that they are disadvantaged. It must be galling to get up to go to a low-paid job and know that others who are staying in bed are getting as much as you are for going to work, and then there are the myriad things that benefit claimants get free which are too expensive for the working poor.

This is one of the reasons I am so rabidly anti means-testing. I don't think it is right that unwaged people can get into (for the sake of argument) concerts, exhibitions or whatever free, when their working neighbours can't go because their budget won't stretch. Similarly, there are a lot of things available to those on benefits which many working people could not afford.

As an example, I have booked some classes over the summer which cost hundreds of pounds unless you can prove that you are in receipt of benefits such as UC or pension credit, in which case they are very cheap. It is a tricky one to unpick, as (speaking for myself) I don't want to deny people on benefits the chance to spend their time productively (or pleasurably for that matter), but I am having to think carefully about which courses to do, as I missed out on a state pension at 60, so am having to use my savings, whereas people who haven't paid in anything can get them free and can take several. I'm not exactly resentful, and I know that the courses need to be funded somehow, but I can't help feeling that it's not very fair.

My example is arguably about a 'luxury' thing to do, and I know that I am lucky to be able to afford it, but I can understand how someone working hard all week but who is still unable to afford to do the things their non-working neighbours get free might be really resentful, and even more so when their children can't get access to things because they go to work.

There are a lot of people in that position. Not spiteful people who want to punish benefit claimants or restrict their lives, but decent people who want to see the benefit of their hard work. Didn't Teresa May call them 'Just About Managing'?

The answer, IMO, is to increase the minimum wage, rather than to cut benefits, but if a politician suggests that, they are shouted down by business owners who say that they 'can't afford' to pay more. I don't know - maybe there should be means testing at their end, too? If your turnover is more than £X you have to pay your staff more than a start-up company turning over a lot less? It doesn't seem fair to me that a hypothetical someone with a yacht and a second home, and children in public schools should be able to claim poverty and pay their staff badly as a result. If means testing sets a line above which the poor are deemed to be able to 'afford' to pay for things, why not balance it with one for the better off?

I think that this 'JAM' demographic is an important one, but a candidate for election who wants to sort it out fairly is up against a media which supports the profit motive, which makes it a difficult one to sell. In the end, it is easier to make the working poor feel better off than non-working neighbours by cutting benefit budgets, which ends up with a race to the bottom.

Read "Labour Losing Women" on Twitter

Gossamerbeynon1945

Until Starmer ditches his TWAW opinion he will lose a lot of women voters. Does he really believe this statement? He needs to get a grip.

Important to you but fairly low down on the overall reasons for voting I would have thought.

growstuff

Pippa With the majority he has, there is no way that 80 Conservatives will work with the opposition to get rid of him. They know very well which side their bread is buttered.

Not at the moment but let me give you a scenario. Johnson has a very short attention span. We see more and more anti-democratic bills go through parliament on the excuse that we need them for Covid. Johnson finds an excuse to leave - long covid or similar. It is decided that Gove will take over and he now has the use of the anti-democratic bills and decides to take everything a little further. You could see some of the currently quiet members of the Tories decide to vote the government down. They could even do so if Johnson tries to go too far.

I do appreciate my knowledge of politics is not deep enough to stop me worrying but I do, truly worry about where we are going.

Until Starmer ditches his TWAW opinion he will lose a lot of women voters. Does he really believe this statement? He needs to get a grip.

Pippa With the majority he has, there is no way that 80 Conservatives will work with the opposition to get rid of him. They know very well which side their bread is buttered.

I think it's very easy easy to take single utterances out of context and not to consider the whole picture. Reeves has actually done other work investigating poverty which is usually forgotten. However, those few word make a fantastic quote on social media.

At the time, the gutter press was full of stories about "benefit scroungers" aimed at Labour voters who were struggling but above the threshold for benefits. They despised people on benefits as much as anybody else - maybe even more because they were genuinely struggling and had been persuaded that people on benefits were playing the system.

Reeves was trying to appeal to those people. It was a silly and misguided thing to say because a deeper analysis of what the opposition Labour party would have done for the low paid wasn't "tougher" for those on benefits than what the Conservatives were doing. Nevertheless, it was picked up by the Tory press and used against the Labour Party - and it worked.

growstuff yes that is what I was thinking of.

I don't know if Starmer's shadow cabinet has the capability to do this.

I feel that concern too. However, we have a government that is pretty incompetent - other than at spending other people's money - except when it comes to staging everything. Wikipedia on Fascism (I hope this isn't deleted yet again - I think they must have an algorithm!)

Historians and other scholars disagree on the question of whether a specifically fascist type of economic policy can be said to exist

And here we have the Johnson government following these paths yet again. He does not want to govern and be held to account; he wants to rule so we have no real idea of his economic plan - and neither do the rest of his party. Other politicians may need to band together to get rid of him. I can't think of any other way of overcoming the propaganda machine he has working for him.

Do you mean Reeves' 2013(?) announcement about being "tougher than the Tories on benefits"?

Sorry Growstuff. It's here.

www.who.int/bulletin/archives/78(6)845.pdf

You are absolutely right MaisieD about Labour and the economy. They just lay back and let the Conservatives lead the narrative.
One of the reasons I am hesitant about Keir Starmer's Labour party is his closeness to Rachel Reeves, who wanted to come down harder on benefit claimants than the Tories, again following their narrative about "scroungers".

I agree with you Maizie. I want to tell them to stop waffling and come out with a clear message.

Do you have a link to the piece Pippa?

I think the LP has got to be a lot more pro-active about the economy. I don't know if Starmer's shadow cabinet has the capability to do this.

Economist Simon Wren- Lewis's latest blog asks why Milliband, and the LP post Milliband, were so utterly passive that they just sat back and let the tories tell the nation the lies about the LP bankrupting the UK and causing the banking crisis. None of it wasn't true yet the LP never fought it, and haven't, right up to the present day.

So, all in all, there's an awful lot of damning perceptions of the Labour Party that any new leader has to overturn...

mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2021/04/labour-should-start-contesting-tory.html

Maizie I'm not in the slightest bit surprised. I don't live in a red wall constituency but I have close relatives and friends who do. They're actually doing OK financially, but they blame local Labour councils for the state of the town where they live, look down on those on benefits and have no time at all for identity politics. I know that most of them either didn't vote in the last election or voted Conservative after a lifetime of voting Labour.

growstuff

The welfare state was actually the brainchild of a Liberal, Beveridge.

Just found a nice piece to read later, on the Beveridge Report. One sentence immediately jumps out at me:

Contrary to what public health specialists might assume, the report is not primarily about health interventions but treats them as among the ‘‘allied services’’ included in a comprehensive scheme whose chief concern is the maintenance of employment and income.

When did anyone last hear talk about full employment?

P.S I'm in a red wall seat.

Iam64

The Attlee government was elected after two world wars which changed society. The working classes wanted education, the nhs, a fairer, more just and equal society than their parents and grandparents had.
I’m in a red wall area. What I heard repeatedly was Labour was (especially its leader) soft on defence, put terrorists over our military, cared more about benefit scrounges (not my term) than working people. Islington isn’t Burnley, Blackburn, Wigan, Leigh. People felt ignored and looked down on.
It’s ironic that somehow, it’s not the leader or front bench to blame for that catastrophic defeat.

What I've suspected about the red wall areas is that Labour were also suffering a backlash from a decade of tory austerity.

The Labour politicians best known to local voters would be the local councillors who had to undertake swingeing cuts to local services because of tory cuts to their budget allocations.

The tory candidates in the 2019 election were promising all sorts of money and 'action' to the local communities and telling them that Labour had never done anything for them. They're still doing this with the local elections coming up.

I'm surprised that no-one seems to have made this connection because it seems pretty obvious to me...

Iam64

The Attlee government was elected after two world wars which changed society. The working classes wanted education, the nhs, a fairer, more just and equal society than their parents and grandparents had.
I’m in a red wall area. What I heard repeatedly was Labour was (especially its leader) soft on defence, put terrorists over our military, cared more about benefit scrounges (not my term) than working people. Islington isn’t Burnley, Blackburn, Wigan, Leigh. People felt ignored and looked down on.
It’s ironic that somehow, it’s not the leader or front bench to blame for that catastrophic defeat.

I think your summary is much like the conversations I heard at the time Iam64. Going to your first paragraph of what the working classes wanted and then to what they don't like could it be partly that, although we got what we wanted, they have had 70 years to become rather outdated and moribund systems.

I am struggling at the moment because I like the sound of the Australian Pension System. (I need to find someone to tell me what is wrong with it). Just looking at our system - it's a mess. However, I do want to ensure that no one is in poverty or, to be honest, close to it, in their old age. Could different systems aiming to achieve long-held goals be an answer?

Being looked down on has come about because of wrong thinking over manufacturing, I feel. We should have kept learning and improving and leading the world but we threw the baby out with the bathwater. This was partly because of Thatcher's determination to destroy the unions and partly because they were determined to destroy her. Neither position improved people's lives or the country.

The welfare state was actually the brainchild of a Liberal, Beveridge.

trisher

Apologies Annie I misread MP for PM. What about Wilson?

Wilson wasn't "far left".