The fundamental dishonesty surrounding this dog whistle election – Inside Croydon

With Labor looking set to form the next government a week before the general election, our columnist ANDREW FISHER argues that political engagement after July 4th will be even more important.

If this was a boxing match, the referee would have stepped in by now to stop Rishi Sunak and his supporters from taking more damage. Several conservatives have already thrown in the towel.

The time is running out: THE Poor Standard sums up Sunak’s predicament

According to Ipsos Mori, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has the lowest net satisfaction score of any prime minister tracked by the company since polls began in 1979. This is a period that has included Thatcher, John Major at the lowest ebb, Gordon Brown during a global economy. crisis, Cameron, May, Johnson and even Liz Truss.

Forecasts show the Tories are on course for a devastatingly bad result when all the votes are tallied in a week’s time. YouGov predicts Labor will win 425 seats to just 108 for the Conservatives.

It’s even worse with another poll, Savanta, predicting the Tories will be reduced to just 53 seats, just three ahead of the Lib Dems on 50 and Labor on 516. It would be the fewest seats ever the Conservatives have had it in Parliament for nearly 200 years and it accounts for less than a third of the seats held by the Conservatives after Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide.

Not that there is a favorable opinion of our likely future minister, Keir Starmer, who Ipsos says “his net satisfaction score (-19) would be the worst for an opposition leader coming in at number 10”.

Polls show Starmer’s personal ratings are lower than Jeremy Corbyn’s at the same stage of the 2017 election campaign.

Luckily, that’s only seven days away.

But although the election campaign will end on July 4, the politics will not stop.

What has been happening since 5 July is vitally important – with huge problems facing our country, problems we can see around us every day here in Croydon.

Bad news in general: Tory Sunak’s stats may be abysmal, but Labour’s Starmer has barely won the nation’s approval, according to these IPSOS figures

And this election campaign has given us little hope that those problems are about to be solved, or even significantly improved, under the likely Labor government.

Another round of austerity is included in Labour’s manifesto – with little or no funding for basic public services. Independent economic think tank the Institute for Fiscal Studies said there was a “conspiracy of silence” from the two major parties on the need for higher taxes or more austerity. The IFS described the increase in public service spending promised in Labour’s manifesto as “minuscule, which continues to be mundane”. Labour’s proposed tax rises, the IFS said, are “even more mundane”.

The NHS has record waiting lists, there is a crisis in social care, huge backlogs in our courts, councils collapsing across the country and universities also on the financial brink.

There is a shortage of general practitioners, dentists, doctors, nurses, workers and teachers. However, Labour, like the Tories, say they will cut immigration and not raise taxes.

It is fundamentally dishonest.

We will need to fund training for more of these workers and welcome more migrants to fill these vacancies, at least in the short to medium term. The alternative is always sold out services, longer backlogs and rationalization of services.

Labour’s answer to this was “growth”.

When Keir Starmer announced his “mission” for Britain to achieve “the highest sustained growth in the G7”, the policy underpinning was “a Green Prosperity Plan that will provide the catalytic investment needed to become a clean energy superpower “.

Gone with the Wind: Starmer’s Labor has abandoned its commitment to green growth

Labour’s Green Prosperity Plan promised “an extra £28bn of capital investment in our country’s green transition for every year of this decade”, which would fund new energy infrastructure, green transport and better insulation of the home.

But in February this year, the plan was scaled back and when the manifesto was published, the plan was left with an extra £4.7bn of investment.

So does Labor have a ‘growth’ plan?

Labour’s argument now seems to rest on two claims:

1) the simple fact of having a stable government after years of conservative chaos; and
2) some liberalization of planning laws (especially with regard to housing and energy infrastructure), which will trigger greater private investment and thereby create jobs.

This may help if it is delivered. But it is not enough on its own.

Two things are usually prerequisites for sustained and stable growth: investment growth and wage growth.

Britain has long lagged behind other nations in terms of public investment. So it becomes a question of scale – is what Labor is proposing enough to drive sustained and higher growth? The answer is that it’s unlikely, given the Institute for Public Policy Research think-tank said it means “both the Tories and Labor plan to cut government investment in the next parliamentary term”.

Then there are wages, which have fallen in this Parliament. In an economy that is 80% service sector, if people don’t have much spare money in their pockets, then they can’t spend it and the economy won’t grow. Businesses big and small are tightening their belts and cutting costs rather than investing. This is a big part of the problem. Without increasing wages or Social Security benefits or significantly increasing investment, it is difficult to confidently predict sustained and higher growth. There is no money earmarked in Labour’s ‘full cost’ manifesto to raise wages or increase benefits.

Overall, there are huge question marks over the jobs growth strategy and the funding of public services.

This means that whoever our newly elected deputies are, we will have the role of holding them to account. Where is the money to fix the council? To reduce NHS waiting lists and tackle the junior doctor strike? Or start building the council that houses the needs of our community?

We must also be vigilant against our new MPs who find scapegoats rather than solutions. The amount of bile spilled against people on benefits and migrants has made this campaign particularly depressing and none of the major parties are coming out looking good…

Labor alienates communities in Bangladesh

It wasn’t just Nigel Farage’s entry that brought anti-migrant racism and dog whistling to this campaign.

scapegoat: Apsana Begum spoke out against her party leader’s comments about Bangladeshis

Speaking at a hustings event organized by Sun. (the Murdoch-owned rag that drips poison into our society every day), Starmer said: “I will make sure we have planes going… back to the countries where people came from. Right now, people coming from Bangladesh are not being turned away.”

And the leader of the Labor Party said: “Those people who should not be here when they come from countries like Bangladesh or wherever, we will send them back.”

Phrase “send them back” it has particular resonance because that’s what racist National Front thugs used to sing on British streets half a century ago.

On BBC Newsnight earlier in the week, Jonathan Ashworth, a member of Starmer’s front bench team, expressed similar views and used similar language: “When they come from countries like Bangladesh or wherever, we will send them back.” When pressed on what he meant by “anywhere”, Ashworth also mentioned India, Afghanistan and Iran.

Most asylum seekers come from Afghanistan, Iran and Syria – countries that are far from safe, where persecution is widespread and opposition to responsible despotic regimes often leads to imprisonment, torture and even death.

Amnesty International says Bangladesh’s increasingly authoritarian government “restricts freedom and rights to privacy, as well as freedom of expression” and uses “legislation to target journalists and human rights defenders, subjecting them to arbitrary detention and torture”. adding that there has been “a worrying increase in enforced disappearances and the lack of accountability for deaths in custody”.

Apsana Begum, Labor MP for Poplar and Limehouse and the daughter of Bangladeshi migrants, released a statement saying: “I am so proud of the diversity of the East End and that our communities include migrants from all over the world.

“Let me be very clear: I will never stand by and let migrant communities be scapegoated.”

Meanwhile, Sabina Akhtar, deputy leader of the Labor group on Tower Hamlets council, resigned from the party in protest, saying “I can no longer be proud of this party when the party leader singles out my community and insults my Bangladeshi identity. “

After Labour’s appalling and wrong-handed treatment of Diane Abbott and Faiza Shaheen at the start of the election campaign, Starmer’s party’s only saving grace is that it alienates voters at a slower rate than the Tories.

For the full list of all the candidates standing for election in your constituency in the 4th of July General Election, use our widget here:

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• From 2015 to 2019, Andrew Fisher was the Labor Party’s Policy Director under Jeremy Corbyn. Fisher is also the author The failed experiment – ​​and how to build an economy that worksand now writes columns for InsideCroydon, the and newspaper and is a regular BBC pundit and Sky News programmer
• Fisher is also a regular and welcome pundit on The Croydon Insider podcast and is a guest on our latest episode – Why Vote? – to answer a series of questions about elections and politics. This is FREE to download now from iC’s Patreon page or Spotify. Click here for more information

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