(New) New Labour got back in power.
Labour are meant to be the left wing workers party. Old school Labour are socialists that brought in such things as the NHS (free healthcare) and The Open University (non-elitist university education open to anybody) in the mid-1900s.
New Labour first came into power in 1997 and left in 2010, they got back in last year (2024). They are not socialist by any means. They pretend at times to be socialist because of the image and reputation of Labour but in reality they’re capitalists. These are the people that introduced privatisation into the NHS (so you can only get healthcare for certain things if you are rich enough) and started the Iraq War 2 with Bush. They have always had an authoritarian streak but the socialists still within the party generally managed to hold them off. They had plans for mass surveillance and mandatory ID cards, but never managed to implement it by the time they lost the 2010 election.
Now they’re back, and the socialist elements of the party have been shunned ot kicked out, so the authoritarians can near do as they wish now.
In one year they have:
- cut winter fuel payments for the elderly
- cut disability benefits
- continued with austerity for public services, making everyone poorer
- cosied up to banks by saying red tape needs cut
- declared nature protections to be in the way
- helped Israel commit genocide by providing equipment and intel
- proscribed a protest group that spray painted 2 planes as terrorist organisations
- given a racist speech to pander to the far right
- brought in draconian restrictions on the internet
- want a vast increase in facial recognition cameras
- announced plans to implement a mandatory digital ID
I’ve been sitting on the toilet too long writing this now so that’ll do, but here’s some more reading if you wish:
tribunemag.co.uk/…/new-labours-authoritarianism-i…
scotsman.com/…/palestine-action-ban-reveals-labou…
Wolf314159@startrek.website 3 hours ago
0? Hardly. For a simple pop-culture counterpoint, V for Vendetta was written as an indictment of the UK’s slide into fascism. It was published in 1982. Fascism doesn’t happen overnight, it’s a slow boil erosion of rights and democracy that works in the shadows of government over decades to dissolve checks and balances from the inside and within the law.