‘Neither’ and ‘don’t know’ vote dwarfs score for either party leader – and no surprise there
Both Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak – two sides of the same dire, droning coin – were soundly beaten in the latest Opinium poll of voter assessment of who would make the best prime minister.
The appalling Sunak managed to do better than the shocking Starmer by two whole points – but both came behind ‘none of these’ and with the ‘don’t knows’ added in, they were trounced by 18-20 points:
The reason for the awful rating for both was partly captured, with some humour, by activist ‘ToryFibs’, who tweeted to ask what the policies of ‘neither’ might be on the NHS and making the minimum wage an actual living wage:
There is barely a cigarette paper’s width between the stances of Sunak and Starmer on both issues. The Tories’ abuse of NHS staff and patients and lust for privatisation is a matter of record; Starmer has refused either to back the £15 minimum wage that was being demanded by unions even before the latest inflation crisis – though he tried to have another MP do the dirty work for him, leading Andy McDonald to resign in disgust – and refused to commit to ensuring NHS staff and teachers do not face further real-terms pay cuts.
He has also binned his leadership campaign promise to renationalise the NHS (or energy, or any of the other things he promised to renationalise until he had conned Labour members into voting him in), and in fact has promised further privatisation, along with breaking every other campaign promise he made, including a shameful betrayal of poor people and their children.
In the face of such homogenous ‘they’re all the same’ awfulness, voters want neither of them – and there is currently no better alternative than the decision not to vote for either, which under the UK’s broken democracy will let one or other of them in to carry on ‘business as usual’.
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