UK General Election 2024

[DownUnder]

So there's a General Election looming in the near future. Hopefully it's going to be a time of big (progressive) change. The Conservatives have had their chance and failed miserably. Let's hope for better things on the horizon!

[Globalfightback]

As ballot day arrives all talk is of a Labour landslide. Polls have proved wrong in recent times though..... and a lot of the far Left are really hating on Starmer on social media and doing their best to scupper his chances, seemingly at any cost. It would certainly be great to see the back of the Tori£$ at last, but what would the new political landscape look like? There are a worrying amount of Reform shills posting on all the progressive pages as well as the official Conservative FB page; hopefully the polls are right and they will only get a handful of seats. Obviously in a PR system they would stand to get more: perhaps in the coming five years the one useful thing Reform might do is help a push for PR next time around. Elsewhere it seems like the Liberal Democrats mght pick up a fair few seats: not a bad thing in some ways since too big a majority for Labour isn't necessarily a good thing. Labour have undoubtedly moved towards the centre ground, but the ousted Corbynites would have you believe they've gone much further and are now just 'red Tories' to use their phrase. I doubt it's that bad, some of the posts smack of sour grapes, but time will tell. Personally I would give an incoming Labour government two years max. to prove they still have some remnants of a socialist backbone, but Starmer certainly isn't all shiny white, or even glossy red..... more about that at a later date.

[Globalfightback]

This is a copy of the post I made on the FB page several days after the Labour landslide on July 4:

THE TORI£$' STRANGLEHOLD ON UK DEMOCRACY IS OVER - BUT IT'S ONLY A BEGINNING

14 years of Conservative doublespeak are finally over. 14 years where we witnessed an endless succession of duplicitous prime Ministers that collectively oversaw a disastrous Brexit founded on misinformation and duplicity, an upward spiraling of knife crime, a widening of the gap between rich and poor, increasing homelessness and the reappearance of third-world soup kitchens in one of the richest nations on the planet, a national health service that might already be terminally ill, and a rekindling of the flames of racism and the fascist mindset that underpins it. These are just a few of the things we can thank one of the most corrupt, self-serving governments in British history for: a government that have made a mockery of the very foundations of democratic principle. If they had been left unchecked for another five years there is little doubt that the stealth march towards a fascist #PoliceState would have continued and the freedom to protest it all but extinguished. Even now there are pretenders to the throne of jackboot autocracy plotting in the wings to where the more extreme factions of Conservatism have scuttled.

The Labour Party won last week's General Election with a massive majority. This has made the Tori£$ little more than an impotent bit-player in the political landscape of the coming four years or so, and it is to be hoped that, during that time, Labour keep good their promises to tackle the corruptions and inequalities that the Tori£$ stamped as their hallmark over 14 years of misrule. But there is no room for complacency. The fact that the % swing of votes towards Labour was small yet catapulted them from a Party of opposition with a relatively small minority of seats, to a Party of government with an even bigger majority of seats than the Tori£$ had, merely casts a glaring spotlight on the broken democracy of Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system. It would seem obvious to any objective mind (although not necessarily to those with vested interests) that a move towards #ProportionalRepresentation is now of utmost urgency, as argued by pressure groups such as #OpenBritain. Additionally, only time will tell whether the misgivings of the Left regarding the authenticity of a Labour Party that has undoubtedly moved from its socialist roots towards a distinctly Centre ground are relevant, and whether its leader, Keir Starmer is truly more than another puppet of a twisted and misanthropic elite. It's surely Labour's last chance to get it right: an opportunity that could consign the politics of undeserving privilege to the dusty cobwebs of the past for eternity, or merely energise it in its mission to push Britain further towards the darkness that has stealthily begun to encircle the entire planet. It's a make-or-break moment, and the vigil has begun.....

See also: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ar ... n-the-room

See also: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... eftwing-uk

[DownUnder]

Labour have sure had it tough over the last week with the racist riots, only one month into their tenure. They seem to have dealt with the problem pretty impressively though.

[Globalfightback]

Labour have sure had it tough over the last week with the racist riots, only one month into their tenure. They seem to have dealt with the problem pretty impressively though.

Certainly Labour came down on the rioters hard (I don’t think many reasonable people would argue that this wasn’t a series of riots by thugs rather than peaceful protest, and hence unlawful). It’s full of complexities though. You could suspect that these riots were orchestrated by hidden figures, given that this sort of thing didn’t happen during 14 years of Tory (mis)rule but broke out a mere month after Labour’s tenure began. It’s true that you could argue there were a few incendiary factors such as the jailing of Anjem Choudary only days earlier, which may have focussed the right-wing elements on the very real threat of Islamic extremism, but even so, as things panned out, the rumours that the murderer of the three poor girls in Stockport was a Muslim asylum seeker turned out to be a whole web of lies, and at least some of those that gave these lies momentum have been rightly jailed.

Things get much murkier when you look into rumours that Tommy Robinson’s EDL was actually co-founded by Jewish people with links to Israel, given the hard-to-refute photographic footage available on the Web showing Robinson mixing with Israeli dignitaries and, additionally, footage of him openly supporting Israel’s fight against the Palestinians. At first sight it would seem absurd that Israel would want to encourage civil unrest in the UK, but Israel certainly appears to be interfering in UK politics given the large proportion of both Conservative and Labour MPs who have ‘sponsored’ by them, so maybe this is merely the entrance to a rabbit hole. More of that at a later date, probably in a separate thread, but you can check with Companies House, a verifiable UK Government resource, that the EDL was initially named the English And Jewish Defence League, for some reason, and that, amongst the principal people in at least one of its several incarnations listed there is a Helen Gower, who also appears in this article: https://hopenothate.org.uk/2018/09/09/g ... eam-tommy/
This is a mere starting point for further research, because that particular web would appear to be much more complex.

Obviously the whole dynamics of this unrest is complex, and it can’t be denied that the uncontrolled immigration, much of it illegal, has been one of the main factors in creating the incendiary tinderbox that eventually burst into flames. It seems stunningly naïve of politicians to think that an endless flood of immigrants at a time of declining living standards wasn’t going to cause a growing resentment that was just waiting for a spark to ignite it. The fact that it ignited when it did definitely raises suspicions that it was to some extent orchestrated, and a cynic might go further and argue that politicians knew they were fanning the flames when they failed to deal with the growing numbers of asylum seekers over the course of two decades or more, by ensuring that those without genuine grounds for asylum were removed from the country rather than housed for months or years at the taxpayer’s expense at a time when the demands on the national budget were already overwhelming. It gets even more complex, and, for example, people can rightly argue that Britain has played its fair share in destabilising much of Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe over the centuries, and so themselves creating some of the factors in this mass movement of displaced peoples, but there are always breaking points in any given construct, and given the economic models currently in play you can’t just overload a system and expect it will continue to support the weight. Ultimately, one of my fundamental beliefs is that a lasting solution to such issues will only arise when there is a global shift away from old tribal boundaries and towards a recognition that we all communally own the planet and that, furthermore, the distribution of resources should not be dictated by the artificial construct of individual ‘wealth’ These are, of course, far too radical ideas to see the light of day anytime soon, in our lifetimes even, and would give the neoliberals currently running the show in many parts of the world acute apoplexy that would merely incite them further rather than prove terminal. So in the meantime we can look forward to decades more of unrest, assuming that said unrest isn’t itself terminal for life on the planet, and hope, at best, that we are able to steer things a little bit further towards a lasting and stable solution that suits us all. The very purpose of these forums and the website is exactly that, and I have no illusions regarding the extent to which any individual, or group of individuals, can contribute towards the greater whole, but each ripple can add to a momentum that will, hopefully, become an irrepressible wave.