This is opinion. So read it as such. But consider it please.
Obviously if you read this based on the title. I assume you oppose the Tories.
But if you are wondering why labour are so keen to manage expectations. There is a reason.
Campaign funding wise the Tories are estimated to be 19m ahead of labour. But honestly at the moment they are not spending a huge amount more.
We know the Tories are skilled at election manipulation. So there is genuine fear that the Tories plan to launch a campaign within the last few days.
I.E. when there is less time and funding to ensure fact checking is effective.
They know Starmer is more publicity aware then Corbyn was. He is able to play it in a way that dose not scare traditional Conservative voters.
They also know thanks to Boris, that the courts are unable to punish them for outright lies during any political campaign. And that Rishi is prepared to lie about and accuse civil servants of lying when challenged.
As huge as polling is against the Tories. All it would take is some dramatic claim against the party or Starmer. To convince Tory traditional voters to bite their tongue and vote Tory. While convincing left wing voters not to vote or to switch to 3rd party in seats where labour are the 1st or 2nd party.
The fact we know they have a huge amount of money unspent. Makes it clear they plan to launch something nearer the end of the election. And the only advantage of leaving it so late. Is it will limit the ability of the party to effectively react. Or fact checkers to be able to prove and distribute evidence of lies.
Please be prepared for this.
Well it would be nice if there was anything left of the left in UK labour. At the moment all you got is a transphobic piece of shit that is just slightly left on economic issues.
Yall really gotta get better to scrub off the stain of the currently accurate description of being TERF island.
And of course I am painfully selfaware that I am saying this from America where our choices are between two genocidal fascists credibly accused of SA
Tactical voting ourselves right into death camps is not the strategy you think it is.
Almost everyone hates FPTP, and we know it sucks, but unfortunately, tactical voting is a realistic option for most areas in the UK. I’m personally very likely to vote Green (or lib dem) as I’m in a safe Labour seat, and I won’t conscionably vote Labour for a myriad of reasons (including being trans), but it’s a bigger priority to get the Tories out than anything else right now.
More optimistically though: voting is one part of a large variety of things people can do to influence politics. Protests, voting locally, working with local and bigger organisations, writing to MPs, donating to causes we care about, etc. can all help offset the feeling of having to vote for a party you hate slightly-less than the worse one.
I AM BEGGING YOU TO FUCKING DO MORE THAN VOTING AND STOP THINKING THAT VOTING IS GOING TO DO ANYTHING HOLY SHIT MAN.
I HATE that you fuckin libs think that politics ends at the ballot box and then when I say this this motherfucker makes up a strawman about me advocating political assassination.
You people are fucking useless.
Please try to calm down a bit mate.
We can appreciate your frustration: It is not a fun situation when the main options for the government both support the horrible things happening in the Middle East.
I can promise you, we don’t enjoy it either. People choose to vote tactically to put the most pressure on the lesser of two evils, and avoid an even more questionable result (CON+REF+DUP coalition, anyone?)
Hopefully, one day we can see AV coming into practice. And we can see MPs better representing the votes of the nation.
And until then, we can continue to put pressure on bad situations, via the small parties, via protest. But not by cutting off our noses to spite our faces.
Please be civil with people on feddit.uk. Shouting is not civil.
I will try to respect your rules better but I fundamentally disagree with civility/tone policing when it comes to literal genocide and people advocating voting for people facilitating said genocide.
Like I said before I got heated and that person strawmanned me saying I was advocating political assassinations. There is a world of action that needs to be taken outside of electoralism and focusing on elections and voting is something I feel is a distraction from What Is To Be Done.
Its reasonable to be angry at world politics right now (I don’t know many people who aren’t) but you can be a good leftist and be kind at the same time.
So I agree: it is an unproductive distraction to start beef on the internet about voting and elections. We both want the same things:
Why not share stuff like: https://linktr.ee/opolivebranch instead of getting into the weeds with strangers
Yeah you’re not wrong but the whole OP was about voting as harm reduction which I fundamentally disagree with.
Paraphrasing Matt Christman.
In short by holding dear to these liberal institutions we are inadvertantly accelerating the rise of fascism.
That sucks. What can we practically do about it?
Things that can’t be dismissed online.
Literally half of their goddamn comment is about doing other stuff. You’re all over this thread getting mad at people for voting because you’ve just made up that that’s the only thing they do.
On that domain they are a bunch of lunatics over there
And which party with any electoral chance is sound on trans issues? Neither? So now you have a choice: vote on a single issue when you know the party you’re voting for has no hope, or take the less bad alternative and try to work from there.
Yeah, right, because Biden and Trump are exactly the same. /s
Anyway, where’s the “credible” accusation of sexual assault against Biden? Laughed out of court for not being credible. And against Trump? A civil finding that he did commit SA, and in any state but New York, it would have been rape.
This all smells like encouraging voters to stay home because “both sides.” And that favours the party with the more fanatical base. Seems to me a more likely way to get death camps than Starmer getting in.
Not going to throw my trans comrades under the bus for political convience, and to vote for a center right liberal party.
God you people have a one track mind. No I am begging people to take more action (and responsibility) than just going to the voting booth once every 2, 4, 6 years etc.
Join a revolutionary party, join a mutual aid organization, volunteer whatever free time you can to actually doing something about issues you claim to care so dearly about. Maybe if you are of the privileged demographics put your body on the line to defend those targeted by state and or fascist violence.
Stop pretending like the only politics is liberal bourgeois democracy ffs. It’s sooooo god damn tiring.
And sure vote if you want to but stop blaming the people for reasonably checking out of this broken system while still doing the more important work of direct action for not endorsing literal genocide.
Like it or not that is materially what your vote does. It endorses the policies of the person you voted for. All of them.