Labour appears to have another disastrous new slogan.
This one is ‘There is no right or left anymore. There is just right and wrong.'
It is being rolled out from the mouths of all the automatons Labour sends out to do the media rounds, all of whom seem to have accepted the program instruction to repeat it as often as possible in the hope that this madness will permeate our thinking.
But it is nonsense. If the claim was that there was no right or left now because politics is now reorientated so that it is about the difference between those who care, and those who do not, I could have lived with the claim.
But that is not what is being said. Instead what is actually being said is that there remains a right wing agenda in politics and there is also a wrong way of doing things, which is when the state does them. That is the actual message they are trying to impart.
It is very hard not to have a deep, almost visceral, loathing of those people in what still claims to be Labour who are creating these lines. They are destroying that Party from within. They are seeking to deny this country the option of having a left-wing government ever again. In the process, they are dedicated to the idea that profit made without responsibility (because what else do their lines about cutting red tape mean?) is all that matters.
I totally reject these values. I do not just do so for the ethical reasons, although I have always done that. I do so because forty or more years of evidence shows how profoundly harmful these attitudes are to the wellbeing of the vast majority of people in this country, and beyond.
There is class warfare going on in this country now, and it is Labour waging it on the people of the UK.
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Agreed. It’s very instructive that Wes Streeting is writing about obesity in the Daily Telegraph today (and Starmer and Cooper have more than once penned pieces for the Sun and Telegraph).
It’s certainly a right wing ‘overton window’, when leading Tories wouldn’t and actively refuse to pen pieces for the Guardian. Badenoch (true to form) in the past has openly quipped about not writing for the Guardian, and showing her contempt for the ‘lefty liberals’ newspaper.
Labour are not going to win over Telegraph and Mail readers. It needs to stop, and it’s utterly pathetic.
He’s writing sh*t about obesity, at that
Wes Streeting (bless his donated campaign funds) now apparently has an anti-obesity injection (a profitable one) to cure long term unemployment.
I immediately thought of “Soma” in Brave New World (Aldous Huxley 1932). It’s obviously time to dust it off & read it again, along with George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas & Epsilons, and a pill for every social ill.
Long live the Savages!
I have to get to this one
That drug is very dangerous – it destroys muscle to cut weight and the long term consequences will be dire
This is not fighting the obesity crisis at all. When it came to smoking action banning advertising, public health information, making public buildings ‘smoke free’, and increasing taxes, showed just how effective such measures can be. Shame that governments didn’t, and still haven’t, acknowledged that ‘vaping’ was deliberately designed by the tobaccco companies to hook children, and acted accordingly.
Tackling obesity, and all it’s related issues, via a pill, instead of dealing with the cause would be like saying: “Don’t worry about smoking, just take this anti-cancer drug”.
You get it
I’m not sure there is any particularly obvious evidence about semaglutide specifically reducing lean mass in a way which is dangerous. Logically, if you are obese, but still moderately active, your lean mass needs to be pretty substantial to support the excess weight. If you lose the fat, your lean mass doesn’t need to be as great so that will reduce also, especially if the number of calories you eat crashes, which is the main reason that the drugs ‘works’. The studies so far seem to indicate that the reduction in fat mass is greater than the reduction in lean mass, which is most likely still a positive.
That said, I wouldn’t fancy taking the stuff! We’ve no idea about the long-term impacts of the medication which impacts the rewards pathway in the brain. Who knows what will happen for people taking it longer-term? We’ll have to watch the wealthy types and actors/actresses who took to the stuff first of all to see what happens to them, I expect!
It goes without saying, of course, that Wes knows widely prescribing it to ‘help people get back to work’ will cost the NHS a heck of a lot of money and the pharmaceutical industry will be rubbing their hands with glee at this opportunity. The first of many, no doubt.
How about investing money in other general methods of improving health across the community, or investing in childcare, or even spending money helping out the many folk with Long Covid and investigating treatments for them?
This would seem to be a more sensible use of resources for me to ‘Get Britain Back to Work’, or whatever their slogan of the month might be.
My wife has looked at the evidence on this. She is MRCP and MRCGP amongst others. She thinks the evidence is compelling and that this drug is a nightmare in the making.
Is Streeting going to force people to take this dangerous drug? Wouldn’t put it past the snivelling creep.
Have they thought this one through (have they thought anything through?)
As far as I’m aware, people can’t be forced to take medication unless sectioned. When someone refuses their soma, will they be considered to be in breach of their ‘jobseeker’s agreement’? If so, they could well be sanctioned.
Perhaps brave new Labour have thought this one through.
This is the sort of stuff I’d expect from a Tory regime. I’m staggered to see these ideas coming from a Labour Government. Well, I wish I was staggered.
Like AC Bruce, my first thought, upon hearing this ‘news’ yesterday, was: “OMG, now they’re going to force benefit claimants to take a DRUG before being able to claim unemployment or other benefits?” I mean—people …how bad does this have to get?
The UK (England) needs a political party that represents real people. (Scotland has the SNP, Wales has Plaid Cymru, Northern Ireland goes its own way.) Can’t the disgruntled ‘real’ Labourites get together and form one for England? In time for the next election, to give real English people something to vote for besides ‘let’s get the Tories out?’
I think it’s time to stop hoping ‘this’ so-called Labour party is going to change. They won’t, unless they are forced to change.
I note that Streeting is about to appoint a certain Blairite Ex Health Minister as a Non Executive Director.. acronym NED to a couple of official government health committees.
Milburn’s payments from US health corporations make him an ideal NED…
Scots readers will certainly agree with Streeting that Milburn is a classic Ned.
This has Peter Mandelson’s mitts all over it if you ask me.
Labour can say what it likes, as the Democrats do in the U.S.
We don’t all ‘grow up’ and loose a childlike innocent sense of fairness and turn into conservatives as we get older.
There will remain a huge section of the population whose aspirations are not met for it seems a very long time.
Agreed
PSR, I think Mandelson’s mitts are over everything.
“There is no right or left anymore. There is just right and wrong.”
I don’t know who might have uttered these words, but it was almost certainly a weasel.
The central issue in politics remains the distorted balance of power between the owners and managers of capital (as the praetorian guard of technocratic banksters tends to align with ownership interests, on whom they depend for personal status) and the people, the workers, who still have relatively little or no power, with predominantly asymmetric relationships with both employers, and the monopoly suppliers of life’s material needs, and wants.
People tend to be of value economically only to supply labour inputs, and then equivalently, to feed consumer demand.
The lower the cost base of the former, and the higher the price base of the latter, the more profits and value can be extracted.
Beyond that limited perspective people have little or no extractable value.
This is why every human activity has to be transactional, and social structures reduced to that very low level.
How that is defined as left and right is immaterial, though it has not changed since the establishment of the class system.
What was it Warren Buffett said (One of if not the worlds richest man)
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Labour needs to stop telling us what we should think and instead concentrate on working in our interests, both short and long term.
This sort of piffle sounds narcissistic
It’s a poor Tony Blair tribute act.
Problem is, Blair got the fundamentals wrong. His governments did not bury the British Right, but emboldened it. The disastrous outcome of this has been the Tory governments 2010 to 2024. Make no mistake, Starmer is attempting the same thing and the outcome will be exactly the same, another long period of self serving rightwing governance, only this time we can already see in the appalling leadership candidates where the Tories are going. It is not good.
Thank you and well said, Ben M.
Speaking of getting the fundamentals wrong, the Bank of England warned Blair and Brown about 2003 – 4 on a range of issues that led to 2008 and Brexit. The team that produced the briefing was led by a deputy governor. The BOE “lifer” was threatened, for the second time during the Blair government, with dismissal. He was first threatened in 1999 when challenging the new regulatory architecture and Howard Davies. He and other former colleagues would like an enquiry into what led to 2008, the files opened as an exception to the thirty year rule, and their day in court.
Absolutely, Tony the Technocrat had no vision for society beyond a narrow view of being nice-ish to people, often it seemed for self validation, but definitely no boat rocking for the wealthy, and highly oriented to personal gain and status. Starmer and Reeves are also
vacuous self preeners.
Thus social democracy faded to grey, and democratic socialism became a mere patina.
He certainly was a Thatcher success story. Labour captured.
There is no Left worthy of the name in the UK, and precious little of a coherent left movement across Europe.
We are definitely post bureaucratic state socialism, but the highly decentralised green model has only begin to emerge in a few places, and articulated in a limited way.
Even the Scandi nations seem to have a void, and either right wing populism or corporatism as their TV dinner for the masses.
The Green Party has a pretty “socialist” agenda – if all disillusioned Labour voters moved there could make a significant impact. And we desperately need them with Starmer’s idiotic “growth growth growth” mantra – being pleased that new investment will expand airports etc. Starmer has taken over leading this country to a final disaster.
My concern about the Greens is the lack of a coherent economic programme that integrates with left thinking, despite the social ecology movement being well established. It often seems as fragmented as the traditional left sects.
Everyone knows green growth will not work, but degrowth has yet to be explained successfully as quality not quantity.
We’ve had almost 70 yrs of sustainability politics and steady state economies, and apart from Donella Meadows, very sadly lost to us, nobody can articulate it in simple terms.
I hear rumour that the economic policy is under review
I am not involved in any way
I’d love the Separatist parties to work out a pact so that each constituency knew which of the So called nationalist or Green parties to vote for in the forth coming elections, that would help defeat the right wing parties. Labour. Conservative and Unionist, and Reform etc.
The more I hear from the government the more I think that Liz Truss is back in power. Its very worrying and I think will end in tears, for some of us more than others. Are ‘Labour’ laying the ground for a reinvigorated Conservative party or Reform?
Thank you, Peter.
I think so.
Look at current polling for Conform… It’s forecast Reform could take 80 odd seats from Labour and even one from the Greens.
Blair admits he was useless at science and still is – despite his reckless ‘AI will solve everything’ – with no need to increase funds for NHS.
Streeting such a stupid attention seeker with his ‘reduce fat’ injections.
But as intended – it’s a useful a talking point away from what is really needed as John Williams says – what we did with smoking , stop advertising, ban ultra processed food, increase taxes on rubbish food etc etc.
But there is no money in ‘public health’ – which , as in the case of covid has been largely abandoned – its now ‘health security’ .
As PSR says – – very simple overt corruption – private health care, pharma, fossil fuel all funded labour.
How can this be deemed a democracy.
Thank you, Richard.
Just published from a retired UK civil servant, not Aurelien, at Naked Capitalism (with regard to western policy in the Middle East and its domestic impact, not off topic):
“It is perfectly easy to see a future where, due to environmental degradation/constraints, war or the reversal of globalisation, prices rise ever higher. Indeed, given prevailing environmental pressures, it is surprising that prices have not yet risen significantly.
All this would be bad enough but for the fact that the welfare systems of developed nations which provide indexation may be unable to cope, and those welfare systems which are characterised by defined contribution saving (which frequently offers no protection against inflation) may tumble into a vortex of increasing pensioner poverty. Many elderly people are more worried about running out of money than of developing a terminal illness, especially where they must self-insure (very expensively) for any social care needs.
Given that the UK has negligible natural resource endowments, is highly dependent upon cheap imports (and as been a net importer of energy since 2004), and the overwhelming majority of the working age population has inadequate defined contribution pension savings, the prospects of such a vortex are becoming all too real, which is why it is all the more curious that its governing class supports US policies in regions like West Asia which seem certain to guarantee higher prices (the UK state pension which is protected from CPI, for the time being, is extremely ungenerous, even for those who have a lifetime of saving). Or perhaps it is not so curious when it is recalled that the British governing class has defined benefit entitlements which are either partially or wholly protected from the effects of inflation.”
See: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/10/what-if-theres-no-landing-at-all-but-flight-at-higher-speed-and-altitude-than-normal-with-higher-and-rising-inflation.html.
‘There is no right or left anymore. There is just right and wrong.’
I agree.
There is a right & a wrong……….. way to e.g. provide clean water and treat sewage – B.Liar’s crew and LINO have picked the wrong way – committing a category error that private can do it & regulators can control them. Ditto energy, ditto transport, ditto NHS, ditto ditto….
McSweeny’s prints/Mandelsons prints are over this – nice little slogan to occupy the meeja – give em summat to chat about/pontificate over/spount the grooming bullshi that they are so good at.
Indeed – how can millions of new houses be built when we are already rationing water to business and the existing sewers aren’t adequate for the housing we have now? How will water be supplied to them and removed from them? How can we even be thinking about introducing Amazon’s thirsty data centres into the land when existing businesses are having to be rationed? If all the unemployed fat folk (how will they be defined, I wonder?) are going to be injected with Ozempic, who in the NHS does Streeting imagine has time enough on their hands to do it? There’s no coherent thinking at all, is there?
No surprise. Again.
It is the declaration of an overt fascist state by a fake ‘socialist’, just like Mussolini did a hundred years ago. The Tories and blairites before festered a covert fascist state.
I have long realised there is no left and right. There is only the Above/Below.
The slave owners and their slaves.
It has always been that way. From the Roman Empire onwards through reinventions as multiple imperialist states passing the baton one to the next.
The same forces and dynasties have shapeshifted through history creating ever more seductive neoreligions. Politics and economics included. All aimed at dividing people (the slaves) against each other so they fight between themselves and ignore the Owners.
Every now and then the Owners mow the grass and kill millions of slaves, young boys and men who are growing restless – seeing the inequities. They don’t need most of us. Hence the Golden Billion and Usless Eaters philosophies developed over the recent decades.
Fascism as Uber nationalism/ supremacy is the method.
The Great Knight Dope was nurtured to lead us to that overt fascist warmongering state.
Taking on the rest of the world and setting it on fire – as the Collective West is doing with glee through the brutal public mass murder of innocents as a means of desensitising the masses.
There is only one way to stop it and that is mass civil disobedience.
Peacefully first. As both Gandhi and Mandela did.
Having told us that Labour is no longer a party of protest, it will be interesting to see how they live down the possible reality that they will rival the Tories in that respect.
I was rather surprised that the last government was not plagued with riots in the way that previous have been during their demise. I do not count the Southport protests in the same category, because they were organized by the extreme right.
Interesting times.
A word about weight loss drugs. They all have a potentially very serious side effect – they can cause thyroid cancer. They slow down gastric emptying, which can cause severe constipation, stomach upsets, and gastrointestinal disorders. Further, the minute you stop taking them, the weight goes back on.
Eli Lilly has promised a £279 million “investment” in a clinical trial on unemployed people to see if losing weight gets them back to work. The trial will be in Manchester (in an SEZ, I believe, dangerously unregulated) and 3000 people will take part over five years.
Five years?? How will that speed up the economy?? Even if 50% went back to work in five years’ time, that’s only 1500 people. 300 a year.
Those that haven’t developed thyroid cancer, that is.
We are not far off from another General election after Starmer and his collective of incompetent nincompoops face a vote of no confidence after the upcoming budget from Chancellor Reeves one of the Worst since Brown or John Major the British people have seen through our newish Government given their dreadful pollratings which are Well deserved the Conservatives do not feel Me with optimism Jenrick and Badenoch are castoffs from the Johnson and Sunak era’s i joined the Social Democratic Party
My sources say that is as unlikely as a successful moon launch by Albania
And the SDP is now a wing of Farage’s domain and not remotely social democrat, in my opinion
There is no alternative
There is no such thing as society
There is no such thing as public money, there is only taxpayers’ money.
Let’s call them what they are; Thatcherites.
The only reason many ex Labour haven’t joined the Greens is their acceptance of the Israeli inspired antisemitism definition; they did this AFAIK in response to the instant antisemitism smears on ex-Labour uttered by Reeves amongst others, and no doubt on McSweeney’s orders.
I am not sure I follow your argument
The obsessional neoliberal ‘warfare’ is impacting the young disproportionately now and might destroy their futures entirely. Given the earlier post ‘How late is too late when it comes to climate change?’ a useful slogan could be; “It’s green or its wrong!”
A House of Lords Science Committee considering ‘research’ was broadcast yesterday. Its chair, a doctor, liberally peppered his contributions with the word ‘growth’ without much qualification.
Some growth is just about possible but growth which increases carbon dioxide emissions, despoils nature or squanders precious resources – spoils our children’s future.
In a Zoom talk to Climate Action Plymouth last week, Jon Fuller stated:
“People Are Dying Now due to climate breakdown. 400,000 killed p/a, incl nearly 1,000 children a day.
150,000,000 impacted by record breaking drought in Horn of Africa.
33 million impacted by record breaking flood in Pakistan. 6 months later people still unable to return.
Chad. 1.7 million impacted by flooding. Over 500 killed between July and September 2024
Sudan. Hundreds of thousands of people permanently displaced by flooding.
If the media Told The Truth, the scale of suffering would be front and centre of all discussion on climate breakdown, including when climate protesters are being interviewed.”
Jonathan N Fuller is founder of ‘Climate Genocide Act Now’. He lives in Southend and posts regularly on Facebook.
Yesterday he commented in articles published in the Times which reviewed Labour energy and climate policy, with an update on several issues connected with climate breakdown.
Jon states ‘the front page and the 2 most important pages – the collapse of the AMOC [Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation which is ‘a large system of ocean currents that carry warm water from the tropics northwards into the North Atlantic.(Wikipedia)]. The Times rightly mentions that the IPCC has said it believes the AMOC probably won’t collapse this century, but notes recent research that indicates collapse could happen around mid-century, with a low risk it could be imminent.
The article notes that this would have catastrophic impacts on UK agricultural production, but government has done nothing to identify the latest science on this and the national security implications for the UK. Without saying it directly – our government ministers are asleep at the wheel.
I will add something on the rest of this special supplement – it sets out all manner of policy issues associated with government efforts to decarbonise, but doesn’t mention the recent surge in greenhouse gas concentrations, the emerging climate feedbacks and accelerating global heating. Despite 16 detailed pages, The Times won’t Tell The Truth that we are out of time. We need emergency action to decarbonise and, without drastic efforts, the young will be thrown over a cliff.”
Jonathan N Fuller is the founder of ‘Climate Genocide Act Now’. He is leading a media ‘Tell The Truth’ campaign and posts regularly on Facebook.
Thanks