In Germany at least since the 1990s more convinced Socialists defected to the Linke while the confident left-liberals and environmentally conscious who still believe they are building a better future joined the Greens.
That leaves a kind of visionless centrist mired in self-doubt stuck in the SPD
Do you mean die Linke (former PDS)? Yes, their comeback is a real eye-opener. Wagenknecht and her followers probably thought they had timed everything right to kill their own party. But it looks like they miscalculated.
Starmer really cares about institutional memory, and in the context of the Labour party that means a lot of your top level staff are going to come from the New Labour era. But much of the new blood at the party's very top is part of that 'the problem with where we are is the Third Way':
Not that i have completely given up and just sort am hitting the hard copiums but how healthy is starmer really? Could he, for instance, have a mysterious but not painful or deadly hair related ailment that would force him to let rayner have the role?
Forget "globe", think "sphere".
Globalism such as we knew it (not that it ever really was worldwide) is rapidly on the way out. In diplomacy East-West is also changing, in this case into 4 or 5 "Spheres of Influence". For trade each will develop its own internal common market & external tariff wall.
Reflecting on this piece, I realised that I am much more sympathetic to New Labour than Starmer is, and at the same time I'm not sure I'd want to be relying so heavily New Labour veterans to staff my operations?
If I were in Starmer's position, I'd be asking myself 'how can I *own* my governing project if I'm surrounding myself with people who've done it all before for someone else?'
But I guess Starmer's problem is that he hasn't had a long political career in which to build up a network of trusted operators who've risen through the ranks alongside him. He defaults to institutional memory because he's a fish out of water.
Not sure, as a member of the public, I'm 'hungry for change and disruption'. I'd just like basic necessities to work (eg NHS, schools, roads) and to have a sense that people, not corporations are the first priority. The rest, whatever it is, can wait.
It could be that I've not thought about it enough or thought about it too much, but I am still not entirely clear on who the Starmer Project is for. As in both whose interests they are consistently advancing and which votes they are depending on getting or keeping
I'm going to use the "why are you doing this now?" meme so much in the next four and a half years that it will reach loss.jpg levels of meaning degradation
I do think the key line in there is "in the initial phase of government, there were far too few political operators, that has been corrected by Morgan in all kinds of ways." Which is not what I'd consider the problem to be.
Thatcher, Blair, even Cameron, whether you agreed with their agenda or not you could look at what they were doing and say whose interests it was advancing and who they were deciding they didn't need. I'm genuinely not sure what "the labour vote" is right now.
and that seemed to be what Starmer was going for in his first speech outside No 10, 'the state can and should be a force for good but shouldn't run our lives'
and some of the departures from that are just breath-taking in their lack of wisdom. Like I'm not conflating Westminster and Hollyrood but how on earth do you look at Musk and DOGE and go "that will be both good and popular"?
indeed, or Nandy's decision to slag off 'wokism in the arts' (which has killed off the good responses I was seeing of what she was actually announcing)
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That leaves a kind of visionless centrist mired in self-doubt stuck in the SPD
Yet here we are.
The starting point should be around agreeing the objectives for four years time.
Then build the team to deliver those objectives.
Globalism such as we knew it (not that it ever really was worldwide) is rapidly on the way out. In diplomacy East-West is also changing, in this case into 4 or 5 "Spheres of Influence". For trade each will develop its own internal common market & external tariff wall.
Have I got this right?
Labour propose bringing Stability to the UK by Reforming all our our institutions through the use of Disruption