Originally Posted by
jackal2
And yet both major parties are seeking to masquerade as right-wing-friendly as they try to retain or win over the (understandably disappointed) voters who put the Conservatives in office last time.
This election feels like a re-run of 1997 in many ways. For John Major read Rishi Sunak, an equally uninspiring and ideologically bereft politician with no concept of how to connect with the common man/woman. And for Labour there's Sir Keir Starmer, seeking to play exactly the same "we're not socialists, in fact we're actually quite conservative" game as Tony Blair did in 1997, but without any of the charisma Blair brought to the table.
To be fair to Keir Starmer it's the right game to play at this moment, even if it is only five years since he was advocating Jeremy Corbyn for Prime Minister (and he wasn't sincere about that either!).
Assuming Starmer wins a majority, it's arguable that no Prime Minister in history will have come into office with less genuine public enthusiasm behind them. It really would be a case of the public half-heartedly changing the deckchairs on the Titanic - but Starmer won't care how or why he wins. From his viewpoint, the moment he walks into No.10 Downing Street he'll have achieved the only thing that ever mattered to him as the very epitome of the modern, vacuous career politician. Just like Rishi, he'll be putty in the hands of the Civil Service and the media thereafter, and 'business as usual' will carry on for the real underlying power brokers and vested interests.
To borrow George Galloway's phrase, the public are being offered two cheeks of the same backside - neither offering anything resembling a genuine conservative or socialist ideology, or a real democratic choice. The 'Uniparty' currently has a stranglehold, and consequently nothing will really alter in the lives of those who voted in various ways for what they truly hoped would be real change over the past ten years. As a result, I can only see the anger and frustration of ordinary people growing and growing, but that's probably a good thing in the long run, because its anger that provides the kind of energy required to ultimately break the current self-serving system.