British politics risks an unprecedented shift to the far right as a result of public disillusionment if a Labour government fails to enact radical change, the former shadow chancellor John McDonnell has warned.
Writing in the Guardian, McDonnell said the threat would come not just from Nigel Farage’s resurgent Reform UK but from the return of a Conservative party “shorn” of its moderate wing and dominated by populists.
McDonnell, who served in the shadow cabinet under Jeremy Corbyn, reflected the views of others on his party’s left who are impatient with what they regard as Labour’s too-cautious approach. “The central messaging of Keir Starmer’s electoral strategy is that he’s not Jeremy Corbyn and that Labour is not the disaster that is the Conservative party,” he said.
McDonnell pointed to the polling figures of Reform UK, reaching as high as 11%, as evidence of “how a far-right populist programme can pull the major parties on to a rightwing agenda”.
This is a bit rich really. Firstly, he’s had two opportunities to get the Tories out and failed. And second, their lurch to the right in 2019 was made easier by his and Corbyn’s desertion of the centre.
And, again, not that this needs repeating, but I voted for Corbyn as leader twice.
Labour pulling left didn’t have the effect I hoped it would when I voted for them to lead the party, if anything, it had the complete opposite one.
Exactly this.
As much as people on here bitch about Starmer, it’s not like Corbyn didn’t already have a go and gave us fucking Boris.
The lurch to the right will continue until it actually hurts. At the moment it just keeps circling the drain, as much as the Tories are cutting the NHS and benefits nothing has actually collapsed. Sure some businesses didn’t make it past Brexit, but we don’t have mass unemployment. There is a delicate balance and it could all go really wrong fast and I don’t see significant change until it does.
Respectfully, I think this betrays your privilege / position.
Things very much are collapsing, and it isn’t limited to the poor and destitute anymore.
A friend of mine was telling me recently how the foodbank they volunteer at has had an absolute explosion of demand and is now being used by people who previously would have been donating food. This is because they are spending every penny they can on their mortgage.
Granted, we are not in the middle of a great depression or anything like that, but things are very bad for a lot of people.
But that’s my point. We are going to have to drop further for people to actually push back because obviously all the shit that’s going down isn’t making people revolt.
It’s not “betraying my privilege” this is me watching the Tories get a stupid amount of votes considering their platform and there has to be a percentage of those struggling voting for them for any of this to make sense.
Or the votings rigged.
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Not sure what your point is? That he increased the number of people voting Labour when he ran again Theresa May (and still lost, I mean talk about someone who was vilified in the press), and promptly lost it when there was any slight competition?
So Starmer should copy the Corbyn playbook of losing, and blaming the Blairites, despite it being 20 years since he was relevant? For fucks sake, when will you just face it that he lost because he didn’t put forward point that the 50.1% cared about.
Blair in 2001, 10,724,953 votes.
Corbyn in 2019, 10,269,051 votes.
Good job increasing that vote share!
It’s not like the fact that Corbyn was leader was what pushed voters away from Labour. The press were pretty merciless with him while his policies themselves were popular, I seem to recall.