Iron Bru › Forums › Non Football › How embarrassing for Starmer › Reply To: How embarrassing for Starmer
Don’t agree. Particularly with Restore taking votes from Reform and in a few years possibly Tories making a slight comeback, Labour are anything but cooked.
Yeah, which is why I added the last sentence. However, the country has serious problems with growth a feeling things are deteriorating, with slow increases in living conditions and everything costing more. This, coupled with things like social media polarisation and scapegoating has created a divided and unhappy nation, where there is no popular decision or willing to confront or accept tough decisions.
We have a lot of money spent on the triple lock pension and winter fuel allowance, with an elderly population, and this harms growth. These policies are OK from the principle, but there is a lack of understanding of the consequences in the current environment. Starmer tried to address this, and admittedly set the barrier too low and was forced into an embarrassing u turn, but he at least saw a core problem people weren’t willing to confront. People are disheartened by the economic slowdown, but also don’t like the hard decisions that may be needed to find money to address this. Young people want to have better access to housing, but new housing gets vetoed due to bureaucracy over small things, people want benefits cut, but the largest benefits are pensions, WFA etc. Yet going after that was met with outrage. Brexit has hamstrung the nation and every PM since has soon fallen foul because the decisions needed to be made are unpopular with our economic environment. Starmer has suffered with all of this, alongside his poor charisma, baffling decisions and a hostile press. I don’t see Burnham, or many other MPs, willing to tackle this and the same pattern will repeat, as it has done for every PM since 2016. He already tried to cater for the WASPIs with their unreasonable demands, only to u turn when it was realised how unfeasible this is. None of that, and other arguments made by him, make me think this is a man who can confront the tough decisions and will likely go down a route that may sound good in vibe from the outset among his supporters, but will soon face the reality of the state of the country. As it did with Starmer, and his u turns, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak.