I think 1997 redux is coming. I don’t think it will be worse (albeit from a worse start point for Labour and better for the Tories. I think a lot of people attribute too much to swings in bye elections with pitiful turnouts. If I were an ambitious young Tory right now I’d be thinking about how to change what the party is offering the nation. The old reputation for economic competence, if it was ever deserved or real, is gone. So what then is the point of a conservative government?
I hope there are also ambitious young Tories who are willing to honestly reflect on their failures in government.
Take housing, for example. Osborne introduced Help to Buy in 2013. It was billed as the largest intervention in the housing market since Right to Buy. So why is there still a housing crisis? What went wrong?
The housing crisis is about the shortage of properties. The price is a symptom.
We have 8 million fewer properties and a similar population, compared with France.
Christopher Hope📝 @christopherhope · 35m 👀 Letters of no confidence can be submitted in Tory leader Rishi Sunak from Wednesday, 12 months after he was appointed leader by MPs, under 1922 rules.
I think 1997 redux is coming. I don’t think it will be worse (albeit from a worse start point for Labour and better for the Tories. I think a lot of people attribute too much to swings in bye elections with pitiful turnouts. If I were an ambitious young Tory right now I’d be thinking about how to change what the party is offering the nation. The old reputation for economic competence, if it was ever deserved or real, is gone. So what then is the point of a conservative government?
I hope there are also ambitious young Tories who are willing to honestly reflect on their failures in government.
Take housing, for example. Osborne introduced Help to Buy in 2013. It was billed as the largest intervention in the housing market since Right to Buy. So why is there still a housing crisis? What went wrong?
Too much immigration as well as the need for more affordable housing
A truly terrible night for the Conservatives (I've heard that before). but two very different results.
In Tamworth, there was an almost direct transfer from Conservative to Labour while in Mid Bedfordshire the Conservative vote splintered between Labour, the LDs and others.
In MId Bedfordshire the Conservative vote nearly halved - in Tamworth, the fall wasn't so great but still considerable. The problem is if your softest vote is in your more marginal seats that means trouble at an election. On these numbers, the notion of Labour in the mid to high 40s and the Conservatives in the mid to high 20s isn't so fanciful.
As for the LD performance in Mid Bedfordshire, which seems the one crumb of comfort for some Conservatives, what it will do is re-enforce a tight targetting message concentrating on the 75-80 seats where the party is the clear challenger and abandoning large parts of England to Labour. I think the extended length of the "campaign" was a problem for the LDs.
It's also worth mentioning after years of under performing in such contests the Labour by election operation is now much improved - we saw it at Selby & Ainsty and now at Tamworth they've overturned the 54th safest Conservativre seat. The Labour "ground game" looks in strong heart ahead of a GE and may surprise in some constituencies.
We're still a year out and a lot can happen and certainly no one can ever write off the Conservatives but Labour looks in a very good place at this stage and set to big gains while the LDs may take some scraps from the Conservative carcass but that's all.
Fully agree re Tamworth.
On your point regarding the improved Labour performance in by-elections, the most telling comparison for me is that between Mid Beds and North Shropshire just 2 years ago. In North Shropshire the starting point was a 41% Conservative majority, with Labour in a clear 2nd place on 22%, 12% ahead of the LDs. In Mid Beds the starting point was a 38% Conservative majority, with Labour in a clear 2nd place on 22%, 10% ahead of the LDs.
So the starting point in Mid Beds and North Shropshire was very similar. Yet while in North Shropshire Labour got badly squeezed by the LDs and saw a 9% fall in its vote, in Mid Beds Labour increased its vote share by 12%, more than the LDs.
That change in the Labour performance is I think indicative of the change in the national polls over the past 2 years, combined with Labour upping its game in that by-election compared to 2 years earlier. Also, in view of the huge effort that the LDs put into Mid Beds alone, and in particular the effort they made to squeeze Labour by the likes of fake polling and personal attacks on the Labour candidate, the LDs have emerged totally discredited. So it was a very poor night for the LDs too.
In mid Beds it became clear after the opinion polls that Labour were the main challengers, that should have resulted in the LibDems being squeezed into losing deposit zone. The fact that they almost doubled their vote to 23% means that it was far from a 'poor night' for them.
George Osborne, first words after exit poll, election night BBC TV, 2019.
It's not a great predictive record.
I will go to my dying day that he was right. If COVID had not happened we would be looking at a second Conservative victory in May 2024. It did and Boris has gone, but if it hadn't...
Not convinced, though Boris undoubtedly was touched with genius and at the time looked good for 10 years. Without Covid he would still have fallen because of his astonishing lack of personal self control and inability to surround himself with the right long term advisers, and his total failure, having led us to Brexit, to envision what it might be about.
In so many other ways he was a centrist Tory with a compassionate politics.
Was he? He told centrist Tories he was a centrist Tory. He told the ERG he was a loyal right wing ERG-er. I think he found policy dull and solely tactical for ladder climbing but was very good at making people think he was with them.
And that was always going to descend into farce once BoJo had to deal in visible actions rather than just words.
The coalition that he built to win was always going to fall apart under it's inconsistencies. It was just a question of when.
Hear Hands on Today? Questioning from Nick R forced him off his script so he ended up saying Andy f off and off the stage Cooper was a really good guy.
I think 1997 redux is coming. I don’t think it will be worse (albeit from a worse start point for Labour and better for the Tories. I think a lot of people attribute too much to swings in bye elections with pitiful turnouts. If I were an ambitious young Tory right now I’d be thinking about how to change what the party is offering the nation. The old reputation for economic competence, if it was ever deserved or real, is gone. So what then is the point of a conservative government?
I hope there are also ambitious young Tories who are willing to honestly reflect on their failures in government.
Take housing, for example. Osborne introduced Help to Buy in 2013. It was billed as the largest intervention in the housing market since Right to Buy. So why is there still a housing crisis? What went wrong?
Help to Buy worked as intended. It drove up the house prices of home owning Tory voters whilst providing a plausible shield to pretend they were helping the young.
The level of investment needed across the country is mind boggling to be honest.
Yet government spending is still way higher than tax revenues. Who’s going to have the honest conversation about the need to tax more and spend less?
The appalling state of public sector services in the UK, from prisons, to courts, to NHS, to Universities to Councils is really grating on people. It is going to be a grim winter ahead as more and more cease to function.
Tories talking of inheritance tax cuts is chucking petrol on that fire.
It isn't for the Tories core vote and after they lost even Mid Bedfordshire the Tories first job is to win that back
Actually the proportion of voters, even ex Tory voters, who are affected by Inheritance Tax is utterly miniscule.
The proportion of voters affected by taxes like National Insurance, Income Tax, VAT, the state of our roads, education, NHS, courts, Police, crime and criminals being released back on the streets as prisons are full and much more is far higher.
If the Tories want to be a party that pander only to those who don't work for a living and want to live off handouts and inheritance instead then so be it. They deserve to be on 5% in the polls if so.
In Mid Bedfordshire even the average house is now over the inheritance tax threshold
IHT threshold in reality depends. It can be £325K. It can be, and for a huge % of the population is, £1million.
The level of investment needed across the country is mind boggling to be honest.
Yet government spending is still way higher than tax revenues. Who’s going to have the honest conversation about the need to tax more and spend less?
The appalling state of public sector services in the UK, from prisons, to courts, to NHS, to Universities to Councils is really grating on people. It is going to be a grim winter ahead as more and more cease to function.
Tories talking of inheritance tax cuts is chucking petrol on that fire.
It isn't for the Tories core vote and after they lost even Mid Bedfordshire the Tories first job is to win that back
Clearly you haven't seen the condition of the roads in any areas outside your enclave.
Equally tax cuts aren't going to win votes from people who have had friends/relatives waiting 18 hours in A&E....
So what, those voters want higher spending and high tax and will be voting Labour anyway.
The Conservatives need to focus on getting the right back united behind them first and that means getting the deficit and inflation down further so there is room for a manifesto commitment for tax cuts
How does getting inflation down provide tax cuts - do tell?
As for getting the deficit down - the problem we have is that no-one has a clue where the money is going because thanks to Osborne there is nothing left to cut - except for actual investment projects that provide a headline £36bn of money that actually doesn't exist..
Which hasn't stopped all the Red Wall MPs demanding money be spent now to keep them in their seats because no tax cut is going to have sufficient impact...
Well done, Labour: two excellent wins in very different seats. The people have decided, ('the bastards'), and there'll be a Labour government after the next election. The only question will be how much of a majority they get. I expect more playing it safe from Starmer - don't scare the horses.
A qualified well done to the LibDems: no one expected anything in Tamworth, so it means nothing, despite the best efforts of some to label it a poor showing, and in Mid Beds they didn't win or come second, but they got a significant vote increase, almost as much in percentage terms as Labour, despite both of them fighting it hard. Reinforces my belief that there is a significant pool of disaffected Tories who won't go Labour under any circumstances. Some constituencies will have any more of those, plus where Labour don't fight a big chunk of the vote that went Labour here will go LibDem. It's going to be a good election for the LibDems.
Disastrous for the Cons: Labour majorities in both seats were smaller than the RefUk vote, That doesn't mean they'd have got all those votes if RefUK didn't stand, but it doesn't bode well that they could do that well. as mentoned above, they're going to be fighting a GE on two fronts, requiring completely different campaign messaging. Even a locally prominent and apparently favoured candidate didn't save the, in Mid Beds. Do they have people with the skills to walk that fine line? Do they have people with skills? For any Con supporters look for straws to clutch at - don't bother, they've all gone.
So Greg Hands says he 'doesn't see any great enthusiasm for Labour' - in which case, Greg, how much do people hate the Tories?
Well done the LDs? ".... my belief that there is a significant pool of disaffected Tories who won't go Labour under any circumstances....."?? Get a grip on reality.
The fall in the Conservative vote share was much the same in both constituencies, 28% in Mid Beds and 25% in Tamworth. Your idea that the LDs somehow aided Labour in mid Beds by causing a collapse in the Conservative vote that otherwise wouldn't have happened doesn't hold water.
What the LDs did do was to badly split the anti-Conservative vote by spending much of the campaign trying to talk down Labour's chances, with blatantly false claims about being set to win and the usual false bar charts even in the face of polling that pointed to the opposite, and highly personal attacks on the Labour candidate. They were desperate to come out ahead of Labour. Some people fell for it but overall the LDs still failed badly. The idea that the LDs somehow helped Labour to win is risible. Labour won in spite of their best efforts.
Did I say that the LibDems helped Labour? No I didn't although it's an interesting argument. My view is that for the LibDems, the result is qualified good ones. You're a Labour partisan, and you've got every right to be delighted with your results. But you've been repeating the same stuff over and over all night. That's fine, but it gets a bit stale. The Tories got beaten badly, and I'm very happy about that. Going to enjoy the GE.
I've seen it done. 2019, Stockton South. Our LD candidate practically openly endorsed Paul Williams (Labour), and we ran a spoiler campaign for posh ward Tories not wanting to vote for him but wanting to derail Boris.
A targeted effort to take votes off the Tories in key wards which Labour had no presence in (of any kind). And we picked up a few thousand votes, with some really good performances in key boxes. The Tory still won because of the landslide of Labour voters going Tory, but we did what we could.
Two numbers to focus on if you think a landslide is on.
271
and
202.
271 was the number of seats Labour won in 1992
202 was the number of seats Labour won in 2019.
Labour start much further behind now than they did in 1997.
#CorbynsToxicLegacy
A large part of that difference is due to SNP surge in Scotland (costing Labour ~50 seats). As that is now unwinding then the gap will close considerably
Christopher Hope📝 @christopherhope · 35m 👀 Letters of no confidence can be submitted in Tory leader Rishi Sunak from Wednesday, 12 months after he was appointed leader by MPs, under 1922 rules.
Yes well there is no alternative and changing the leader again won't make any difference.
Getting the deficit and inflation down further and allowing room for tax cuts will
Meanwhile...yesterday, the prosecutor got a plea bargain for Trump's lawyer, Sidney Powell, in the Georgian election interference case. Who must now testify against Trump.
There has been a tsunami of bad news for Trump in the various cases going on against him. (Although worse for Rudy Guiliani, who is now very likely to be personally bankrupted by the cases against him.)
With the timelines of these cases, especially state cases where he can't pardon himself, I just don't see how Trump can be the candidate next year.
There’s something totally screwed up in the US ‘justice’ system, where the whole thing relies on threatening several dozen people with decades in jail, then trying to convince them one by one to sh!t on each other with the promise of community service instead of jail time.
I still think Trump can sustain a sufficient number of appeals until after the election, but the whole thing is a total mess.
Can’t both parties find half-suitable candidates any more, rather than relying on a pair of octogenarians with dodgy histories?
With dodgy histories? OK, Trump has a dodgy history, but he has a dodgier present too. Well, I’m judging insurrection as worse than sexual assault.
Biden has a spotless history of public service… and unfortunately a tragic family, including a dodgy son. You need to stop believing US right wing media.
I think 1997 redux is coming. I don’t think it will be worse (albeit from a worse start point for Labour and better for the Tories. I think a lot of people attribute too much to swings in bye elections with pitiful turnouts. If I were an ambitious young Tory right now I’d be thinking about how to change what the party is offering the nation. The old reputation for economic competence, if it was ever deserved or real, is gone. So what then is the point of a conservative government?
I hope there are also ambitious young Tories who are willing to honestly reflect on their failures in government.
Take housing, for example. Osborne introduced Help to Buy in 2013. It was billed as the largest intervention in the housing market since Right to Buy. So why is there still a housing crisis? What went wrong?
Help to Buy worked as intended. It drove up the house prices of home owning Tory voters whilst providing a plausible shield to pretend they were helping the young.
What was and is needed is Help to Build.
Given the skills shortages I would go further and set up a big govt housebuilding department that could both build houses but also offer secure employment and training to reduce the skills gap.
Incidentally as I mentioned Dr Paul Williams, I hope that he enjoys his footnote in political history. Having been unseated in Stockton South by Matt Parmo Vickers he was running to be Teesside's PCC. Until he abruptly jumped ship to be the Labour candidate in the Hartlepools byelection. Labour lost both and Dr Paul made himself so unpopular that he wasn't selected for either Stockton seat next time.
That Hartlepool byelection loss to Jill Where's Hartlepool Mortimer was peak Boris. It was also peak Tory, a high water mark which will stand likely for decades to come...
The level of investment needed across the country is mind boggling to be honest.
Yet government spending is still way higher than tax revenues. Who’s going to have the honest conversation about the need to tax more and spend less?
The appalling state of public sector services in the UK, from prisons, to courts, to NHS, to Universities to Councils is really grating on people. It is going to be a grim winter ahead as more and more cease to function.
Tories talking of inheritance tax cuts is chucking petrol on that fire.
It isn't for the Tories core vote and after they lost even Mid Bedfordshire the Tories first job is to win that back
Clearly you haven't seen the condition of the roads in any areas outside your enclave.
Equally tax cuts aren't going to win votes from people who have had friends/relatives waiting 18 hours in A&E....
So what, those voters want higher spending and high tax and will be voting Labour anyway.
The Conservatives need to focus on getting the right back united behind them first and that means getting the deficit and inflation down further so there is room for a manifesto commitment for tax cuts
How does getting inflation down provide tax cuts - do tell?
As for getting the deficit down - the problem we have is that no-one has a clue where the money is going because thanks to Osborne there is nothing left to cut - except for actual investment projects that provide a headline £36bn of money that actually doesn't exist..
Which hasn't stopped all the Red Wall MPs demanding money be spent now to keep them in their seats because no tax cut is going to have sufficient impact...
As once you have inflation and the deficit down enough, and they are falling now, you can have room for a manifesto commitment for some tax cuts
I hope the Liberals will learn their lesson from this. Don’t run at seats where you are third. I think they should target 30-40 seats at the GE, no more.
Confucius say, political party unlikely to take advice from man who can't even be bothered to get their name right.
Er that is their name. LIBERAL Democrats - Libs is a common shortening. Should I avoid it?
What an extremely funny set of results, nothing less than they deserve.
Wonder if this will break the collective delusion that they're fighting to win the next election not just trying to minimise the scale of the defeat (see their 80/20 strategy).
It's also striking that just from 2019 my early/mid 20s, pretty middle-class+ social circle has gone from about 50% conservative to absolute zero. If Starmer capitalises on housebuilding and infrastructure it's going to be a very long path back.
Christopher Hope📝 @christopherhope · 35m 👀 Letters of no confidence can be submitted in Tory leader Rishi Sunak from Wednesday, 12 months after he was appointed leader by MPs, under 1922 rules.
Yes well there is no alternative and changing the leader again won't make any difference.
Getting the deficit and inflation down further and allowing room for tax cuts will
You can't cut taxes whilst the country is broken and expect to win favour. You need to be spending money, not giving it to the PM's billionaire wife
The level of investment needed across the country is mind boggling to be honest.
Yet government spending is still way higher than tax revenues. Who’s going to have the honest conversation about the need to tax more and spend less?
The appalling state of public sector services in the UK, from prisons, to courts, to NHS, to Universities to Councils is really grating on people. It is going to be a grim winter ahead as more and more cease to function.
Tories talking of inheritance tax cuts is chucking petrol on that fire.
It isn't for the Tories core vote and after they lost even Mid Bedfordshire the Tories first job is to win that back
Actually the proportion of voters, even ex Tory voters, who are affected by Inheritance Tax is utterly miniscule.
The proportion of voters affected by taxes like National Insurance, Income Tax, VAT, the state of our roads, education, NHS, courts, Police, crime and criminals being released back on the streets as prisons are full and much more is far higher.
If the Tories want to be a party that pander only to those who don't work for a living and want to live off handouts and inheritance instead then so be it. They deserve to be on 5% in the polls if so.
In Mid Bedfordshire even the average house is now over the inheritance tax threshold
IHT threshold in reality depends. It can be £325K. It can be, and for a huge % of the population is, £1million.
The threshold should be £1 million for all estates
Meanwhile...yesterday, the prosecutor got a plea bargain for Trump's lawyer, Sidney Powell, in the Georgian election interference case. Who must now testify against Trump.
There has been a tsunami of bad news for Trump in the various cases going on against him. (Although worse for Rudy Guiliani, who is now very likely to be personally bankrupted by the cases against him.)
With the timelines of these cases, especially state cases where he can't pardon himself, I just don't see how Trump can be the candidate next year.
I think people are getting slightly ahead of themselves on Powell testifying against Trump.
Strictly, her plea deal only directly implicates another co-defendant, Misty Hampton, with whom she admits to conspiring to unlawfully access voting machines in Coffee County. She'd certainly be called to give evidence against Hampton because, by definition with conspiracy, at least one other person is involved and Hampton is named. That's if Hampton doesn't also flip, which I strongly suspect she will as this pulls the rug from under her and she's a minor player who'd get a good deal.
But it may be Powell's position that Trump was not involved and this was her acting on his behalf but without his knowledge, so prosecutors will be careful about how to play this as her testimony could, but may not, implicate Trump.
What it does do is move the jeopardy closer to Trump. The man who will really be sweating initiially (with all the hair dye implications that involves) is Rudy Guliani as I understand there are emails indicating he was involved in the Coffee County breach. Although he's not named in the plea deal documents, I think it'd be really hard for Powell to not implicate Giuliani in testimony.
It will be really hard for Giuliani to escape the fact that he's already testified under oath to stuff that's clearly not true. The question is rather whether he too ends up flipping.
To be honest, I can more envisage Giuliani flipping out of a window. The net is definitely closing in very tightly on him, but I'm just not sure he's the type to back down by doing a deal. Sorry to say it as I don't wish physical harm on the man - but give him eight or nine bottles of whisky and a revolver, and he may well step outside.
The Reform vote in both by-elections interests me. Is this a cohort of voters than can be squeezed with the right policies back into the Tory column, or is it, and I fear this may be true, a cohort of voters who don't want to vote for a party led by an PM of Indian heritage. We would all rightly abhor the racism, but I don't think we can discount the possibility that some of the Reform vote isn't salvagable for Con for that reason.
I don't think those are the two alternatives. The most likely reason they won't be squeezed is they neither trust the Tories to do anything they say, nor believe they are in any way competant enough to do it even if they want to. It is a view shared by the majority of the country and the main defining characteristic of Reform voters as opposed to Labour or Lib Dems is they don't trust those parties either.
I think there are lots of things at work but there is something about Sunak that some right of centre voters took against immediately. If you look at the Wiki wiggly line there was an immediate 3pp rise in RefUK support at the very moment Sunak became PM. Not at the time of the Truss debacle, not at the time of Partygate, and not gradually over the course of Sunak's premiership. It's not a massive cohort of people, it's certainly not a majority of Tory-inclined voters by any means, but unfortunately I do think that an element of racism is probably at work and contributing to the Tories' current unpopularity (maybe they just object to his wealth? Possibly, I doubt it).
I disagree. I think it is a reflection of the influence of the right-wing media who portrayed Sunak as a left-wing elite Remainer being brought in by the establishment to snuff out the Truss Revolution.
These are the people who believed Truss' line that the financial markets are part of a left-wing anti-growth coalition. I don't think it's about the race of the PM.
I think 1997 redux is coming. I don’t think it will be worse (albeit from a worse start point for Labour and better for the Tories. I think a lot of people attribute too much to swings in bye elections with pitiful turnouts. If I were an ambitious young Tory right now I’d be thinking about how to change what the party is offering the nation. The old reputation for economic competence, if it was ever deserved or real, is gone. So what then is the point of a conservative government?
I hope there are also ambitious young Tories who are willing to honestly reflect on their failures in government.
Take housing, for example. Osborne introduced Help to Buy in 2013. It was billed as the largest intervention in the housing market since Right to Buy. So why is there still a housing crisis? What went wrong?
Help to Buy worked as intended. It drove up the house prices of home owning Tory voters whilst providing a plausible shield to pretend they were helping the young.
What was and is needed is Help to Build.
Given the skills shortages I would go further and set up a big govt housebuilding department that could both build houses but also offer secure employment and training to reduce the skills gap.
Given the history of government run, vast projects....
What you need is zillions of small projects. The problem we have at the moment is Big Government doing deals with Big Business. Makes everyone feel important. But doesn't actually deliver.
Christopher Hope📝 @christopherhope · 35m 👀 Letters of no confidence can be submitted in Tory leader Rishi Sunak from Wednesday, 12 months after he was appointed leader by MPs, under 1922 rules.
Yes well there is no alternative and changing the leader again won't make any difference.
Getting the deficit and inflation down further and allowing room for tax cuts will
You can't cut taxes whilst the country is broken and expect to win favour. You need to be spending money, not giving it to the PM's billionaire wife
You can put tax cuts as an election manifesto commitment as a reward if voters re elect the Conservatives.
If your main priority is spending more you will vote Labour anyway
Well done, Labour: two excellent wins in very different seats. The people have decided, ('the bastards'), and there'll be a Labour government after the next election. The only question will be how much of a majority they get. I expect more playing it safe from Starmer - don't scare the horses.
A qualified well done to the LibDems: no one expected anything in Tamworth, so it means nothing, despite the best efforts of some to label it a poor showing, and in Mid Beds they didn't win or come second, but they got a significant vote increase, almost as much in percentage terms as Labour, despite both of them fighting it hard. Reinforces my belief that there is a significant pool of disaffected Tories who won't go Labour under any circumstances. Some constituencies will have any more of those, plus where Labour don't fight a big chunk of the vote that went Labour here will go LibDem. It's going to be a good election for the LibDems.
Disastrous for the Cons: Labour majorities in both seats were smaller than the RefUk vote, That doesn't mean they'd have got all those votes if RefUK didn't stand, but it doesn't bode well that they could do that well. as mentoned above, they're going to be fighting a GE on two fronts, requiring completely different campaign messaging. Even a locally prominent and apparently favoured candidate didn't save the, in Mid Beds. Do they have people with the skills to walk that fine line? Do they have people with skills? For any Con supporters look for straws to clutch at - don't bother, they've all gone.
So Greg Hands says he 'doesn't see any great enthusiasm for Labour' - in which case, Greg, how much do people hate the Tories?
Well done the LDs? ".... my belief that there is a significant pool of disaffected Tories who won't go Labour under any circumstances....."?? Get a grip on reality.
The fall in the Conservative vote share was much the same in both constituencies, 28% in Mid Beds and 25% in Tamworth. Your idea that the LDs somehow aided Labour in mid Beds by causing a collapse in the Conservative vote that otherwise wouldn't have happened doesn't hold water.
What the LDs did do was to badly split the anti-Conservative vote by spending much of the campaign trying to talk down Labour's chances, with blatantly false claims about being set to win and the usual false bar charts even in the face of polling that pointed to the opposite, and highly personal attacks on the Labour candidate. They were desperate to come out ahead of Labour. Some people fell for it but overall the LDs still failed badly. The idea that the LDs somehow helped Labour to win is risible. Labour won in spite of their best efforts.
Breathe! We have stress-tested the theory that Lab & LD vying for votes delivers a Tory victory. Lets assume for a minute that some of the LD votes added may have been winnable for Labour - that is almost certainly true. At the same time some - and likely many more - of the LD votes added were not winnable by Labour.
Labour have 2 tasks - convert people to directly switch Con > Lab. Or if they won't do that to switch Con > not Con. The former is a 2 vote swing to Labour, the latter a 1 vote swing.
Lets say that 60% of the new LD voters weren't winnable by Labour. The safest path is have them vote for someone not Con. Riskier is hope that they don't vote at all - might they change their mind? Riskiest is just not bother with Con voters because Never Kissed A Tory.
Tamworth is nor Mid Beds. Your form of Labour absolutism is a risk to your majority. There are scores of seats where you Cannot Win - even in a landslide. Do you want the Con tally reduced by 1 or not?
While it's obviously true that SOME Tories won't switch to Labour and will switch to LibDem, my impression - IMO reniforced by the results - is that it's now quite rare. What is more common is that Tories don't switch to either of us, but accept a potential PM Starmer as an OK result (so a "stop Starmer!" campaign by the Tories won't pay off as the "stop Corbyn" campaign did).
I do think that the result discredits the kind of scorched-earth LibDem tactical campaigning that they tried in mid-Beds. It's demonstrably untrue that "Labour can't win here" in this sort of seat, but the LD negative tactics and dodgy bar charts came close to misleading the voters and handing the seat to the Tories. I remember that you suggested that your party should ease off in mid-Beds once the polls showed the position.
What seems to me perfeclty fair is Verulamus's comment on the lsst thread that the LibDems should concentrate resources on say 40 seats. There are certaibly 40 seats in Britain (discretion prevents me from naming them) where they can perfectly reasonably say that only they can beat the Tories, and gaining 40 seats would be a damn good result, without trying to go for the seats where Labour were second even in the poor 2019 election.
What an extremely funny set of results, nothing less than they deserve.
Wonder if this will break the collective delusion that they're fighting to win the next election not just trying to minimise the scale of the defeat (see their 80/20 strategy).
It's also striking that just from 2019 my early/mid 20s, pretty middle-class+ social circle has gone from about 50% conservative to absolute zero. If Starmer capitalises on housebuilding and infrastructure it's going to be a very long path back.
Depends on the economy what happens with inflation and growth and strikes under a Starmer government
Christopher Hope📝 @christopherhope · 35m 👀 Letters of no confidence can be submitted in Tory leader Rishi Sunak from Wednesday, 12 months after he was appointed leader by MPs, under 1922 rules.
Yes well there is no alternative and changing the leader again won't make any difference.
Getting the deficit and inflation down further and allowing room for tax cuts will
I mean they might be able to get someone in with a comprehensive vision, rather than a pint sized authoritarian whose only policies are to ban his pet peeves and cancel crucial infrastructure. A Pierre Poilievre tribute act would at least be able to reverse the trend a bit and lay the foundations of a 2029 challenge.
Christopher Hope📝 @christopherhope · 35m 👀 Letters of no confidence can be submitted in Tory leader Rishi Sunak from Wednesday, 12 months after he was appointed leader by MPs, under 1922 rules.
Yes well there is no alternative and changing the leader again won't make any difference.
Getting the deficit and inflation down further and allowing room for tax cuts will
You can't cut taxes whilst the country is broken and expect to win favour. You need to be spending money, not giving it to the PM's billionaire wife
You can put tax cuts as an election manifesto commitment as a reward if voters re elect the Conservatives.
If your main priority is spending more you will vote Labour anyway
The problem with that is that the main priority of most voters now is more spending (or maybe the second priority - the first is getting the Tories out, which leads to the same place).
Labour's defeat in December 2019 was their worst post war performance at a General Election in terms of seats in The Commons. They were left with a rump of 202 seats. They only need to gain 126 seats for a majority of one.
As for the Tories, the war on woke isn't working, and the voters don't care enough about it.
One little whinge about the BBC by-election coverage: Why is it so hard to find what the actual result was? Reams and reams of discussion and news about landslides and majorities overturned, but where are the actual numbers? I end up having to go to PB or Wikipedia to find out!
The Reform vote in both by-elections interests me. Is this a cohort of voters than can be squeezed with the right policies back into the Tory column, or is it, and I fear this may be true, a cohort of voters who don't want to vote for a party led by an PM of Indian heritage. We would all rightly abhor the racism, but I don't think we can discount the possibility that some of the Reform vote isn't salvagable for Con for that reason.
I don't think those are the two alternatives. The most likely reason they won't be squeezed is they neither trust the Tories to do anything they say, nor believe they are in any way competant enough to do it even if they want to. It is a view shared by the majority of the country and the main defining characteristic of Reform voters as opposed to Labour or Lib Dems is they don't trust those parties either.
I think there are lots of things at work but there is something about Sunak that some right of centre voters took against immediately. If you look at the Wiki wiggly line there was an immediate 3pp rise in RefUK support at the very moment Sunak became PM. Not at the time of the Truss debacle, not at the time of Partygate, and not gradually over the course of Sunak's premiership. It's not a massive cohort of people, it's certainly not a majority of Tory-inclined voters by any means, but unfortunately I do think that an element of racism is probably at work and contributing to the Tories' current unpopularity (maybe they just object to his wealth? Possibly, I doubt it).
Aren't you reading the tealeaves wrong there? I'm one of those who did vote for Boris*, would have voted for Truss (she had the diagnosis right, and possibly the solutions, just made a hash of the presentation, and was particularly unlucky with the timing) and is very unlikely to vote for Rishi.
That's nothing to do with the colour of his skin, and everything to do with the fact that he's a high tax, high spend, big government, nanny state managerialist, and several successive generations of those in power have ruined the country. That was obvious from before he got the job, so I was "out" from the moment he became Prime Minister.
I'm not a huge fan of RefUK, but that's the clearest message I can send in the current circumstances. Starmer clearly is utterly unfit to be prime minister (Covid showed that - we had too much lockdown, he always wanted more), the public seem to think he's the only option, but he's not getting my vote.
*I'm not sure I would have voted for him again, it seems that once he got into bed with Carrie he suddenly went soft left on everything.
One little whinge about the BBC by-election coverage: Why is it so hard to find what the actual result was? Reams and reams of discussion and news about landslides and majorities overturned, but where are the actual numbers? I end up having to go to PB or Wikipedia to find out!
Because the reporting of basic facts and data, is now total anathema to mainstream news media? Let’s all have emotions and opinions instead.
I think 1997 redux is coming. I don’t think it will be worse (albeit from a worse start point for Labour and better for the Tories. I think a lot of people attribute too much to swings in bye elections with pitiful turnouts. If I were an ambitious young Tory right now I’d be thinking about how to change what the party is offering the nation. The old reputation for economic competence, if it was ever deserved or real, is gone. So what then is the point of a conservative government?
I hope there are also ambitious young Tories who are willing to honestly reflect on their failures in government.
Take housing, for example. Osborne introduced Help to Buy in 2013. It was billed as the largest intervention in the housing market since Right to Buy. So why is there still a housing crisis? What went wrong?
Help to Buy worked as intended. It drove up the house prices of home owning Tory voters whilst providing a plausible shield to pretend they were helping the young.
What was and is needed is Help to Build.
Given the skills shortages I would go further and set up a big govt housebuilding department that could both build houses but also offer secure employment and training to reduce the skills gap.
Given the history of government run, vast projects....
What you need is zillions of small projects. The problem we have at the moment is Big Government doing deals with Big Business. Makes everyone feel important. But doesn't actually deliver.
Ideally I would also prefer your scenario but to make progress from here over the next 5-10 years it would be much easier to do it centrally.
The level of investment needed across the country is mind boggling to be honest.
Yet government spending is still way higher than tax revenues. Who’s going to have the honest conversation about the need to tax more and spend less?
The appalling state of public sector services in the UK, from prisons, to courts, to NHS, to Universities to Councils is really grating on people. It is going to be a grim winter ahead as more and more cease to function.
Tories talking of inheritance tax cuts is chucking petrol on that fire.
It isn't for the Tories core vote and after they lost even Mid Bedfordshire the Tories first job is to win that back
Clearly you haven't seen the condition of the roads in any areas outside your enclave.
Equally tax cuts aren't going to win votes from people who have had friends/relatives waiting 18 hours in A&E....
So what, those voters want higher spending and high tax and will be voting Labour anyway.
The Conservatives need to focus on getting the right back united behind them first and that means getting the deficit and inflation down further so there is room for a manifesto commitment for tax cuts
How does getting inflation down provide tax cuts - do tell?
As for getting the deficit down - the problem we have is that no-one has a clue where the money is going because thanks to Osborne there is nothing left to cut - except for actual investment projects that provide a headline £36bn of money that actually doesn't exist..
Which hasn't stopped all the Red Wall MPs demanding money be spent now to keep them in their seats because no tax cut is going to have sufficient impact...
As once you have inflation and the deficit down enough, and they are falling now, you can have room for a manifesto commitment for some tax cuts
I think inflation will go up in the next few months. The driver will be Owner Occupier housing costs and rents. Every month, thousands of people are coming off low interest rates and going onto high rates, adding hundreds of pounds to their housing costs. That's going to be the case for the next few years and I think housing forms a significant chunk of the inflation calculations. We're already seeing house prices fall, businesses going under (Wiggle and Chain Reaction going into administration showing that consumers are spending less on hobbies and recreation, amongst their other business problems). I'm happy to be shouted down, but I think we're heading into a bit of a recession.
Meanwhile...yesterday, the prosecutor got a plea bargain for Trump's lawyer, Sidney Powell, in the Georgian election interference case. Who must now testify against Trump.
There has been a tsunami of bad news for Trump in the various cases going on against him. (Although worse for Rudy Guiliani, who is now very likely to be personally bankrupted by the cases against him.)
With the timelines of these cases, especially state cases where he can't pardon himself, I just don't see how Trump can be the candidate next year.
I think people are getting slightly ahead of themselves on Powell testifying against Trump.
Strictly, her plea deal only directly implicates another co-defendant, Misty Hampton, with whom she admits to conspiring to unlawfully access voting machines in Coffee County. She'd certainly be called to give evidence against Hampton because, by definition with conspiracy, at least one other person is involved and Hampton is named. That's if Hampton doesn't also flip, which I strongly suspect she will as this pulls the rug from under her and she's a minor player who'd get a good deal.
But it may be Powell's position that Trump was not involved and this was her acting on his behalf but without his knowledge, so prosecutors will be careful about how to play this as her testimony could, but may not, implicate Trump.
What it does do is move the jeopardy closer to Trump. The man who will really be sweating initiially (with all the hair dye implications that involves) is Rudy Guliani as I understand there are emails indicating he was involved in the Coffee County breach. Although he's not named in the plea deal documents, I think it'd be really hard for Powell to not implicate Giuliani in testimony.
In which case may I propose a pardon for Giuliani? I may abhor the attempted coup and his part in it, but I really, really do not want to see more of him sweating.
You prefer Giulini farting, then? Kinky, but that's your choice and I defend your right to be into it.
I suspect Jenna Ellis will flip next, if only because she was downwind of him in that particular hearing. Also, she's already distanced herself and is looking for an exit ramp.
The Reform vote in both by-elections interests me. Is this a cohort of voters than can be squeezed with the right policies back into the Tory column, or is it, and I fear this may be true, a cohort of voters who don't want to vote for a party led by an PM of Indian heritage. We would all rightly abhor the racism, but I don't think we can discount the possibility that some of the Reform vote isn't salvagable for Con for that reason.
I don't think those are the two alternatives. The most likely reason they won't be squeezed is they neither trust the Tories to do anything they say, nor believe they are in any way competant enough to do it even if they want to. It is a view shared by the majority of the country and the main defining characteristic of Reform voters as opposed to Labour or Lib Dems is they don't trust those parties either.
I think there are lots of things at work but there is something about Sunak that some right of centre voters took against immediately. If you look at the Wiki wiggly line there was an immediate 3pp rise in RefUK support at the very moment Sunak became PM. Not at the time of the Truss debacle, not at the time of Partygate, and not gradually over the course of Sunak's premiership. It's not a massive cohort of people, it's certainly not a majority of Tory-inclined voters by any means, but unfortunately I do think that an element of racism is probably at work and contributing to the Tories' current unpopularity (maybe they just object to his wealth? Possibly, I doubt it).
Aren't you reading the tealeaves wrong there? I'm one of those who did vote for Boris*, would have voted for Truss (she had the diagnosis right, and possibly the solutions, just made a hash of the presentation, and was particularly unlucky with the timing) and is very unlikely to vote for Rishi.
That's nothing to do with the colour of his skin, and everything to do with the fact that he's a high tax, high spend, big government, nanny state managerialist, and several successive generations of those in power have ruined the country. That was obvious from before he got the job, so I was "out" from the moment he became Prime Minister.
I'm not a huge fan of RefUK, but that's the clearest message I can send in the current circumstances. Starmer clearly is utterly unfit to be prime minister (Covid showed that - we had too much lockdown, he always wanted more), the public seem to think he's the only option, but he's not getting my vote.
*I'm not sure I would have voted for him again, it seems that once he got into bed with Carrie he suddenly went soft left on everything.
Also- Rishi is the sort of globetrotting big finance sort of guy who some see as the problem. A citizen of nowhere, so to speak. The Green Card more than the brown skin.
Though there's no escaping it. For some voters in some places, skin colour is a dealbreaking issue. I hope not for many, but for some.
What an extremely funny set of results, nothing less than they deserve.
Wonder if this will break the collective delusion that they're fighting to win the next election not just trying to minimise the scale of the defeat (see their 80/20 strategy).
It's also striking that just from 2019 my early/mid 20s, pretty middle-class+ social circle has gone from about 50% conservative to absolute zero. If Starmer capitalises on housebuilding and infrastructure it's going to be a very long path back.
Depends on the economy what happens with inflation and growth and strikes under a Starmer government
Can't be any worse than the high inflation, low growth, record immigration, rocketing taxes and constant strikes of a Tory government eh.
Besides it's a free spin for me - I am skilled enough to get permanent residency in Australia or Canada at short notice, and a good number of my friends are also planning to emigrate there there!
I think 1997 redux is coming. I don’t think it will be worse (albeit from a worse start point for Labour and better for the Tories. I think a lot of people attribute too much to swings in bye elections with pitiful turnouts. If I were an ambitious young Tory right now I’d be thinking about how to change what the party is offering the nation. The old reputation for economic competence, if it was ever deserved or real, is gone. So what then is the point of a conservative government?
I hope there are also ambitious young Tories who are willing to honestly reflect on their failures in government.
Take housing, for example. Osborne introduced Help to Buy in 2013. It was billed as the largest intervention in the housing market since Right to Buy. So why is there still a housing crisis? What went wrong?
Help to Buy worked as intended. It drove up the house prices of home owning Tory voters whilst providing a plausible shield to pretend they were helping the young.
What was and is needed is Help to Build.
Given the skills shortages I would go further and set up a big govt housebuilding department that could both build houses but also offer secure employment and training to reduce the skills gap.
Given the history of government run, vast projects....
What you need is zillions of small projects. The problem we have at the moment is Big Government doing deals with Big Business. Makes everyone feel important. But doesn't actually deliver.
Ideally I would also prefer your scenario but to make progress from here over the next 5-10 years it would be much easier to do it centrally.
The problem is that trying to do stuff centrally, like that, bogs down. See HS2, NHS computer projects etc.
What central government is good at, is clearing the way. For example, the massive build out in offshore wind was made possible by central government creating better rules for the planning of these.
George Osborne, first words after exit poll, election night BBC TV, 2019.
It's not a great predictive record.
I will go to my dying day that he was right. If COVID had not happened we would be looking at a second Conservative victory in May 2024. It did and Boris has gone, but if it hadn't...
Not convinced, though Boris undoubtedly was touched with genius and at the time looked good for 10 years. Without Covid he would still have fallen because of his astonishing lack of personal self control and inability to surround himself with the right long term advisers, and his total failure, having led us to Brexit, to envision what it might be about.
In so many other ways he was a centrist Tory with a compassionate politics.
Was he? He told centrist Tories he was a centrist Tory. He told the ERG he was a loyal right wing ERG-er. I think he found policy dull and solely tactical for ladder climbing but was very good at making people think he was with them.
And that was always going to descend into farce once BoJo had to deal in visible actions rather than just words.
The coalition that he built to win was always going to fall apart under it's inconsistencies. It was just a question of when.
That was the same contradiction within Brexit. Despite 52% voting for it, there wasn't actually a majority for any kind of Brexit. It's why May couldn't really deliver anything. Boris managed, but as you say, his coalition was always going to come apart.
To avoid TOTAL disaster, and absolute wipeout, the Tories have no choice other than to focus on their core vote
His name is Derek Borrett, and he lives with his Lib Dem wife at 26 Coleridge Avenue, Framlingham, Suffolk. I know Derek’s sister and she’s told me he’s “pretty certain to vote Tory, even now”
There’s still a chance they get one vote. Derek. They mustn’t give in to despair
I think 1997 redux is coming. I don’t think it will be worse (albeit from a worse start point for Labour and better for the Tories. I think a lot of people attribute too much to swings in bye elections with pitiful turnouts. If I were an ambitious young Tory right now I’d be thinking about how to change what the party is offering the nation. The old reputation for economic competence, if it was ever deserved or real, is gone. So what then is the point of a conservative government?
I hope there are also ambitious young Tories who are willing to honestly reflect on their failures in government.
Take housing, for example. Osborne introduced Help to Buy in 2013. It was billed as the largest intervention in the housing market since Right to Buy. So why is there still a housing crisis? What went wrong?
Help To Buy did. It was wrong from day 1. All it did was increase the price of houses and the amount of debt. It was stupid and everybody loved it. If you look at the house price curve you'll see that after about four years of static house prices HTB sent them back up again. A genuinely stupid policy.
To avoid TOTAL disaster, and absolute wipeout, the Tories have no choice other than to focus on their core vote
His name is Derek Borrett, and he lives with his Lib Dem wife at 26 Coleridge Avenue, Framlingham, Suffolk. I know Derek’s sister and she’s told me he’s “pretty certain to vote Tory, even now”
There’s still a chance they get one vote. Derek. They mustn’t give in to despair
But how old is Derek? 50,000 die every month and most of them are Tories!!
It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.
And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?
I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.
It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.
The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?
Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...
One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.
Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years
That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.
It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.
The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.
A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.
The argument against changing Tory leader by some in the party is the same that was wheeled out when Johnson was under pressure. Not a time to change leader because of events overseas . The second reason I’d give is to have 3 leaders inflicted on the country without any GE would be an insult and would I think go down very badly with the public.
I don’t see a change helping the Tories much and those who’d want to go for it don’t want the poisoned chalice . Sunak can take all the blame then for a likely GE defeat .
I think 1997 redux is coming. I don’t think it will be worse (albeit from a worse start point for Labour and better for the Tories. I think a lot of people attribute too much to swings in bye elections with pitiful turnouts. If I were an ambitious young Tory right now I’d be thinking about how to change what the party is offering the nation. The old reputation for economic competence, if it was ever deserved or real, is gone. So what then is the point of a conservative government?
I hope there are also ambitious young Tories who are willing to honestly reflect on their failures in government.
Take housing, for example. Osborne introduced Help to Buy in 2013. It was billed as the largest intervention in the housing market since Right to Buy. So why is there still a housing crisis? What went wrong?
Help To Buy did. It was wrong from day 1. All it did was increase the price of houses and the amount of debt. It was stupid and everybody loved it. If you look at the house price curve you'll see that after about four years of static house prices HTB sent them back up again. A genuinely stupid policy.
That was the intent. It won support for the Tories. It was not intended to help the young.
Christopher Hope📝 @christopherhope · 35m 👀 Letters of no confidence can be submitted in Tory leader Rishi Sunak from Wednesday, 12 months after he was appointed leader by MPs, under 1922 rules.
Yes well there is no alternative and changing the leader again won't make any difference.
Getting the deficit and inflation down further and allowing room for tax cuts will
You can't cut taxes whilst the country is broken and expect to win favour. You need to be spending money, not giving it to the PM's billionaire wife
You can put tax cuts as an election manifesto commitment as a reward if voters re elect the Conservatives.
If your main priority is spending more you will vote Labour anyway
Tory voters are affected by the collapse in public services and local government. It is YOUR voters demanding these things as well.
Two numbers to focus on if you think a landslide is on.
271
and
202.
271 was the number of seats Labour won in 1992
202 was the number of seats Labour won in 2019.
Labour start much further behind now than they did in 1997.
#CorbynsToxicLegacy
All parties start each election on zero seats. Labour are clearly the Opposition. If the voters truly want rid of the Tories, and they want to bury them under a landslide just to make sure, then the Tories will be buried under a Labour landslide, regardless of how many seats behind Labour "start" on.
I think 1997 redux is coming. I don’t think it will be worse (albeit from a worse start point for Labour and better for the Tories. I think a lot of people attribute too much to swings in bye elections with pitiful turnouts. If I were an ambitious young Tory right now I’d be thinking about how to change what the party is offering the nation. The old reputation for economic competence, if it was ever deserved or real, is gone. So what then is the point of a conservative government?
I hope there are also ambitious young Tories who are willing to honestly reflect on their failures in government.
Take housing, for example. Osborne introduced Help to Buy in 2013. It was billed as the largest intervention in the housing market since Right to Buy. So why is there still a housing crisis? What went wrong?
Help to Buy worked as intended. It drove up the house prices of home owning Tory voters whilst providing a plausible shield to pretend they were helping the young.
What was and is needed is Help to Build.
Given the skills shortages I would go further and set up a big govt housebuilding department that could both build houses but also offer secure employment and training to reduce the skills gap.
Given the history of government run, vast projects....
What you need is zillions of small projects. The problem we have at the moment is Big Government doing deals with Big Business. Makes everyone feel important. But doesn't actually deliver.
Ideally I would also prefer your scenario but to make progress from here over the next 5-10 years it would be much easier to do it centrally.
The problem is that trying to do stuff centrally, like that, bogs down. See HS2, NHS computer projects etc.
What central government is good at, is clearing the way. For example, the massive build out in offshore wind was made possible by central government creating better rules for the planning of these.
The (possible) plan to give local authorities enhanced planning powers might be part if that. LA borrowing to finance house building on land acquired much more cheaply than builders' land banks would be an interesting spin. It would certainly be sounder economics than their gambles on the commercial property market.
Well done, Labour: two excellent wins in very different seats. The people have decided, ('the bastards'), and there'll be a Labour government after the next election. The only question will be how much of a majority they get. I expect more playing it safe from Starmer - don't scare the horses.
A qualified well done to the LibDems: no one expected anything in Tamworth, so it means nothing, despite the best efforts of some to label it a poor showing, and in Mid Beds they didn't win or come second, but they got a significant vote increase, almost as much in percentage terms as Labour, despite both of them fighting it hard. Reinforces my belief that there is a significant pool of disaffected Tories who won't go Labour under any circumstances. Some constituencies will have any more of those, plus where Labour don't fight a big chunk of the vote that went Labour here will go LibDem. It's going to be a good election for the LibDems.
Disastrous for the Cons: Labour majorities in both seats were smaller than the RefUk vote, That doesn't mean they'd have got all those votes if RefUK didn't stand, but it doesn't bode well that they could do that well. as mentoned above, they're going to be fighting a GE on two fronts, requiring completely different campaign messaging. Even a locally prominent and apparently favoured candidate didn't save the, in Mid Beds. Do they have people with the skills to walk that fine line? Do they have people with skills? For any Con supporters look for straws to clutch at - don't bother, they've all gone.
So Greg Hands says he 'doesn't see any great enthusiasm for Labour' - in which case, Greg, how much do people hate the Tories?
Well done the LDs? ".... my belief that there is a significant pool of disaffected Tories who won't go Labour under any circumstances....."?? Get a grip on reality.
The fall in the Conservative vote share was much the same in both constituencies, 28% in Mid Beds and 25% in Tamworth. Your idea that the LDs somehow aided Labour in mid Beds by causing a collapse in the Conservative vote that otherwise wouldn't have happened doesn't hold water.
What the LDs did do was to badly split the anti-Conservative vote by spending much of the campaign trying to talk down Labour's chances, with blatantly false claims about being set to win and the usual false bar charts even in the face of polling that pointed to the opposite, and highly personal attacks on the Labour candidate. They were desperate to come out ahead of Labour. Some people fell for it but overall the LDs still failed badly. The idea that the LDs somehow helped Labour to win is risible. Labour won in spite of their best efforts.
Breathe! We have stress-tested the theory that Lab & LD vying for votes delivers a Tory victory. Lets assume for a minute that some of the LD votes added may have been winnable for Labour - that is almost certainly true. At the same time some - and likely many more - of the LD votes added were not winnable by Labour.
Labour have 2 tasks - convert people to directly switch Con > Lab. Or if they won't do that to switch Con > not Con. The former is a 2 vote swing to Labour, the latter a 1 vote swing.
Lets say that 60% of the new LD voters weren't winnable by Labour. The safest path is have them vote for someone not Con. Riskier is hope that they don't vote at all - might they change their mind? Riskiest is just not bother with Con voters because Never Kissed A Tory.
Tamworth is nor Mid Beds. Your form of Labour absolutism is a risk to your majority. There are scores of seats where you Cannot Win - even in a landslide. Do you want the Con tally reduced by 1 or not?
While it's obviously true that SOME Tories won't switch to Labour and will switch to LibDem, my impression - IMO reniforced by the results - is that it's now quite rare. What is more common is that Tories don't switch to either of us, but accept a potential PM Starmer as an OK result (so a "stop Starmer!" campaign by the Tories won't pay off as the "stop Corbyn" campaign did).
I do think that the result discredits the kind of scorched-earth LibDem tactical campaigning that they tried in mid-Beds. It's demonstrably untrue that "Labour can't win here" in this sort of seat, but the LD negative tactics and dodgy bar charts came close to misleading the voters and handing the seat to the Tories. I remember that you suggested that your party should ease off in mid-Beds once the polls showed the position.
What seems to me perfeclty fair is Verulamus's comment on the lsst thread that the LibDems should concentrate resources on say 40 seats. There are certaibly 40 seats in Britain (discretion prevents me from naming them) where they can perfectly reasonably say that only they can beat the Tories, and gaining 40 seats would be a damn good result, without trying to go for the seats where Labour were second even in the poor 2019 election.
Added to that is the possibility that Reform (or whatever it is called at the election) seems to be able to attract 5% of the vote. That these votes come almost certainly from people who otherwise would have voted Conservative then the Conservatives are in real trouble.
Well done, Labour: two excellent wins in very different seats. The people have decided, ('the bastards'), and there'll be a Labour government after the next election. The only question will be how much of a majority they get. I expect more playing it safe from Starmer - don't scare the horses.
A qualified well done to the LibDems: no one expected anything in Tamworth, so it means nothing, despite the best efforts of some to label it a poor showing, and in Mid Beds they didn't win or come second, but they got a significant vote increase, almost as much in percentage terms as Labour, despite both of them fighting it hard. Reinforces my belief that there is a significant pool of disaffected Tories who won't go Labour under any circumstances. Some constituencies will have any more of those, plus where Labour don't fight a big chunk of the vote that went Labour here will go LibDem. It's going to be a good election for the LibDems.
Disastrous for the Cons: Labour majorities in both seats were smaller than the RefUk vote, That doesn't mean they'd have got all those votes if RefUK didn't stand, but it doesn't bode well that they could do that well. as mentoned above, they're going to be fighting a GE on two fronts, requiring completely different campaign messaging. Even a locally prominent and apparently favoured candidate didn't save the, in Mid Beds. Do they have people with the skills to walk that fine line? Do they have people with skills? For any Con supporters look for straws to clutch at - don't bother, they've all gone.
So Greg Hands says he 'doesn't see any great enthusiasm for Labour' - in which case, Greg, how much do people hate the Tories?
Well done the LDs? ".... my belief that there is a significant pool of disaffected Tories who won't go Labour under any circumstances....."?? Get a grip on reality.
The fall in the Conservative vote share was much the same in both constituencies, 28% in Mid Beds and 25% in Tamworth. Your idea that the LDs somehow aided Labour in mid Beds by causing a collapse in the Conservative vote that otherwise wouldn't have happened doesn't hold water.
What the LDs did do was to badly split the anti-Conservative vote by spending much of the campaign trying to talk down Labour's chances, with blatantly false claims about being set to win and the usual false bar charts even in the face of polling that pointed to the opposite, and highly personal attacks on the Labour candidate. They were desperate to come out ahead of Labour. Some people fell for it but overall the LDs still failed badly. The idea that the LDs somehow helped Labour to win is risible. Labour won in spite of their best efforts.
Breathe! We have stress-tested the theory that Lab & LD vying for votes delivers a Tory victory. Lets assume for a minute that some of the LD votes added may have been winnable for Labour - that is almost certainly true. At the same time some - and likely many more - of the LD votes added were not winnable by Labour.
Labour have 2 tasks - convert people to directly switch Con > Lab. Or if they won't do that to switch Con > not Con. The former is a 2 vote swing to Labour, the latter a 1 vote swing.
Lets say that 60% of the new LD voters weren't winnable by Labour. The safest path is have them vote for someone not Con. Riskier is hope that they don't vote at all - might they change their mind? Riskiest is just not bother with Con voters because Never Kissed A Tory.
Tamworth is nor Mid Beds. Your form of Labour absolutism is a risk to your majority. There are scores of seats where you Cannot Win - even in a landslide. Do you want the Con tally reduced by 1 or not?
While it's obviously true that SOME Tories won't switch to Labour and will switch to LibDem, my impression - IMO reniforced by the results - is that it's now quite rare. What is more common is that Tories don't switch to either of us, but accept a potential PM Starmer as an OK result (so a "stop Starmer!" campaign by the Tories won't pay off as the "stop Corbyn" campaign did).
I do think that the result discredits the kind of scorched-earth LibDem tactical campaigning that they tried in mid-Beds. It's demonstrably untrue that "Labour can't win here" in this sort of seat, but the LD negative tactics and dodgy bar charts came close to misleading the voters and handing the seat to the Tories. I remember that you suggested that your party should ease off in mid-Beds once the polls showed the position.
What seems to me perfeclty fair is Verulamus's comment on the lsst thread that the LibDems should concentrate resources on say 40 seats. There are certaibly 40 seats in Britain (discretion prevents me from naming them) where they can perfectly reasonably say that only they can beat the Tories, and gaining 40 seats would be a damn good result, without trying to go for the seats where Labour were second even in the poor 2019 election.
The 40 seat strategy is absolutely the plan. There won't be resources to go after even 100 seats. But again again, Labour are very unlikely to win scores of seats where we could. Do you want those seats to stay Tory or not?
What a pair of extraordinary victories for Labour. SKSFPE etc.
Honestly expect probably both to swing back at the GE - especially Mid Beds, as I'm sure a fair amount of DNV and Lib/Lab/Ind vote was an F-you to Nads. But wow. How's that 'war on woke' going, Rishi? Turns out people care more about actual issues than imagined ones.
It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.
And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?
I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.
It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.
The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?
Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...
One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.
Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years
That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.
It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.
The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.
A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.
Even if misconceived, the manner of the north of Birmingham cancellation was even more so.
Completely off thread - but my wife and I have been discussing Blue Peter viewing figures, which when we were kids were about 6 million and are now about 30,000; indeed there was an episode a few years back which got no viewers at all (though I have my doubts about the accuracy of these figures). Anyway, we were interrupted by our 8 year old daughter: "what even is Blue Peter?". Which kind of illustrates the point. Kids don't watch live telly any more. (This has come about quite suddenly; my older two, 13 and 12, don't watch live telly either, but do at least remember doing so; my youngest never really has).
This makes me very sad. My kids don't watch it either. I do think my kids are much less well informed about the world than I was at their age - I picked a lot of stuff up without trying just by watching whatever was on TV. It's hard to have a vibrant well informed democracy when people know SFA about the world around them and get their information from sources that are vulnerable to disinformation campaigns.
There's good stuff still being made- both by the BBC and others. That includes online- it was good to see Map Men get a plug in the Sunday Times this weekend.
What's been lost has been the shared institutions that everyone knew about and most people watched. That atomisation isn't great for society or shared conversations, but somehow it's worse for children. The loss of general interest programmes as the only kids thing on means that some improve themselves a lot and others watch utter trash and nothing else.
In education, it's the Matthew Principle- to he who has shall be given more but to get who has not, what they have shall be taken away.
No PM I can think of has known less about the country they govern and the people that live in it than Rishi Sunak. Not one has had less interest in finding out more. He has no hinterland beyond his family, spreadsheets and tech. His manner and decision making reflect that. Voters can see it.
It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.
And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?
I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.
It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.
The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?
Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...
One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.
Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years
That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.
It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.
The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.
A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.
This is over an hour long but gets to the root of all of HS2's problems
The simply problem is the treasury kills things for laughs.
What we should be doing (and have been doing for decades) is to have a continual process of enhancements / developments that allow a team of people to start on project 1 and move on to project 2/3/4 as the previous one tails off.
To avoid TOTAL disaster, and absolute wipeout, the Tories have no choice other than to focus on their core vote
His name is Derek Borrett, and he lives with his Lib Dem wife at 26 Coleridge Avenue, Framlingham, Suffolk. I know Derek’s sister and she’s told me he’s “pretty certain to vote Tory, even now”
There’s still a chance they get one vote. Derek. They mustn’t give in to despair
Tories have more than one core vote groups, and they are incompatible. (Just as Labour have social democrat and socialist core vote groups.)
With the Tories those core groups are: Populists (complex problems have simple answers) and Burkeans (gradualist and organic development is the Tory way).
While the party itself appears to be in hock to get rich quick merchants. These are not good starting points.
Re the far right vote in Tamworth, Staffs used to be a safe County Council for Labour when most ccs were Tory but ìt's gone very strong right and Leave in recent years. Labour should get the Stoke seats back but I'd expect a high Ref vote. The new Stone seat which is one of those weird cobbled together BC wouldn't change despite protest seats has selected Gavin Williamson....
Christopher Hope📝 @christopherhope · 35m 👀 Letters of no confidence can be submitted in Tory leader Rishi Sunak from Wednesday, 12 months after he was appointed leader by MPs, under 1922 rules.
Yes well there is no alternative and changing the leader again won't make any difference.
Yes it - playing your silly games and knifing each other in public (again!) will bury your party even deeper. So go for it
Completely off thread - but my wife and I have been discussing Blue Peter viewing figures, which when we were kids were about 6 million and are now about 30,000; indeed there was an episode a few years back which got no viewers at all (though I have my doubts about the accuracy of these figures). Anyway, we were interrupted by our 8 year old daughter: "what even is Blue Peter?". Which kind of illustrates the point. Kids don't watch live telly any more. (This has come about quite suddenly; my older two, 13 and 12, don't watch live telly either, but do at least remember doing so; my youngest never really has).
This makes me very sad. My kids don't watch it either. I do think my kids are much less well informed about the world than I was at their age - I picked a lot of stuff up without trying just by watching whatever was on TV. It's hard to have a vibrant well informed democracy when people know SFA about the world around them and get their information from sources that are vulnerable to disinformation campaigns.
There's good stuff still being made- both by the BBC and others. That includes online- it was good to see Map Men get a plug in the Sunday Times this weekend.
What's been lost has been the shared institutions that everyone knew about and most people watched. That atomisation isn't great for society or shared conversations, but somehow it's worse for children. The loss of general interest programmes as the only kids thing on means that some improve themselves a lot and others watch utter trash and nothing else.
In education, it's the Matthew Principle- to he who has shall be given more but to get who has not, what they have shall be taken away.
Indeed. things have really changed. The social assumptions underpinning the UK between 1945 and (say) 2015 are disappearing before our eyes. The belief in Britain as a communal experience underpinned by shared institutions has gone and it makes me sad.
The Reform vote in both by-elections interests me. Is this a cohort of voters than can be squeezed with the right policies back into the Tory column, or is it, and I fear this may be true, a cohort of voters who don't want to vote for a party led by an PM of Indian heritage. We would all rightly abhor the racism, but I don't think we can discount the possibility that some of the Reform vote isn't salvagable for Con for that reason.
I don't think those are the two alternatives. The most likely reason they won't be squeezed is they neither trust the Tories to do anything they say, nor believe they are in any way competant enough to do it even if they want to. It is a view shared by the majority of the country and the main defining characteristic of Reform voters as opposed to Labour or Lib Dems is they don't trust those parties either.
I think there are lots of things at work but there is something about Sunak that some right of centre voters took against immediately. If you look at the Wiki wiggly line there was an immediate 3pp rise in RefUK support at the very moment Sunak became PM. Not at the time of the Truss debacle, not at the time of Partygate, and not gradually over the course of Sunak's premiership. It's not a massive cohort of people, it's certainly not a majority of Tory-inclined voters by any means, but unfortunately I do think that an element of racism is probably at work and contributing to the Tories' current unpopularity (maybe they just object to his wealth? Possibly, I doubt it).
Aren't you reading the tealeaves wrong there? I'm one of those who did vote for Boris*, would have voted for Truss (she had the diagnosis right, and possibly the solutions, just made a hash of the presentation, and was particularly unlucky with the timing) and is very unlikely to vote for Rishi.
That's nothing to do with the colour of his skin, and everything to do with the fact that he's a high tax, high spend, big government, nanny state managerialist, and several successive generations of those in power have ruined the country. That was obvious from before he got the job, so I was "out" from the moment he became Prime Minister.
I'm not a huge fan of RefUK, but that's the clearest message I can send in the current circumstances. Starmer clearly is utterly unfit to be prime minister (Covid showed that - we had too much lockdown, he always wanted more), the public seem to think he's the only option, but he's not getting my vote.
*I'm not sure I would have voted for him again, it seems that once he got into bed with Carrie he suddenly went soft left on everything.
Interesting that you say Starmer is unfit to be PM, at no point in 2019 did you think Johnson was unfit to be PM, in a straight fight, on suitability to be PM Starmer beats Johnson hands down surely
To avoid TOTAL disaster, and absolute wipeout, the Tories have no choice other than to focus on their core vote
His name is Derek Borrett, and he lives with his Lib Dem wife at 26 Coleridge Avenue, Framlingham, Suffolk. I know Derek’s sister and she’s told me he’s “pretty certain to vote Tory, even now”
There’s still a chance they get one vote. Derek. They mustn’t give in to despair
Tories have more than one core vote groups, and they are incompatible. (Just as Labour have social democrat and socialist core vote groups.)
With the Tories those core groups are: Populists (complex problems have simple answers) and Burkeans (gradualist and organic development is the Tory way).
While the party itself appears to be in hock to get rich quick merchants. These are not good starting points.
It was a joke (tho if you have to explain the joke it didn’t work)
The joke is the Tory core vote is literally down to one voter, Derek Borrett, in Framlingham
Christopher Hope📝 @christopherhope · 35m 👀 Letters of no confidence can be submitted in Tory leader Rishi Sunak from Wednesday, 12 months after he was appointed leader by MPs, under 1922 rules.
Yes well there is no alternative and changing the leader again won't make any difference.
Getting the deficit and inflation down further and allowing room for tax cuts will
You can't cut taxes whilst the country is broken and expect to win favour. You need to be spending money, not giving it to the PM's billionaire wife
You can put tax cuts as an election manifesto commitment as a reward if voters re elect the Conservatives.
If your main priority is spending more you will vote Labour anyway
Who’d trust the Tories anyway. They claim to want lower taxes but just raise them directly and via fiscal drag.
I didn't learn from Rutherglen - Lab have greatly improved their byelection machine and the mood for change should NEVER be underestimated. Well done to Lab in Mid Beds - their candidate didn't impress me but then he didn't need to!
I note Cons pointing out the low turn-out and that many of their old voters didn't turn out rather than voting Lab. Yup - correct. An awful lot of them will do that at the GE too. That's where the 2019 Con 'don't knows' will largely end up - sat at home. Especially if Mr Sunak's genius advisers decide on a December or January GE!
Surely it is time for the Truss Signal from CCHQ? The legendary modified searchlight with a stylized symbol of a cabbage attached to project a large Cabbage emblem on the sky or buildings of Britain must now be turned on. Howe else will the Queen Over the Water can ride to the rescue, save the UK, and ensure my retirement on my winnings.
The level of investment needed across the country is mind boggling to be honest.
Yet government spending is still way higher than tax revenues. Who’s going to have the honest conversation about the need to tax more and spend less?
The appalling state of public sector services in the UK, from prisons, to courts, to NHS, to Universities to Councils is really grating on people. It is going to be a grim winter ahead as more and more cease to function.
Tories talking of inheritance tax cuts is chucking petrol on that fire.
It isn't for the Tories core vote and after they lost even Mid Bedfordshire the Tories first job is to win that back
Actually the proportion of voters, even ex Tory voters, who are affected by Inheritance Tax is utterly miniscule.
The proportion of voters affected by taxes like National Insurance, Income Tax, VAT, the state of our roads, education, NHS, courts, Police, crime and criminals being released back on the streets as prisons are full and much more is far higher.
If the Tories want to be a party that pander only to those who don't work for a living and want to live off handouts and inheritance instead then so be it. They deserve to be on 5% in the polls if so.
In Mid Bedfordshire even the average house is now over the inheritance tax threshold
IHT threshold in reality depends. It can be £325K. It can be, and for a huge % of the population is, £1million.
Yup. If you were married & had a house worth over £350k as one of your family assets of sufficient value then you can pass on £1million tax free to your children & grandchildren.
The Reform vote in both by-elections interests me. Is this a cohort of voters than can be squeezed with the right policies back into the Tory column, or is it, and I fear this may be true, a cohort of voters who don't want to vote for a party led by an PM of Indian heritage. We would all rightly abhor the racism, but I don't think we can discount the possibility that some of the Reform vote isn't salvagable for Con for that reason.
I don't think those are the two alternatives. The most likely reason they won't be squeezed is they neither trust the Tories to do anything they say, nor believe they are in any way competant enough to do it even if they want to. It is a view shared by the majority of the country and the main defining characteristic of Reform voters as opposed to Labour or Lib Dems is they don't trust those parties either.
I think there are lots of things at work but there is something about Sunak that some right of centre voters took against immediately. If you look at the Wiki wiggly line there was an immediate 3pp rise in RefUK support at the very moment Sunak became PM. Not at the time of the Truss debacle, not at the time of Partygate, and not gradually over the course of Sunak's premiership. It's not a massive cohort of people, it's certainly not a majority of Tory-inclined voters by any means, but unfortunately I do think that an element of racism is probably at work and contributing to the Tories' current unpopularity (maybe they just object to his wealth? Possibly, I doubt it).
Aren't you reading the tealeaves wrong there? I'm one of those who did vote for Boris*, would have voted for Truss (she had the diagnosis right, and possibly the solutions, just made a hash of the presentation, and was particularly unlucky with the timing) and is very unlikely to vote for Rishi.
That's nothing to do with the colour of his skin, and everything to do with the fact that he's a high tax, high spend, big government, nanny state managerialist, and several successive generations of those in power have ruined the country. That was obvious from before he got the job, so I was "out" from the moment he became Prime Minister.
I'm not a huge fan of RefUK, but that's the clearest message I can send in the current circumstances. Starmer clearly is utterly unfit to be prime minister (Covid showed that - we had too much lockdown, he always wanted more), the public seem to think he's the only option, but he's not getting my vote.
*I'm not sure I would have voted for him again, it seems that once he got into bed with Carrie he suddenly went soft left on everything.
Also- Rishi is the sort of globetrotting big finance sort of guy who some see as the problem. A citizen of nowhere, so to speak. The Green Card more than the brown skin.
Though there's no escaping it. For some voters in some places, skin colour is a dealbreaking issue. I hope not for many, but for some.
But as The Prole indicates, your background is just your background. Nobody would care a jot for Rishi's wealth, or especially not his heritage, if he'd proven to be a staunch defender of the national interest with a set of great policies to address today's issues. He did a whole leadership speech without mentioning cost of living or housing. He's an irrelevant waste of space, and if the Tory Party had a drop of gumption, they'd be handing him the metaphorical brandy and revolver and pointing him in the direction of the nearest library.
It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.
And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?
I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.
It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.
The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?
Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...
One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.
Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years
That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.
It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.
The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.
A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.
The problem being that we need East/West and intra-region capacity a lot more than we need North/South (which actually just means London to the rest of the country). We could find far more useful and viable projects for every penny of that which was going to be spent on HS2 - whether it was the original £37.5 billion or the pre-abandonment £180 billion.
HS2 was the infrastructure equivalent of that old problem that plagues politics.
We must do something This is something We must do it.
As we have known for a while but these results confirm, the Tories will suffer massive losses at the next GE. Although I do think that both these seats will swing back to the Tories at a GE.
I'm a natural Tory supporter but I think they need some time in opposition. However, too much power is not good for any country so I hope Labour do not win too large of a majority as we always need a strong opposition. Based on that I will probably still vote Tory at the GE but without any enthusiasm.
For me the interesting part will be to see Labour's position in the polling after the next GE. There has not been in most people's living memory a time where Labour have taken power with anything other than a golden economic legacy (i.e. Ken Clarke 1997). This time it will be very different and Labour will find it very difficult to do what all their instincts tell them to do (spend more). From a politics geek's perspective it will be fascinating to see how they handle it.
Two numbers to focus on if you think a landslide is on.
271
and
202.
271 was the number of seats Labour won in 1992
202 was the number of seats Labour won in 2019.
Labour start much further behind now than they did in 1997.
#CorbynsToxicLegacy
All parties start each election on zero seats. Labour are clearly the Opposition. If the voters truly want rid of the Tories, and they want to bury them under a landslide just to make sure, then the Tories will be buried under a Labour landslide, regardless of how many seats behind Labour "start" on.
Labour start on 202 seats (2019 result). Or Labour start on Zero seats (this is a GE and there are Zero MPs at this moment). The distinction between these two thoughts is entirely metaphysical. The facts of the matter remain the same, under different descriptions.
The first description is more useful unless you believe that Labour (or whoever) are exactly as likely to win South Holland as they are to win Bootle. Which thought is, as they say, repugnant to the intellect.
It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.
And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?
I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.
It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.
The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?
Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...
One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.
Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years
That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.
It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.
The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.
A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.
The problem being that we need East/West and intra-region capacity a lot more than we need North/South (which actually just means London to the rest of the country). We could find far more useful and viable projects for every penny of that which was going to be spent on HS2 - whether it was the original £37.5 billion or the pre-abandonment £180 billion.
HS2 was the infrastructure equivalent of that old problem that plagues politics.
We must do something This is something We must do it.
It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.
And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?
I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.
It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.
The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?
Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...
One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.
Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years
That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.
It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.
The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.
A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.
Even if misconceived, the manner of the north of Birmingham cancellation was even more so.
Oh, absolutely: that was Sunakian / Treasury Brain vandalism of the worst sort. When you’ve spent the majority of the £ on a train line already, to cancel it in a way that guarantees you will never see any economic return is the worst kind of penny pinching.
They could at least have built it out to Crewe so that it would join up with the other mainlines, but no, even that was too much for the hogoblins of the Treasury.
One little whinge about the BBC by-election coverage: Why is it so hard to find what the actual result was? Reams and reams of discussion and news about landslides and majorities overturned, but where are the actual numbers? I end up having to go to PB or Wikipedia to find out!
I switched on the BBC this morning to find the results but found only discussion about football and then the fact that Eric Cantona was launching a carear as a singer. I had to switch to ITV. Luckily, Richard Madely wasn't on today.
It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.
And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?
I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.
It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.
The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?
Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...
One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.
Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years
That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.
It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.
The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.
A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.
This is over an hour long but gets to the root of all of HS2's problems
The simply problem is the treasury kills things for laughs.
What we should be doing (and have been doing for decades) is to have a continual process of enhancements / developments that allow a team of people to start on project 1 and move on to project 2/3/4 as the previous one tails off.
Instead, the Tories set up a 'National Infrastructure Commission', whose recommendations they ignore.
To avoid TOTAL disaster, and absolute wipeout, the Tories have no choice other than to focus on their core vote
His name is Derek Borrett, and he lives with his Lib Dem wife at 26 Coleridge Avenue, Framlingham, Suffolk. I know Derek’s sister and she’s told me he’s “pretty certain to vote Tory, even now”
There’s still a chance they get one vote. Derek. They mustn’t give in to despair
Tories have more than one core vote groups, and they are incompatible. (Just as Labour have social democrat and socialist core vote groups.)
With the Tories those core groups are: Populists (complex problems have simple answers) and Burkeans (gradualist and organic development is the Tory way).
While the party itself appears to be in hock to get rich quick merchants. These are not good starting points.
It was a joke (tho if you have to explain the joke it didn’t work)
The joke is the Tory core vote is literally down to one voter, Derek Borrett, in Framlingham
Oddly I had noticed. But your joke was as good a hook as any to carry on burbling.
These losses that Ukraine claims Russia suffered yesterday are massive. They can probably take the loss of men but how can 120 IFVs and 55 tanks be sustainable? I have a small hope that Russia is making one last throw of the dice in their recent offensives, like the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, but so far they have not achieved anything.
It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.
And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?
I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.
It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.
The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?
Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...
One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.
Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years
That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.
It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.
The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.
A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.
The problem being that we need East/West and intra-region capacity a lot more than we need North/South (which actually just means London to the rest of the country). We could find far more useful and viable projects for every penny of that which was going to be spent on HS2 - whether it was the original £37.5 billion or the pre-abandonment £180 billion.
HS2 was the infrastructure equivalent of that old problem that plagues politics.
We must do something This is something We must do it.
The question you should be asking is not: why HS2? But rather: why is it apparently impossible to build these other projects?
I note in passing that a country which had built these other projects would probably be one that would happily build another north-south train line as the economic advantages would be obvious & unarguable & we would have an economy which could more easily afford the interest costs.
Christopher Hope📝 @christopherhope · 35m 👀 Letters of no confidence can be submitted in Tory leader Rishi Sunak from Wednesday, 12 months after he was appointed leader by MPs, under 1922 rules.
Yes well there is no alternative and changing the leader again won't make any difference.
Yes it - playing your silly games and knifing each other in public (again!) will bury your party even deeper. So go for it
Getting the deficit and inflation down further and allowing room for tax cuts will
I see. Bribe them hard enough and it might offset the effects of knifing each other? It's a plan I suppose... voter neutral perhaps?
The trouble is that HYUFD and much of the Tory party think the electorate are like children and they treat them accodingly.
Even those of us who are in favour of a low tax, small state economy know that there are times when the country is in such a lot of shit that that just won't work. Although people scorn teh Thatcherite household budget analogy, that is how a lot of people think and they instinctively recoil from the idea that you can have massive amounts of debt and costs and just cut taxes.
If you want to cut taxes then first cut costs. People understand that and wil repsond to it. Spreadsheet Sunak doesn't understand it and, as others have pointed out, neither does he understand people.
It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.
And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?
I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.
It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.
The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?
Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...
One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.
Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years
That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.
It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.
The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.
A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.
This is over an hour long but gets to the root of all of HS2's problems
The simply problem is the treasury kills things for laughs.
What we should be doing (and have been doing for decades) is to have a continual process of enhancements / developments that allow a team of people to start on project 1 and move on to project 2/3/4 as the previous one tails off.
It's also worth pointing out that we keep on completely messing up the BCR calculations - the Elizabeth line is already used twice as much as the upper end long term prediction. It's probably similar for things like a Leeds metro, HS2, a proper Birmingham underground, mid-size city tram systems etc.
It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.
And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?
I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.
It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.
The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?
Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...
One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.
Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years
That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.
It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.
The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.
A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.
The problem being that we need East/West and intra-region capacity a lot more than we need North/South (which actually just means London to the rest of the country). We could find far more useful and viable projects for every penny of that which was going to be spent on HS2 - whether it was the original £37.5 billion or the pre-abandonment £180 billion.
HS2 was the infrastructure equivalent of that old problem that plagues politics.
We must do something This is something We must do it.
The question you should be asking is not: why HS2? But rather: why is it apparently impossible to build these other projects?
I note in passing that a country which had built these other projects would probably be one that would happily build another north-south train line as the economic advantages would be obvious & unarguable & we would have an economy which could more easily afford the interest costs.
That misses that HS2 was also intended to create on rail long distance freight capacity and give an alternative to airlines, eventually for various Scottish airports too.
All that - unless it can be salvaged - has now been pissed away.
To avoid TOTAL disaster, and absolute wipeout, the Tories have no choice other than to focus on their core vote
His name is Derek Borrett, and he lives with his Lib Dem wife at 26 Coleridge Avenue, Framlingham, Suffolk. I know Derek’s sister and she’s told me he’s “pretty certain to vote Tory, even now”
There’s still a chance they get one vote. Derek. They mustn’t give in to despair
Tories have more than one core vote groups, and they are incompatible. (Just as Labour have social democrat and socialist core vote groups.)
With the Tories those core groups are: Populists (complex problems have simple answers) and Burkeans (gradualist and organic development is the Tory way).
While the party itself appears to be in hock to get rich quick merchants. These are not good starting points.
It was a joke (tho if you have to explain the joke it didn’t work)
The joke is the Tory core vote is literally down to one voter, Derek Borrett, in Framlingham
Oddly I had noticed. But your joke was as good a hook as any to carry on burbling.
Fair enough
FWIW I had lunch with a fairly senior and core Tory journalist yesterday. He’s abandoned the party. Sees no point in voting for them, “they deserve to lose”
It’s over. It’s as over as a just bowled over in the over-age cricket comp in Overton
Well done, Labour: two excellent wins in very different seats. The people have decided, ('the bastards'), and there'll be a Labour government after the next election. The only question will be how much of a majority they get. I expect more playing it safe from Starmer - don't scare the horses.
A qualified well done to the LibDems: no one expected anything in Tamworth, so it means nothing, despite the best efforts of some to label it a poor showing, and in Mid Beds they didn't win or come second, but they got a significant vote increase, almost as much in percentage terms as Labour, despite both of them fighting it hard. Reinforces my belief that there is a significant pool of disaffected Tories who won't go Labour under any circumstances. Some constituencies will have any more of those, plus where Labour don't fight a big chunk of the vote that went Labour here will go LibDem. It's going to be a good election for the LibDems.
Disastrous for the Cons: Labour majorities in both seats were smaller than the RefUk vote, That doesn't mean they'd have got all those votes if RefUK didn't stand, but it doesn't bode well that they could do that well. as mentoned above, they're going to be fighting a GE on two fronts, requiring completely different campaign messaging. Even a locally prominent and apparently favoured candidate didn't save the, in Mid Beds. Do they have people with the skills to walk that fine line? Do they have people with skills? For any Con supporters look for straws to clutch at - don't bother, they've all gone.
So Greg Hands says he 'doesn't see any great enthusiasm for Labour' - in which case, Greg, how much do people hate the Tories?
Well done the LDs? ".... my belief that there is a significant pool of disaffected Tories who won't go Labour under any circumstances....."?? Get a grip on reality.
The fall in the Conservative vote share was much the same in both constituencies, 28% in Mid Beds and 25% in Tamworth. Your idea that the LDs somehow aided Labour in mid Beds by causing a collapse in the Conservative vote that otherwise wouldn't have happened doesn't hold water.
What the LDs did do was to badly split the anti-Conservative vote by spending much of the campaign trying to talk down Labour's chances, with blatantly false claims about being set to win and the usual false bar charts even in the face of polling that pointed to the opposite, and highly personal attacks on the Labour candidate. They were desperate to come out ahead of Labour. Some people fell for it but overall the LDs still failed badly. The idea that the LDs somehow helped Labour to win is risible. Labour won in spite of their best efforts.
Breathe! We have stress-tested the theory that Lab & LD vying for votes delivers a Tory victory. Lets assume for a minute that some of the LD votes added may have been winnable for Labour - that is almost certainly true. At the same time some - and likely many more - of the LD votes added were not winnable by Labour.
Labour have 2 tasks - convert people to directly switch Con > Lab. Or if they won't do that to switch Con > not Con. The former is a 2 vote swing to Labour, the latter a 1 vote swing.
Lets say that 60% of the new LD voters weren't winnable by Labour. The safest path is have them vote for someone not Con. Riskier is hope that they don't vote at all - might they change their mind? Riskiest is just not bother with Con voters because Never Kissed A Tory.
Tamworth is nor Mid Beds. Your form of Labour absolutism is a risk to your majority. There are scores of seats where you Cannot Win - even in a landslide. Do you want the Con tally reduced by 1 or not?
While it's obviously true that SOME Tories won't switch to Labour and will switch to LibDem, my impression - IMO reniforced by the results - is that it's now quite rare. What is more common is that Tories don't switch to either of us, but accept a potential PM Starmer as an OK result (so a "stop Starmer!" campaign by the Tories won't pay off as the "stop Corbyn" campaign did).
I do think that the result discredits the kind of scorched-earth LibDem tactical campaigning that they tried in mid-Beds. It's demonstrably untrue that "Labour can't win here" in this sort of seat, but the LD negative tactics and dodgy bar charts came close to misleading the voters and handing the seat to the Tories. I remember that you suggested that your party should ease off in mid-Beds once the polls showed the position.
What seems to me perfeclty fair is Verulamus's comment on the lsst thread that the LibDems should concentrate resources on say 40 seats. There are certaibly 40 seats in Britain (discretion prevents me from naming them) where they can perfectly reasonably say that only they can beat the Tories, and gaining 40 seats would be a damn good result, without trying to go for the seats where Labour were second even in the poor 2019 election.
The 40 seat strategy is absolutely the plan. There won't be resources to go after even 100 seats. But again again, Labour are very unlikely to win scores of seats where we could. Do you want those seats to stay Tory or not?
If the LDs gained +45-50 from the Tories and Labour gained Zero, remaining on 202, Labour would, barring black swans, lead the next parliament, though not gloriously and not for long.
To avoid TOTAL disaster, and absolute wipeout, the Tories have no choice other than to focus on their core vote
His name is Derek Borrett, and he lives with his Lib Dem wife at 26 Coleridge Avenue, Framlingham, Suffolk. I know Derek’s sister and she’s told me he’s “pretty certain to vote Tory, even now”
There’s still a chance they get one vote. Derek. They mustn’t give in to despair
Tories have more than one core vote groups, and they are incompatible. (Just as Labour have social democrat and socialist core vote groups.)
With the Tories those core groups are: Populists (complex problems have simple answers) and Burkeans (gradualist and organic development is the Tory way).
While the party itself appears to be in hock to get rich quick merchants. These are not good starting points.
It was a joke (tho if you have to explain the joke it didn’t work)
The joke is the Tory core vote is literally down to one voter, Derek Borrett, in Framlingham
Oddly I had noticed. But your joke was as good a hook as any to carry on burbling.
Fair enough
FWIW I had lunch with a fairly senior and core Tory journalist yesterday. He’s abandoned the party. Sees no point in voting for them, “they deserve to lose”
It’s over. It’s as over as a just bowled over in the over-age cricket comp in Overton
Surely it is time for the Truss Signal from CCHQ? The legendary modified searchlight with a stylized symbol of a cabbage attached to project a large Cabbage emblem on the sky or buildings of Britain must now be turned on. Howe else will the Queen Over the Water can ride to the rescue, save the UK, and ensure my retirement on my winnings.
Doing history at school there was that smashing period where they kept swapping round the king of England. The guy who was deposed then came back for a cameo at the end in 1470?
That could be Truss. Lets be clear - under Sunak's leadership the Tories are going to get fucked harder than TSE's stepmom collection on Pornhub. They are consistently 20 points adrift in the polls, they're getting beaten by more in a succession of byelections across the country, and the PM has a massive image problem twatting around in his private jet signing millions off to his wife with the cap still on his pen.
When so many Tories face wipeout - and their spiv friends face having to pay back the Covid money corruptly handed out - its is clear that in ordinary times Something Must Be Done.
But another leadership election would surely be madness. The country won't accept another imposed nobody as PM claiming to be a new government as Greg WHoops Hands did on LBC this morning.
So just like a failed Windows update, roll it back. Tory 10.2.7 Rishi edition has crashed. Go back to 10.2.1 Truss edition.
Go on you Tories. You know you want to. Your only hope - as Rev @HYUFD has said - is a slash and burn tax giveaway paid for by putting the workshy British scum ('erm, don't you mean "voters"?' Ed) to a proper day's work making gold-plated taps for a favoured head-chopper football club owner.
To avoid TOTAL disaster, and absolute wipeout, the Tories have no choice other than to focus on their core vote
His name is Derek Borrett, and he lives with his Lib Dem wife at 26 Coleridge Avenue, Framlingham, Suffolk. I know Derek’s sister and she’s told me he’s “pretty certain to vote Tory, even now”
There’s still a chance they get one vote. Derek. They mustn’t give in to despair
Tories have more than one core vote groups, and they are incompatible. (Just as Labour have social democrat and socialist core vote groups.)
With the Tories those core groups are: Populists (complex problems have simple answers) and Burkeans (gradualist and organic development is the Tory way).
While the party itself appears to be in hock to get rich quick merchants. These are not good starting points.
It was a joke (tho if you have to explain the joke it didn’t work)
The joke is the Tory core vote is literally down to one voter, Derek Borrett, in Framlingham
Oddly I had noticed. But your joke was as good a hook as any to carry on burbling.
Fair enough
FWIW I had lunch with a fairly senior and core Tory journalist yesterday. He’s abandoned the party. Sees no point in voting for them, “they deserve to lose”
It’s over. It’s as over as a just bowled over in the over-age cricket comp in Overton
I hope you are right. The Populist v Burkeans fight needs to take place in opposition.
To avoid TOTAL disaster, and absolute wipeout, the Tories have no choice other than to focus on their core vote
His name is Derek Borrett, and he lives with his Lib Dem wife at 26 Coleridge Avenue, Framlingham, Suffolk. I know Derek’s sister and she’s told me he’s “pretty certain to vote Tory, even now”
There’s still a chance they get one vote. Derek. They mustn’t give in to despair
Tories have more than one core vote groups, and they are incompatible. (Just as Labour have social democrat and socialist core vote groups.)
With the Tories those core groups are: Populists (complex problems have simple answers) and Burkeans (gradualist and organic development is the Tory way).
While the party itself appears to be in hock to get rich quick merchants. These are not good starting points.
It was a joke (tho if you have to explain the joke it didn’t work)
The joke is the Tory core vote is literally down to one voter, Derek Borrett, in Framlingham
Oddly I had noticed. But your joke was as good a hook as any to carry on burbling.
Fair enough
FWIW I had lunch with a fairly senior and core Tory journalist yesterday. He’s abandoned the party. Sees no point in voting for them, “they deserve to lose”
It’s over. It’s as over as a just bowled over in the over-age cricket comp in Overton
Surely it is time for the Truss Signal from CCHQ? The legendary modified searchlight with a stylized symbol of a cabbage attached to project a large Cabbage emblem on the sky or buildings of Britain must now be turned on. Howe else will the Queen Over the Water can ride to the rescue, save the UK, and ensure my retirement on my winnings.
Doing history at school there was that smashing period where they kept swapping round the king of England. The guy who was deposed then came back for a cameo at the end in 1470?
That could be Truss. Lets be clear - under Sunak's leadership the Tories are going to get fucked harder than TSE's stepmom collection on Pornhub. They are consistently 20 points adrift in the polls, they're getting beaten by more in a succession of byelections across the country, and the PM has a massive image problem twatting around in his private jet signing millions off to his wife with the cap still on his pen.
When so many Tories face wipeout - and their spiv friends face having to pay back the Covid money corruptly handed out - its is clear that in ordinary times Something Must Be Done.
But another leadership election would surely be madness. The country won't accept another imposed nobody as PM claiming to be a new government as Greg WHoops Hands did on LBC this morning.
So just like a failed Windows update, roll it back. Tory 10.2.7 Rishi edition has crashed. Go back to 10.2.1 Truss edition.
Go on you Tories. You know you want to. Your only hope - as Rev @HYUFD has said - is a slash and burn tax giveaway paid for by putting the workshy British scum ('erm, don't you mean "voters"?' Ed) to a proper day's work making gold-plated taps for a favoured head-chopper football club owner.
Under Truss the Tories were polling even worse than they are now
Mr. M, is there a Russian election or milestone calendar event soon? A desire for a positive story ahead of a vote or suchlike could be the 'justification' for hurling many troops into a meatgrinder.
Christopher Hope📝 @christopherhope · 35m 👀 Letters of no confidence can be submitted in Tory leader Rishi Sunak from Wednesday, 12 months after he was appointed leader by MPs, under 1922 rules.
Yes well there is no alternative and changing the leader again won't make any difference.
Yes it - playing your silly games and knifing each other in public (again!) will bury your party even deeper. So go for it
Getting the deficit and inflation down further and allowing room for tax cuts will
I see. Bribe them hard enough and it might offset the effects of knifing each other? It's a plan I suppose... voter neutral perhaps?
The trouble is that HYUFD and much of the Tory party think the electorate are like children and they treat them accodingly.
Even those of us who are in favour of a low tax, small state economy know that there are times when the country is in such a lot of shit that that just won't work. Although people scorn teh Thatcherite household budget analogy, that is how a lot of people think and they instinctively recoil from the idea that you can have massive amounts of debt and costs and just cut taxes.
If you want to cut taxes then first cut costs. People understand that and wil repsond to it. Spreadsheet Sunak doesn't understand it and, as others have pointed out, neither does he understand people.
The level of investment needed across the country is mind boggling to be honest.
Yet government spending is still way higher than tax revenues. Who’s going to have the honest conversation about the need to tax more and spend less?
The appalling state of public sector services in the UK, from prisons, to courts, to NHS, to Universities to Councils is really grating on people. It is going to be a grim winter ahead as more and more cease to function.
Tories talking of inheritance tax cuts is chucking petrol on that fire.
It isn't for the Tories core vote and after they lost even Mid Bedfordshire the Tories first job is to win that back
Clearly you haven't seen the condition of the roads in any areas outside your enclave.
Equally tax cuts aren't going to win votes from people who have had friends/relatives waiting 18 hours in A&E....
So what, those voters want higher spending and high tax and will be voting Labour anyway.
The Conservatives need to focus on getting the right back united behind them first and that means getting the deficit and inflation down further so there is room for a manifesto commitment for tax cuts
How does getting inflation down provide tax cuts - do tell?
As for getting the deficit down - the problem we have is that no-one has a clue where the money is going because thanks to Osborne there is nothing left to cut - except for actual investment projects that provide a headline £36bn of money that actually doesn't exist..
Which hasn't stopped all the Red Wall MPs demanding money be spent now to keep them in their seats because no tax cut is going to have sufficient impact...
As once you have inflation and the deficit down enough, and they are falling now, you can have room for a manifesto commitment for some tax cuts
I think inflation will go up in the next few months. The driver will be Owner Occupier housing costs and rents. Every month, thousands of people are coming off low interest rates and going onto high rates, adding hundreds of pounds to their housing costs. That's going to be the case for the next few years and I think housing forms a significant chunk of the inflation calculations. We're already seeing house prices fall, businesses going under (Wiggle and Chain Reaction going into administration showing that consumers are spending less on hobbies and recreation, amongst their other business problems). I'm happy to be shouted down, but I think we're heading into a bit of a recession.
You may well be right about a recession, but inflation will almost certainly be lower over the Winter until well into 2024 due to historic gas and electricity prices.
The reason is that the CPI is based on comparisons with what prices were 12 months earlier. So the current CPI compares prices under the Sept 23 energy price cap (£2,074) with what they were in Sept 22 (£1,968). So the current CPI allows for about 5% energy price inflation. But energy prices rose to £2,500 in October 2022 under the Energy Price Guarantee and stayed there for 3 quarters. So from October 2024 CPI the new energy price cap (£1,923 based on comparative usage levels) will be measured against a much higher base of £2,500 12 months earlier. So instead of 5% energy inflation in the current CPI, the next CPI for October (published in November) will record 23% NEGATIVE energy price inflation. That effect will be enough to pull the whole CPI down substantially.
This all has a major bearing on the timing of the next general election. The £2,500 Energy Price Guarantee will remain as the base for comparison with current energy prices up to and including the June 2024 CPI figure, after which the base will fall back to £2,074. That means that, even if by July 2024 the energy price cap is much the same as it is now, the July 2024 CPI will still record a big increase compared to the previous month, because negative energy price inflation will no longer be dragging the whole CPI down.
The July 2024 CPI is published in August 2024.
Sunak's best chance is to call a GE election in Spring or early Summer 2024 when inflation is low and certainly not when it has suddenly jumped up again. That means that he must go to the country before August 2024.
Surely it is time for the Truss Signal from CCHQ? The legendary modified searchlight with a stylized symbol of a cabbage attached to project a large Cabbage emblem on the sky or buildings of Britain must now be turned on. Howe else will the Queen Over the Water can ride to the rescue, save the UK, and ensure my retirement on my winnings.
Doing history at school there was that smashing period where they kept swapping round the king of England. The guy who was deposed then came back for a cameo at the end in 1470?
That could be Truss. Lets be clear - under Sunak's leadership the Tories are going to get fucked harder than TSE's stepmom collection on Pornhub. They are consistently 20 points adrift in the polls, they're getting beaten by more in a succession of byelections across the country, and the PM has a massive image problem twatting around in his private jet signing millions off to his wife with the cap still on his pen.
When so many Tories face wipeout - and their spiv friends face having to pay back the Covid money corruptly handed out - its is clear that in ordinary times Something Must Be Done.
But another leadership election would surely be madness. The country won't accept another imposed nobody as PM claiming to be a new government as Greg WHoops Hands did on LBC this morning.
So just like a failed Windows update, roll it back. Tory 10.2.7 Rishi edition has crashed. Go back to 10.2.1 Truss edition.
Go on you Tories. You know you want to. Your only hope - as Rev @HYUFD has said - is a slash and burn tax giveaway paid for by putting the workshy British scum ('erm, don't you mean "voters"?' Ed) to a proper day's work making gold-plated taps for a favoured head-chopper football club owner.
Under Truss the Tories were polling even worse than they are now
There is freeness in opposition. Truss would never have worked in government (as proven), but in opposition, it'll make the Tories feel better about themselves until they get workable plans in order in 10 years time or so.
To avoid TOTAL disaster, and absolute wipeout, the Tories have no choice other than to focus on their core vote
His name is Derek Borrett, and he lives with his Lib Dem wife at 26 Coleridge Avenue, Framlingham, Suffolk. I know Derek’s sister and she’s told me he’s “pretty certain to vote Tory, even now”
There’s still a chance they get one vote. Derek. They mustn’t give in to despair
Tories have more than one core vote groups, and they are incompatible. (Just as Labour have social democrat and socialist core vote groups.)
With the Tories those core groups are: Populists (complex problems have simple answers) and Burkeans (gradualist and organic development is the Tory way).
While the party itself appears to be in hock to get rich quick merchants. These are not good starting points.
It was a joke (tho if you have to explain the joke it didn’t work)
The joke is the Tory core vote is literally down to one voter, Derek Borrett, in Framlingham
Oddly I had noticed. But your joke was as good a hook as any to carry on burbling.
Fair enough
FWIW I had lunch with a fairly senior and core Tory journalist yesterday. He’s abandoned the party. Sees no point in voting for them, “they deserve to lose”
It’s over. It’s as over as a just bowled over in the over-age cricket comp in Overton
By Overton.
Is his twin batting?
Dunno, but he was bowling over the wicket, and the last ball of the over was hit for six, going over Overton.
Christopher Hope📝 @christopherhope · 35m 👀 Letters of no confidence can be submitted in Tory leader Rishi Sunak from Wednesday, 12 months after he was appointed leader by MPs, under 1922 rules.
Yes well there is no alternative and changing the leader again won't make any difference.
Getting the deficit and inflation down further and allowing room for tax cuts will
You can't cut taxes whilst the country is broken and expect to win favour. You need to be spending money, not giving it to the PM's billionaire wife
You can put tax cuts as an election manifesto commitment as a reward if voters re elect the Conservatives.
If your main priority is spending more you will vote Labour anyway
Tory voters are affected by the collapse in public services and local government. It is YOUR voters demanding these things as well.
No Tory voters do not want higher tax and higher spend, they want a choice not an echo
It must be really chastening for Rishi Sunak, who by any odds has had a remarkably successful and lucrative career, to realise he just isn’t any good at this. Oxford. Fulbright Scholar. Goldman Sachs. Chancellor. First Asian-extraction British PM.
And he just can’t do it. Whatever he tries doesn’t work. How do you get up every morning and start work knowing you’re not going to succeed?
I've been harsh on Sunak in the past and I once said he was a man who had never failed at anything or had known defeat. If you go into politics there's a fair chance that will change.
It could be a positive and character building experience for him and remember he's only 43 (Blair's age in 1997). In twenty years time opinions of him could be very different and he might be the respected elder statesman.
The truth is there may be nothing as ex as an ex-MP (as someone once said) but there's really nothing as ex as an ex-PM. Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Truss, Johnson - all still with us, all still able to contribute to the national debte but do they? If they do, does anyone listen or are their past sins thrown back at them and used as an excuse to ignore them?
Nope in 20 years time his screwing round with HS2 will be regarded as a sign of utter incompetency highlighting the reduction of the UK's status as it's seen as incompetent...
One of the very first things I was taught in my economics degree was that knowledge is everything so if a skill set is required retaining that knowledge is very important.
Which means that you should have a continual set of projects going (rail electrification. nuclear power station developments, roads....) so that you aren't starting afresh all the time needing to import foreign expertise because no-one in the UK has done this in x0 years
That works fine when the projects you want to build are both economially viable and necessary. There were lots of programmes that could apply to. HS2 was not one of them and indeed it sucked money away from other more important and useful projects.
It’s possible (reasonable even) to argue that HS2 itself was misconceived from the start. But the fact remains that rail transport in this country, both passenger & freight, would benefit greatly from a N<->S high speed passenger rail line. The other routes are full to capacity - the demand is clearly there.
The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.
A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.
The problem being that we need East/West and intra-region capacity a lot more than we need North/South (which actually just means London to the rest of the country). We could find far more useful and viable projects for every penny of that which was going to be spent on HS2 - whether it was the original £37.5 billion or the pre-abandonment £180 billion.
HS2 was the infrastructure equivalent of that old problem that plagues politics.
We must do something This is something We must do it.
The question you should be asking is not: why HS2? But rather: why is it apparently impossible to build these other projects?
I note in passing that a country which had built these other projects would probably be one that would happily build another north-south train line as the economic advantages would be obvious & unarguable & we would have an economy which could more easily afford the interest costs.
That misses that HS2 was also intended to create on rail long distance freight capacity and give an alternative to airlines, eventually for various Scottish airports too.
All that - unless it can be salvaged - has now been pissed away.
To be clear: I personally think the misconception of HS2 was in feather bedding it with monstrosities like this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-66803258 to appease Tory voters in the shires. A small number of rural voters drove up the cost of the project by ££billions.
Designing the thing to run at 400km/hr was also ludicrous & completely unnecessary.
The need for another N<->S rail line seems unarguable to me & I expect a future government will end up doing it.
Comments
We have 8 million fewer properties and a similar population, compared with France.
@christopherhope
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35m
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Letters of no confidence can be submitted in Tory leader Rishi Sunak from Wednesday, 12 months after he was appointed leader by MPs, under 1922 rules.
The coalition that he built to win was always going to fall apart under it's inconsistencies. It was just a question of when.
As for getting the deficit down - the problem we have is that no-one has a clue where the money is going because thanks to Osborne there is nothing left to cut - except for actual investment projects that provide a headline £36bn of money that actually doesn't exist..
Which hasn't stopped all the Red Wall MPs demanding money be spent now to keep them in their seats because no tax cut is going to have sufficient impact...
A targeted effort to take votes off the Tories in key wards which Labour had no presence in (of any kind). And we picked up a few thousand votes, with some really good performances in key boxes. The Tory still won because of the landslide of Labour voters going Tory, but we did what we could.
Getting the deficit and inflation down further and allowing room for tax cuts will
Biden has a spotless history of public service… and unfortunately a tragic family, including a dodgy son. You need to stop believing US right wing media.
Sean Thomas had an eight minute flounce.
That Hartlepool byelection loss to Jill Where's Hartlepool Mortimer was peak Boris. It was also peak Tory, a high water mark which will stand likely for decades to come...
Wonder if this will break the collective delusion that they're fighting to win the next election not just trying to minimise the scale of the defeat (see their 80/20 strategy).
It's also striking that just from 2019 my early/mid 20s, pretty middle-class+ social circle has gone from about 50% conservative to absolute zero. If Starmer capitalises on housebuilding and infrastructure it's going to be a very long path back.
These are the people who believed Truss' line that the financial markets are part of a left-wing anti-growth coalition. I don't think it's about the race of the PM.
What you need is zillions of small projects. The problem we have at the moment is Big Government doing deals with Big Business. Makes everyone feel important. But doesn't actually deliver.
If your main priority is spending more you will vote Labour anyway
Sir Keir is too old!
this morning. Maybe that will be the new line?
I do think that the result discredits the kind of scorched-earth LibDem tactical campaigning that they tried in mid-Beds. It's demonstrably untrue that "Labour can't win here" in this sort of seat, but the LD negative tactics and dodgy bar charts came close to misleading the voters and handing the seat to the Tories. I remember that you suggested that your party should ease off in mid-Beds once the polls showed the position.
What seems to me perfeclty fair is Verulamus's comment on the lsst thread that the LibDems should concentrate resources on say 40 seats. There are certaibly 40 seats in Britain (discretion prevents me from naming them) where they can perfectly reasonably say that only they can beat the Tories, and gaining 40 seats would be a damn good result, without trying to go for the seats where Labour were second even in the poor 2019 election.
As for the Tories, the war on woke isn't working, and the voters don't care enough about it.
That's nothing to do with the colour of his skin, and everything to do with the fact that he's a high tax, high spend, big government, nanny state managerialist, and several successive generations of those in power have ruined the country. That was obvious from before he got the job, so I was "out" from the moment he became Prime Minister.
I'm not a huge fan of RefUK, but that's the clearest message I can send in the current circumstances. Starmer clearly is utterly unfit to be prime minister (Covid showed that - we had too much lockdown, he always wanted more), the public seem to think he's the only option, but he's not getting my vote.
*I'm not sure I would have voted for him again, it seems that once he got into bed with Carrie he suddenly went soft left on everything.
Now time to focus on the important event this weekend, the rugby 👍
We're already seeing house prices fall, businesses going under (Wiggle and Chain Reaction going into administration showing that consumers are spending less on hobbies and recreation, amongst their other business problems).
I'm happy to be shouted down, but I think we're heading into a bit of a recession.
I suspect Jenna Ellis will flip next, if only because she was downwind of him in that particular hearing. Also, she's already distanced herself and is looking for an exit ramp.
Though there's no escaping it. For some voters in some places, skin colour is a dealbreaking issue. I hope not for many, but for some.
Besides it's a free spin for me - I am skilled enough to get permanent residency in Australia or Canada at short notice, and a good number of my friends are also planning to emigrate there there!
What central government is good at, is clearing the way. For example, the massive build out in offshore wind was made possible by central government creating better rules for the planning of these.
His name is Derek Borrett, and he lives with his Lib Dem wife at 26 Coleridge Avenue, Framlingham, Suffolk. I know Derek’s sister and she’s told me he’s “pretty certain to vote Tory, even now”
There’s still a chance they get one vote. Derek. They mustn’t give in to despair
The underlying problem seems to be that we are completely unable to build projects that are of clear economic benefit at all thanks to a Treasury that cannot see beyond the next budget & a planning system that drives up the cost beyond all reasonable measure. The only way to get HS2 through parliament at all was to turn it into some gold-plated national monument to Britain. It’s no way to run a railway, or an economy for that matter.
A high speed rail project like HS2 should cost something like a third the HS2 budget: the HS2 costs are a symptom of wider problems in the UK economy. Every major infrastructure project spends interminable years trapped in a planning system that not only imposes insane costs all by itself, it drives up the cost of the final project by $billions.
I don’t see a change helping the Tories much and those who’d want to go for it don’t want the poisoned chalice . Sunak can take all the blame then for a likely GE defeat .
LA borrowing to finance house building on land acquired much more cheaply than builders' land banks would be an interesting spin. It would certainly be sounder economics than their gambles on the commercial property market.
What a pair of extraordinary victories for Labour. SKSFPE etc.
Honestly expect probably both to swing back at the GE - especially Mid Beds, as I'm sure a fair amount of DNV and Lib/Lab/Ind vote was an F-you to Nads. But wow. How's that 'war on woke' going, Rishi? Turns out people care more about actual issues than imagined ones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QU1euu72M5M (yes you may disagree with some bits but the fundamentals are right).
The simply problem is the treasury kills things for laughs.
What we should be doing (and have been doing for decades) is to have a continual process of enhancements / developments that allow a team of people to start on project 1 and move on to project 2/3/4 as the previous one tails off.
With the Tories those core groups are: Populists (complex problems have simple answers) and Burkeans (gradualist and organic development is the Tory way).
While the party itself appears to be in hock to get rich quick merchants. These are not good starting points.
The new Stone seat which is one of those weird cobbled together BC wouldn't change despite protest seats has selected Gavin Williamson....
The joke is the Tory core vote is literally down to one voter, Derek Borrett, in Framlingham
I note Cons pointing out the low turn-out and that many of their old voters didn't turn out rather than voting Lab. Yup - correct. An awful lot of them will do that at the GE too. That's where the 2019 Con 'don't knows' will largely end up - sat at home. Especially if Mr Sunak's genius advisers decide on a December or January GE!
HS2 was the infrastructure equivalent of that old problem that plagues politics.
We must do something
This is something
We must do it.
I'm a natural Tory supporter but I think they need some time in opposition. However, too much power is not good for any country so I hope Labour do not win too large of a majority as we always need a strong opposition. Based on that I will probably still vote Tory at the GE but without any enthusiasm.
For me the interesting part will be to see Labour's position in the polling after the next GE. There has not been in most people's living memory a time where Labour have taken power with anything other than a golden economic legacy (i.e. Ken Clarke 1997). This time it will be very different and Labour will find it very difficult to do what all their instincts tell them to do (spend more). From a politics geek's perspective it will be fascinating to see how they handle it.
The first description is more useful unless you believe that Labour (or whoever) are exactly as likely to win South Holland as they are to win Bootle. Which thought is, as they say, repugnant to the intellect.
They could at least have built it out to Crewe so that it would join up with the other mainlines, but no, even that was too much for the hogoblins of the Treasury.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9-0WGo9Zrk
These are the indicative estimates of Russia’s combat losses as of Oct. 20, according to the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
https://x.com/KyivIndependent/status/1715277446860148923?s=20
I note in passing that a country which had built these other projects would probably be one that would happily build another north-south train line as the economic advantages would be obvious & unarguable & we would have an economy which could more easily afford the interest costs.
Even those of us who are in favour of a low tax, small state economy know that there are times when the country is in such a lot of shit that that just won't work. Although people scorn teh Thatcherite household budget analogy, that is how a lot of people think and they instinctively recoil from the idea that you can have massive amounts of debt and costs and just cut taxes.
If you want to cut taxes then first cut costs. People understand that and wil repsond to it. Spreadsheet Sunak doesn't understand it and, as others have pointed out, neither does he understand people.
All that - unless it can be salvaged - has now been pissed away.
FWIW I had lunch with a fairly senior and core Tory journalist yesterday. He’s abandoned the party. Sees no point in voting for them, “they deserve to lose”
It’s over. It’s as over as a just bowled over in the over-age cricket comp in Overton
That could be Truss. Lets be clear - under Sunak's leadership the Tories are going to get fucked harder than TSE's stepmom collection on Pornhub. They are consistently 20 points adrift in the polls, they're getting beaten by more in a succession of byelections across the country, and the PM has a massive image problem twatting around in his private jet signing millions off to his wife with the cap still on his pen.
When so many Tories face wipeout - and their spiv friends face having to pay back the Covid money corruptly handed out - its is clear that in ordinary times Something Must Be Done.
But another leadership election would surely be madness. The country won't accept another imposed nobody as PM claiming to be a new government as Greg WHoops Hands did on LBC this morning.
So just like a failed Windows update, roll it back. Tory 10.2.7 Rishi edition has crashed. Go back to 10.2.1 Truss edition.
Go on you Tories. You know you want to. Your only hope - as Rev @HYUFD has said - is a slash and burn tax giveaway paid for by putting the workshy British scum ('erm, don't you mean "voters"?' Ed) to a proper day's work making gold-plated taps for a favoured head-chopper football club owner.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/21/uk-budget-deficit-tax-cuts-jeremy-hunt-inflation
The reason is that the CPI is based on comparisons with what prices were 12 months earlier. So the current CPI compares prices under the Sept 23 energy price cap (£2,074) with what they were in Sept 22 (£1,968). So the current CPI allows for about 5% energy price inflation. But energy prices rose to £2,500 in October 2022 under the Energy Price Guarantee and stayed there for 3 quarters. So from October 2024 CPI the new energy price cap (£1,923 based on comparative usage levels) will be measured against a much higher base of £2,500 12 months earlier. So instead of 5% energy inflation in the current CPI, the next CPI for October (published in November) will record 23% NEGATIVE energy price inflation. That effect will be enough to pull the whole CPI down substantially.
This all has a major bearing on the timing of the next general election. The £2,500 Energy Price Guarantee will remain as the base for comparison with current energy prices up to and including the June 2024 CPI figure, after which the base will fall back to £2,074. That means that, even if by July 2024 the energy price cap is much the same as it is now, the July 2024 CPI will still record a big increase compared to the previous month, because negative energy price inflation will no longer be dragging the whole CPI down.
The July 2024 CPI is published in August 2024.
Sunak's best chance is to call a GE election in Spring or early Summer 2024 when inflation is low and certainly not when it has suddenly jumped up again. That means that he must go to the country before August 2024.
Designing the thing to run at 400km/hr was also ludicrous & completely unnecessary.
The need for another N<->S rail line seems unarguable to me & I expect a future government will end up doing it.