People would rather be told a lie by those they like than a truth by those they do not. This is our new power, in modernity, granted to us by the mechanisms of social media, to make us feel like we are significant and the things we feel are valid. Used to be that if you were a weirdo, and I like weird btw, then you were somewhat isolated in the tribe. Now you can join a tribe of weirdos because of the way the world is networked and we are all linked objects in a virtual social media fabric. Well, nearly all of us.
I’m watching Biden have a hard time, and he deserves it really, because he’s not up to the job and he won’t admit or realise it. His continued stance will harm the Democrats more than help. Starmer has just taken over in Number 10 and a new dawn has been declared, I suspect more of the same will follow though because this lot have the same corporate masters as the last lot. In truth nothing changes but the rhetoric, the motions will be the same yet the descriptions will differ, and the weird thing is that people will not really notice. Given a different description, explanation, excuse, for exactly the same action as the previous power people, the followers will think themselves happier with the same menu, the same dreadful fare, and the same lousy service. I find that rather strange.
We could demolish the idea that Starmer is on the left (as he is described by media and himself) or that his newly rebuilt labour party is in any way different to the other neoliberal party it is replacing, we could look at how he has reneged on every promise and pledge he made to become the leader of the party, how he described Corbyn as a friend and then claimed he hadn’t, his justifications of the actions Israel took in punishing the Palestinian civilian population that many other countries decried as war crimes, we could look at his purge on Jewish Labour Party members and anyone on the left, describing the party as “broad” while in the process of narrowing it, we could ask questions about his time as a prosecutor when he chose not to prosecute, but these have been done many times over, with no result. People simply do not care that he is no more a figure of trust that the last guy, or the one before that, or the one before that.
Add to this debate on the truth of 2024 election that the media have herald the Labour win as a “Landslide”. I think we need to put that into perspective… Labour increased it’s vote share by 1.6%, taking this from the Tories but gaining a huge amount of seats. Reform UK didn’t exist in the last election and grabbed a very significant 14%, again from the Tories, but only get 5 seats. The Lib Dems captured an extra 0.7% of the vote but translated that into 71 seats. So Labour gained 209 seats since Corbyn with an increase of 1.6% of the vote but a lower turnout (meaning more people actually voted for Corbyn’s Labour party in 2019 – 10.3M, than voted for Starmer’s in 2024 – 9.7M). The Conservatives lost 251 seats by losing 20% of the vote, Other parties(+2.5%), The Greens(+4.1%), Plaid Cymru(+0.2%), the SNP(+1.5%), and Independents took the remaining few percentage points. If we look just at the numbers and how they add up we see that the Right (Cons, Reform) took 10.8 Million votes, the Centre-Right (Lib Dem, Labour) took 13.2 Million, and the Left (Greens) only captured 1.9 Million.
These numbers are significant because they clearly indicate that Reform UK caused the Labour win by biting a chunk away from the Tory share, there’s just no other way it can be put if the numbers returned are correct, even if we count the Brexit Party as Reform UK then it is an increase of 12.3% from 2019, which is still higher than the 9.9% all other parties collectively increased by this time. So where does this idea of a “Landslide” come from, is that just a spin term? No, it’s revealed in the way we do our politics in Britain using the extremely unfair First-Past-The-Post system of regions, this makes politics a lot like a tennis match where I could lose every point in a set, win the next two sets on tie-breaks after winning each game by game to 30, and even though you had heavily outscored me in games and points I would still be the winner. As a result then, every vote for a party that did not win that particular seat is of no consequence at all, a party could actually come second in every seat and accumulate a total vote share that was higher than any other party, yet still fail to capture a single seat in parliament. That should be a wow moment, again though, and quite surprisingly, it is not. It’s just the way we do things here. Plaid Cymru get 4 seats in parliament with 194,811 votes, Reform UK get 5 seats with 4,072,947, 25 times a bigger number!
So this leaves Reform UK (who I am no fan of) as the biggest losers because they get a lot less parliamentary power than their vote deserves if we are in fact a democracy, the Lib Dems get big power at 71 seats even though they actually secured less votes overall than Reform UK, and Starmer looking like he is a victorious PM with a huge mandate even though his party only got 34% of the vote in contrast with the 43% that the nitwit Johnson got in 2019, and less votes overall than the guy he got rid of who captured more votes in losing the last two UK elections than Starmer won this one with. I think this makes Starmer the lesser evil, and just at the right moment for his ambitions, the party across the floor demolished themselves and lost out to the increasing right wing feelings of the British populous in their rush toward the hard line Reform UK party.
We should not be celebrating, we should be very worried, the European trend of a lurch rightward is happening here too, we are just refusing to see it and our media is refusing to show it for what it is. In 1997 Blair beat the Tories by a good way, but it wasn’t these type of Tories that he beat it was vanilla economic actors that believed in Milton Friedman, the Austrian School, and Thatcherism. Crooks by my reckoning yes, and following an evil economic ideology I am sure, but they did believe in the merits of it at least. To gain this victory Starmer had to bring the Labour party to the right by a long way, I would say beyond the centre and over to the right so that the news media could stop scrutinising it and recognise that it now aligned with the sort of politics their owners favoured, therefore allowing them to treat it in the same soft way it treats the usual suspects in blue.
Blair did this also, he lurched Labour to the right in 1997. It could be said that Brown, Miliband, and Corbyn were all differing forms of leftists, and with our media the way it is, predominantly right wing owned, that’s why they didn’t win. It’s neoliberals, fascists, ultra right-wing actors that have been running Britain since 2010, and the Reform UK party are the same as the Conservatives but even further to the right. The media owns the narrative, they decide how you feel and how you vote, they were the backers of Brexit, the backers of the Tories, the backers of Farage, and now they are somewhat on Starmer’s side, that is why he is where he is.
I’ve pointed it out in many blog posts, but I’ll do it again now.. If you happen to have anything good in your life that is provided by government, or if you have been the beneficiary of any help that was not charity or family based that you did not have to pay for directly, if you hold rights in your job or have a pension, if you enjoy free healthcare and education, then that artifact of society has the actions of a Liberal or Labour government as its foundation. Who it was most definitely not provided by was a right wing government, because that is simply not what they do. They strip away, they force austerity, they protect power and wealth and act against distribution or using taxation to provide for those that cannot, they make poverty a necessity and moot it as a choice. What the right does is to increase the wealth of the wealthy and convince the population through its media that the greediest persons in society are the most benevolent of us, being so good to us that they will let us make them wealthier at the cost of our health and our happiness and our rights, in return they will maybe let us have just enough of what they are born to own (everything) to survive and continue to provide labour.
Anyway, I ramble as always… fear and suspect the right always, and stop fucking celebrating, there is much more still to be done..
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