Yes agree, to your other point about magic wands, the years spent in opposition are where plans should be made in readiness for getting elected. How else do you come up with your manifesto?
For me “real financial gain” is several billion extra every year guaranteed, the measures announced so far do not do that if as predicted the economy takes a hit from the NI increase.
I want radical change and wouldn’t have a problem with more borrowing if the money was spent improving public services.
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Yes of course - and they were - but to expect everything to come right within the first six months is unrealistic I feel, especially in view of the damage done by Brexit and Tory asset-stripping, plus the Ukraine war and coronavirus.
And next up we have Trump’s tariffs which will also be Labour’s fault. 
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I would have said that my prediction is coming true, that unfortunately a crooked and greedy party has been replaced with a slightly dim one, blundering about doing things that are not smart, making a poor situation worse. How did the UK end up like this?
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That’s only really going to happen if people accept rises in Income Tax &/or VAT, but it makes sense to adjust come of those little things, especially where things were previously unfair.
I totally agree. Counter to what the right wing media always claim, borrowing has almost always been lower under Labour governments, but that gets portrayed as the opposite.
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I don’t think they are dim, I think they are just rubbish at explaining what they are doing and what the timescale is.
The press used to give the Tories a free pass by letting them get away with making grandiose promises and not holding them to account when they failed to deliver, by which time Boris et al were on to the next promise.
Labour are not surprisingly being criticised for making unpopular but necessary choices and for not delivering (impossible) instant results.
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To be fair Keir positioned himself as the “competent continuity candidate” - he thought that the centre right, naturally Tory, voters would come over to Labour because they were aghast at what the Tories had become but basically wanted roughly the same policies but done by honest/competent politicians.
And that’s what we got.
Bar for a few missteps which have had poor optics (WFP, to an extent WASPI, IHT’s hit on small farmers).
The danger, as I see it, is that he actually believes that group of voters indeed moved to support him and that he has made long term converts within their number to the Labour cause - because the evidence is that he hasn’t. He got fewer votes than Corbyn (think about that for a sec) though a slightly larger percentage of a poor turn out.
The bulk movements were as I have described for elections over the past couple of years - moderate Tories are aghast at what the party has become but are not about to vote Labour so stayed home, meanwhile the rabid right wing of the party went and voted reform - the Tory vote collapsed in the wake of these two assaults.
Labour benefitted from the collapse of the SNP as well - it has lost popularity, presumably because devolution has gone off the boil plus all the scandal around Salmon & Sturgeon.
Labour does not have a solid voter base at all - it’s just that the Tories are even more wobbly at the moment. That could change - though it might just be that Reform positions itself as the replacement Tory party and succeeds (though I doubt it TBH)
The Lib Dems picked up tactical votes - again there is a danger that this goes to their heads, but it’s nice that they were left with a nearly proportional share of the seats.
I think things could go very wrong for Labour in 2029 - Starmer’s main hope is that the right doesn’t get its act together (possible) or that people remember how terrible 14 years of Tory rule was for the country (possible but voters have notoriously short memories).
He’s (disappointingly) doing exactly what I expected, but the alternatives were much worse.
By making a series of errors bit by bit.
Oh, and allowing the likes of Nigel Farage much more influence than was wise.
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Insert bought them off.
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Because it got so used to lurching ftom one crisis to another that it developed and accepted the crisis culture to the point where crisis is the normality. The uk still hasn’t shaken off the 2008 financial crisis. Meanwhile countries Britons mocked back then have recovered and better olaced now than they were before the crash. A country with a set of cojonies would have revolted by now.
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Think cojones usually come as a ‘pair’ rather than a ‘set’ (!) but happy to accept this may not be the case in Scotland… 
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Why Scotland,?
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For a lot of people, it’s not the just optics which are poor, but more of a Dennis Moore approach (steals from the poor, gives to the rich) to managing the nations finances. WASPI was a damp squib, but WFP seems to be punishing the Tory-voting pensioners and IHT was looking for a soft target that appears left leaning.
Agreed. Labour only won because they weren’t the Tories. My perception of the SNP is that they’ve not managed Scotland well, and this is retribution for that failure. Sure there are some Scots who still want independence, but I’m not convinced it’s a rallying call right now.
2019 concerns me, because I really doubt Labour will have done any good by then and the conservatives will still be a mess without decent leadership unless someone can come through the ranks unexpectedly. The thought of Reform getting a term is very worrying because I’m sure they’ll make the last conservative government look like a kindergarten, but I have to seriously entertain the possibility because the next election isn’t going to be Labour’s for the winning, and I think the country will be sick of them.
Electing Cameron was the first one, although the choice wasn’t great then either.
More cojones than the average Brit 
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I really don’t understand why he has not brought in a wealth tax (well I do, but…).
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Well, you did refer to a ‘set’ so I assumed you were privy to some local knowledge of which I was ignorant. Thought that might be the origin of the kilt! Plenty more room than in a pair of trousers
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I was expecting that one!
But, have we collectively deflected discussion of Starmer’s premiership to date?
And this again is frustrating, that a government that might be on the left area around the centre doesn’t do something about taking a little more from the real rich instead of going after relatively ordinary people.
Indeed.
I have mentioned I quite like the way Richard Murphy explains modern economics.
In “Money for nothing and my Tweets for free” he suggests that the role of tax is to rebalance the economy - and there is no greater imbalance at the moment than the extremely wealth hogging all the cash and assets.
Given that the very wealthy sitting on piles of cash do not do a great deal with it - they don’t need to spend the majority of it for instance, they just use it to accumulate even more - it would make good sense to tax them a couple of % of their total wealth (with some allowance for those who are illiquid asset rich but cash poor) and get it properly working for all of us.
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TBH I’ve only ever heard “grow a pair” and never “grow a set” but this could just be a part of the infinite variability in the universe.