A short story in why this country is fucked, and how you can see this logic across the political spectrum.
I want Starmer to resign if it means Burnham gets in. But also, it's obvious what will follow. It will be people yelling about things Burnham supported in 2015, because to the internet, nobody is capable of changing position. He will not be left enough. He will not be right enough. He will have committed the unforgivable crime of existing in public for more than five minutes.
I am already dreading the smarmy interviewers on GMB, the BBC and everywhere else interviewing Labour MPs like they're the Gestapo, while practically begging Farage, Yusuf and Tice to go on Newsnight to clip farm, with minimal pushback on their countless MPs who have openly expressed fascist sentiment that belongs in 1950s Germany.
Burnham will be treated the exact same way as Starmer. We have literally seen the logical failure of "all politicians are the same". Would America have detention centres if Harris had won? This level of backing of the Israeli government? Really? It is lazy.
Meanwhile, the other side will paint Burnham as the second coming of Stalin as he tries to wrangle with the actual issues we are facing, while offering no path forward themselves and showing little to no interest in getting involved with politics beyond screaming from the sidelines. Because who would want to do that? No matter how hard you try to inflict positive change or deal with material reality, you will still become the endless recipient of screaming from the worst cunts you can imagine.
And yes, I do think Starmer has done some good things. In fact, if you are even remotely paying attention, you would know that a lot of the legislation passed is genuinely good for working-class people. Far enough? That is a debate and I would argue no. Curiously bad decisions? Obviously. But if you read the political cave-dwellers on here and Instagram, you would think Starmer was part of the NSDAP. It is insanity. Pure and utter insanity.
If something is not spoon-fed to people through a social media feed, it simply does not exist in their political reality. If someone is bad on one issue, they must be bad on every issue. If someone was wrong ten years ago, they must be frozen there forever. Nobody can shift. Nobody can learn. Nobody can be judged in proportion.
It is fundamentally anti-progressive, and it puts a muzzle on the idea that people can grow and change. And what are the consequences of that? It becomes a repackaged fundamentalist dogma, obsessed with the idea of innate wrongness. It is absolutely fucking bizarre.
And frankly, democracy does not work if it is decided by algorithms. That is no 'educating' yourselves.
The more time goes on, the clearer it becomes that the loudest people on the internet do not have the critical thinking skills to consume social media in a way that does not rot democracy itself. Tech companies benefit from us hating each other. The less we have outside, the more we scroll. The more we scroll, the more ads we see. There is no incentive to challenge misinformation or de-platform people like Tommy Robinson when they incite race riots and pogroms.
For the loudest people online, it appears that politics is not a set of beliefs or material outcomes. It is an identity. So a shift in position feels less like growth and more like betrayal.
Starmer has done a fair few things I do not like. But alas, I am not the centre of the fucking universe. We live in a diverse society full of different opinions, different needs, and lobby groups that make everything near-on impossible. The same structures that protect our democracy also mean you have to work through systems to pass legislation and make genuine change.
If only it were as easy as the absolute slime balls online make it out to be.
And if you genuinely think Starmer is a "fascist", which I have literally seen and heard people say, then good luck under Farage. Some of you have made it a hell of a lot easier for him over the past few years x
