LogFAQs > #979415690

I'm in the UK.

Kradek posted...

What is the current political environment in your country like?

Increasingly right-wing, authoritarian, transphobic and Islamophobic. The Conservative Party, which is now in power (led by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak), are going increasingly deranged and creeping slowly towards fascism (though at least they haven't charged headlong into it like the US Republicans).

The good news is that they're almost certain to lose the next election. The bad news is that the main opposition, the Labour Party, though nominally socialist and with many left-wing or centre-left members, is led by Keir Starmer, who lied his way into getting elected leader by pretending to be a leftist and then u-turned on absolutely all his pledges and became a right-wing authoritarian, while his henchmen (or puppeteers) in the party bureaucracy centralised power in the party among themselves to prevent the wider party from reversing their takeover.

Polling shows no enthusiasm for Starmer to be PM, but the Conservatives are now so loathed - thanks to the "Partygate" scandal of former PM Boris Johnson and others breaking their own covid lockdown laws to have drunken parties while ordinary people weren't allowed to attend their relatives' funerals, and then his successor Liz Truss tanking the economy with her idiotic policies and being forced to resign after just 47 days - that Labour has big poll leads anyway. But there's no prospect of them reversing any of the current government's worst laws and policies - either Starmer supported them in the first place or he made noises of opposition but now refuses to commit to reversing them. Unless he completely u-turns (which, to be fair, he has quite a record of doing), environmental regulations will remain watered down, the National Health Service and local government will remain underfunded, authoritarian laws restricting immigration and peaceful protest will remain, and discrimination against trans people will continue to increase.

Kradek posted...

Do you agree with the current state or the direction your nation is heading?

No. Nothing here to add beyond what I've said above, really.

Kradek posted...

Are there any threats from parties/politicians that have you concerned?

Yes, from both the main parties, though the Conservatives more so. The Conservatives are more and more aligned with the extreme right and Labour seem more intent on appeasing them than opposing them.

Kradek posted...

Is there anything that's giving you hope for the future, such as possibly countering the aforementioned concerns?

Maybe. The Conservatives' coming defeat isn't likely to be reversed any time soon - much of it is down to long-term social and economic factors, not just their recent disasters - and the old truism about people getting more right-wing as they get older appears not to be true anymore, so the Labour leadership may eventually find themselves forced by electoral pressure to actually adopt some of the left-wing policies that are needed to reverse our ongoing national decline. But at this stage that's highly speculative.