Best Of

Have we done the Tories in fourth place with YouGov?

Ref 23 (-2)

Lab 19 (+2)

GRN 18 (-1)

Con 17 (=)

LD 13 (-1)

I reckon it is the war that is behind a lot of this.

Hearing the focus groups are sympathetic to Starmer re Trump & the war.

Albeit Tories only 1% behind the Greens and only 6% separates them from top placed Reform with Yougov now.

If those are the voteshares in the NEV after the local and devolved elections in May and the Tories are 4th behind Reform, Labour and even the Greens though Kemi will be gone, there will be a VONC in her leadership from Tory MPs and she will then be replaced by Cleverly. So Kemi needs to get a better result than that, on the plus side for her Yougov have the Greens higher than most pollsters do

A £50 charity bet that Kemi either does not face a VONC by 1st September - or if she does, she survives it.

Interested?

Yes, if the Tories are 4th in May Kemi will certainly face a VONC in my view, so I will take a bet on those terms, the Tories coming third or worse in May will have a VONC. If the Tories are second or better she won't so the bet is then void

You're in the party am I'm not. But I would have thought the pressure on her was past:
Tories have cleared out the mad, insane and stupid to Reform. You are a Better Party without those morons.
Reform are on the slide. Plot the trendline, look at the hurdles they face.
Kemi has found her rhythm - previous government a bit crap, I'm new, I'm punchy, life vs Starmer's inertia

And you want to replace her with Shithole Cleverley?

If the Tories are second to Reform in May then yes Kemi will be safe.

If Yougov is right though and the Conservatives are behind not only Reform but Labour too and even maybe the Greens I am afraid Kemi is gone and will be removed. Not only will she have failed to win back rightwing voters from Reform she will also have lost centrist swing voters to Labour, the latter the type of voters Cleverly appeals more to

What do you think Cleverly would do any different to Kemi other than take the party lower in the polls ?

Well he polls better with all voters as shown at the time of the 2024 leadership election and if the Tories are fourth as Yougov says this morning there really isn't much lower they can go Kemi hasn't already taken them

If you are using a 2024 poll then you have no case

Kemi is a gnats bollock away from losing 33% of the Tory vote in a GE that was their worst result in 100 years

She tries to out Reform as Reform lose 20% of their headline vote.

One Nation Toryism of the likes of Heseltine and Cameron would comfortably polling low to mid 20s

She has no
Brand
Identity
Policy
Vision
Plan

Everything is an argument
She is surrounded by busted flushes

The more people see of her the less they like.

She is irrelevant to the right, the left and in the centre.

Usual tripe from you

Kemi tops leaders approval and is on 84% approval with members

Kemi is not the problem, the brand is still suffering from Johnson Truss years but she has 3 years to recover the brand

Anyway you and @HYUFD seem to agree and like each other posts so that is the strangest of alliances on here

Popularity is a fickle thing, Depends on who you ask, and you can select the result you want to believe.

.

Have we done the Tories in fourth place with YouGov?

Ref 23 (-2)

Lab 19 (+2)

GRN 18 (-1)

Con 17 (=)

LD 13 (-1)

I reckon it is the war that is behind a lot of this.

Hearing the focus groups are sympathetic to Starmer re Trump & the war.

Albeit Tories only 1% behind the Greens and only 6% separates them from top placed Reform with Yougov now.

If those are the voteshares in the NEV after the local and devolved elections in May and the Tories are 4th behind Reform, Labour and even the Greens though Kemi will be gone, there will be a VONC in her leadership from Tory MPs and she will then be replaced by Cleverly. So Kemi needs to get a better result than that, on the plus side for her Yougov have the Greens higher than most pollsters do

A £50 charity bet that Kemi either does not face a VONC by 1st September - or if she does, she survives it.

Interested?

Yes, if the Tories are 4th in May Kemi will certainly face a VONC in my view, so I will take a bet on those terms, the Tories coming third or worse in May will have a VONC. If the Tories are second or better she won't so the bet is then void

You're in the party am I'm not. But I would have thought the pressure on her was past:
Tories have cleared out the mad, insane and stupid to Reform. You are a Better Party without those morons.
Reform are on the slide. Plot the trendline, look at the hurdles they face.
Kemi has found her rhythm - previous government a bit crap, I'm new, I'm punchy, life vs Starmer's inertia

And you want to replace her with Shithole Cleverley?

If the Tories are second to Reform in May then yes Kemi will be safe.

If Yougov is right though and the Conservatives are behind not only Reform but Labour too and even maybe the Greens I am afraid Kemi is gone and will be removed. Not only will she have failed to win back rightwing voters from Reform she will also have lost centrist swing voters to Labour, the latter the type of voters Cleverly appeals more to

What do you think Cleverly would do any different to Kemi other than take the party lower in the polls ?

Well he polls better with all voters as shown at the time of the 2024 leadership election and if the Tories are fourth as Yougov says this morning there really isn't much lower they can go Kemi hasn't already taken them

If you are using a 2024 poll then you have no case

Kemi is a gnats bollock away from losing 33% of the Tory vote in a GE that was their worst result in 100 years

She tries to out Reform as Reform lose 20% of their headline vote.

One Nation Toryism of the likes of Heseltine and Cameron would comfortably polling low to mid 20s

She has no
Brand
Identity
Policy
Vision
Plan

Everything is an argument
She is surrounded by busted flushes

The more people see of her the less they like.

She is irrelevant to the right, the left and in the centre.

Usual tripe from you

Kemi tops leaders approval and is on 84% approval with members

Kemi is not the problem..

The members, then ?

Putting as much distance as possible between himself and Trump/Netanyahu is the gift that will keep on giving.

Badenoch had her chance but backed the wrong horse and Farage will always be seen as Trumps best buddy

Zack and Davey too but the market leader always benefits disproportionately and that can only be Starmer. Is it possible Labour could take the lead? I wouldn't rule it out. Trump is way beyond insane and Netanyahu is genuinely evil.

https://x.com/joecguinan/status/2036248591111438748

The British media have entirely invented a stand-his-ground Keir Starmer that bears zero relation to reality. He tried to give Trump access to the bases, the cabinet blocked him, then he invented a legal fig leaf and access was granted. This stuff is professional malpractice.

I agree. It just happens that the Great British Public only seems to take notice of headlines.

And for some reason people seem to think Starmer stood up to the the two evil Satans.

On 'Question Time' last week it was a given that plucky Starmer had single handedly held his ground against the two evil tyrants.

That's the way 24 hour news works and that's the narrative. I wondered whether there had been a press release that I'd missed

Book banning in Manchester: https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2026/03/school-book-banning-escalates-in-the-uk-as-greater-manchester-secondary-school-censors-scores-of-books/

That story is insane.
Sounds like something out of Trump's America.

Truer than (perhaps) you think

In the story, “AI” was used to create the list of books to ban.

Probably ChatGPT.

“AI” is actually just a really fancy way of guessing an output, based on the input. The guess is based on a vast amount of examples, which are used to create the model.

The vast majority of reports of “problematic books” and sites about problematic books, in English, are from Christian Right types on the US.

The training data for most AIs consists of scraping the internet.

So if you give a list of books to an “AI”, it will list as “problematic” those that offended MAGA type Americans.

A very good clue is that the list of banned stuff included Terry Pratchett and various Goth Vampire juvenile books - both are disliked, by such people, for writing about magic and monsters as if they aren’t super evil.

Yes, that occurred to me too.
But what is most disturbing is that there's no justification for any of this, and we seem to be importing a completely alien version of far right cultural warfare.
In the US, school boards have hijacked legal procedures to impose censorship; here, they're just making it up wholesale.

..“The fact it’s gone through safeguarding means Emily will never be able to work in a school again,” Roche from the SLG said.
During their investigations, the school referred to their statutory obligations under the government’s Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) and Keeping Children Safe in Education guidance documents and said that materials in the school should align to them.
There is in fact no statutory guidance for school libraries because there is no obligation in law to have either a school library or a school librarian. Following Index’s investigation into school library censorship in 2024, many librarians and supporting bodies have spoken to Index about the confusion this causes, with support for librarians and their books left to the whim of their schools’ senior teams...
..When Emily first started at the school, books like Heartstopper and Black Flamingo were in the library, but there wasn’t much in the way of an LGBTQ+ offering. On an open evening, she put those two books on a table. She says a parent complained to the school that he “didn’t want his son exposed to gender bending”.
“The school defended me and defended those books and their right to be in there, and then two years later, completely forgot about it and changed their mind and said they’re inappropriate,” she said.
Index believes this story is of huge public interest. It is an unprecedented attack on the freedom to read and intellectual freedom, where important safeguarding measures have been misused to threaten and target a school librarian. This librarian is no longer able to do her job. Without this story being surfaced and changes being made, the risk is that it will happen again...

A major feature of The Process State is that the Process is the Punishment.

“You have done nothing wrong. But under section 13.1.3.4 (b) we have to fuck your entire life.”

Another major feature is that it provides an opportunity for people of certain mindsets. Those that love ever more rules. Perhaps most of all, those who love using ever extending rules to tell people what to do. And those that adore using rules to inflict pain.

C.S. Lewis was exactly on the button on this. See “That Hideous Strength”

Not everything fits your pet theory. The school wasn’t following a Process here, is what the article says.

That's not quite true. It followed a process, just the wrong one. Which will have highly unfortunate consequences for all concerned, probably including the management of the school if any parent raises a safeguarding concern about them.

Yes the Polanski Greens are basically Corbyn lite attracting the same type of voters, mainly under 40 burdened by student debt and not owning a house and feeling capitalism does not work for them and willing to give tax and spend socialism a go. They are no longer the party of posh middle class environmentalists like Jonathan Porritt.

Green voters do though have some similarity with Reform voters though in that they are less likely to be financially comfortable than average

Isn't the reason that Green voters don't feel like capitalism is working for them that, in many cases, it isn't particularly? Not exclusively because it's so hard to escape the rental trap, but that being a very large factor. And that, in turn being linked to a change in small-c-conservatism from "pass a better life on to the next generation/enough evolution to prevent revolution" to "après moi le déluge".

And that's just another form of nihlism- that of the powerful, rather than the powerless.

Yes they are socialist as they don't have any capital mainly

Which raises the question: why did the Tories (2010-2024) shaft the young, rather than make little capitalists out of them?

They concluded that there were more votes to be had in fluffing the over-60s. The core text is "The Triumph of Janet";

https://www.himbonomics.com/p/-the-triumph-of-janet-

And in the short term, they were right. As for the long term...

Putting as much distance as possible between himself and Trump/Netanyahu is the gift that will keep on giving.

Badenoch had her chance but backed the wrong horse and Farage will always be seen as Trumps best buddy

Zack and Davey too but the market leader always benefits disproportionately and that can only be Starmer. Is it possible Labour could take the lead? I wouldn't rule it out. Trump is way beyond insane and Netanyahu is genuinely evil.

https://x.com/joecguinan/status/2036248591111438748

The British media have entirely invented a stand-his-ground Keir Starmer that bears zero relation to reality. He tried to give Trump access to the bases, the cabinet blocked him, then he invented a legal fig leaf and access was granted. This stuff is professional malpractice.

Is this the same British media that have propelled Farage to the brink of government with absolutely no scrutiny whatsoever?

You are right they are a bunch of Charlatans.

Have we done the Tories in fourth place with YouGov?

Ref 23 (-2)

Lab 19 (+2)

GRN 18 (-1)

Con 17 (=)

LD 13 (-1)

I reckon it is the war that is behind a lot of this.

Hearing the focus groups are sympathetic to Starmer re Trump & the war.

Albeit Tories only 1% behind the Greens and only 6% separates them from top placed Reform with Yougov now.

If those are the voteshares in the NEV after the local and devolved elections in May and the Tories are 4th behind Reform, Labour and even the Greens though Kemi will be gone, there will be a VONC in her leadership from Tory MPs and she will then be replaced by Cleverly. So Kemi needs to get a better result than that, on the plus side for her Yougov have the Greens higher than most pollsters do

A £50 charity bet that Kemi either does not face a VONC by 1st September - or if she does, she survives it.

Interested?

Yes, if the Tories are 4th in May Kemi will certainly face a VONC in my view, so I will take a bet on those terms, the Tories coming third or worse in May will have a VONC. If the Tories are second or better she won't so the bet is then void

You're in the party am I'm not. But I would have thought the pressure on her was past:
Tories have cleared out the mad, insane and stupid to Reform. You are a Better Party without those morons.
Reform are on the slide. Plot the trendline, look at the hurdles they face.
Kemi has found her rhythm - previous government a bit crap, I'm new, I'm punchy, life vs Starmer's inertia

And you want to replace her with Shithole Cleverley?

If the Tories are second to Reform in May then yes Kemi will be safe.

If Yougov is right though and the Conservatives are behind not only Reform but Labour too and even maybe the Greens I am afraid Kemi is gone and will be removed. Not only will she have failed to win back rightwing voters from Reform she will also have lost centrist swing voters to Labour, the latter the type of voters Cleverly appeals more to

Even if the Tories squeeze some of those softer Tory Lib Dem switchers with Cleverly that’s not going to do a great deal for their polling .

Wouldn’t they be better trying to find someone who wasn’t in previous Tory cabinets which might offer a cleaner break .

The other alternative is to stick with Badenoch and hope Reform implode closer to the next GE .

Oh for goodness sake, it is Tory to Labour switchers on this poll. Badenoch if she has taken the Tories to 4th would be taking the Tories to ultimately being taken over by Reform anyway and 'fresh face' Katie Lam would be the same.

No if Kemi bombs in May it would have to be a heavyweight ex great office of state holder who replaces her or the party goes extinct within a decade unless we get PR. It would then.be Cleverly or bust, Cleverly the Michael Howard to Kemi's IDS