There is a phenomenon here in America where our “left” party will get elected because of how unambiguously evil the conservatives are, fail to help their constituents or even stop those conservative policies, and lose house elections until they’re out of power. Gained power after 8 years of Bush in 2008, then lost seats in 2010,12,14, and the presidency in 2016. Then they regained the house in 2018 under Trump, and presidency in 2020, and lost the house majority and senate seats in 2022, and are on track to lose the presidency and senate in 2024.
Am I being needlessly pessimistic by expecting Labor to follow the same pattern?
One thing that changes the dynamic substantially is that we don’t have the same balance of power between the two houses of the legislature. Whatever the failings of our system, and there are many, the issue where the executive can’t do anything without capitulating to a house of the legislature controlled by the opposition doesn’t happen outside of unusual circumstances. As such we can probably expect Labour to at least generally follow through on opposing any Conservative policies that they currently oppose.
That does leave the issue of policies that they do agree with the Conservatives on. I’m certainly not expecting the UK to become some kind of utopia under Labour. We can probably at least expect things like the relentless demonisation of trans people and asylum seekers to reduce significantly, both of which are the subjects of recently-passed Conservative legislation. Whether or not they can improve the lives of the average person outside of those groups remains to be seen; the Tories have not left them with a good economic situation to work with, and I haven’t seen any solid plans for anything that seems like it operates on a sufficiently large scale to make a big difference. I hope that they’ll do some measure of re-integration with the EEA, which would help a great deal, but I’m filing that under “plausible hope” rather than “likely”. We almost certainly won’t see Labour withdraw us from the ECHR, which the Tories look more and more likely to do with each passing day.
So… yes and no. There are reasons to be pessimistic. There are also reasons to look forward to it. It’s too reductionist to see it as a binary situation.
There is, unfortunately, a lot of space between Blair and where the Tories currently are
There is a phenomenon here in America where our “left” party will get elected because of how unambiguously evil the conservatives are, fail to help their constituents or even stop those conservative policies, and lose house elections until they’re out of power. Gained power after 8 years of Bush in 2008, then lost seats in 2010,12,14, and the presidency in 2016. Then they regained the house in 2018 under Trump, and presidency in 2020, and lost the house majority and senate seats in 2022, and are on track to lose the presidency and senate in 2024.
Am I being needlessly pessimistic by expecting Labor to follow the same pattern?
One thing that changes the dynamic substantially is that we don’t have the same balance of power between the two houses of the legislature. Whatever the failings of our system, and there are many, the issue where the executive can’t do anything without capitulating to a house of the legislature controlled by the opposition doesn’t happen outside of unusual circumstances. As such we can probably expect Labour to at least generally follow through on opposing any Conservative policies that they currently oppose.
That does leave the issue of policies that they do agree with the Conservatives on. I’m certainly not expecting the UK to become some kind of utopia under Labour. We can probably at least expect things like the relentless demonisation of trans people and asylum seekers to reduce significantly, both of which are the subjects of recently-passed Conservative legislation. Whether or not they can improve the lives of the average person outside of those groups remains to be seen; the Tories have not left them with a good economic situation to work with, and I haven’t seen any solid plans for anything that seems like it operates on a sufficiently large scale to make a big difference. I hope that they’ll do some measure of re-integration with the EEA, which would help a great deal, but I’m filing that under “plausible hope” rather than “likely”. We almost certainly won’t see Labour withdraw us from the ECHR, which the Tories look more and more likely to do with each passing day.
So… yes and no. There are reasons to be pessimistic. There are also reasons to look forward to it. It’s too reductionist to see it as a binary situation.