/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2799931
Looks good! We have our May day celebrations tomorrow. Not sure how big it's going to be (feel it will be smaller than last year) but it is nice actually doing something as compared to years previously.

>>2799941
inshallah comrade. the celebration in barnsley was 100-200+ people but my dad said it was 300ish but i have my doubts. regardless it was pretty nice. its not going to lead to revolution but i can perhaps the centenury bring brought up another time in politics sometime this year maybe

>>2799947
I think there is something in building up to May Day next year, which is a Saturday. I have been involved in organising our local May Day celebrations since 2024 but IDK that feels like it could be something.

The dark secret of Britain is that neoliberalism is actually the cure to 95% of its problems but Britain manages to get everything backwards. None of our "Neoliberal" leaders did anything like neoliberalism. Just as Attlee was an export-lead developmentalist wearing socdem clothing, Thatcher and Blair were just the abstract concept of malice in neoliberal clothing. Republicanism has had better innings in these isles than neoliberalism.

What we should have: fairly frictionless market economy, high cash-focused welfare, simple but progressive tax system, social liberalism, incredibly easy to get a work visa, large state-lead infrastructure projects
What we've got instead: highly regulated LARP economy, mediocre confusing arbitrary welfare, absolutely incomprehensible regularly-regressive tax system, social illiberalism, bizarre mix of harsh immigration rules and high willingness to let people settle permanently, state refuses to build any infrastructure out of baffling penny-pinching then goes and legislates itself into statutory obligations to spend billions of pounds.

>>2799695
Their job is to ration care.

>>2800007
>true neoliberalism has never been tried

lol cope

>>2800007
Give practical policies we should implement

>>2800024
That's my joke!

>>2800029
Off the top of my head: Progressively deregulate the former nationalized industries (make market entry easier before taking off price caps etc), greatly liberalize planning law, improve the universal credit taper rate so that you're actually always better off in work, get rid of dumb shit like the withdrawal of child benefit above a certain income, abolish national insurance and fold it into income tax, abolish most cutouts and exemptions to income tax, scrap/replace the Equality Act 2010 and blacklist half the "EHRC" and adjacent illiberal bodies from working in public service ever again, change the visa system so that it's easier to get visas without a pathway to citizenship, require the treasury to assess the cost/benefit ratio of all legislation that creates new obligations for the state but - crucially - do not hire more civil servants to do this, make them reallocate people who currently go through infrastructure projects with a fine tooth comb.

Idealistically: Outsource most central government functions and spending to current councils, giving them the kind of power the Scottish parliament has currently. Give Scotland and Wales full fiscal autonomy. (Probably with some degree of subsidy to both in the short-medium term, longer term for Wales.)

>>2800007
>What we should have: fairly frictionless market economy, high cash-focused welfare, simple but progressive tax system, social liberalism, incredibly easy to get a work visa, large state-lead infrastructure projects

which isn't what neoliberalism is so what are you even talking about

>>2799691
>I think he would have succumbed to cultural pressure if he had lived today.
I don't think he would've changed. He wouldn't have supported Hamas for sure, but the Palestinian cause had less support among Western publics when he was alive, so why would he give in to public pressure now. He would be a big pro-Ukraine guy. Also he was very pro-Kurd.

>>2800142
>but the Palestinian cause had less support among Western publics when he was alive, so why would he give in to public pressure now.
Because there are quite a few celebs-. sorry "intellectuals" of his calibre did the Hopscotch to zionism during the corbyn years as a way to leverage over "the communists". The mainstream tory party is a great example of this.

Why doesn’t England just send all its welfare scroungers and junkies into Northern Ireland to boost protestant numbers artificially while clearing NHS waitlists? Seems like a win win for everyone not in Sinn Fein

>>2800151
He was also a neocon and you can't really be one of those without being at least somewhat pro Israel, at least not for the past 15 years

>>2800154
What on earth would that solve. Do you really think Westminster even cares if they keep Norn at this point

>>2800139
Define neoliberalism as you understand it
Being lazy and using google's AI overview:
>Neoliberalism is a political-economic ideology advocating free-market capitalism, deregulation, privatization, and reduced government spending
I would contend that Britain's "neoliberals" failed on all 4 counts and that we should directly seek to chance 3/4 of these failures. (on the last one: attempting to cut government spending doesn't work, so why not just reform government to work better - e.g. decentralize it - and let local people decide their priorities, with representatives actually accountable for the quality of local services, and with areas allowed to make trade-offs as their citizens prefer?)

This is obviously some flavor of neoliberalism, even if it's an atypical one.

>>2800137
Yeah well I have autism so the joke is always not understood, take that.

I was working over fucking May day so I missed the march (apparently it was shit at least with all the same liberal crowd who turn up to every march saying the same shit). Like I missed the working day because I was at work at some evil online american AI job. Fuck this shit I want to go back to being lumpen and getting paid for by the government to undemine them.

>>2800179
So you were looking for a job and then you found a job, and heaven knows your miserable now?

>>2800211
It was easier when I didn't have a job lol, why wouldn't I be pissed off?

why are you still a monarchy? what went wrong?

>>2800300
They threw out the Stewarts for daring to actually act like monarchs in a monarchy, the Windsors are dutch puppets of the bourgeois and lord coalition called parliament.

Restore the Stewarts, death to parliament, death to 1688

>>2800154
You joke, but the British government did consider moving Hong Kongers to Northern Ireland for a similar reason.

>>2800484
they honestly should do the funniest thing possible and just make it independent to appease no one

>>2800137
I think you are still to unspecific. We are extremely liberal with our visas: 400,000 student visas were approved in 2025, and 160,000 skilled work visas issued. Family visas also allow people to work (I was mates with an Indian fella who got a job through a family visa, since his wife was a medical student). On further numbers, arou d 100,000 people were included in asylum claims in 2025. We are not a fortress. So, in your proposed reforms, should we lower the skilled work income threshold to allow for more immigrant visa holders? If so, what should the rate be, and should citizens get any priority? For example, in a low-skilled position, is it fair to give it to an immigrant rather than a citizen?

>>2800514
Immigration is the area I find least interesting and Britain is currently on course for net-negative migration, although (due to bad modelling techniques) government statistics agencies haven't caught up to this yet.

I will say, however, that I would gladly approve a million student visas a year if foreign students can afford the fees, and if you want to regulate numbers (for overseas students, at least) you should use fees instead of the visa system.
Education is one of the few things this country is actually good at, it's de-facto an export industry, it's an industry a lot of native citizens would love to work in, and it's absolute madness that we're trying to kneecap it in the quixotic desire to pretend that students coming here for 5 years are "immigrants" in the same way as people who're going to become citizens. This is especially the case under the status quo where, due to moronic planning laws and council-tax, students regularly live in purpose-built accommodation that you're not even allowed to rent to other people.

I do not in principle believe in citizens being given priority and I do not in principle float around with an ideal number of migrants in my head. That said the practical point I would make is that numbers tell you basically nothing. 160,000 people with a pathway to citizenship and to bringing their families and getting pensions and so on, and 160,000 people who're only allowed to be here so long as they work in the social care sector and aren't allowed to bring anyone with them and aren't allowed to switch visa type are two very different definitions of 160,000. (And both are very different again to someone willing to hand over £70,000 a year to be in the country playing candy crush during lectures.)

>>2800530
>1 million student visas
Well, we must be weary of capacity; in housing and positions in universities. There are approximately 1.2 million students renting property in the UK, and only 750,000 purpose-built housing; the rest going private. If we accepted 600,000 more students, they wouldn't have anywhere to live. Also on university positions, different universities scale based on prospects, and so filling up low-prospect universities with immigrants limits the educational opportunities of citizens (for example, in the US, they have racial protections for black and white students over east asians, since it is so competitive). So, do you think universities should just be filled with east asian autists while everyone else settles for less? Its not a moral judgement, just an open question - for example, we currently have junior doctors in the UK struggling to find work; what do we do with them? Make them work in starbucks or tesco like the others? There is a certain double standard however, since we dont have protections or penalties in athletics, and so the 100m dash is always going to be filled with black people, swimming with white people, and marathon running with Kenyans. Is higher education a natural monopoly?

Neoliberalism will never work in the UK (if it works anywhere at all, which it doesn't because it fundamentally misunderstands how capitalism works) in large part for cultural reasons. Neoliberalism is an outgrowth of the American economic and cultural frontier mindset, it's an ideology that everyone is a go-getter individualist who seeks manifest destiny of carving their place out in the world, that every person wants to spend their life hustling, doing their own business etc and bootstrapping every day.
This is a very Yankoid mindset, Yanks DO in large part have this view, i've spent plenty of time in the US and among Americans and it's shocking how much more go getter and enthusiastic culturally they are than the rest of the Anglosphere, but that's the thing, it's an AMERICAN cultural view, not a British one.
British people have been a strict class almost caste based society for literally over a thousand years. Class is extremely culturalised here, even if you are working class and "make it", without the right accent, right school background and right boys networks, you will still have almost every door shut in your face, everyone who is working class intrinsically knows this, so of course that Yank attitude will never truly take place here. Class culture in the UK also means that most UK working class don't see themselves as even wanting to be business petite bougies, but just want to go earn a simple wage, head to the pub at the end of the day etc, for most working class brits, the goal in life is to have one "investment property" so they can mooch off some students for rent.
Ironically, in terms of material history, the UK is far closer to Japan, China, South Korea etc, than a frontier colonial nation like the US. Which is why I've long argued as long as the UK is Capitalist, it should follow the Asian Tiger state-directed market model, rather than the Neoliberalism.

>>2800539
>Neoliberalism is an outgrowth of the American economic and cultural frontier mindset, it's an ideology that everyone is a go-getter individualist who seeks manifest destiny of carving their place out in the world, that every person wants to spend their life hustling, doing their own business etc and bootstrapping every day.


Now wait till you learn where American Neoliberalism came from.

>>2800535
I think most of this could be solved at a stroke with deregulation, bar one point on which we could keep more or less the current system.

1. It should be easier to open new universities and easier for private/non-charitable universities to be founded. why is it that the last new ordinary university (e.g. actually new, not a college changing its name and status) was founded in the 1960s? Why is it that there are only, give or take, 5 private sector universities? Pair this with a general liberalization of planning law and you can imagine someone, for example, throwing together an overseas student colony in the middle of nowhere.
   
2. While housing supply is fixed, rental supply is an interesting one. I think we could solve a lot of our problems, particularly for students, if people were more willing to rent out spare rooms. This is already less regulated, but it'd be worth looking at what it is that puts people off doing it. (I'd even consider something a bit naff like an advertising campaign just going "did you know you can do this?", I mean, you're complaining about money troubles, but you've got 2 rooms sitting empty since your kids moved out…), students would be ideal candidates for this because you can reasonably expect they're going to go away after a few years.
   
3. A chunk of our unis already make more from foreign students from domestic students, but they still choose to take domestic students for a range of reasons (their ostensible chartered purpose is to educate locals, it helps them get government grants and research funding, it's good for their reputation, etc.) and I think even if we massively expanded the number of foreign students this would stay the case. What we've basically got, and could retain, is an informal quota at each uni. e.g. Oxford would take more or less the same domestic students as now, but more foreign students or charge higher fees to foreign students. (And this would cascade downwards: every uni would take more or less the same number of domestic students.)
   

4-ish. I'd consider ditching the requirement to vet that foreign students are actually attending classes for unis/courses charging fees over a certain threshold. Let's be honest, just like domestic students a chunk of them are dossing about anyway. If the uni doesn't have to physically fit them all, it can better cater itself to the people who're actually trying while letting the people who just want a degree certificate cross-subsidize them.

>>2800539
I don't think you're entirely wrong, but I take the optimistic view that if you were to expose people to the right conditions for long enough, you could smash these bad parts of British culture. We have, after all, smashed most of the good parts with our current way of doing things. You don't have to turn everyone into a yank striver to create a culture where people are a bit more relaxed, but know that you can just do things, who're willing to fix problems when they find them.

The Asian tiger model is a nice idea but it relies on a competent state with a lot of state capacity (and more than a little repression of labour), and Britain's state is anything but competent. If that's the aim, the best chance we've got at implementing it would unironically be to sell the whole country to Hyundai. The upside about imagining a neoliberal Britain is that it doesn't require the government to do much at all: it just has to stop meddling in things, or at least meddle less.

thank you keir stalin

>>2800546
>(i) build more universities
We are shit at building new things in this country in general. Filling potholes even takes a month.
>(ii) rent out spare bedrooms
I dont think many people are fine with letting strangers live in their houses tbh, and i doubt students want to live with boomers, either.

I dont think we're advancing from the central concern, which is the intrinsic limits of the economy. I regard universities as elite institutions, not commercial enterprises, and so I think we ought to regulate access, by more stringent sponsorships, like in Scotland, since the backend of more students is going to be more debt, which impoverishes people rather than enriching them. So, I would like to nationalise universities, but leave some in the private sector as well.

>>2800561
>Filling potholes even takes a month.

try years

>In Scotland

The education system is about to collapse because they over-leveraged into foreign students for that easy cash money, that's now drying up and they're basically cutting back by like 70% and have decimated the rental sectors of every city. Its not a good example.

>>2798843
Lots of things can be said or criticized about the American Democrats or the French left but one undeniable quality they both have over anything left-of-center in the UK is they never ever ever ever cuck out. Something like this or the Corbyn fiasco would litteraly never happen there.

>>2800568
We are just too polite, it seems.

>>2800564
>The education system is about to collapse because they over-leveraged into foreign students for that easy cash money, that's now drying up and they're basically cutting back by like 70% and have decimated the rental sectors of every city.
Well I found this BBC article:
<The latest figures from HESA (Higher Education Statistics Agency) show there were 73,915 students from outside the UK, down 12% from 83,975 the year before. The statistics also show there were 173,795 students from Scotland at Scottish universities.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1w0y93w8vyo
So around 40% of Scottish students are foreign, which is more than the stats for the UK in general:
<In 2023/24 there were 732,285 overseas students studying at UK higher education providers or 23% of the total student population. 75,490 of these students were from the EU and 656,795 from outside the EU. […] India sent the most students to the UK in 2023/24 with 107,500 entrants. This was almost nine times the number of entrants from India in 2017/18.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7976/
So I suppose youre right, that the tuition fee coverage doesn't protect students from competition. 🤷‍♂️ The alternative still seems grim; of indebting the citizenry to boost revenue, as opposed to outsourcing it to foreigners. I think in general, the depreciation of degrees shows that there has to at least be limits on graduation.

>>2800576
The 2nd and 3rd order effects are the real killers, every big city in Scotland's rents have skyrocketed because of this (and the flood of Asylum/inactive immigration)

British version of "touch grass"

>>2800561
We're bad at building because planning law is a farce and councils have few incentives to approve development that can offset annoying NIMBYs, both of which are solvable problems. Relax current planing restrictions (easy-ish) and decentralize power to local councils (so that their budget gets more of the benefit from local development and they can tax developments as they see fit, rather than the current council tax farce.)
People don't like letting strangers live in their house, but that's something that can change. People used to take lodgers and encouraging more to do it again would ease housing shortages without having to lay a single brick.
Though if you pair it with relaxed planning laws, you could imagine it being economical to re-do the layout of a house so that one of the bedrooms is turned into a bedsit without any direct access to the rest of the property. That's not as nice a solution (it's more of the cunt-landlord archetype) but it would have the same effect of cheaply increasing supply.

It's entirely possible for a university to be both an elite institution for domestic students and a money-spinner from foreign students. That said, on the whole I disagree that we should restrict access: I'm all for subsidizing higher education because (as well as being a general social good if we could get our economy in order in general) it's a massive factory for people to develop left/liberal dispositions. Student finance is a bit of a mess and, while framed as debt, it's really just another overcomplication to our income tax system for the majority of students.
Aspirationally, I would abolish tuition fees for domestic students, or move to a system where your "loan" is recorded but repaid by the government unless you choose to emigrate. More cost-neutrally, you could let local authorities decide their own policies on subsidizing higher education.

>>2800629
>It's entirely possible for a university to be both an elite institution for domestic students and a money-spinner from foreign students. That said, on the whole I disagree that we should restrict access
Well, we have to deal with the fact that junior doctors are going to be unemployed, then. Take it, or leave it.

You think because you’re British you’re entitled to a job touching other people’s bodies and looking at their DNA, die you fucking pervert. I hope Fentanyl from Amerikkka gets into your coke and ketamine.

>>2800647
get a job mate

Polanski doubles down in his humiliation ritual

>>2798655
If a Christian bakery can't refuse making a wedding cake for a gay couple, it works in the other direction too: a gay bakery can't refuse to make a homophobic wedding cake.
Bake the cake, ballsack mongler.

>>2800682
Pointless surmising this situation; he's completely beholden to a public image curated by the bourgeois press. The fact that his media team engaged with it in the first place beyond condemnation speaks to the fact of how incompetent they are, as the issue would just cause tumult due to its own disagreements.

Just more evidence he's a useful idiot for the party membership in driving engagement with potential voters

>>2800790
its own disagreements within the party*

>>2800735
>a gay bakery can't refuse to make a homophobic wedding cake

political views aren't a protected class (supposedly)

if you make cakes condemning gay marriage, you need to make one condemning straight marriage if asked

>>2800168
>Define neoliberalism as you understand it

I agree with your definition mostly but would also include tax cuts.

>[what you described] is obviously some flavor of neoliberalism, even if it's an atypical one.

It's really not, you're just proposing social democracy with extra localist characteristics. You can't be like 'they should do proper neoliberalism - high welfare, progressive taxes, and big infrastructure projects' because that's not neoliberalism. they did do neoliberalism, which is just voodoo economics and an excuse to rob the poor blind.

Left the thread for a day and its dead swear to god I carry this site on my back.

>>2799984
>>2799947
Turnout was good in the end happy days.