Over the last few years, the Australian and UK Labor/Labour[1] parties, have followed strikingly parallel paths.

• A better-than expected result with a relatively progressive platform (Oz 2016, UK 2017)

• A demoralizing defeat in 2019, followed by the election of a new more conservative leader (Albanese, Starmer)

• Wholesale abandonment of the program

• Failure of the rightwing government to handle Covid and other problmes

Because we have elections every three years, Australia is now ahead of the UK and we now have a Labor government led by Anthony Albanese. In its election campaign and its first eighteen months in office, Labor ran on a platform of implementing rightwing policies with better processes and minor tweaks to the most repressive aspects. This is, AFAICT, what can be expected from Starmer in the UK.

But over the last month or so, we’ve had a series of significant policy wins, which may set the stage for more.
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