Yeah, Labour has tacked significantly
economically leftwards - which they were always better at than socially liberal ideas. So Labour is promising eye-wateringly large increases in the size of the state, largely reversing the 1980s privatisations of utilities under Thatcher as well as significantly bigger centralised education and social care services in particular, as well as big pledges on free childcare, free university tuition, and so on - whatever it is, Labour is probably pledging to spend a lot of money on it. Labour has moved socially somewhat more liberal since Blair too, but that's a much harder point for the party - a few weeks ago it looked like Labour might be fighting the election as a soft-Remain people's vote type party, but had to row back under pressure from more socially conservative union leaders and now are claiming to be "neutral" on Brexit. Similarly, their party conference endorsed retaining free movement of people, which got scrapped for the manifesto. Corbyn is basically running as a big-state, centralising, soft-isolationist democratic socialist, which is in and of itself fair enough albeit not really my flavour of politics. In some ways that's very different to Blair, who was much more generally seen as centrist and more internationally interventionist, but Labour still often rolls out bits of Blair era rhetoric, and the Labour offer of big public service spending in a very centralised way along with a pretty mixed position on social issues is still if framed that way not so dissimilar to where it was under Blair and Brown.
As to what people are talking about in the media/nationally:
- Hating all the party leaders, who all have atrocious approval ratings.
- Labour's messaging is mostly "you have to vote for us to stop the Tories, Lib Dem and Green votes will let the Tories in, Lib Dems and Greens are all Tory enablers and all kill babies". I'm seeing a lot of that.
- Labour's major antisemitism crisis, which keeps hanging around them like an albatross, not least because Corbyn clearly thinks he's done nothing wrong and doesn't want to apologise for it so journalists have worked out that they can make him look terrible by just hitting him with that question repeatedly.
- Johnson vs the Press. He's basically bullied the BBC into giving him the interviewer he wanted, not the one they wanted to interview him, and he's been threatening Channel 4 after they empty chaired him when he didn't turn up to a climate change debate and instead sat a melting ice sculpture on his podium.
- Security, because we just had people get stabbed in a terror attack. So the Tories are playing the tough on crime card very heavily and Labour are pointing out that they've been in No 10 for nine years now and things that go wrong are probable their fault.
- Tactical voting and whether it can remove the Conservatives, who still hold a solid but not entirely robust polling lead.
Interestingly this is completely different from the list of things people seem to want to know about locally: my local candidate's campaign has recieved maybe three or four communications on the subject of Brexit, none on tactical voting - what people seem to be most willing to write to us about is animal welfare standards, climate change action, and many different aspects of the NHS and social care.