What short memories people have. The incoming Labour government proposed the most radical wealth redistribution measures this century to address poverty and the whole country had a shit fit.
Meanwhile they were also discovering that the Tory governments had lied about borrowing and spending.
…so most of their first year in government was taken up with trying to work out where the Tories had actually been spending our money and re-writing their plans on how to actually improve things.
Since then they have done a lot of things that in theory should alleviate poverty (free school meals, raised taxes on higher earners, increased NHS pay, raised minimum wage, massive infrastructure investment, new investment and laws to make adoption of renewable energy easier, renters reform, removal of inheritance tax breaks for wealthy landowners, that’s just off the top of my head) but will take time to actually show a change. Statistics are released yearly about 6 months in arrears so we won’t know whether this worked until late 2027.
Then we have been cut-off from one of our major energy supplies by an out of control superpower, not something you can really blame our government for but when people see prices going up they want someone to blame.
Edit to add that clamping down on parasitic organisations like Uber, Amazon, Starbucks needs to be a priority and is an easy and obvious win and it is annoying they haven’t.
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Getting rid of FPTP would be a help. Governments are getting elected on ever smaller shares of the actual vote. Labour only got 34% of the vote at the election. Governing was always going to be hard, and the huge gap between the parliamentary majority and the reality of the public is not helping.
They got 34% of a 60% turnout, or about 20% of the possible vote.
Labour only got 34% of the vote at the election
Labour only got 420+ seats in parliment, leading to a surplus from majority required of 80+.
Due to the elections timing law, they had five fucking years with this majority to unfuck the country, two of which are fucking gone.
You’d think they’d be making progress by now.
I don’t see how? Labour got 34% of the vote, but has a massive parliamentary majority due to FPTP. That majority should translate into being able to do whatever the fuck they want for 5 years.
In all likelihood, a switch to a more proportional system, though very positive in the long run, would have a serious teething problem in a country like the UK where we’re not used to it: political parties would actually have to work together to get anything done. If we still have a prime minister, they would need to retain the confidence not just of their party’s MPs, but also of the other MPs in the (likely) coalition. In a country where politicians are used to just being able to have their way when in power, that seems likely to cause problems in the form of coalitions collapsing every five minutes.
This can be a problem in other countries with PR. It’s not a necessary feature of PR by any means (and FPTP is so awful that it’s also not a reasonable criticism of PR) but I think it’s more likely to happen in a young PR system than an established one.
Fixing literally anything could tbh.
But they’re always breaking more than they’re fixing.
Shocking that addressing the problems of the people might help a PM stay in power!
Problem is it’s too little too late.
Title feels like an onion headline
Doing what their votes want instead of what reform voters want is the only thing they need to do.
If I could upvote this twice, I would
Don’t get crazy here, this itty bitty bit of instability could never justify taking rich people’s hard earned money! /s
Hmm while saving the poor is a great idea, I’m not so fond on saving the jobs of politicians.
How exactly is someone meant to solve poverty in 20 months?
There is no silver bullet, and redistribution of wealth takes a long time, even if you go full armed revolution.
Progress is being made, albeit slowly, wages are growing faster than inflation, school kids are getting free meals, 3rd+ kids aren’t being punished for simply existing.
There is a lot more to do, but suggesting nothing has been done is pure fiction.
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Probably true.
Note that your chart is from the IRS for the USA, not the UK.
But Labour also got to power with a promise not to touch most taxes because they were terrified that promising to do anything big would give the Tories what they needed to dupe the electorate once more. So they adopted a meek strategy to get into power. Then people got mad that they weren’t radical once in power.
And while I support higher top rates of tax, I think you need to be very careful in what you promise from them: there ways to avoid paying taxes that are very hard to fix, especially in a world where such rates are unusual, and the tax base for these high marginal rates becomes very small very quickly: HMRC statistics say there are 26,000 taxpayers earning over £1M. If we guess they earn on average £2M each, your 90% marginal tax nets about £23bn a year. That’s a big chunk of change, and would absolutely make a difference (assuming you can collect it all) but… it’s also less than 2% of the UK budget. It’s not going to “fix poverty” in the two years which Labour is being criticised for not having achieved it in.
I would love for higher income and capital gains tax brackets to be electorally viable.
The problem is that without the explicit threat of the USSR, and the implicit threat to the rich that their options are high taxes or death, you’re not going to get that policy enacted anytime soon.
Fuck, just look at the sheer level of bad faith argument made against changes to equalise personal inheritance tax for agricultural business assets (aka farm land) to close a loophole abused by Bezos et al.
As I said, there is not easy path or singular option.
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The problem is those are minor steps of appeasement and they are reactionary to unease.
It should not have gotten that far. And unfortunately voting and democracy has been hijacked by the rich who have no intent of playing fair.
The politicians did not care on the way down and can’t be trusted. We voted and played fair. The average man contributed, worked hard and went along with the rules and still get taken advantage of.
It’s been shown political parties cannot act In the interests of the commons. They can be bought and manipulated.
They had the chance to not have poors. They abused it. Short term we can keep cycling through parties with further appeasement but the system is broke. We all know. And we all know they won’t give it up and redo the system until they fear the mass
There are more of us. They can hide behind tech and policy but there are more of us and we are not powerless.
- Use your voice to organise in your communities.
Use your wallet to punish those who continually take and disrespect from you.
Use your force to demand fair treatment
.Remember you dont need to use violence…however the message that anti-violence is not working can be powerful tool.
