UK General Election

[Arneb]

On Independence Day, of all dates... Seems like an act of courage of despair, and Rishi couldn't habe been dressed more appropriately for the occasion.



A lot of True Blue gubmint personnel must be mad at him now for cutting short their employment by half a year.

[Richard A]

It did remind me of lines from an old American union song (I was brought up on the Almanac Singers): "On the 4th of July, the politicians say, 'Vote for us and we'll raise your pay!' Get thee behind me, Satan. Travel on down the line."

Rarely have I approached an election with such mixed views. The fact that the Tories are widely tipped to lose is of course a good thing. But Starmer is only just starting to come up with anything like clear policies - and keeps as much as possible as vague as possible in order to avoid upsetting too many potential voters. One thing he says and means is that he'll scrap the Rwanda policy - we can be done with it. A few poor sods are probably going to get manhandled on to a plane or two in the next few weeks, just so Rishi can say he's done it, but at least most now won't. And he'll probably get rid of the worse elements of the new public order laws - although he might not, just to make the point that it's not just Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbot but the whole of their supporters that are history. But other than that, who knows. He says that he wants to develop a better relationship with the EU, but he's not prepared to say what that would look like. Or even what he wants it to look like. Other than that he will not seek to rejoin the European Single Market. That's right - whether or not the EU would be remotely interested in having us back (Terry Reintke and, now, Guy Verhofstadt make encouraging statements, but I have no idea how representative they are), Starmer is not up for even asking it. So that rules EFTA out. Despite the shitshow that more and more of us now recognise Brexit to be, Labour will respect the will of the British people. (Well, 3.5 years more recently than the Brexit referendum, the expressed will of the British people was to have BoJo as our Prime Minister.) There will be a nationalised energy company, Great Britain Energy, but what will that look like?

What will be interesting, though, will be to see the part that other Labour politicians play. But my guess is, we won't be hearing much from Zarah Sultana or her like. Come to that, we don't know if she'll even be a candidate - that will be decided by Sir Keir, not her local party.

But one piece of news: Nigel Farage isn't going to stand as an MP. Partly because he wants to run around the entire country campaigning for the Reform Party rather than having to stay in one place trying to win a seat there, but mainly, he admits, because his attention is really on the US and November. He recognises that the UK isn't really that important in the global scheme of things, but the US is - so he wants to make a real difference by helping to get Trump elected. He could yet return to London as the US Ambassador - who knows?