Labour to win next UK general election?

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He wasn't that unpopular at his peak. Certainly popular enough to spur the media into nobbling him. The story I got from the press was that he was a Jew-hater and terrorist who would also bankrupt the country with unworkable economic policies designed to redistribute. I've yet to see anything sober and objective that shows he was anything like that terrible, but I didn't take that much interest at the time, so to me he still represents the only chance we had for decades of getting a bit of socialism. All water under the bridge now of course, and we're back to the usual choice, i.e. between centre-right and centre, and as always, whoever we get probably won't be sincere.

I think you're right that most voters here didn't see foreign policy as much of an issue compared to economic issues at home, though immigration policy was likely important to them, and perceived to have a significant bearing on the quality of life in the UK.

I vaguely recall they were going to change the way council tax works to basically charge people more who had larger gardens. Bigger the garden the more people pay. We'd just bought a bungalow on half an acre plot (huge garden) as our dream retirement bungalow. He was planning on hurting us financially for wanting to grow our own veg.

I think the Lib-Dems were also planning something similar, so they ruled themselves out too.

They had a hatred of anyone who wasn't on minimum wage or the dole. All it took to end up in their net is having a slightly bigger house than your neighbor.

Corbyn policy was for the entire country to have the same income regardless and to achieve it, they would target anyone investing in business, anyone owning a business and anyone who has a large amount of property. Obviously targeting all investment income will mean a lot less investment in the UK. I'm glad the guy is gone.

Still don't trust labour though.

It's an interesting question, how to go about reducing the rich-poor divide, whether or not we should, and if so then by how much? Who loses / gains, and by how much? Some time ago I got a few numbers and did a few sums as a thought experiment:
Wealth ownership as it stands:
Top 10%:
2.78m households hold a total of £3.616trillion, £1.3m each
Middle 40%:
11.12m households hold a total of £4.036trillion, £363,000 each
Bottom 50%
13.9m households hold a total of £756.8billion, £54,450 each
Effect of complete egalitarian redistribution (just to see what it would look like):
Levelling that completely would give every household £302,500
top 10% would lose 76.7% each
middle 40%: would lose 16.7% each
bottom 50%: would gain 455.5% each
I'd weep no tears for the top 10%. For the middle ones it's not a huge loss, and the formula could be tweaked so that the top end of the middle sector paid a little more while its lower end gained a little. So over 50% of households would gain.

But the other big problem is what would happen if anybody tried to do that in the real world. Stiff opposition from the wealthy and powerful of course, and we've got this economic system that depends on "the markets" which showed how they could wreak havoc when Truss was about to try exercising radical measures, though they did involve borrowing rather than just confiscating from the wealthy. It seems that capitalism has reached a point where it'll sink the boat if anybody starts trying to share the rations equally. As for democracy, morality and equality, they're not exactly the same thing, e.g. it's clearly a matter of opinion and preference how much equality is a good thing.

^ The question is, how such redistribution would affect the ways various people and groups contribute to overall wealth.
Because wealth is not something given once forever, goods and services need to be provided.
Communist experiments around the world suggest, the wealth of the privileged melts quickly and the state is much less efficient provider of most goods and services than the market - there are possible exceptions but they need to be carefully identified and exceptionally well handled.

Capitalism has its diseases where people make wealth on idly pumping money without providing anything useful - but market mechanisms can't be flat out abolished without enormous harm. Cutting the tumor without harming the healthy body is not easy.

Yes. I would imagine a lot of the previously-impoverished menial workers would suddenly fail to turn up for work, for one thing. They'd have no immediate need for wages. It's probably a sad truth that slavery is good for the economy. The wealthy people who run factories etc. would probably quit too, though it's debatable how important and irreplaceable they are.

I've heard many times that the state tends to run things very inefficiently, but what I've never found out is why that's the case. The profit motive of the market is very likely a strong driver for business owners, but what stops the government from simply applying their own sticks and carrots to the situation?


I like the analogy to a tumour. Until the disease is noticeably worse than the remedy, nobody in their right mind will dare to operate. And the disease and the remedy are extremely complicated things to evaluate. I doubt that anybody fully understands them. I once decided to look at an antiviral drug a doctor was recommending, as the treatment didn't look too safe and might be more dangerous than the infection. In the end I got so bogged down with the data that I began to think the best option would be to toss a coin. And I suspect that economics is less of a science than health is.

Someone has to do the management jobs or things fall apart pretty quickly.
That's the observed reality that we can try to explain.

My model: Government, because of its fundamentally privileged position, is much more prone to curruption than entities operating under it. Also, goverment can't just go bankrupt and leave the niche for someone else, so there is no market mechanism to curb bad management. Taking it together, if you need efficiency, you need other means for controlling corruption and ensuring efficient management. In dictatorships, it often means brutality. In democracies, it's usually extensive bureaucracy and several levels of inspection systems. The former is undesired. The latter is costly.

That's how I understand why, in the mixed economy where I live, a family member who is a bussiness consultant notices the following rule:
Private enterprises care if they make profit.
State-run enterprises care if all the paperwork is correct.

Certainly, economics is complex and full of simple solutions that don't work.

A lot of people are against it because the bottom 50% are benefiting a grossly disproportional amount while many middle earners who are not on amazing money, much of which could be from considerable overtime will still be hammered. I would have been hammered by corbyn's labour as a landlord who works a lot of overtime in work.

I never cheated the "system" but simply out worked and out saved my peers but I was still targeted if they ever got into power.

The labour of today seems more reasonable but a tiger never changes its stripes. Many of the labour MP's who loved Corbyn's Robin Hood policies are still labour MP's now and pose a threat.

Indeed, there has to be a co-ordinator. Though I never understood why it has to be a really tough role that must command high rewards.


Interesting. A lot of things were under state control in the UK when I was young - e.g. television and radio, healthcare, energy, public transport, water - and from the viewpoint of an end user I didn't notice any overall improvement when they were privatised. Those industries were very straight-laced and "boring," and at the time I disliked that, but in hindsight I'd love to go back to it. These days it's almost impossible to pay an electricity bill without being funneled through an experience of marketing hype and silly bells and whistles. People always used to complain that the prices were too high, so no change there. But I've no idea what the balance sheets of these state-owned industries were like. I don't think there's ever been a time when the overall state of the UK's finances were said to be good, either back then or now.

There are situations when some industries are better-off run by the state - e.g. see the difference of costs and accessibility of healthcare USA vs Canada. Not always being profit-oriented is good.
Sometimes it's worth to pay the additional cost of anti-corruption measures and multi-level inspection system, to prevent other problems. But it's rather about some critically important exceptions, not the whole economy.

Where I live, things like healthcare, media and education are areas of competition and cooperation between state-run services and private enterprises. The state-run part is, at least in theory, accessible to everyone, without payment. The private part is much more focused on quality and way quicker in reacting to changing needs of various communities.
In media, the state-run part got badly corrupted recently, becoming a political tool of the ruling party :/ I'm glad there is diversity and media freedom here, otherwise we'd be looking like Hungary right now.

Very few would sign up to compulsory redistribution if it meant a significant cut in their own money, however wealthy they were. Not that I'm saying your particular case is invalid. It's hard to think of any economic change a national government could make that would be fair to every individual by all measures of right and wrong.

It's hard to know what the moral situation is for those at the bottom of the pile. There's this idea that the poor have brought poverty on themselves by their own laziness, that they're already getting too much in handouts and don't deserve to be levelled up to the national average. Then there's a view at the other extreme, that the system is to blame for all poverty and that nothing above the national average was fairly obtained. Personally I lean towards that, though not 100%. My calculation about how wealth might be equalised wasn't meant as something that could or should be done (though I see some attraction in it), it's just a thought experiment to give some idea what the gains and losses would look like, in order to roughly measure how much real hardship would be caused if complete equalisation were done. Clearly one effect would be the shock of a completely different system when everybody is so used to the current one.

As for Corbyn, I doubt he would ever have been able to do half the things he was promising. The best he could have hoped for would have been a coalition with the liberals, who would have watered his wish list down a great deal, and we'd have ended up with a little bit more redistribution. I remember when Greece got into deep economic trouble, so they voted the socialists in on a promise to default on their debt and to refuse to cut the standard of living for the masses. As soon as they got into power they had a meeting with the IMF, came back and tore up their election pledges. I don't think the wealthy were ever in any great danger from Corbyn.

Yes the UK's healthcare still knocks the USA system into a cocked hat too, even though the NHS is gradually being privatised by stealth and the "free at point of use" ideal is being eroded little by little. Looking back it's hard to believe how much the NHS and welfare state did for us. Free prescriptions, free orange juice and cod liver oil for children, free glasses, free dental care, even free milk and dinners at school. Most of that is history. But it still has advantages over the US private system. I don't know how ordinary Americans stand the anxiety from the threat of bankruptcy when their health starts to fail in their old age. And talking of bureaucracy, the US healthcare system has a ton of that. It's rare a week goes by without my wife getting some paperwork in the mail from heath insurance companies, and the first hurdle of every medical appointment is filling in forms to prove the insurance will cover the work. In the UK I just go to the doctor and get seen, though since the pandemic the waiting times for appointments are said to be quite bad.

I guess an interesting question is, what is it about a particular industry that makes it suitable for public ownership? And does the country make a difference?

Yes, that's an interesting question. I don't think there would be a simple answer valid in every situation.

I'd approach it from the other end - why industries could benefit from being private and how?
The main argument is "the invisible hand of the market", which means the self-regulatory mechanisms of market economy.
To properly work, they need fair competition between many businesses.
That's not always true in capitalistic world. Most of the "innovations" of e.g. Amazon were all about innovative ways to bypass anti-monopoly laws. And it could be seen when during covid, people suddenly massively switched to remote shopping. In US, I heard about waiting for weeks and weeks for deliveries. In Poland, where remote shopping market is full of different small and medium-sized businesses and delivery market is independent from it and also diversified - the market adapted instantly to the whole new situation.

So, better instead of worshipping the invisible hand of the market, we should care for it to stay healthy.

Now, what industries are better to be state-owned? I think those that are naturally hard or very hard to diversify, yet crucial for the society to function. Infrastructure comes first to mind, various branches of it.
Then, those we believe should be provided for free or for very low prices because the benefit of their availability overweights the cost of maintaining them. Education. Public health. Public security. Mass transport. Maybe even housing?
They may or may not compete with private enterprises in the same areas.

The exact optimal solutions, I think, depend on a lot of factors and may change not only from country to country but also over time, with technological progress and other changes.

Sturgeon going has to be good news for Labour. She was a very effective and popular politician.

This morning’s shock news that Nicola Sturgeon is stepping down as the Scottish first minister and leader of the SNP inevitably reduces what chances there were of an early second independence referendum.

The move also makes it a bit easier for Scottish labour in a UK general election. It will be recalled how Scottish politics was totally changed by the initial independence referendum in September 2014. At the 2010 General Election LAB managed to secure 41 of Scotland’s 59 seats. At the following General Election this was reduced to a single Scottish Labour MP.

The analysis of many over the years has been that without Scotland Labour would struggle to secure a majority at Westminster.

My guess is that it will now be a bit easier for Labour to win back some of the seats that were lost in 2015. This could help pushing Starmer’s party over the 326 Westminster MP threshold required for an overall majority.

https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index ... most-zero/

This is actually really good policy, although you have slightly misunderstood.

The policy is that instead of taxing property value (which is land value plus building value), you only tax land value. Council tax and business rates would be scrapped and replaced with a new system.

In your case, it is likely that the land isn’t actually particularly valuable - you probably live in a remote area, which is why you were able to afford so much land. But in cities, land is much more expensive, so it is important we make good use of it.

Taxing land rather than property means that people aren’t punished for building an extension. It also encourages property developers to actually build, rather than owning land and keeping it empty in the expectation it will be worth more in the future.

Our current system of property tax punishes people who build new homes, or improve existing ones, and rewards people who bought houses a long time ago in desirable areas.

There are lots of reasons to support taxing land value, and the Conservative spin of it being a “garden tax” is very misleading. Your council tax is already a garden tax!

On the “what industries should be publicly owned?” question, I think the key question is “given that we have limited resources, is government ownership of this industry really a priority?”

The smaller questions that flow from it are things such as:

- if the government does nothing, what will the consequences be?
- what are the benefits from government intervention, and how do they compare to other interventions?
- is it possible to make a profit in this sector?

The ultimate example is street lighting. It is not possible to charge someone for using the street lights, and a very large number of people can “use” one street light at any time. So if you want street lights to exist, they have to be funded by a not-for-profit body, and the government is probably the best one.

Should street lights exist? Well, they’re relatively cheap, they reduce accidents at night, and they make people feel safe, increasing the amount of night time walking. They don’t seem to stop property crimes like burglary and carjacking, but possibly help with violent personal crime. Whether you think streetlights are a good idea is ultimately a decision for the individual, but you’re going to struggle to find something that achieves the same effects for lower cost.

What about a government lollipop factory? Well, lollipops are already being made. While some people enjoy them, they’re not nutritious - basically empty calories. Sure, in an ideal world we’d have unlimited free lollipops, but right now, most people will agree that government should focus on using scarce resources to do other things.

Public ownership of energy and water is obviously somewhere in-between those two options. Unlike street lights, private energy and water that you pay for does work, although water companies in this country can’t actually cut you off. Government ownership might mean you can cut consumer costs… but the government already has that power through mechanisms like the energy price guarantee (very expensive, but no more so than government subsidising something it owned would be). It’s not really clear to me why Corbyn wanted public ownership of utilities beyond “public ownership is good in itself”. What was he trying to achieve through public ownership? Was it really a better use of our money than a stronger social care system, better education, or green infrastructure?