Our first constituency poll has awful news for Britain’s Conservatives
Our first constituency poll has awful news for Britain’s Conservatives
Hartlepool is on track to lurch back to Labour in the election. Reform UK is in second spot
... But great news for Britain!
Hartlepool is on track to lurch back to Labour in the election. Reform UK is in second spot
Came across this via LabourList, so giving them a shout, too.
A survey of voting intentions in Hartlepool for The Economist by WeThink, a pollster, suggests how far the party has slumped. Our poll of 448 voters in the constituency puts Labour on 58%, Reform uk on 23% and the Tories on a remarkable 10% (see chart). Labour seems to have picked up voters both from the Brexit Party, Reform uk’s forerunner, and the Conservatives. If such an extreme Tory collapse seems unlikely, consider that in local elections in May it won a seat in only one of the 12 wards it contested in the town.
Not British, but interested in your opinions: isn't Labor almost as bad as the Tories these days? I watched the Sunak - Starmer debate, and they seemed to just be angrily agreeing with eachother on every point that mattered. There was a lot of "Yes, we should do that, but your track record shows you're not serious about [policy]!"
No.
Labour are promising the biggest expansion of workers' rights in decades and the most ambitious environmental policies in history, while the Conservatives are promising a whole load of impossible tax cuts. It's totally fine, of course, to believe Labour could and should go further - and I agree. But to say they're proposing almost the same things is, as a matter of plain fact, untrue.
Labour are promising the biggest expansion of workers’ rights in decades and the most ambitious environmental policies
You made me interested in what exactly they're promising, so I tracked down their manifesto.
The fines on river and ocean polluting sounds long overdue. Hardly revolutionary (every EU country does this) but it's definitely needed from some headlines I've read. There's also some stuff there about taxing oil and gas companies. That's honestly a good thing! Wouldn't exactly call that incredibly ambitious though.
EDIT: My eyes completely glossed over the "Clean Power by 2030" investment plan somehow. That sounds pretty great, and definitely counts as ambitious. My napkin math says 95 GW of electricity could power about 18 million homes, which according to this is more than half of UK homes. Pretty ambitious.
I couldn't find anything in there about workers' rights though. Maybe I missed something?
EDIT2: Why wasn't Starmer mentioning any of this in the debate, I wonder?
Labour in its current incarnation has a great deal of problems, but they absolutely are not as bad as the Conservatives. I don't think they're going to improve things much, but the current government is basically just flailing about trying to figure out which combination of asylum seekers, trans people, disabled people, and the EU they need to throw bricks at to stay in power. This party brought us Brexit, the Rwanda deportation plan, the "hostile environment", Liz Truss' entire premiership, and one of the worst covid death rates in the world. Labour's opposition to those things has left much to be desired, but fucking hell at least they weren't throwing their full weight behind each one
Fair enough. So if I understand you correctly, this isn't really about Labor having any positive policies, but more that they won't actively make things much worse.
Btw, on the Rwanda plan, didn't Starmer say in the debate he'd do that if it complied with international law? EDIT: I'm wrong, he said he'd do third country processing of migrants if it complied with international law.
No they're not. A lot of angry people like to say they're the same, but they are generally the people who have about as much political acumen as a potato.
Labour or not radical left wing and that seems to have annoyed a certain subsection of society, who seemed to think that everyone else should want them to be radically left wing (part of the problem being that there isn't actually a radically left-wing political party in the UK, George Galloway's party does not count on the basis he's a leech). Obviously I'd prefer radically left radically right but realistically I'm quite happy with them being left of center.
Although I will admit that sometimes they do say some stupid things.