Quote Originally Posted by the other bob wilson View Post
What evidence do you see of enthusiasm for Starmer? I can understand his caution in a way, but he needs to increasingly get on the front foot in the coming months.

The Tories have got little left to campaign effectively with and targeting Starmer seems a sensible way for them to go to me because I dont' see the same attitude towards him that there was towards Blair leading up to 1997. I did warm to Starmer somewhat when I heard he'd been self deprecating about his speeches a while ago, I think that a bit more of that would go down well with voters (think a lot of Johnson's appeal came from that).
I don't really know what you are expecting, people dancing in the streets chanting his name? Centre ground policies aren't going to excite people, economically left policies are political suicide because the UK is run by those with vested interests. Starmer has consistently gone for the 'im more ethical and efficient than the Tories' and it has worked if the polls are to be believed.

The country is ****ed to almost incredible levels (via Tory lack of vision and incompetence in combination with 'acts of god'). If labour make grand promises they can't achieve, they will be judged accordingly. What are labour meant to actually do with a country with broken underfunded public services, near record tax burden, low wages, enormous debt and consistently flat lining growth? A slow grind is the only way, maybe they won't be given multiple terms to try and fix things, maybe they aren't capable of fixing things, which knows.

I would prefer them to have more vision/ambition but we are where we are.