(C) OpenDemocracy This story was originally published by OpenDemocracy and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Join the conversation: Readers’ thoughts on a Labour government [1] [] Date: 2024-06 Welcome to openDemocracy’s weekly reader comments round-up. We receive so many carefully considered messages about our work, it seemed a shame to keep them to ourselves! You can send your thoughts to be included in next week’s round-up by replying directly to any of our emails or commenting on our articles. These comments have been edited for clarity, accuracy and length, and don’t necessarily reflect openDemocracy's editorial position. Re: Weekly poll – Would things be different under Labour? A lot will change at the fringes but when it comes to the big things that really matter, it almost certainly won't change. Get our free Daily Email Get one whole story, direct to your inbox every weekday. Sign up now Already we know that we have a government-in-waiting that has as little integrity as the current government. I have no idea why people think voting for a human rights barrister who [defended] Israel’s [right] to stop water and aid getting into Gaza, is a good idea. -Jane Peryer Yes, things will change. But will they change enough? The answer to that is a resounding no. The Labour leadership has already committed itself to more than one retrogressive policy on no taxation for the wealthy, discriminatory immigration rules and a flagrant disregard of super urgent environmental measures to help protect ourselves against the worst of climate change. Making all these promises (in effect to reassure Conservative voters that nothing will change) will tie Labour’s hands, making them powerless to change the things that really matter. Labour MPs hint that there could be U-turns after the election to keep the left activists hopeful enough to vote Labour. But this is not going to happen with a cautious fear-filled Labour leadership. We face a mediocre and naive Labour government, which tinkers with the deckchairs on the Titanic The only good thing that can be said about it will be that they are “not as bad as the Tories”. -NaturesRainbow Even if Labour doesn't do anything good, hopefully it will do fewer things that are stupid. For example, while it has rowed back on spending £28bn a year on environmental projects, Labour has still committed to not award new licences to explore oil and gas fields. It has also said it would create the publicly owned Great British Energy firm to grow renewable energy generating capacity. I suspect the NHS in general, and NHS dentistry in particular, will be safer in Labour hands because the unconscious biases of Labour politicians are less inclined to the support of private enterprise (and the exploitation which capitalism facilitates), and more inclined to providing universal services which are free at the point of use. -John Starmer’s Labour Party is just as broken and corrupt as the Conservative crime syndicate and the electorate will fall into the same trap they do every election and waste their vote by voting for the ‘lesser of two evils’. All they are doing is putting one of two rabidly corrupt parties into a broken and corrupt system of government that’s not fit for purpose. It’s the system that feeds these politicians who have no interest in representing their constituents. None of us will ‘win’ until we change the system of government to one based on democracy, not kleptocracy. -Ian Until the electoral system is reformed and Proportional Representation replaces First Past The Post, our ‘representatives’ in Parliament will continue to represent a minority of the electorate. Neither party address the most threatening issue of our time, the climate crisis, and neither seems to want to stop subsidising fossil fuel companies. Meanwhile the rich get richer and the poor poorer. What an unequal society Britain has become since Thatcher and even Blair! -Philosophers Anonymous Re: I escaped an authoritarian regime. I don’t feel safer in the UK That's because the UK is now a quasi-authoritarian political culture run by a number of powerful oligarchs. More pluralistic than Russia, sure, but how much more so? Not by that much, given how the media – including papers, magazines, TV news outlets and so on – is an unleashed capitalist-oligarchic force with much power in itself… Social media can be more diverse, but not sufficiently to make up the democratic deficit of the mainstream media. If one factors in the now Uni-Party, from the Tories to Reform but also largely including the Labour leadership, too, we have a much less pluralistic political culture than many think. You suffer, as we all now do, from a strongly hard-right political culture in the UK. Captive to hard-right interests (which I differentiate in my 2022 doctoral thesis from the far right, albeit only subtly and there can be overlap indeed, too, not just differentiation, as they build and mutually reinforce each other in complex ways). It is tragic that so many people are suffering under this system. So, to the author, I send my solidarity and best wishes. -Nik Read the original story here. Have more thoughts? 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