The previous head, Jeremy Corbyn, was socialist and had a long history of fighting for socialist causes. It would have been hard for Labour to find a leader more socialist than him amongst their MP's.

Corbyn was also at the helm of a horrible Labour defeat in 2019.

Starmer has been compared to Blair, for better or worse. Given the Labour party's platform, I expect a lot of the energy of this government will be to fix the damage that the Tories caused, get some new clean energy, and try to grow the economy as some former Warsaw Pact countries are creeping up to the UK's average wage.

The media is pushing the narrative that Labour is on the left of politics as a way to fear monger and ensure his failures will be seen as failures of left wing policies, and shift the Overton window further to the right as a result, but they haven't even been in the centre, but rather completely past it and in to mild right wing since Starmer took over and purged all the actually left leaning members from the party, and made it clear that he has zero class, or any other conscious.

His entire career in opposition has been proof that he's nothing but a Tory in a red tie, since he didn't oppose them on anything of any substance, and his entire election campaign was cantered on benefitting businesses, not the people of the country.

He's gone against unions, he's neglected health and social services, he's ignored disabled people, he's mocked the fight against racism, he's made it clear over and over and over again that he's in politics to serve the establishment, and his own career, not the country or the working class people who carry it on our backs.

So like, yay, Tories are out, but actually, we just have more of the same, only this time the veil is thicker and there is a pretence of progressiveness, that is only going to lull liberals in to a false sense of security, and push centre and right winged voters even further to the right, and leftism remains unrepresented in our parliament, because it's too big a threat to the establishment (why Starmer was brought in in the first place - damage control after Corbyn).

Labour's two headline policies are:

1. Green investment through a new state-owned company
2. A big expansion of workers' rights

The green investment will be the biggest in the country's history and the workers' rights expansion will be the biggest in decades. Now, for me, those are two necessary, excellent, leftwing policies.

I think people criticising them from the left are mainly criticising omissions: why no wealth taxes? Why not nationalise the water companies? And that's fair enough. Labour could do more and I hope they will. But the platform is a leftwing one, and I'm happy with it, even if it could always be more leftwing.

Because they were further left the last two elections and lost. The people wanted a right wing government, but the last one became so corrupt which is why Labour needed to be a comfortable party for them to vote for.

It’s a good question. There’s nothing Left about the party at the moment. They are neoliberals who have already sold workers down the river to the Corporations, walking back basic promises for worker protections etc.

Policy wise, there is not much to look forward to. We can hope for more integrity and competence, but it’s slim.

The risk I see, is that they flop around in the centre, don’t deliver anything for voters, and leave the door open to right wing loons in one or two cycles from now.

Politicsjoe is a good outlet for uk politics. Or watch John Oliver's recent episode Essentially, the UK has had fiscal austerity for 14 years under the conservatives. To prove that labor will be 'good for business' their new platform maintains the same cuts and has tied their own hands on taxing.
So, fiscally, there wasn't much diff with the conservatives, minus some crazy tory boondoggles like tax cuts for rich and paying tons to Rwanda to deport asylum seekers.