Starmer expected to resign on Monday and set out orderly exit
(observer.co.uk)
from stumu415@lemmy.zip to world@lemmy.world on 20 Jun 21:13
https://lemmy.zip/post/66512988
from stumu415@lemmy.zip to world@lemmy.world on 20 Jun 21:13
https://lemmy.zip/post/66512988
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I don’t closely follow British politics, but what’s up with all of their more recent Prime Ministers resigning before their term is up?
In short: Rearranging chairs on the Titanic.
That’s not really helpful or informative.
It’s symbolic more than anything. Just like rearranging chairs on a sinking ship isn’t going to save the ship.
Just a new face on the same policies so the party can pretend they changed. The current leader knows they have no chance to win a vote so it is better to save a little face and resign.
I’m familiar with the analogy. It means it’s a futile effort. But it didn’t explain anything about the UK in particular like the second sentence of this comment did.
The PM is the most prominent representative in the public eye. They are the figurehead of the government.
When the government is failing (by any definition) that figurehead is the one who ‘takes one for the team’. Occasionally another Minister might be the one to take the fall for a particularly egregious failure in their department.
The party in government nor the officials in the public service change. Just the figurehead… Do nothing actually changes, nothing is done to address the actual problems causing the government to ‘fail’.
This is more or less true in all Westminster style parliaments. In the US, for example, having the
kingpresident fire their Secretary of whatever department tends to be the M.O.No, you’re a towel.
The party has the ability to kick them out, which they’d rather do as far as possible from a general election so that the new leader can be in a position to carry out a successful campaign.
When they resign between elections, it’s usually a matter of leaving before they’re kicked out, to minimise the damage of a public power struggle
Can you explain it like I’m Canadian, why Starmer in particular is leaving? I know one of his appointees had some scandal I can’t remember, but why is Starmer in so much shit these days?
Like a Canadian, I’ll give it a shot.
So basically, theres a whole party of insane people who make the Alberta Separatists seem reasonable that have a preceved chance of becoming the next party in power.
Starmer is in deep because he isn’t popular with the opposition for obvious reasons, and he lost support among his base because he hasn’t really stood up to the pro Israel crowd.
The whole Peter Mandelson, UK ambassador to the US who also was a big friend of Epstein, being appointed without proper vetting, is just a Cherry on top.
Does this make enough sense ?
The Mandelson thing I knew, but is it really just his Isreal stance that killed a PM?
You’ve seen what they’ve been doing with Palestine Action.
It’s a bit more than just a “stance” when they’re arresting people for what should be free speech.
I do remember reading a bit about arrests for Pro-palestinian protestors. The line between protest and hate can be crossed and I’m not well enough informed to say which is which in any given event. I take you at your word that peaceful protest was stomped on.
I thought this is a function of police and courts isn’t it? What was the PM’s role in this?
How would you categorize holding a sign that says “I support Palestine Action”?
I get that, and I’ll take you at your word without knowing anything about who Palestinian Action is, or the UK context. But what did the PM do here?
Isn’t stepping on rights for police and courts to settle. Sorry, I don’t understand the connection.
It was a political decision to ban the phrase in the first place, and to make it a jailable offence
Thanks for helping me understand.
I feel like you’re getting a lot of partial answers, so I’ll try and fill in the gaps.
Palestine action are a protest group who believe that Palestinians are being mistreated by Israel, and that the UK shouldn’t support Israel in doing that. They e been around for a while, but obviously they’ve gotten a lot more active recently.
The key thing is that when they say “action”, that’s exactly what they mean. They aren’t about the usual things like protest marches, although I imagine they take part in those as well. Their approach is to do things like shut down roads leading to companies supplying the Israeli military or police by physically blocking the road.
The significant thing they did which brought them to the center of attention was to break into a military airfield, and throw paint into the engines of aircraft which they believed (and were likely correct to believe) were about to go to Israel to provide reconnaissance over Palestine to support military operations there. A lot of the news called that “vandalism”, but in reality a bucket of paint in the intake for a modern jet engine means the engine needs to be partially dismantled and thoroughly cleaned before it can run again. That costs a lot of time, and a huge amount of money, so really it amounts to sabotage.
That seriously angered the government, who used certain powers they were given by parliament years ago to declare that Palestine Action weren’t just criminal, they were terrorists. Those powers allow them to deny all sorts of fundamental legal rights, so much so that they can’t really be said to have been given fair trials. These are powers which were intended for people planting bombs in public places, and they’re alarmingly authoritarian even for that.
Among other things, declaring them terrorists has made it illegal for anyone to support them in any way. As a result, the overwhelming majority of people who have ever been arrested under the terrorism laws are now people who’s only crime was to say that Palestine Action did nothing wrong. Police were rounding up whole crowds of protestors, including harmless elderly people, and arresting them all for “supporting terrorists”
Thanks. Best answer by far.
They’re hammering people with terrorist level sentencing. It’s a fucking travesty and Starmer et al should be facing the same charges. It’s ludicrous.
Well, the UK government declared a pro Palestinian protest group a terrorist organization.
For more context, there’s a Last Week tonight on it
Thanks! I appreciate this.
Edit: can’t see it without a vpn, and then it asks to sign in. Alas I have no account.
No, the left has hated him long before this.
His problem is appearing as if he does nothing. He isnt popular with anyone at all, and as i say a lot of labour members have hated him since he was made leader.
Why?
In basic terms: too left for the right, too right for the left. He appears to have pulled the Labour party more centre-right and abandoned a lot of the socialist and soc-dem positions for more neoliberal policies (though people have varying opinions if it’s actually true.) That has made a lot of people unhappy, leading to a surge of Reform UK (the ultra-right party) and the Green Party (the left, environmental focused party). You can see the current trends in this Wikipedia article as well as the other parties in play.
The guy has 0 charisma. He doesn’t have an opinion on anything or is scared to voice it. He promised to change things for the better (that was his entire campaign, no actual plans on how to get it done) and so far he failed catastrophically. You have to understand that after 14 years of Tory leadership ANYTHING else was better and that’s the entire reason Labour won. The guy is an actual clown. He isn’t right wing enough for the right wingers and he’s not left wing enough for the left wingers. That combined with the fact he’s just killing time in office made him extremely unpopular. Every terror attack on minorities had zero reaction from his party outside of the usual “we condemn this behavior, this is not what the UK is about” and then proceed to do nothing.
There’s probably more to rant about
It’s crazy that all you have to do is be perceived to be more charismatic and competent than Liz Truss and Rishi fucking Sunak, and Starmer only just cleared that low, low bar. This might be hell.
He kicked all the remaining left wing out of the Labour Party at a time when left-wing policies were very popular with the members. He has overseen some pretty regressive social policy, particularly in catering to transphobes. He’s a liar and has no charisma. He put Peter Mandelson back in a powerful position though he was known to be a bad guy and an Epstein associate. He has taken Labour to the right, abandoning its base while offering nothing but more of the vaguely Thatchery stuff the UK has suffered from for decades. He committed the government to more austerity than even the Tories had dared to implement, at a time when poverty is a massive problem in the UK. He handed chunks of the NHS to Palantir. Conservatives don’t like him and left-wingers don’t like him and no one trusts him. He’s been so uninspiring that the electorate is sleepwalking towards fascism. Plus there’s the Israel thing and the crackdown on anyone who expresses sympathy with Palestinians. It’d be quicker to list what he has done right.
Palantir’s contract with the NHS started under the Tories. Not booting Palantir out is on Labour.
Great answer. Thanks.
Ding dong the genocidal far-right shit is leav-
Oh, Labour still hasn’t learned any lessons then. I remember when Labour had different values to UKIP. It really wasn’t that long ago.
Labour doing Labour things
‘We have a new guy now! Hooray!’
‘Does the new guy also suck?’
‘YES!’
Aww boo. I was hoping he would barricade himself in
I really wish that UK parlimentarians would try to spend at least as much time solving actual problems that the UK is facing instead of the constant, can we get rid of PM/party leader and sub in a new one, that seems to be their entire focus of the last decade.
I think I hve taking shits that stank longer than UK PMs of late