What are the biggest threats to an incoming Labour government? This is not an idle question. I sincerely hope that Labour is already asking the question given its lead in opinion polls.
There is no definite answer to this question because none of us know what the future might hold. As a consequence up to three votes are available in this poll. If you choose the 'Something else' option please do suggest what it is.
What are the biggest threats that an incoming Labour govermment might face?
- The failure of public services (24%, 320 Votes)
- Its own inaction (20%, 268 Votes)
- Climate change (15%, 194 Votes)
- A loss of confidence in government (10%, 129 Votes)
- The rise of the far-right (8%, 110 Votes)
- Recession (8%, 109 Votes)
- Bank of England interest rate policy (8%, 109 Votes)
- Wars (3%, 37 Votes)
- Something else (3%, 34 Votes)
- The demand that a country leave the UK (2%, 27 Votes)
Total Voters: 538
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Labour has created a problem for itself in that it it’s own fiscal rules mean that it will not be able to use government spending to address issues in public services.
While it might be able to spend on a target issue such as NHS waiting lists, that will be at the expense of spending elsewhere, likely Education.
Once the media starts to expose (and exaggerate) Labour failings, public confidence will be dented.
The alternative could be widescale use of privatisation, which will keep the media onside, but the consequences will be the further decline of public services.
When I saw the headline my kneejerk reaction to “What are the biggest threats to an incoming Labour government? ” was:
“The incoming Labour government”
And there it was, more or less, in the menu.
Deliberately
‘Over promising’…..The UK desperately needs to build lots of new homes, where people actually want to live. High housing costs are the main cause of in-work poverty. Labour has announced plans to build 1.5 million new ‘affordable’ homes over 5 years. But………very importantly, has not announced how they will fund this. As the cost could be £60 Bn a year for 5 years = £300 Bn
Something else=Rachel Reeves’s commitment to “fiscal discipline”
If KS diverts from his current path of mimicking Tory policy he will face the vitriol of the media, the establishment and the Tories in opposition, as Corbyn did. If he doesn’t, he will seriously disappoint those who voted for him.
The media needs a change in control and financing, and the country needs the change to the voting system to proportional representation. Without these two things we are lost as a country imho.
The media and the opposition will just have to go on being vitriolic. The past 4 years have clearly demonstrated that there’s nothing that can be done to remove a government with a sizeable majority. Most voters don’t much care so long as they aren’t adversely affected.
IF (enormous ‘IF’) Labour drop the neolib nonsense and start investing in public services and green policies they might even do OK.
(I’m sure hollow laughs are in order here, but I read somewhere recently that Rachel Reeves claims to be a Keynsian)
‘Biggest threats’ to:
– humanity: climate change.
– a Labour government’s …
… legitimacy: a) ignoring the wishes of Labour Party members – such as their expressed desire for proportional representation;
… effectiveness b) being dominated by the right wing press and financial heavy-weights.
I voted “Failure of public services”.
The damage done since 2010 has been immense and it is unclear to me that the decline can be arrested in time WHATEVER Labour does….. and it certainly can’t be stopped with the current Labour proposals.
More money is necessary but not sufficient. It is about staff and recruiting/training takes time (as well as money) and I doubt they can be brought on stream quickly enough to relieve/bolster the current workforce that is on its knees.
The only chance is to promise (and mean it) to do “whatever it takes” to deliver decent public services. This might improve morale sufficiently to allow time for policy changes to work through.
“Whatever it takes”? – well, first it means a decent pay settlement. What else? I leave that to the experts.
That was one of my choices
Labour appear to lack the knowledge of how the money system works. If they did know they appear to have no imagination of how to improve things for the population. They want to be seen as tory light.
and they have the approval of Ken Clarke
Sadly, incoming Labour governments have a long history of worrying about this question – but first by making the mistake of framing it as worrying (as they have too often done while in opposition) about the reactions to them of the media, the banks and the City. They usually compound the error by then answering the misconstrued question by acting fearfully/defensively and thus, in terms of the public weal, inadequately. Bad opposition habits are hard to break.
For Labour to address any of the needs of this country it needs to abandon it’s commitment to the economic ideology of government spending is always and everywhere a bad thing, an ideology that has demonstrably failed in its half century of experimentation, and rediscover the ideology that government is good, as was demonstrated after 1945 when the Welfare State was created at a time when the economy was on it’s knees and which produced recovery and an era in which we never had it so good.
Something else = Making BREXIT work.
Making BREXIT work is also tied to the UK entering or not entering a substantial recession in the next 12 months.
I personally believed that many misguided people voted for BREXIT simply for the promised increased funding to the NHS.
Landmines.
Who knows what is being done behind the scenes in order to create havoc for any administration coming in.
When Labour left last time the note said ‘no money left’, this time it should read ‘nothing left to sell’. The tories have sold off just about every public asset they could get their hands on, and probably more behind the scenes we don’t know about.
The problem is that there is still plenty to sell and Labour are promising to sell it. Private Health Care sponsors Wes Streeting and Sir Kier
My ‘something else’ vote is…The inability or refusal to embrace MMT.
🙂
Yes. Although any alternative the insanity of Friedmanomics would be an advance.
“The inability or refusal to embrace MMT.”
seen that during covid, and we have all seen the inflationary consequences. MMT is no more than a discredited footnote these days..
You clearly gave not a clue about what mmt is
Keir Starmer’s insincerity and lack of morality!
Internal dissent has to in there somewhere, doesn’t it? Surely KS’s Labour party is going to fall over backwards trying to please those it should be there to oppose – or at least rein in. I’m thinking of the Right, the media and all who will take every concession and come back for more. Will it be very long before internal frustration and external criticism yield the sort of headlines that will put them behind in the polls and we see panicky day to day reaction?
If KS were starting out with some clearly held principles, I’d be less pessimistic.
Richard would you consider being an economic advisor to the Labour Party? … perhaps you already are unofficially behind the scenes?
Yes if they asked
I’d prefer no publicity
But I really do not see it happening
Something else = All the public service workers with years of below inflation pay increases will strike, hoping that a Labour government will give them what they deserve. The immediate result will be paralysis.
I would add the total absence of a vision for a better, fairer, functional and more equal society and the ability to change the financial narrative.
And, as ever, the vested interests of big money.
To me, it’s something else.
Labour’s problem is it’s a lack of ambition, bordering on fatalism.
I didn’t vote. We are already well past the tipping point. Government is no longer about doing anything. It is solely a matter of orchestrating the news agenda, and managing the language of politics. Politics is no longer about achievements. It is rather a matter of declaration. Success is not accomplished, it is simply asserted. Brexit. Done. success declared. Austerity: “The government has declared it has ‘turned the page on austerity’ (Sajid Javid statement in Parliament, BBC News 4th October, 2019: or, “People need to know that the austerity is over and that their hard work has paid off”. Theresa May to Conservative Conference, claiming future increasing public service and welfare budgets, The Guardian, 4th October, 2018. Two declarations of the end of austerity in a year: two-for-the-price-of-none). The product of all this hot air isn’t change, reform, higher living standards, or wellbeing: it is the delivery of offstage noise. Distraction. Deception. Misdirection. Lots to it. Headlines. More headlines. Look there, not here. Guff.
The rest is window dressing.
One hundred percent this. It’s how you become a prominent politician too, get a cabal of journalists to go on about how great you are, suddenly you’re a ‘political heavyweight’. CF Jess Phillips for a perfect example of this.
Starmer repeatedly failing to show any leadership abilities on matters of life and death! Why if you have any sense of morality would you want to vote for such a poor specimen of humanity?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/nov/04/gaza-siege-conditions-unacceptable-says-lammy-as-labour-toughens-line-on-israel
Now Starmer has attracted the label “Genocide Starmer” for his lack of morality:-
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/04/thousands-demonstrate-in-trafalgar-square-for-gaza-ceasefire
This is clearly not a Labour Party any more! The party’s origins were based on the need to engage morally with the issues facing human beings.
I think the greatest problem is their slavish obedience to the city & the right wing media. They will not reform the tax system as a whole. Will not tax big business fairly or the Midas’s of this country/world. They think maintaining the high burden of tax on the working poor is the way to go and more cuts to spending. They have no vision.
Jenny Vinson said what I was going to say.
International bond markets response to Labour government borrowing
There won’t be one
Anyone else here involved with Green Party Economic policy committee?
I feel more disillusioned than I have ever felt in politics too but I believe not voting is worse than voting. Labour and the Tories will not care about a low turnout but they might take some notice of a large proportion of votes going to other parties. SNP or UKIP would not have had their influence if people had not voted.
I couldn’t agree more. As a Labour Party member I am thoroughly disillusioned with the current leader and the way he is micro managing the party to reflect himself and his “beliefs” (whatever they might be?). I feel I cannot vote for him or my prospective candidate when I, and many others, were prevented from having a say in who should represent us – completely excluded from the process. The trouble is, if I say I’ll vote for an alternative candidate such as an Independent or Green, I’m liable to be kicked out of the Party, and I want to stay, if only to get to vote for the next leader who might make a difference. I don’t hold out much hope.
Something else:
That the past 14yrs of Tory rule, Covid, & Brexit have completely emptied the public purse.
A Labour Government will really struggle to fund any meaningful improvements to education, health, & degraded public services.
Annie you are starting from the wrong position. Money is not a finite quantity. Both the UK government and its licenced banks have the power to create money from nothing whenever they want relative to avoiding over or indeed under bidding real resources causing inflationary or deflationary pressures in the economy. Controlling these pressures is dependent on several factors but key amongst these is that no part of the population is able to manipulate government and many other members of the population by unfairly benefitting through minimising taxation, maximising government subsidies and paying inadequate wages. Sadly that is the state of affairs in the UK with no political party showing any serious signs of recognising this reality.
Something else: failure to plan and prepare for major shock(s): another zoonotic disease pandemic and/or a food supply chain crisis (I suppose that falls into the war category, since that’s a likely cause; but it could also be due to a climate-change tipping point); or another major financial crisis due to excessive private debt and loss of confidence.
Something else “events, dear boy, events”. Something unforeseen or at least unplanned for as the likelihood is it/they would overlap with items already on the list. Labour’s inaction wouldn’t be a problem in that context as they would be bounced into action as the current mob were (in its own special way) by CoVID.
I would also add ‘The Tories desire to destroy as much of the UK as possible before they’re forced out of office.’ It seems to be the Tories main plan at the moment.