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How many Prime Ministers until Christmas? – politicalbetting.com
How many Prime Ministers until Christmas? – politicalbetting.com
? The 1922 Committee will consider a rule change to allow a no confidence vote in Rishi Sunak if the party suffers a major blow in the local elections, The Telegraph understands https://t.co/SBj3xGPant
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This is akin to the Lib Dems panicking about Davey being unexciting and arguing among themselves whether to bring back Clegg or Swinson.
I wouldn't mind Farron back as leader, but think the next LD leader is Daisy.
Anyone who blames or credits BREXIT for either our failings or successes is not really worth paying much attention to - it’s a distraction from the fundamental issues that WE need to fix. No one else. Us.
Only then can he claim the super-agent crown from Agent Truss.
The one overriding messages from the top prosciutto makers was: Italians eat way too much shit cheap salty and watery industro-ham, some of it actually pretending to be “prosciutto”
If this is the case in Italy it will be the case across Europe. Spain excepted
“Not since Bonnie Prince Charlie sacrificed his Highlanders at Culloden has a Scottish battleground been so ill-chosen.
“This ideology is a personal passion of the first minister so now she must answer for any harm done – to women, obviously, but also to her party and the cause of independence.”
https://www.sundaypost.com/fp/former-msp-warns-fm-must-own-gender-id-fallout/
‘Don’t worry your empty wee heads, it’s up to Westminster to fix this’
FPT
The plain and simple truth is that the offical was crooked, so we never got to find out how good England were against a truly fine side like France.
I would say there was little to choose between the sides but the referee ruined the game.
Would independence have improved Scottish education, reduced drug deaths or got ferries built faster?
It all comes back to the perennial question - is there anyone in the Conservative Parliamentary party under whose leadership the Party's polling numbers would be any better? There's no polling evidence indicating such an individual exists.
In 1995, after the Party lost 2,000 councillors in a single night, the challenger to John Major was John Redwood - I believe there was some polling done at the time which indicated the Conservatives under Redwood would be polling even worse than they were under Major. Redwood still got 89 votes in the Parliamentary party despite the infamous picture of him and his supporters.
The other question is, put simply, who'd want it? When the music stops, you don't want to be the one holding the grenade with the pin removed.
The three "B"s - Badenoch, Braverman and Barclay - are all well placed to survive the severest of defeats but with a 10 year road back (probably), there's a fair chance the one taking the first step won't be the one reaching the destination (ask Neil Kinnock). Badenoch has time on her side.
As for the LDs, I think it's lazy to assume Daisy Cooper will win if/when Davey stands down. On the assumption Labour wins big and the LDs come out with 25 MPs (not inconceivable the Party will scavenge some scraps from the Conservative carcass while the Labour dinosaur gets most of the meal), Cooper could well be challenged by either Munira Wilson or Sarah Olney. I'd be interested to hear more from Sarah Green but she'll have a fight to hold her seat.
Didn't stop the Irish wanting independence though. Or lead them to want the status quo ante when they'd got it and it hadn't worked as they hoped.
The fact that all the long distance moaning about Scotland from people like you is about a Scotland within the Union isn’t really your strongest argument for the UK imo, though I guess you’ve all forgotten how to make the positive case for it (if indeed you were ever capable of such a thing).
My guess is there's a plan to do something seriously f***ing nasty that they need a gung-ho thug of a justice secretary for who won't wimp around bleating about needing to obey the law.
Get 50% for, 50% against in top Tory circles and push ahead. Weaponise polarisation...
Court manoeuvres in preparation for years in opposition - no. That's 11D chess that they're not playing.
The longer Raab and Zahawi don't get replaced, the more likely a move against Sunak, but that's on a far shorter scale than years.
One possibility is a night of the long knives next week.
Truss made a complete horlicks of her opportunity - the main reason she failed was her policy of reducing tax for the wealthiest ran contrary to the prevailing notion of "fairness" or, in Conservative terms the "we're in all this together" meme. She and those who think like her are now casting round for "forces" to blame - no, she got it wrong because the policy, however attractive in economic theory, failed to pass the smell test of public opinion.
She couldn't convince the electorate the idea of giving more money to the very wealthiest was economically sound. You might think it's a brilliant idea, I understand the economic theory but most people don't see it in those terms. Truss and Kwarteng thought we were all still Thatcher's children but we've moved on.
As a serious politician he was a long, long way better than Truss, by any measure.
I wouldn't fancy being a constituency MP and having to deal with the various and often intractable problems we face as a country.
I yield to no one in my admiration for my local MP, Stephen Timms, who often has to deal with heart-rending issues from constituents as well as nearly being murdered by one.
DavidL said:
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I am somewhat bemused by her propositions that a "Citizen Assembly" is going to help and her insistence that this problem should be "sorted out in Scotland without further interference with the UK government." To me, what is needed is safeguards in the UK EA which can only be done by Westminster. If they attempt to do these in the Scottish bill they will run into the problem of competence again because equality is a reserved matter.
The Scottish government should propose a new schedule to the EA which will apply to Scottish issued certificates under the GRR Bill which deals with sex offenders, prisons, refuges and sports. Once those safeguards are in place the current bill can proceed.
David, she may be giving a nod to fact we need independence rather than be at the behest of England to make up its mind what we want or need. For good or bad.
As you implied in a previous post, there is a difference between a nation making a decision and a union of nations making one, particularly when these nations vote in quite different ways. I will of course look forward to a Scottish Borders remoaner movement in the event of Scottish Indy, led by firebrand David Mundell.
We may even end up with a decent government.
Just as we saw in Brexit. Or with Ireland's independence. Or, indeed, the independence movements in Slovakia, the Soviet Union, or Hungary, or any other area since time began.
The fact is those arguments usually turn out to be a nonsense, but they then say, 'well, it would have happened *if only we'd done it properly.*
What I was also trying to say is that I don't see Scotland rejecting independence merely because it would be an economic catastrophe. Even though it almost certainly would be. I think a better argument than that is needed.
And if you didn't hear the number of times people said 'we need to leave the EU so our politicians can't hide their dreadful decisions behind Brussels,' including on these boards, you're right, you weren't paying attention.
Though 2014 voided the bet, the ascendancy into opposition of SCon was a modest vindication.
There was a brief philosophical convergence between Cameron's version of "liberal conservatism" and the Orange Bookers such that the likes of Osborne, Laws and Webb could all sit in the same room and broadly agree on finances and pension reform. That convergence, aided by the strong personal relationship between Clegg and Cameron, made the coalition not only possible but inevitable once the shape of the 2010 GE became clear.
Nick thought (or hoped) the LD voting bloc would understand but they didn't. Being NOTA was compromised the moment a choice had to be made - even on electoral reform, the Conservatives wouldn't even put STV on the ballot paper because they knew what would happen if that option won. AV, which was never LD policy and isn't proportional, was as far as they would go.
Add to that the backdrop of a real crisis in the Eurozone and the very real possibility Greece would be forced out and the LDs caved - they should have been willing to walk out of the negotiations but I can understand the enormous pressure from the civil service, the Bank of England and others to do a deal and form a stable Government.
As per last night's brief exchanges, I am even more convinced the Conservatives win, and win big with a restoration of capital punishment as manifesto policy. That would be the last refuge of scoundrels, but if winning to keep the gravy train on the tracks is the only requirement, that has to be the way forward. Why else would Sue Ellen be installed as Secretary of State for Home Affairs?
The kite has already been flown for the unaffordability of, and hence privatisation/ direct payment for schools and the NHS, and the narrative has been taken up by the media. Tax reduction for client voters could then be afforded. A full on right wing agenda, confirmed because we would like to see Ian Huntley hanged is on the cards in my view.
P.S. I do like a conspiracy theory, but mark my words...
Where I feel Truss went wrong was not to have ensured that she was working in lock step with the BOE, with her Government as the senior partner. She was played like a tambourine by the Bank, who contributed to the general instability with their bond-selling programme (unique amongst central banks) and called it an 'emergency intervention' when they were forced to stop and buy some back. In the end, as Tom Harwood notes, they made £4bn profit doing this anyway. It felt at the time like the Government and the Bank were competing - the one to put money in peoples' pockets to combat recession, the other to take it out to combat inflation. Now it feels like the Government has just given up and given in to the Bank. A more desirable situation is that the two work together to ensure a growing economy AND keep inflation at bay.
Edit: Her energy package was also not great. She had bought a lot of wriggle room by refusing to confirm help with bills during the leadership election, and squandered it by subscribing in full to Labour's scheme.
The best Spanish ham is in a league of its own
That's the key thing, I reckon. Had the numbers fallen slightly differently, and the result of 2010 been a Lib/Lab coalition, the net effect would have been the same (albeit with a different regional distribution). And refusing to go into government when given the chance... attractive as it is, that would also have hugely dented the credibility of the Lib Dems.
Chasing the NOTA vote had been a fruitful strategy for the Inbetweeners for ages... It's not entirely Clegg's fault the he was holding the parcel when it exploded.
I’d agree there was little to choose between the two sides.
So the Tory voteshare even on current polling is likely to be little worse than last time. Plus as there are no elections in London, Wales and Scotland many of the seats up will be Tory v LD, where the Tories could even gain seats where councils the LDs won in 2019 are unpopular. So far from being a 'major blow' Sunak's party might even gain a few seats from the LDs in the Home Counties even if they lose seats to Labour, especially in the North and Midlands
In fact it never happened and we never actually joined in the first place...
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I would have tried to ensure that the Bank froze their bond sale programme until the bonds reached their former value, in line with the ECB. With the OBR, I might have commissioned a report, but insisted that their methodology took into account the dynamic affect of changes to corporation tax etc., or failing that insisted on a 'minority report' that did.
Then we may have possibly made some kind of start on confronting the issues that always were ours alone to solve?
But we didn't, so we haven't.
We’ve gone from “sunny uplands” to “it’s not the main reason we’re shit”.
You don't get to his level and make the mistakes he did accidentally. It wasn't just the big decisions, it was lots of little stuff. Why? I doubt it was cash, but guys like that know who is sitting in the stand, who to please, who hands out the top jobs, and they lean accordingly. Happens in the Premiership too bit less regularly and obviously.
Pierluigi Collina has done a great job of cleaning the business up, but little shits like that Brazilian ref will always ingratiate themselves somewhere.
https://youtu.be/t2c-X8HiBng
Nailed on.
(And that election will deffo be 2024. Don't throw your money away on any other options.)
Beating Leeds is possibly only second to beating Derby, if you are a Forest fan.
“Europe is a museum, Japan is a nursing home and China is a jail.”
Britain’s demographics are not actually that bad. There’s a lot of pessimism around right now, but I don’t believe there’s any inherent cultural reason why Britain can’t succeed.
The one think I liked about Truss is that she believed that a more dynamic future is possible.
Dirty Leeds on the other hand.
Had Remain narrowly won in 2016, Cameron would have handed over to the less charismatic Osborne as PM just before a 2020 general election. UKIP though would have been polling about 20%+, the Tories and Labour stuck in the mid 30s. Corbyn may then have become PM on an anti austerity agenda in a hung parliament with SNP support.
It was only Boris and getting Brexit done that enabled the Tories to win over most of the 12% UKIP vote from 2015 and to win over Labour Leave voters in the redwall in 2019
But massive tax cuts for corporations and the already wealthy with privatisation of everything else isn't the route.
We've been driving that road for 40+ years and it has brought us here.
No reason to believe just putting our foot down and continuing in the same direction will make it better.
The market was already beginning to worry about some of the promises made by Truss.
The market reaction to her budget was pretty much immediate.
She is right to blame bad luck (LDIs) and push back from vested interests, but she almost entirely neglects her own idiocy, communications, and madness.
The risk is that she has actually tarnished the whole idea of “growth” as something too risky and politically impossible.
This seems a bit similar to the idea that Brexit would have been a success if Remainers (who possess a functioning brain) helped implement it. I can see a problem here.
As we'd have grown so fast already.
It's the same old failed ideology that got us here.
By waiting till after the GE you can stand with almost nothing to lose. You leave Sunak to ride the 200/1 horse in the GE2024 Handicap. If he won, fair play to him. But he won't. You stand once he has lost, and you can lead while Labour take the strain under a not very charismatic leader.
Currently the Tories are so bonkers that this prediction could be wrong. I suspect the only possible answer to my initial question is one Boris Johnson.
It seems the era of ‘no debate’, imposed on public life by the trans lobby group Stonewall, is officially over.
Politicians need to recognise that that the mantra ‘trans women are women’ is now recognised as the ludicrous, flat-earth statement that it is. The entire house of cards is collapsing, and our political parties need to catch up.
The country is no longer in a fugue state when it comes to transgender doctrine – and I look forward to the day when every political leader roundly denounces it.
https://juliebindel.substack.com/p/uk-politics-is-in-a-fugue-state-over
BTW a piece today in the Graun about the trials abd tribulations of walking around the UK. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/feb/05/life-on-the-edge-meet-the-man-who-walked-around-the-uk
The LDs as you said toxified themselves after pursuing austerity in the Coalition so they posed little threat to Corbyn Labour even in 2019 with a diehard Remainer agenda and certainly would have posed no threat at all to Corbyn had Remain won the referendum and Leave lost anyway
"It seems the era of ‘no debate’, imposed on public life by the trans lobby group Stonewall, is officially over."
"Politicians need to recognise that that the mantra ‘trans women are women’ is now recognised as the ludicrous, flat-earth statement that it is."
'
https://www.tiktok.com/@matthancock/video/7196660649202552070