Kate BarrettIf you live in britain, vote for labour
Florian@thewaether I'm still feeling a bit thrown under the bus by the "free movement will end" turn but other than that the manifesto is good
@theoutrider I thought they said the opposite? That they weren't going to focus on immigrtion as an issue at all. I don't know if I can dig up the quote, though
@thewaether yeah, that was the draft manifesto. They backpedalled on that, reportedly Starmer pushed for it to be changed
@theoutrider ugh. I swear, left wing partied keep pandering to the right thinking it will get them votes, and it always leaves their actual base behind. and then they don't vote for them, and it reinforces itself.
Mind, despite labour's failings, this is the most left platform I've seen in this country my whole life, so I'm still voting for them. It's either 1 bad thing or all the bad things
@thewaether I'm not allowed to vote anyway so it's a moot point but I agree. The manifesto also specifies that they would guarantee a "truly meaningful vote on the final deal" which sounds like a get-out clause.
@thewaether If I were to vote I'd be quite torn - Cambridge's former LD MP is a legitimately good guy, and the current Labour one has been woefully ineffective on basically anything.
I became a Labour member after Corbyn's first election but as an EU citizen with a UK partner any variant of Brexit would be potential trouble. At the same time I don't think the LDs could get strong enough to actually reverse anything, while Labour still seem to be trying to keep all options open...
@theoutrider yeah. I've always been against brexit for exactly those reasons (free travel made things so much easier) I'd say if your labour MP is inneffective, you've gotta vote for em anyway, cause the choice is,
Labour: do good innefficiently
Tories: do evil very efficiently
Labour: do good innefficiently
Tories: do evil very efficiently
@thewaether I'm more than a little grouchy about both Labour and the LDs going "lol coalition? fuck no" because for shit's sake, you're literally saying you'd rather hand power to the Tories than have to share it with anyone else
@thewaether like now more than ever anyone left of what the Tories have become has to work together to obstruct them in any way possible
@theoutrider Also yeah, the tories are UKIP, they absorbed all their policies. I'm disturbed that my mum for example, hates ukip, but is dead set on voting for the tories this election. I keep saying, "you know they ARE ukip now, right?" and it just bounces off
@thewaether so here's a little story
in Germany, coalition or "largest minority" governments are the norm
in 2005, the New Labour equivalent government of Germany called an early general election, saying (correctly) the endless obstructionism of the conservatives made it unable to act
a few months prior, a new party formed of people grumpy w/the New Labourisation of the social democrats, people from the socialist party that grew out of the E.German regime, and various other left-wingers
@thewaether the general election ended with both the New Labour equiv and the conservatives losing about 10% of the vote each, which distributed among the new party, Greens, libertarian party and very minor others
Labour + The Left together would have had a comfortable but not absolute majority
instead they had a big hissy fit, ruled out any coalition, and instead Germany got saddled with Lab+Con coalition holding near 70% of parliament
@theoutrider So you're saying that's similar to what we'll have here? Sounds possible.
@thewaether no, I'm just venting about leftist parties that should be perfectly capable of allying rather handing power to the right than working together which is what Lab/LDs have been posturing about here
@theoutrider I'd like to hope they can set aside their differences, cause otherwise we're in a con + ukip coalition
@thewaether yikes. I'd rather not think about what that would mean.
Labour of course have expelled people who were forming cross-party anti-Tory pacts at a local level and I can't find enough swear words to express my thoughts there
@thewaether I mean, letter of the law and all but for shit's sake you asshats