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Will labour make things worse? Will it just float a bunch of debt to make it look like they’re doing something?
I’m taking for granted that nobody is going to actually improve Britain’s problems. I’m legitimately not sure what the move of the British left is to; will they import even more immigrants, get slightly softer or harder on crime, make housing regulations even worse, build more council housing(probably funded by debt)?
Labour will naturally benefit from external events. Unless China invades Taiwan, we'll probably see peace deals in Ukraine and Israel, inflation will slowly but surely return to normal, the economy will gradually rebound into 1-2% growth, and the strikes which have plagued a lot of the country will magically clear up.
A strong criticism of the way the Tory party governed over the past decade is that they spent a huge amount of time tinkering at the margins, constantly passing new laws over the most meaningless things, and never really made any big changes aside from a Brexit that was forced on them. I expect Labour will be quite similar
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The likelihood is that they will not do anything significant about migration, as all the migrants by and large vote for them anyways. Or will up until the muslim vote bloc becomes strong enough to support its own party. It just solidifies their demographic victory. They may be cajoled by the hard left part of the party into profound acts of self harm such as taking masses of Gazan refugees; a mass amnesty for already existing asylum seekers is exceedingly likely too (and then they will crow about having "cleared the backlog" where Sunak did not).
Crime is tough to say... they're unlikely to end the draconian speech laws we have nor tell the police to stop wasting time on them. They may well push non-prison alternative sentences for the scant few serious crimes that do get solved, since we have no prison space, apparently.
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Housing regulations at least are probably likelier to loosen up under labour (though not necessarily likely in absolute terms) as their base consists less of older homeowners who are against new building for house price/aesthetic purposes.
Labour have a public commitment to building more houses, a policy which will allow them to do it (namely removing protection from low-value land in greenbelts) that isn't motherhood and apple pie (the Conservatives are promising to protect greenbelts), a coalition that supports it (as @RegularlyExpressed points out) and a golden opportunity to do something that everyone knows is necessary but is unpopular with swing voters (a likely majority in the stratosphere).
If, like most people who are paying attention, you think that the housing shortage is the most pressing problem facing the UK, then things will get better, albeit slowly.
The other thing that is going to get better regardless of the election result is that the headline net migration number is going to drop (unless Ukraine collapses). Net migration in 2022 and 2023 is inflated by the Hong Kong and Ukraine resettlement schemes and by the post-COVID rebound in the stock of foreign students in the UK (which implies a temporarily high net inflow). An incoming Labour government will, of course, claim credit.
I have modest hopes that a Starmer government will be more competent on crime. Starmer was both competent and (given his other political views) surprisingly based as Director of Public Prosecutions (among other things, he was responsible for the decision to throw the book at the 2011 rioters, and issued guidance to reduce the number of people being prosecuted for offensive tweets). The pozzing of the Crown Prosecution Service happened under his successor Alison Saunders.
I assume you meant to reply directly to @hydroacetylene with this comment?
I was responding to both of you - I wanted to explicitly agree with you that Labour's coalition makes them likely to get housing right.
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