LogFAQs > #979420186

Thanatos_the_Great posted...

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.

I have seen discussion of your country's politics to some degree as the UK and CA are the other 2 majorly discussed nations due to posters, so I have some grasp of what you've talked about. I knew Starmer basically betrayed the party, I didn't realize it was to such an egregious degree. I also remember Borris and his parties during lockdown being something that resonated deeply with your fellow citizens, which I was admittedly jealous of because my country has a party that intentionally mishandled COVID for political & economic reasons, but ultimately that attitude didn't even spawn until the news in like March was reporting that it was primarily black people dying from COVID and of course that's when Trump and Republicans started saying it's not worth keeping everything shut down, blood for the money god. Also Newsom of California had a similar party to what Borris did, if I'm not mistaken. The people of CA didn't reject him for it like the UK did Johnson, which while I wish he had faced harsher backlash for it, I wouldn't want CA to put Republicans into power over it.

Thanatos_the_Great posted...

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.

Depressing similar to the Republican & Democratic party in the U.S. Though they have gotten better in calling out Republicans for their atrocities, we still have shit like the Senate refusing to investigate/call into question the fact that the USSC has accountability to literally nobody and will not self-regulate (The court's solution to their conflicts of interest) at times when it's of greatest interest to do so (such as Thomas removing himself from anything Jan 6th related). Dick Durbin has been especially frustrating on this.

Thanatos_the_Great posted...

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.

Well that's reassuring, however I do understand your point about it being speculative. I think the U.S. is also thankfully breaking away from that old truism as well. For the first time in a long time people lost rights due to right-wing fascism and recently elections have shown it. Also the fact that the Democratic party has overperformed in every election since 2018, minus Republicans winning a 5 seat majority due to 5 seats in NY in 2022, which is still an overperformance from Dems as traditional trends showed the party getting demolished in Congress, as all the pundits/media were saying with their "red wave/tsunami" bullshit.