Newspaper Reader comments.
Dec 29, 2024
Editor: Under the rubric of ‘THE SUNDAY TIMES VIEW’
Headline: The age of uncertainty is here to stay — so let’s embrace it
When Labour last won a landslide victory, in 1997 under Tony Blair, it took a long time for voters to become disenchanted. Mori had Labour with a 29-point lead over the Tories in December 1997, seven months after the election. That was the platform on which Blair built three strong election victories.
Today under Sir Keir Starmer things could hardly be more different. As we report today, a large-scale, seat-by-seat polling analysis by More in Common shows that if there were to be an election now, Labour would lose nearly 200 seats and its majority, finishing only slightly ahead of the Tories, with Reform UK, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish Nationalists winning dozens of seats. At first blush the analysis merely tells you Labour has shot itself in the foot repeatedly since the election, making enemies and few friends. The real cause, though, arguably goes far deeper. It is down to political fragmentation, which increasingly describes the world that we are in.
The clues were there at the time of the July general election. Turnout was a paltry 59.7 per cent, and of that the combined vote share of the two main parties, Labour and the Tories, was only 57 per cent. Only 20 per cent of those entitled to vote backed Labour, 14 per cent the Tories.
If the analysis we are reporting today provides anything like a glimpse into the future, the fragmentation we saw in July 2024 is a mere taster. No workable coalitions could be established. It would be like importing the present French or German instability into the UK, something that first-past-the-post is meant to prevent.
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Editor: Reader recall the dismal record of this newspaper for ‘truth telling’? This just a sample of the defamation that Corbyn suffered from all British Corporate Media !
Headline: Biography
Review: Dangerous Hero: Corbyn’s Ruthless Plot for Power by Tom Bower — portrait of a monomaniac
If Jeremy Corbyn became prime minister, he would easily be the most dangerous, most indolent and least intelligent holder of the office in history
Review by Dominic Sandbrook
Sunday February 24 2019, 12.01am GMT, The Sunday Times
Editor: given this reprehesable record of lies, how might the Reader treat this wan apologetic for Tony Blairs political catamite Kier Starmer ? The diagnosis of the present is thin, and carelessly refracted through a politically self-serving characature of a past!
This fragmentation has not happened in a vacuum. People are probably more cynical about politicians than they have ever been. Years of slow growth, high immigration and squeezed living standards, and of high taxes alongside crumbling public services, have created permanent disquiet and turbocharged Reform UK. The world is also increasingly splintered — worryingly so. It is not that long since post-Soviet Russia, even under Vladimir Putin, was being embraced. For a while, the G7 was the G8. Less than ten years ago, too, under David Cameron’s “golden era” of relations with China, the then prime minister posed with a pint in a pub with Xi Jinping.
Editor : ‘Growth’ is the very linch-pin of Neo-Liberalism , no matter how they self-present , in the guises adapted for the self-serving present! The final paragraph of the essay is just reiteration, in political costume!
Otherwise the future looks painful: a slow march to an election in which “none of the above” is the favoured choice. UK elections are by tradition won in the centre ground. But it would be a mistake to rely on this. The age of uncertainty is here to stay. The challenge for Starmer, and other western leaders, is to embrace it
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