Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
hardly err brave given the tories are going to get crushed at the election as things stand . Basically for not being conservative enough especially on the economy - One thing the tories always used to get right if disliked by some for it
So what would be more being more Conservative on the economy? Big unfunded tax cuts? Allow me to introduce you to Liz Truss. Big tax cuts funded by spending cuts? Have you seen the state of public services?
Truth is, it's Conservative policies that have got us into a mess by failing on their own terms, with the Tory Party, like crack addicts, then demanding a bigger purer hit each time to deal with the low caused by the last episode of failure.
the tories have shown (through total weakness) that the largest tax take since WW" has delivered even chitter public services - They could not have been more socialist than Arthur Scargill . If you subsidise anything you get more of it like benefits - try incentivising work and enterprise
A large state is an inevitable consequence of a growing population of dependent sick and elderly people. A large state that prioritises asset value growth and pensioner benefits over wages and productivity is an inevitable consequence of having an enormous cohort of wealthy homeowning pensioners and their heirs in the electorate. I don't know how our democracy is meant to solve this problem. It probably can't.
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
Bits of the Tory party have lost their mind. Surely we are looking at a May election now, the party is falling apart in front of our eyes.
This does all feel "exceptional". I don't think I've seen the Tories fall apart this badly in the ~40 years I've been aware of politics.
Of course, we've seen factions rip each other apart over policy before, but this feels qualitatively different.
I don't think it necessarily leads to a May election though. Pop the tin hats on.
I don't know.
In the 1990s the Tories were riven from top to bottom over Europe. People forget now just how bitter things got after Maastricht. Interestingly we've not heard that much about Europe recently.
This split is more a proxy for the Red Wall Vs the Blue Wall, IMO. I suspect it will soon be resolved at the next election by a mass exodus of "red wall" MP's at the hands of Red Wall voters. Though as someone said down thread, those "red wall" voters aren't necessarily going to be Labour voters...
I agree with you - rancorous Tory splits are nothing new. Before the schisms on Europe, there was a pretty heated war between the wets and the dries under Thatcher.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
hardly err brave given the tories are going to get crushed at the election as things stand . Basically for not being conservative enough especially on the economy - One thing the tories always used to get right if disliked by some for it
So what would be more being more Conservative on the economy? Big unfunded tax cuts? Allow me to introduce you to Liz Truss. Big tax cuts funded by spending cuts? Have you seen the state of public services?
Truth is, it's Conservative policies that have got us into a mess by failing on their own terms, with the Tory Party, like crack addicts, then demanding a bigger purer hit each time to deal with the low caused by the last episode of failure.
the tories have shown (through total weakness) that the largest tax take since WW" has delivered even chitter public services - They could not have been more socialist than Arthur Scargill . If you subsidise anything you get more of it like benefits - try incentivising work and enterprise
Quite. They are spending more than Jeremy Corbyn wanted to in his manifesto.
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
The old station was still there, or at least a decade ago anyway. Looks OK to me - typical York bricks, like the terraces along Bootham (west of the museum/St Mary's Abbey). Maybe it had to be moved a bit?
Infrastructure needs good planning, and old station sites are not necessarily the best ones for current ones. As an example, I think Corby station had three sites: the original one, a new one for the first reopening in the 1980s, and another one, near the original station's site, in the 2010s.
Passenger usage is different nowadays: a station site that may have been good for passengers (and freight...) using horse and carts in Victorian times might not be ideal for modern passengers using cars. As an example: is there enough land available for a car park? Before any reopening, there should be studies that look into these issues, including multimodal, and decide where the best location is. Sometimes it will be where the old station is; sometimes close by; sometimes on a very different location.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
algarkirk didn’t say anything about Reform UK. You can vote for them if you so wish.
Those are Tory principles - RefUK only exist because of the wet centrist miasma the Tory Party suffers from. Thankfully 'the adults in the room' are cruising for a well-deserved shellacking, and with them the centrist cause in the party, after the election if sadly not before.
So the centrists get defeated and the Tories go off to the far right? Then what?
They get smashed again in 2028/2029? As only center right/left parties win elections?
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
I wonder if Andy Street should be on Tory Party resignation watch? He was mightily pissed off with the HS2 decision, and seems a decent chap who clearly doesn't want any part of the current divisive shitshow.
On the other hand, Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan both successfully used their mayoralties to remain untainted by Corbynism. I think Street could probably do something similar if he's re-elected.
Though that's far from certain given the state of the polls!
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
On a post on social media platform Nextdoor asking if LGBTQ+ people in Tower Hamlets feel safe, a commenter who is listed as from Arnold Circus said: "I’m feeling less and less safe.
"Holding hands with my partner is something we now only do in busy places. I’ve even started to receive abuse walking on my own, which does influence which route I walk home, which roads I’ll choose to take.”
Got to feel sorry for Rishi, every time he gets some space one of his MPs puts their foot in it.
Feels a bit like Labour 2015-2019.
You can go back ten years earlier than that as well: the infighting between Blair and Brown's mob from about 2004 to 2007 was quite something. It's interesting to consider how different politics might be if Brown hadn't stabbed Blair repeatedly in the back over the years. The GFC would still have happened (unless perhaps Blair had replaced Brown much earlier...), but would Blair have won the 2010 GE?
The path is now very clear for 30p Lee. Defect to UFUK. Noisily. Denouncing the Tories and everything they don't stand for. Foam on about "proper British values" which are anything but. Become the totem for the angry gammonite WWC. Lead the UFUK block in the Commons which will be bigger than the LibDem block as he shows the way for other angry doomed Tories. With a GBeebies show as a pulpit every week. Winning his seat at the GE.
Or, don't. Offer up an insincere apology and get the Tory whip back, only to get demolished at the election.
Didn't Tice offer him £400,000 to join ?
The rancour in politics is hard to witness and it is only getting worse
I did suggest yesterday that post GE the right may come together probably taking over the conservative party
Nothing in the last few days has done anything to change my view
Mind you Starmer has his own issues with a Savanta poll just now saying that 40% think he has an antisemitic problem in his party
Given the current Govt is the most left wing of my lifetime, I do hope the centre right takes back control of the Tory party!
People keep saying that but then don’t provide examples to back it up… so what makes this Tory Government left wing?
People keep asking me this then totally ignoring me when I provide concrete examples:
- Largest set of tax rises since the war - Huge growth in bureaucracy i.e. civil service - Govt paying part of everyone's energy bills - Huge growth in NHS spending
Well, I agree with you regarding energy bills. I think that kind of government support is dumb and means that energy demand doesn't fall as much as it should.
But are you sure regarding bureaucracy? It is worth remembering that - because spending on the NHS and pensions is baked in to keep rising - pretty much every other department is seeing real terms reductions in spending.
And tax rises? Are you sure there too? The early Thatcher budgets were massively tax raising as she closed the big hole in the finances left by Callaghan. (The charts are here: https://obr.uk/box/the-uks-tax-burden-in-historical-and-international-context/ - and '79 to '83 saw a 5 percentage point increase in tax take as a % of GDP against 2 percentage points in the the last few years.)
Basically the civil service is now 26% bigger than it was in 2016 but still not as big as it was in 2005. The Civil Service is also becoming more senior with an ever higher percentage in the higher paid ranks or more chiefs and fewer Indians if you are still allowed to say that.
These figures can be distorted by jobs being contracted out and other definitional problems but a 26% increase is still pretty remarkable. Much of Osborne's good work has been undone for very little obvious benefit.
As you hint in your penultimate sentence, virtually all of the reduction in the CS numbers was illusory. Maude and Osborne contracted out huge numbers of functions. Where numbers were genuinely cut, gaps then had to be filled by highly-paid consultants, not defined as CS of course. The whole thing was a scam, just to reduce the official CS headcount. I don't reckon it saved a penny -probably the opposite.
We urgently need to start improving the efficiency of our public sector services. At the moment we are spending more and more to get less and less. We cannot afford to continue with this.
It is becoming tempting to just do a Musk and sack half of them to see if anything breaks.
How did that work out at Twitter? Very badly.
So says everyone who complains whilst still using it, yes.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
algarkirk didn’t say anything about Reform UK. You can vote for them if you so wish.
Those are Tory principles - RefUK only exist because of the wet centrist miasma the Tory Party suffers from. Thankfully 'the adults in the room' are cruising for a well-deserved shellacking, and with them the centrist cause in the party, after the election if sadly not before.
So the centrists get defeated and the Tories go off to the far right? Then what?
They get smashed again in 2028/2029? As only center right/left parties win elections?
If a party is not racist, sectarian or homophobic, it doesn't deserve to be labelled as far right, especially not by its supporters. It is a crap meaningless label put on us by Labour supporters, and it says a lot more about those who use it than those they use it on.
I want a set of policies that will create the conditions we need to grow the economy, start to return power to people and families, and protect our security. I happen to believe that conservative policies will do that - hence I support parties that will enact them. It's not about where you are on a made-up right left spectrum, it's about finding solutions and convincing the public that they're right.
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
On a post on social media platform Nextdoor asking if LGBTQ+ people in Tower Hamlets feel safe, a commenter who is listed as from Arnold Circus said: "I’m feeling less and less safe.
"Holding hands with my partner is something we now only do in busy places. I’ve even started to receive abuse walking on my own, which does influence which route I walk home, which roads I’ll choose to take.”
A single comment on Nextdoor is not strong evidence of anything, is it now?
However, I’d be happy if you want to come down and we could take part in a Pride march through the borough. Let’s see if Kemi Badenoch will come along.
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
I wonder if Andy Street should be on Tory Party resignation watch? He was mightily pissed off with the HS2 decision, and seems a decent chap who clearly doesn't want any part of the current divisive shitshow.
On the other hand, Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan both successfully used their mayoralties to remain untainted by Corbynism. I think Street could probably do something similar if he's re-elected.
Though that's far from certain given the state of the polls!
Andy Street seems, from the little I know of him, to be exactly the sort of person the Tories need to get into Parliament and to take (so tempted to just say regain) control of the party. Practical, pragmatic, moderate, results driven. Much, much better path to go down than the culture wars.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
algarkirk didn’t say anything about Reform UK. You can vote for them if you so wish.
Yes. Democracy is: we can all vote, all organise and all stand. It doesn't dictate the rest. People dictate the outcomes.
The Tories used to get criticised for being heartless even if competent ,now they get criticised for being useless and weak . They should worry more they are not getting criticised for the former
Sadly the Conservative Party trashed its brand when a bunch of thick-witted swivel-eyed geriatric loons thought that it was a good idea to put a clown in as leader. The rot started before then when it was insanely decided that activists should have more say over who leads the parliamentary party than the MPs who actually have a proper democratic mandate.
That said, I think they will recover. I quite admire Sir Kier Boring, but fundamentally he leads the Labour Party. They have as many fruitcakes as the Tories with huge dollops of hypocrisy and naivety thrown in. They will fuck up big time as they always do.
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
On a post on social media platform Nextdoor asking if LGBTQ+ people in Tower Hamlets feel safe, a commenter who is listed as from Arnold Circus said: "I’m feeling less and less safe.
"Holding hands with my partner is something we now only do in busy places. I’ve even started to receive abuse walking on my own, which does influence which route I walk home, which roads I’ll choose to take.”
A single comment on Nextdoor is not strong evidence of anything, is it now?
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
That pinpoints the issue the Tory party faces. It has become multiple parties in one. It’s a strong case for PR.
Has it really? CCHQ is strongly centrist* oriented, and since CCHQ attempts to control the selection process, that leads to centrist MPs, centrist ministers, and centrist peers. I cannot really see that the permeation of centrism within the party goes much further than that. I appreciate that some party activists are also centrists, but they seem to be to be the sort of hanger on types who harbour ambitions of being selected as MPs. In other words all centrist influence stems from patronage within the party aparatus. Nobody pounds pavements because they dream of a future for their kids where the country will do exactly what the the Labour Party want to do but with a posher accent.
*I use the neutral term centrist, though personally I find the centrist agenda extreme and loopy.
I guess everyone looks left-wing when you're out on the far right.
Every one of my friends and relations who are normally Conservative voters (and living in rural Dorset, that's quite a lot) and who have expressed any kind of opinion, seem to be exasperated and dejected by the mess the Tories have got into.
I think some will switch to Labour/LDs/Green but many will just abstain this time at least.
I doubt a move to the populist right would attract any back at all.
Just my opinion. I am biased, no doubt.
I don't recognise myself as 'far right'. I deplore racism, and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. I want our Government to behave no less or more chauvinistically than that of Switzerland, France or Germany. I support a mixed economy - I don't support privatisation of the BBC, or the selling off of the NHS. Those are not far right opinions, they are right opinions.
The thing I am not is 'centrist' - I don't look at the prevailing political trends and say 'I'm going to put myself in the middle of that' - because to do that would be completely meaningless and give me no actual conscience, no ability to distinguish what is right, wrong, sensible or foolish using my own brain.
Fair enough, apologies for the 'far-right' slur.
Neoliberal maybe?
For what it's worth, I think Neoliberalism has been found out and had its day. These things swing into and out of fashion.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
algarkirk didn’t say anything about Reform UK. You can vote for them if you so wish.
Those are Tory principles - RefUK only exist because of the wet centrist miasma the Tory Party suffers from. Thankfully 'the adults in the room' are cruising for a well-deserved shellacking, and with them the centrist cause in the party, after the election if sadly not before.
So the centrists get defeated and the Tories go off to the far right? Then what?
They get smashed again in 2028/2029? As only center right/left parties win elections?
If a party is not racist, sectarian or homophobic, it doesn't deserve to be labelled as far right, especially not by its supporters. It is a crap meaningless label put on us by Labour supporters, and it says a lot more about those who use it than those they use it on.
I want a set of policies that will create the conditions we need to grow the economy, start to return power to people and families, and protect our security. I happen to believe that conservative policies will do that - hence I support parties that will enact them. It's not about where you are on a made-up right left spectrum, it's about finding solutions and convincing the public that they're right.
I agree about the unhelpful far right moniker. The problem comes from us having decided to put politics on a left-right spectrum but then conflating economics and cultural beliefs. Alt-right and hard-right have been used but tend just to shade into cultural stuff again.
The Tories used to get criticised for being heartless even if competent ,now they get criticised for being useless and weak . They should worry more they are not getting criticised for the former
Sadly the Conservative Party trashed its brand when a bunch of thick-witted swivel-eyed geriatric loons thought that it was a good idea to put a clown in as leader. The rot started before then when it was insanely decided that activists should have more say over who leads the parliamentary party than the MPs who actually have a proper democratic mandate.
That said, I think they will recover. I quite admire Sir Kier Boring, but fundamentally he leads the Labour Party. They have as many fruitcakes as the Tories with huge dollops of hypocrisy and naivety thrown in. They will fuck up big time as they always do.
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
On a post on social media platform Nextdoor asking if LGBTQ+ people in Tower Hamlets feel safe, a commenter who is listed as from Arnold Circus said: "I’m feeling less and less safe.
"Holding hands with my partner is something we now only do in busy places. I’ve even started to receive abuse walking on my own, which does influence which route I walk home, which roads I’ll choose to take.”
Arnold Circus is the expensive, upmarket, leafy end of Shoreditch. Homophobic incidents around there (and I'm quite sure there are plenty) are as likely to be the fault of people from elsewhere who've come into town for a big night out.
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
The old station was still there, or at least a decade ago anyway. Looks OK to me - typical York bricks, like the terraces along Bootham (west of the museum/St Mary's Abbey). Maybe it had to be moved a bit?
Infrastructure needs good planning, and old station sites are not necessarily the best ones for current ones. As an example, I think Corby station had three sites: the original one, a new one for the first reopening in the 1980s, and another one, near the original station's site, in the 2010s.
Passenger usage is different nowadays: a station site that may have been good for passengers (and freight...) using horse and carts in Victorian times might not be ideal for modern passengers using cars. As an example: is there enough land available for a car park? Before any reopening, there should be studies that look into these issues, including multimodal, and decide where the best location is. Sometimes it will be where the old station is; sometimes close by; sometimes on a very different location.
Nah, you use the old station.
Just like 99% of the rest of us do - nationwide.
Given your occupation, I'm quite staggered you came out with that. To the extent that I wonder if either you or I have got the wrong end of the stick.
The conversation was about station reopenings; where the vast majority of prospective passengers will not have used any old station at all if it closed in the 1960s, and the best site is judged by metrics rather than nostalgia. The idea is to get people to use the reopened station, and the old station might be the best site for that. In many cases it is not.
This is heresy.
You're the sort of person who favoured the redevelopment of Euston in the 1960s and demolition of the Doric Arch.
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
On a post on social media platform Nextdoor asking if LGBTQ+ people in Tower Hamlets feel safe, a commenter who is listed as from Arnold Circus said: "I’m feeling less and less safe.
"Holding hands with my partner is something we now only do in busy places. I’ve even started to receive abuse walking on my own, which does influence which route I walk home, which roads I’ll choose to take.”
A single comment on Nextdoor is not strong evidence of anything, is it now?
However, I’d be happy if you want to come down and we could take part in a Pride march through the borough. Let’s see if Kemi Badenoch will come along.
Oh look, you're dismissing someone's lived experience of homophobia.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
That pinpoints the issue the Tory party faces. It has become multiple parties in one. It’s a strong case for PR.
Has it really? CCHQ is strongly centrist* oriented, and since CCHQ attempts to control the selection process, that leads to centrist MPs, centrist ministers, and centrist peers. I cannot really see that the permeation of centrism within the party goes much further than that. I appreciate that some party activists are also centrists, but they seem to be to be the sort of hanger on types who harbour ambitions of being selected as MPs. In other words all centrist influence stems from patronage within the party aparatus. Nobody pounds pavements because they dream of a future for their kids where the country will do exactly what the the Labour Party want to do but with a posher accent.
*I use the neutral term centrist, though personally I find the centrist agenda extreme and loopy.
I guess everyone looks left-wing when you're out on the far right.
Every one of my friends and relations who are normally Conservative voters (and living in rural Dorset, that's quite a lot) and who have expressed any kind of opinion, seem to be exasperated and dejected by the mess the Tories have got into.
I think some will switch to Labour/LDs/Green but many will just abstain this time at least.
I doubt a move to the populist right would attract any back at all.
Just my opinion. I am biased, no doubt.
I don't recognise myself as 'far right'. I deplore racism, and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. I want our Government to behave no less or more chauvinistically than that of Switzerland, France or Germany. I support a mixed economy - I don't support privatisation of the BBC, or the selling off of the NHS. Those are not far right opinions, they are right opinions.
The thing I am not is 'centrist' - I don't look at the prevailing political trends and say 'I'm going to put myself in the middle of that' - because to do that would be completely meaningless and give me no actual conscience, no ability to distinguish what is right, wrong, sensible or foolish using my own brain.
Fair enough, apologies for the 'far-right' slur.
Neoliberal maybe?
For what it's worth, I think Neoliberalism has been found out and had its day. These things swing into and out of fashion.
Neoliberalism is different: it’s globalist, Blair-Clinton, Davos etc. Definitely not what we’re talking here.
Closest I can think of is “tea party” but that movement had some very American traits like religiosity and strong views on abortion.
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
The old station was still there, or at least a decade ago anyway. Looks OK to me - typical York bricks, like the terraces along Bootham (west of the museum/St Mary's Abbey). Maybe it had to be moved a bit?
Infrastructure needs good planning, and old station sites are not necessarily the best ones for current ones. As an example, I think Corby station had three sites: the original one, a new one for the first reopening in the 1980s, and another one, near the original station's site, in the 2010s.
Passenger usage is different nowadays: a station site that may have been good for passengers (and freight...) using horse and carts in Victorian times might not be ideal for modern passengers using cars. As an example: is there enough land available for a car park? Before any reopening, there should be studies that look into these issues, including multimodal, and decide where the best location is. Sometimes it will be where the old station is; sometimes close by; sometimes on a very different location.
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
On a post on social media platform Nextdoor asking if LGBTQ+ people in Tower Hamlets feel safe, a commenter who is listed as from Arnold Circus said: "I’m feeling less and less safe.
"Holding hands with my partner is something we now only do in busy places. I’ve even started to receive abuse walking on my own, which does influence which route I walk home, which roads I’ll choose to take.”
To be honest, I see more same sex couples (not in that way) hold hands in Turkey or India than I do here.
I'm not sure, outside of places like Brighton, it's particularly common anywhere in the UK.
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
On a post on social media platform Nextdoor asking if LGBTQ+ people in Tower Hamlets feel safe, a commenter who is listed as from Arnold Circus said: "I’m feeling less and less safe.
"Holding hands with my partner is something we now only do in busy places. I’ve even started to receive abuse walking on my own, which does influence which route I walk home, which roads I’ll choose to take.”
A single comment on Nextdoor is not strong evidence of anything, is it now?
57% rise in homophobic hate crime in Tower Hamlets
Thank you for responding with some evidence. That is concerning and I am glad that the Mayor and Labour Assembly members are doing something about it. I wouldn’t want Tower Hamlets to follow the path trod by the Trumpian Republicans you so like. (Which GOP politician recently said gay people aren’t welcome in his state?) I don’t think it will, however. Through many years of constant change, London has generally remained a welcoming city.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
That pinpoints the issue the Tory party faces. It has become multiple parties in one. It’s a strong case for PR.
Has it really? CCHQ is strongly centrist* oriented, and since CCHQ attempts to control the selection process, that leads to centrist MPs, centrist ministers, and centrist peers. I cannot really see that the permeation of centrism within the party goes much further than that. I appreciate that some party activists are also centrists, but they seem to be to be the sort of hanger on types who harbour ambitions of being selected as MPs. In other words all centrist influence stems from patronage within the party aparatus. Nobody pounds pavements because they dream of a future for their kids where the country will do exactly what the the Labour Party want to do but with a posher accent.
*I use the neutral term centrist, though personally I find the centrist agenda extreme and loopy.
I guess everyone looks left-wing when you're out on the far right.
Every one of my friends and relations who are normally Conservative voters (and living in rural Dorset, that's quite a lot) and who have expressed any kind of opinion, seem to be exasperated and dejected by the mess the Tories have got into.
I think some will switch to Labour/LDs/Green but many will just abstain this time at least.
I doubt a move to the populist right would attract any back at all.
Just my opinion. I am biased, no doubt.
I don't recognise myself as 'far right'. I deplore racism, and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. I want our Government to behave no less or more chauvinistically than that of Switzerland, France or Germany. I support a mixed economy - I don't support privatisation of the BBC, or the selling off of the NHS. Those are not far right opinions, they are right opinions.
The thing I am not is 'centrist' - I don't look at the prevailing political trends and say 'I'm going to put myself in the middle of that' - because to do that would be completely meaningless and give me no actual conscience, no ability to distinguish what is right, wrong, sensible or foolish using my own brain.
Conservative centrists do not, in my experience, "look at the prevailing political trends and say 'I'm going to put myself in the middle of that' ". Right of centre centrists (and I am proud to be one) look for moderate practical and pragmatic solutions. It is the populists (of both right and left) who are constantly looking to the "prevailing political trends" and attempt to find a position that angers their opponents. Populism is a dangerous and disastrous path. It was personified by Boris Johnson who was without doubt the most incompetent, dishonest and unsuitable person ever to have held high office, and the Tory Party has to live with the consequences of that ridiculous appointment for years to come.
I did think there was some political subtlety and nuance about Anderson's comments and they've certainly caused a few ructions including taking the steam out of Tice's speech at the Reform UK conference but the other possibility is there are creatures as yet undiscovered in the Amazonian rainforest which have more political nous and Anderson was doing what a politician usually never does - saying what he thinks.
To her credit (and I won't say that often) Susan Hall has come to Khan's defence and while there may be a few in the Outer suburbs who would agree with Anderson, but Hall knows among the voters she needs to win to capture the mayoralty Anderson's comments will have gone down like a lump of cold sick.
How it plays "in the provinces" makes no odds to her - she isn't running to be Mayor of Provincial England.
This evening's two polls show Labour in the low to mid-40s and the Conservatives in the low to mid 20s - the Lab/LD/Green vs Con/Reform vote sits at 60-33 or 61-35.
Some will assert the Reform vote is basically a Conservative vote - I'm much less convinced. There's no polling evidence for that claim nor, listening to Tice, is there a scintilla of respect for Sunak. I suspect Tice wants as big as Conservative defeat as possible so Reform can take over the remnants and pivot the Conservative Party back to the kind of positions it occupied in the 1930s - a revived form of narrow nationalism chasing the ephemeral populist vote.
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
I wonder if Andy Street should be on Tory Party resignation watch? He was mightily pissed off with the HS2 decision, and seems a decent chap who clearly doesn't want any part of the current divisive shitshow.
On the other hand, Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan both successfully used their mayoralties to remain untainted by Corbynism. I think Street could probably do something similar if he's re-elected.
Though that's far from certain given the state of the polls!
Andy Street seems, from the little I know of him, to be exactly the sort of person the Tories need to get into Parliament and to take (so tempted to just say regain) control of the party. Practical, pragmatic, moderate, results driven. Much, much better path to go down than the culture wars.
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
On a post on social media platform Nextdoor asking if LGBTQ+ people in Tower Hamlets feel safe, a commenter who is listed as from Arnold Circus said: "I’m feeling less and less safe.
"Holding hands with my partner is something we now only do in busy places. I’ve even started to receive abuse walking on my own, which does influence which route I walk home, which roads I’ll choose to take.”
To be honest, I see more same sex couples (not in that way) hold hands in Turkey or India than I do here.
I'm not sure, outside of places like Brighton, it's particularly common anywhere in the UK.
I was thinking the other day, I rarely see anyone hold hands these days. Then remembered pecking my girlfriend on the lips a few years ago and and old biddy screaming at us "PERVERTS! FILTHY PERVERTS!".
The Tories used to get criticised for being heartless even if competent ,now they get criticised for being useless and weak . They should worry more they are not getting criticised for the former
Sadly the Conservative Party trashed its brand when a bunch of thick-witted swivel-eyed geriatric loons thought that it was a good idea to put a clown in as leader. The rot started before then when it was insanely decided that activists should have more say over who leads the parliamentary party than the MPs who actually have a proper democratic mandate.
That said, I think they will recover. I quite admire Sir Kier Boring, but fundamentally he leads the Labour Party. They have as many fruitcakes as the Tories with huge dollops of hypocrisy and naivety thrown in. They will fuck up big time as they always do.
Who is this 'Kier' person you speak of?
Ah, a typo I fear. I should have remembered the maxim of i before e except after K.
With the no go areas trope back in the news I was reflecting how it’s been a constant throughout my life. Always about areas of inner cities and generally shared and believed by people not in inner cities.
I get the impression it goes through phases. In the 70s and early 80s it was generally used about areas with large black populations, then in the late 80s and 90s it seemed to focus much more on lawless “youth” of whatever colour. Now it’s Muslim areas. But the same sentiment.
I don’t know whether it’s ever been true. It’s probably always contained some grain of truth (ie places outsiders might feel nervous walking in), but probably also more an extrapolation of someone’s sense of unease into something bigger.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
That pinpoints the issue the Tory party faces. It has become multiple parties in one. It’s a strong case for PR.
While there is always a case for PR, all it does is push the 'no majority' problem down the line. We have, like most countries, a plurality of political positions. PR faithfully (look at Israel) respects this and has them all separately getting seats, Great.
At that point the compromises necessary to majority government kick in.
All we do is stick the compromises up the line a bit, by compressing them not by post election horse trading, but pre election conjuring.
And in the end it is the voters who choose to have a 2 party system. There is a choice....Farage, Gallaway, Lozza, Binhead, Davey, the rays of sunshine that make up the SNP....
The big problem I have with discussions about electoral systems is that everyone starts off with a conclusion (my team doing really well), and then works back from there.
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
On a post on social media platform Nextdoor asking if LGBTQ+ people in Tower Hamlets feel safe, a commenter who is listed as from Arnold Circus said: "I’m feeling less and less safe.
"Holding hands with my partner is something we now only do in busy places. I’ve even started to receive abuse walking on my own, which does influence which route I walk home, which roads I’ll choose to take.”
To be honest, I see more same sex couples (not in that way) hold hands in Turkey or India than I do here.
I'm not sure, outside of places like Brighton, it's particularly common anywhere in the UK.
I was going to comment that you rarely see anyone holding hands these days but see that ohnotnow stole my thunder.
I want a set of policies that will create the conditions we need to grow the economy, start to return power to people and families, and protect our security. I happen to believe that conservative policies will do that - hence I support parties that will enact them. It's not about where you are on a made-up right left spectrum, it's about finding solutions and convincing the public that they're right.
I think you'll find many who now support Labour would support most of that. The truth is in office both Conservative and Labour don't give power to anyone but simply take more for themselves. Indeed, Johnson even by-passed Parliament and parliamentary scrutiny in the name of giving more power to Ministers and Whitehall.
That ultimately is why I see Conservative and Labour as this country's two biggest problems.
As far as security and economic growth is concerned, Starmer, Davey and even Tice would all agree - politics is usually about means rather than ends. Many would indeed argue a conservative-minded person should be quite relaxed about a Labour Government led by Starmer with Reeves as Chancellor.
I'm going to give Paul Scully the benefit of the doubt.
Last word on my response to Lee Anderson's comments. As someone who has stood up and indeed championed British Muslims for a decade to end up as seen as espousing division and likened to Katie Hopkins, I'll bow out of the conversation and leave the two sides to argue...
I've always said language matters. So does perception and if moderates are pushed to one side or another, nothing will be resolved. I'm out.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
algarkirk didn’t say anything about Reform UK. You can vote for them if you so wish.
Yes. Democracy is: we can all vote, all organise and all stand. It doesn't dictate the rest. People dictate the outcomes.
Provided we have the right ID of course.
As an aside - is it now easier to stand as a candidate ID-wise than it is to vote for one? I don't see anything on the Electoral Commission or Parliament website saying otherwise.
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
The old station was still there, or at least a decade ago anyway. Looks OK to me - typical York bricks, like the terraces along Bootham (west of the museum/St Mary's Abbey). Maybe it had to be moved a bit?
Infrastructure needs good planning, and old station sites are not necessarily the best ones for current ones. As an example, I think Corby station had three sites: the original one, a new one for the first reopening in the 1980s, and another one, near the original station's site, in the 2010s.
Passenger usage is different nowadays: a station site that may have been good for passengers (and freight...) using horse and carts in Victorian times might not be ideal for modern passengers using cars. As an example: is there enough land available for a car park? Before any reopening, there should be studies that look into these issues, including multimodal, and decide where the best location is. Sometimes it will be where the old station is; sometimes close by; sometimes on a very different location.
Nah, you use the old station.
Just like 99% of the rest of us do - nationwide.
Given your occupation, I'm quite staggered you came out with that. To the extent that I wonder if either you or I have got the wrong end of the stick.
The conversation was about station reopenings; where the vast majority of prospective passengers will not have used any old station at all if it closed in the 1960s, and the best site is judged by metrics rather than nostalgia. The idea is to get people to use the reopened station, and the old station might be the best site for that. In many cases it is not.
This is heresy.
You're the sort of person who favoured the redevelopment of Euston in the 1960s and demolition of the Doric Arch.
If you actually read my posts you'd realise how hilariously and stupidly you are off the mark with that comment.
We're not talking about Euston. We're talking about a host of small towns, and even villages, that were once rail served. Often the old station site is perfect and available. Often it is not. These new stations cost millions - and it is important to site them so they get as many new passengers as possible. If you get more passengers on a new site, why be beholden to the old? I' not talking about moving currently-open stations (though that does happen, see below); but new stations. Often the villages and towns have grown since then, and the natural axis of the settlement might be different.
Also note that rail companies sometimes moved stations in ye olden days as traffic and other factors came into play.
And if an old site was reopened, the old buildings might be demolished, as I think happened at the new Ilkeston station (though the old station at the site had a different name). Modern regulations need platforms to be wider; access to be different, and if you're building new, there are no grandfather rights.
As a modern example of stations moving, Bromsgrove station - which was still open - was moved a few years back. So I think was Rochester at about the same time.
The big problem I have with discussions about electoral systems is that everyone starts off with a conclusion (my team doing really well), and then works back from there.
Moast debates/arguments start from positions of motivated self interest. It's challenging those which informs the discussion. To a point, you're right in that the voting system is peripheral to the political culture and trying to figure out what moving to PR would mean for the UK and using the example of other countries is ridiculous.
The question is how do you evolve the political culture so it transcends the voting system and provides good governance supported by adequate and appropriate levels of scrutiny ? Indeed, one might argue the example of other systems shows populist or personality-led parties can achieve much more under PR than FPTP which in theory favours parties which are broad based coalitions.
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
Good design costs money.
I thought that Network Rail had a decent set of template designs to use when building a new station - I take it no one has looked at them.
BR used to have a particularly nasty sort of standard modular design in the 1960s - I forget the name but it made a Bayko set look positively sophisticated. I suppose it did make it easier to replace high-maintenance Victorian buildings with something a bit more than a glorified bus shelter, and witht he size and layout to match the needs, but it would be a shame if we were going back to those days.
Anything built along those lines that hasn't already been rebuilt will need to be replaced by the end of the decade...
That's it. Oxford was one such, really manky. One would have preferred Max Beerbohm's take on the mock Victorian gothic of the older station (not counting the LNWR Crystal Palace modular job which was a tyre depot when I used to visit my chums there and crawl the pubs and quirky heritage of that kind):
That old bell, presage of a train, had just sounded through Oxford station; and the undergraduates who were waiting there, gay figures in tweed or flannel, moved to the margin of the platform and gazed idly up the line. Young and careless, in the glow of the afternoon sunshine, they struck a sharp note of incongruity with the worn boards they stood on, with the fading signals and grey eternal walls of that antique station, which, familiar to them and insignificant, does yet whisper to the tourist the last enchantments of the Middle Age.
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
The old station was still there, or at least a decade ago anyway. Looks OK to me - typical York bricks, like the terraces along Bootham (west of the museum/St Mary's Abbey). Maybe it had to be moved a bit?
Infrastructure needs good planning, and old station sites are not necessarily the best ones for current ones. As an example, I think Corby station had three sites: the original one, a new one for the first reopening in the 1980s, and another one, near the original station's site, in the 2010s.
Passenger usage is different nowadays: a station site that may have been good for passengers (and freight...) using horse and carts in Victorian times might not be ideal for modern passengers using cars. As an example: is there enough land available for a car park? Before any reopening, there should be studies that look into these issues, including multimodal, and decide where the best location is. Sometimes it will be where the old station is; sometimes close by; sometimes on a very different location.
Nah, you use the old station.
Just like 99% of the rest of us do - nationwide.
Given your occupation, I'm quite staggered you came out with that. To the extent that I wonder if either you or I have got the wrong end of the stick.
The conversation was about station reopenings; where the vast majority of prospective passengers will not have used any old station at all if it closed in the 1960s, and the best site is judged by metrics rather than nostalgia. The idea is to get people to use the reopened station, and the old station might be the best site for that. In many cases it is not.
This is heresy.
You're the sort of person who favoured the redevelopment of Euston in the 1960s and demolition of the Doric Arch.
If you actually read my posts you'd realise how hilariously and stupidly you are off the mark with that comment.
We're not talking about Euston. We're talking about a host of small towns, and even villages, that were once rail served. Often the old station site is perfect and available. Often it is not. These new stations cost millions - and it is important to site them so they get as many new passengers as possible. If you get more passengers on a new site, why be beholden to the old? I' not talking about moving currently-open stations (though that does happen, see below); but new stations. Often the villages and towns have grown since then, and the natural axis of the settlement might be different.
Also note that rail companies sometimes moved stations in ye olden days as traffic and other factors came into play.
And if an old site was reopened, the old buildings might be demolished, as I think happened at the new Ilkeston station (though the old station at the site had a different name). Modern regulations need platforms to be wider; access to be different, and if you're building new, there are no grandfather rights.
As a modern example of stations moving, Bromsgrove station - which was still open - was moved a few years back. So I think was Rochester at about the same time.
Elgin. No longer a delta junction, needing to simplify signalling (it used to have two signal boxes one at each end and an official BR cycle to get between the two IIRC).
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
That pinpoints the issue the Tory party faces. It has become multiple parties in one. It’s a strong case for PR.
Has it really? CCHQ is strongly centrist* oriented, and since CCHQ attempts to control the selection process, that leads to centrist MPs, centrist ministers, and centrist peers. I cannot really see that the permeation of centrism within the party goes much further than that. I appreciate that some party activists are also centrists, but they seem to be to be the sort of hanger on types who harbour ambitions of being selected as MPs. In other words all centrist influence stems from patronage within the party aparatus. Nobody pounds pavements because they dream of a future for their kids where the country will do exactly what the the Labour Party want to do but with a posher accent.
*I use the neutral term centrist, though personally I find the centrist agenda extreme and loopy.
I guess everyone looks left-wing when you're out on the far right.
Every one of my friends and relations who are normally Conservative voters (and living in rural Dorset, that's quite a lot) and who have expressed any kind of opinion, seem to be exasperated and dejected by the mess the Tories have got into.
I think some will switch to Labour/LDs/Green but many will just abstain this time at least.
I doubt a move to the populist right would attract any back at all.
Just my opinion. I am biased, no doubt.
I don't recognise myself as 'far right'. I deplore racism, and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. I want our Government to behave no less or more chauvinistically than that of Switzerland, France or Germany. I support a mixed economy - I don't support privatisation of the BBC, or the selling off of the NHS. Those are not far right opinions, they are right opinions.
The thing I am not is 'centrist' - I don't look at the prevailing political trends and say 'I'm going to put myself in the middle of that' - because to do that would be completely meaningless and give me no actual conscience, no ability to distinguish what is right, wrong, sensible or foolish using my own brain.
Conservative centrists do not, in my experience, "look at the prevailing political trends and say 'I'm going to put myself in the middle of that' ". Right of centre centrists (and I am proud to be one) look for moderate practical and pragmatic solutions. It is the populists (of both right and left) who are constantly looking to the "prevailing political trends" and attempt to find a position that angers their opponents. Populism is a dangerous and disastrous path. It was personified by Boris Johnson who was without doubt the most incompetent, dishonest and unsuitable person ever to have held high office, and the Tory Party has to live with the consequences of that ridiculous appointment for years to come.
15 years ago, the centrist position on gay marriage was that civil partnerships should be allowed but that marriage was a sacred bond between man and woman and should remain so. Hillary Clinton espoused this opinion. Today, anyone who objects to gay marriage would be classified as homophobic. That shows me that the prior position was always just a 'let's be reasonable guys' triangulation, and that as campaigners have moved the agenda in one direction, centrists have gone along with it, just in the slightly slower lane. This is not an argument against gay marriage, just an argument that centrism is nothing. It is an empty belief system. Real wisdom is immutable; it doesn't just get swept along every few years.
I note Susan Hall uses the approved Conservative Party jargon of "anti-Muslim hatred" rather than saying "Islamophobia". God knows why they feel the need to quibble over this. Kemi Badenoch tried explaining.
Badenoch clearly thinks she's done a gotcha. But I would ask how this has anything to do with Lee Anderson? Is he anti-Muslim, Islamophobic, both, neither? And what difference does it make?
I would also question her motive for making the distinction. Why is anti-semitism a thing (which she calls out regularly), and Islamophobia not, given they have identical meanings, but slightly different etymologies? I suspect it is less a question of anti OK, phobia not OK, than Jew OK, Muslim not OK.
I'm going to give Paul Scully the benefit of the doubt.
Last word on my response to Lee Anderson's comments. As someone who has stood up and indeed championed British Muslims for a decade to end up as seen as espousing division and likened to Katie Hopkins, I'll bow out of the conversation and leave the two sides to argue...
I've always said language matters. So does perception and if moderates are pushed to one side or another, nothing will be resolved. I'm out.
This is the Paul Scully who was going to be the Conservative Mayoral candidate for London. He's actually made Susan Hall look reasonable today (which is something I never thought would happen).
I don't know what a "no-go" area looks like. Londonderry had one until Operation Motorman and there have always been areas of every town and city you don't visit alone at night but above and beyond that, what was Scully implying?
A "no-go" area for whom? I'm a White British person in East Ham so I'm a minority but am I harrassed or abused in the High Street? To be blunt, it's busy and bustling but that's all.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
hardly err brave given the tories are going to get crushed at the election as things stand . Basically for not being conservative enough especially on the economy - One thing the tories always used to get right if disliked by some for it
So what would be more being more Conservative on the economy? Big unfunded tax cuts? Allow me to introduce you to Liz Truss. Big tax cuts funded by spending cuts? Have you seen the state of public services?
Truth is, it's Conservative policies that have got us into a mess by failing on their own terms, with the Tory Party, like crack addicts, then demanding a bigger purer hit each time to deal with the low caused by the last episode of failure.
the tories have shown (through total weakness) that the largest tax take since WW" has delivered even chitter public services - They could not have been more socialist than Arthur Scargill . If you subsidise anything you get more of it like benefits - try incentivising work and enterprise
If you want to incentivise work, then tax work less, and tax wealth, property and land more.
The Tories used to get criticised for being heartless even if competent ,now they get criticised for being useless and weak . They should worry more they are not getting criticised for the former
Sadly the Conservative Party trashed its brand when a bunch of thick-witted swivel-eyed geriatric loons thought that it was a good idea to put a clown in as leader. The rot started before then when it was insanely decided that activists should have more say over who leads the parliamentary party than the MPs who actually have a proper democratic mandate.
That said, I think they will recover. I quite admire Sir Kier Boring, but fundamentally he leads the Labour Party. They have as many fruitcakes as the Tories with huge dollops of hypocrisy and naivety thrown in. They will fuck up big time as they always do.
Who is this 'Kier' person you speak of?
Ah, a typo I fear. I should have remembered the maxim of i before e except after K.
Tbh I have to check every time I type it - not helped by autocorrupt changing Keir to Kier half the time.
I want a set of policies that will create the conditions we need to grow the economy, start to return power to people and families, and protect our security. I happen to believe that conservative policies will do that - hence I support parties that will enact them. It's not about where you are on a made-up right left spectrum, it's about finding solutions and convincing the public that they're right.
I think you'll find many who now support Labour would support most of that. The truth is in office both Conservative and Labour don't give power to anyone but simply take more for themselves. Indeed, Johnson even by-passed Parliament and parliamentary scrutiny in the name of giving more power to Ministers and Whitehall.
That ultimately is why I see Conservative and Labour as this country's two biggest problems.
As far as security and economic growth is concerned, Starmer, Davey and even Tice would all agree - politics is usually about means rather than ends. Many would indeed argue a conservative-minded person should be quite relaxed about a Labour Government led by Starmer with Reeves as Chancellor.
Oh absolutely. The Tory faction that actually prioritises a low tax environment above everything else will be horrified, but the faction that is most interested in defending the right of the already wealthy to accumulate loot and pass it on tax-free to their heirs will find little to object to in the next Labour government. They strike me very much as a Camerosborne tribute act: an ever increasing share of national wealth to be spaffed on elderly hand outs and house price inflation, paid for by more austerity and steeper rents and mortgages for everyone else.
There are more public spending cuts and fiscal drag on income taxation coming after the next election, regardless of who wins it, and the campaign will be a tissue of lies to cover up the real nature of the choice that is coming: between two virtually indistinguishable teams of suits planning to manage decline in a near-identical fashion. We might as well not bother TBH.
The Tories used to get criticised for being heartless even if competent ,now they get criticised for being useless and weak . They should worry more they are not getting criticised for the former
Sadly the Conservative Party trashed its brand when a bunch of thick-witted swivel-eyed geriatric loons thought that it was a good idea to put a clown in as leader. The rot started before then when it was insanely decided that activists should have more say over who leads the parliamentary party than the MPs who actually have a proper democratic mandate.
That said, I think they will recover. I quite admire Sir Kier Boring, but fundamentally he leads the Labour Party. They have as many fruitcakes as the Tories with huge dollops of hypocrisy and naivety thrown in. They will fuck up big time as they always do.
Who is this 'Kier' person you speak of?
Ah, a typo I fear. I should have remembered the maxim of i before e except after K.
Tbh I have to check every time I type it - not helped by autocorrupt changing Keir to Kier half the time.
You're not a papermaker in the day job by any chance?
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
You assume that people will vote according to their identity their whole lives long. I think people will vote based on an assessment of who is going to form a Government that will be more beneficial to them, and will change their allegiances accordingly in ways hitherto unimagined. Quite apart from the fact that the big state approach is rapidly running out of road affordability-wise.
I don't assume people will vote according to their identities their whole lives long. What we have seen in recent times though is that the long-established trend of people shifting right as they age has stopped for those born from the late 80s onwards and gone into reverse.
I agree, people will vote for a government that they feel will be beneficial to them - but after 14 years of Tories it's not looking like the right at the moment - and likely won't be for a while, without changes, as the right are largely to blame for policies that were billed as doing the things you claim to want, but failed on their own terms.
Austerity was supposed to cut the state. It didn't work because the politically easiest bits to do and way of doing it (salami slicing, protecting spending universal spending on the elderly, cancelling investment, lumping cuts onto local government, and pay freezes) merely stored up problems for later - when they will cost you.
Then Brexit was supposed to cut immigration, and free us from the tyranny of bureaucracy, making us all richer in the process. But of course immigration is up, businesses face more red tape than ever and we're poorer. Again. The Tory right got what it lusted after, we found out it doesn't work. So like any good addict, their answer is to demand more of it.
And therein lies the problem - a smaller state and lower immigration are perfectly valid goals. But by putting the cart before the horse and believing in magical answers rather than hard work and sometimes counterintuitive thinking. It ends up in the mess we have now of making absolutely everyone unhappy.
You've had your 'real conservatism' it's just like real communism. It fails, then its proponents claim it's never been tried.
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
The old station was still there, or at least a decade ago anyway. Looks OK to me - typical York bricks, like the terraces along Bootham (west of the museum/St Mary's Abbey). Maybe it had to be moved a bit?
Infrastructure needs good planning, and old station sites are not necessarily the best ones for current ones. As an example, I think Corby station had three sites: the original one, a new one for the first reopening in the 1980s, and another one, near the original station's site, in the 2010s.
Passenger usage is different nowadays: a station site that may have been good for passengers (and freight...) using horse and carts in Victorian times might not be ideal for modern passengers using cars. As an example: is there enough land available for a car park? Before any reopening, there should be studies that look into these issues, including multimodal, and decide where the best location is. Sometimes it will be where the old station is; sometimes close by; sometimes on a very different location.
Nah, you use the old station.
Just like 99% of the rest of us do - nationwide.
Isn't the old station now a private house?
Buy it back or CPO it.
How very illiberal of you.
I think if an old station is empty or otherwise easily reused then fine, but kicking people out of their home is a bit draconian when there are other options available.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
hardly err brave given the tories are going to get crushed at the election as things stand . Basically for not being conservative enough especially on the economy - One thing the tories always used to get right if disliked by some for it
So what would be more being more Conservative on the economy? Big unfunded tax cuts? Allow me to introduce you to Liz Truss. Big tax cuts funded by spending cuts? Have you seen the state of public services?
Truth is, it's Conservative policies that have got us into a mess by failing on their own terms, with the Tory Party, like crack addicts, then demanding a bigger purer hit each time to deal with the low caused by the last episode of failure.
the tories have shown (through total weakness) that the largest tax take since WW" has delivered even chitter public services - They could not have been more socialist than Arthur Scargill . If you subsidise anything you get more of it like benefits - try incentivising work and enterprise
If you want to incentivise work, then tax work less, and tax wealth, property and land more.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
hardly err brave given the tories are going to get crushed at the election as things stand . Basically for not being conservative enough especially on the economy - One thing the tories always used to get right if disliked by some for it
So what would be more being more Conservative on the economy? Big unfunded tax cuts? Allow me to introduce you to Liz Truss. Big tax cuts funded by spending cuts? Have you seen the state of public services?
Truth is, it's Conservative policies that have got us into a mess by failing on their own terms, with the Tory Party, like crack addicts, then demanding a bigger purer hit each time to deal with the low caused by the last episode of failure.
the tories have shown (through total weakness) that the largest tax take since WW" has delivered even chitter public services - They could not have been more socialist than Arthur Scargill . If you subsidise anything you get more of it like benefits - try incentivising work and enterprise
If you want to incentivise work, then tax work less, and tax wealth, property and land more.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
You assume that people will vote according to their identity their whole lives long. I think people will vote based on an assessment of who is going to form a Government that will be more beneficial to them, and will change their allegiances accordingly in ways hitherto unimagined. Quite apart from the fact that the big state approach is rapidly running out of road affordability-wise.
I don't assume people will vote according to their identities their whole lives long. What we have seen in recent times though is that the long-established trend of people shifting right as they age has stopped for those born from the late 80s onwards and gone into reverse.
I agree, people will vote for a government that they feel will be beneficial to them - but after 14 years of Tories it's not looking like the right at the moment - and likely won't be for a while, without changes, as the right are largely to blame for policies that were billed as doing the things you claim to want, but failed on their own terms.
Austerity was supposed to cut the state. It didn't work because the politically easiest bits to do and way of doing it (salami slicing, protecting spending universal spending on the elderly, cancelling investment, lumping cuts onto local government, and pay freezes) merely stored up problems for later - when they will cost you.
Then Brexit was supposed to cut immigration, and free us from the tyranny of bureaucracy, making us all richer in the process. But of course immigration is up, businesses face more red tape than ever and we're poorer. Again. The Tory right got what it lusted after, we found out it doesn't work. So like any good addict, their answer is to demand more of it.
And therein lies the problem - a smaller state and lower immigration are perfectly valid goals. But by putting the cart before the horse and believing in magical answers rather than hard work and sometimes counterintuitive thinking. It ends up in the mess we have now of making absolutely everyone unhappy.
You've had your 'real conservatism' it's just like real communism. It fails, then its proponents claim it's never been tried.
Anyone who thinks that we've had our 'real conservatism' (meaning right-wing politics) is deluding themselves.
The people who think that 'LibLabCon' are a liberal monoparty are a lot closer to the truth than the people who think the Tories are borderline far-right.
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
The old station was still there, or at least a decade ago anyway. Looks OK to me - typical York bricks, like the terraces along Bootham (west of the museum/St Mary's Abbey). Maybe it had to be moved a bit?
Infrastructure needs good planning, and old station sites are not necessarily the best ones for current ones. As an example, I think Corby station had three sites: the original one, a new one for the first reopening in the 1980s, and another one, near the original station's site, in the 2010s.
Passenger usage is different nowadays: a station site that may have been good for passengers (and freight...) using horse and carts in Victorian times might not be ideal for modern passengers using cars. As an example: is there enough land available for a car park? Before any reopening, there should be studies that look into these issues, including multimodal, and decide where the best location is. Sometimes it will be where the old station is; sometimes close by; sometimes on a very different location.
Nah, you use the old station.
Just like 99% of the rest of us do - nationwide.
Given your occupation, I'm quite staggered you came out with that. To the extent that I wonder if either you or I have got the wrong end of the stick.
The conversation was about station reopenings; where the vast majority of prospective passengers will not have used any old station at all if it closed in the 1960s, and the best site is judged by metrics rather than nostalgia. The idea is to get people to use the reopened station, and the old station might be the best site for that. In many cases it is not.
This is heresy.
You're the sort of person who favoured the redevelopment of Euston in the 1960s and demolition of the Doric Arch.
And another follow-up to your post: the 1960s redevelopment of Euston produced some really ugly architecture. But how would you have lengthened the platforms without it, given the site's constraints? If you wanted modern (for the 1960s...) electric trains, and longer ones at that, the station needed expanding. If you are criticising the rebuilt station's architecture, I'm right with you. But if you're saying it should not have been rebuilt to cope with modern trains, then I fear you're being silly.
IIRC the Doric Arch, once well outside the station, was where one of the platforms now is. Now I believe it should have been rebuilt elsewhere, and not just rent asunder and demolished. But it could not stay where it was.
I want a set of policies that will create the conditions we need to grow the economy, start to return power to people and families, and protect our security. I happen to believe that conservative policies will do that - hence I support parties that will enact them. It's not about where you are on a made-up right left spectrum, it's about finding solutions and convincing the public that they're right.
I think you'll find many who now support Labour would support most of that. The truth is in office both Conservative and Labour don't give power to anyone but simply take more for themselves. Indeed, Johnson even by-passed Parliament and parliamentary scrutiny in the name of giving more power to Ministers and Whitehall.
That ultimately is why I see Conservative and Labour as this country's two biggest problems.
As far as security and economic growth is concerned, Starmer, Davey and even Tice would all agree - politics is usually about means rather than ends. Many would indeed argue a conservative-minded person should be quite relaxed about a Labour Government led by Starmer with Reeves as Chancellor.
Oh absolutely. The Tory faction that actually prioritises a low tax environment above everything else will be horrified, but the faction that is most interested in defending the right of the already wealthy to accumulate loot and pass it on tax-free to their heirs will find little to object to in the next Labour government. They strike me very much as a Camerosborne tribute act: an ever increasing share of national wealth to be spaffed on elderly hand outs and house price inflation, paid for by more austerity and steeper rents and mortgages for everyone else.
There are more public spending cuts and fiscal drag on income taxation coming after the next election, regardless of who wins it, and the campaign will be a tissue of lies to cover up the real nature of the choice that is coming: between two virtually indistinguishable teams of suits planning to manage decline in a near-identical fashion. We might as well not bother TBH.
Would you increase taxes on the wealthy (perhaps via a land value tax or an increased VAT rate on luxury goods?) and would you reduce pensions to existing pensioners? Yes you can defer paying out the State pension to 70 or further and that will probably happen but the sheer number of people reaching that age will increase pressure on welfare spending.
Depending on who you believe, we either have full employment or under employment but if we want to grow the economy, how do we do it? Import more labour to fill the vacancies (they will need somewhere to live and spend) or hope AI or capital investment or investment in other forms of technology and automaton will spur a new phase of growth?
I suspect none of the current political leaders would accept they are "managing decline" - indeed there's plenty of evidence we are living better lives than ever before but the perception is one of "decline". What would the opposite of "managing decline" look like? I need to visualise what this would look like in order to work out how we could get there.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
That pinpoints the issue the Tory party faces. It has become multiple parties in one. It’s a strong case for PR.
While there is always a case for PR, all it does is push the 'no majority' problem down the line. We have, like most countries, a plurality of political positions. PR faithfully (look at Israel) respects this and has them all separately getting seats, Great.
At that point the compromises necessary to majority government kick in.
All we do is stick the compromises up the line a bit, by compressing them not by post election horse trading, but pre election conjuring.
And in the end it is the voters who choose to have a 2 party system. There is a choice....Farage, Gallaway, Lozza, Binhead, Davey, the rays of sunshine that make up the SNP....
The big problem I have with discussions about electoral systems is that everyone starts off with a conclusion (my team doing really well), and then works back from there.
That's not how democracy works. If it is democracy, voters fix the conclusions; you can't work backwards. This is why so many people hate it. It actually gives power to people they think don't count.
The conceptual 'design' for that station is utterly banal and uninspired.
Whatever happened to railway architecture?
The old station was still there, or at least a decade ago anyway. Looks OK to me - typical York bricks, like the terraces along Bootham (west of the museum/St Mary's Abbey). Maybe it had to be moved a bit?
Infrastructure needs good planning, and old station sites are not necessarily the best ones for current ones. As an example, I think Corby station had three sites: the original one, a new one for the first reopening in the 1980s, and another one, near the original station's site, in the 2010s.
Passenger usage is different nowadays: a station site that may have been good for passengers (and freight...) using horse and carts in Victorian times might not be ideal for modern passengers using cars. As an example: is there enough land available for a car park? Before any reopening, there should be studies that look into these issues, including multimodal, and decide where the best location is. Sometimes it will be where the old station is; sometimes close by; sometimes on a very different location.
Nah, you use the old station.
Just like 99% of the rest of us do - nationwide.
Given your occupation, I'm quite staggered you came out with that. To the extent that I wonder if either you or I have got the wrong end of the stick.
The conversation was about station reopenings; where the vast majority of prospective passengers will not have used any old station at all if it closed in the 1960s, and the best site is judged by metrics rather than nostalgia. The idea is to get people to use the reopened station, and the old station might be the best site for that. In many cases it is not.
This is heresy.
You're the sort of person who favoured the redevelopment of Euston in the 1960s and demolition of the Doric Arch.
If you actually read my posts you'd realise how hilariously and stupidly you are off the mark with that comment.
We're not talking about Euston. We're talking about a host of small towns, and even villages, that were once rail served. Often the old station site is perfect and available. Often it is not. These new stations cost millions - and it is important to site them so they get as many new passengers as possible. If you get more passengers on a new site, why be beholden to the old? I' not talking about moving currently-open stations (though that does happen, see below); but new stations. Often the villages and towns have grown since then, and the natural axis of the settlement might be different.
Also note that rail companies sometimes moved stations in ye olden days as traffic and other factors came into play.
And if an old site was reopened, the old buildings might be demolished, as I think happened at the new Ilkeston station (though the old station at the site had a different name). Modern regulations need platforms to be wider; access to be different, and if you're building new, there are no grandfather rights.
As a modern example of stations moving, Bromsgrove station - which was still open - was moved a few years back. So I think was Rochester at about the same time.
Elgin. No longer a delta junction, needing to simplify signalling (it used to have two signal boxes one at each end and an official BR cycle to get between the two IIRC).
The new bridge at Elgin is horribly ugly. It's the same type as used at all the new stations in the north of Scotland.
It upsets me more than it should do. Grim place to start a journey.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
You assume that people will vote according to their identity their whole lives long. I think people will vote based on an assessment of who is going to form a Government that will be more beneficial to them, and will change their allegiances accordingly in ways hitherto unimagined. Quite apart from the fact that the big state approach is rapidly running out of road affordability-wise.
I don't assume people will vote according to their identities their whole lives long. What we have seen in recent times though is that the long-established trend of people shifting right as they age has stopped for those born from the late 80s onwards and gone into reverse.
I agree, people will vote for a government that they feel will be beneficial to them - but after 14 years of Tories it's not looking like the right at the moment - and likely won't be for a while, without changes, as the right are largely to blame for policies that were billed as doing the things you claim to want, but failed on their own terms.
Austerity was supposed to cut the state. It didn't work because the politically easiest bits to do and way of doing it (salami slicing, protecting spending universal spending on the elderly, cancelling investment, lumping cuts onto local government, and pay freezes) merely stored up problems for later - when they will cost you.
Then Brexit was supposed to cut immigration, and free us from the tyranny of bureaucracy, making us all richer in the process. But of course immigration is up, businesses face more red tape than ever and we're poorer. Again. The Tory right got what it lusted after, we found out it doesn't work. So like any good addict, their answer is to demand more of it.
And therein lies the problem - a smaller state and lower immigration are perfectly valid goals. But by putting the cart before the horse and believing in magical answers rather than hard work and sometimes counterintuitive thinking. It ends up in the mess we have now of making absolutely everyone unhappy.
You've had your 'real conservatism' it's just like real communism. It fails, then its proponents claim it's never been tried.
Anyone who thinks that we've had our 'real conservatism' (meaning right-wing politics) is deluding themselves.
The people who think that 'LibLabCon' are a liberal monoparty are a lot closer to the truth than the people who think the Tories are borderline far-right.
Yes, the Overton window is quite narrow. Which means there is loads of room for other, better ideas. The problem is the policy detail. From time to time someone on PB will suggest a proper right wing conservative idea of, say, cutting state managed expenditure by 10%. Which is great. 10% can't be much. But it generally comes unstuck on where exactly the £100 billion cut will fall, since real options would be of the scale of 'abolish the state pension' and 'halve the work the NHS does'.
Got to feel sorry for Rishi, every time he gets some space one of his MPs puts their foot in it.
Feels a bit like Labour 2015-2019.
You can go back ten years earlier than that as well: the infighting between Blair and Brown's mob from about 2004 to 2007 was quite something. It's interesting to consider how different politics might be if Brown hadn't stabbed Blair repeatedly in the back over the years. The GFC would still have happened (unless perhaps Blair had replaced Brown much earlier...), but would Blair have won the 2010 GE?
The infighting cannot have helped.
The Global Financial Crisis "which started in America" was not caused by Gordon Brown so it is moot.
I note Susan Hall uses the approved Conservative Party jargon of "anti-Muslim hatred" rather than saying "Islamophobia". God knows why they feel the need to quibble over this. Kemi Badenoch tried explaining.
Badenoch clearly thinks she's done a gotcha. But I would ask how this has anything to do with Lee Anderson? Is he anti-Muslim, Islamophobic, both, neither? And what difference does it make?
I would also question her motive for making the distinction. Why is anti-semitism a thing (which she calls out regularly), and Islamophobia not, given they have identical meanings, but slightly different etymologies? I suspect it is less a question of anti OK, phobia not OK, than Jew OK, Muslim not OK.
It's a bit like someone saying "that guy can't possibly be antisemitic because he's an arab and arabs are semites". We all know what antisemitic means. Call it something else if you like. Maybe it will catch on, but quibbling over semantics isn't a good look.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
You assume that people will vote according to their identity their whole lives long. I think people will vote based on an assessment of who is going to form a Government that will be more beneficial to them, and will change their allegiances accordingly in ways hitherto unimagined. Quite apart from the fact that the big state approach is rapidly running out of road affordability-wise.
I don't assume people will vote according to their identities their whole lives long. What we have seen in recent times though is that the long-established trend of people shifting right as they age has stopped for those born from the late 80s onwards and gone into reverse.
I agree, people will vote for a government that they feel will be beneficial to them - but after 14 years of Tories it's not looking like the right at the moment - and likely won't be for a while, without changes, as the right are largely to blame for policies that were billed as doing the things you claim to want, but failed on their own terms.
Austerity was supposed to cut the state. It didn't work because the politically easiest bits to do and way of doing it (salami slicing, protecting spending universal spending on the elderly, cancelling investment, lumping cuts onto local government, and pay freezes) merely stored up problems for later - when they will cost you.
Then Brexit was supposed to cut immigration, and free us from the tyranny of bureaucracy, making us all richer in the process. But of course immigration is up, businesses face more red tape than ever and we're poorer. Again. The Tory right got what it lusted after, we found out it doesn't work. So like any good addict, their answer is to demand more of it.
And therein lies the problem - a smaller state and lower immigration are perfectly valid goals. But by putting the cart before the horse and believing in magical answers rather than hard work and sometimes counterintuitive thinking. It ends up in the mess we have now of making absolutely everyone unhappy.
You've had your 'real conservatism' it's just like real communism. It fails, then its proponents claim it's never been tried.
Anyone who thinks that we've had our 'real conservatism' (meaning right-wing politics) is deluding themselves.
The people who think that 'LibLabCon' are a liberal monoparty are a lot closer to the truth than the people who think the Tories are borderline far-right.
Some current Conservative MPs are borderline far-right. Nothing new. The ghost of Terry Dicks says hello.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
hardly err brave given the tories are going to get crushed at the election as things stand . Basically for not being conservative enough especially on the economy - One thing the tories always used to get right if disliked by some for it
So what would be more being more Conservative on the economy? Big unfunded tax cuts? Allow me to introduce you to Liz Truss. Big tax cuts funded by spending cuts? Have you seen the state of public services?
Truth is, it's Conservative policies that have got us into a mess by failing on their own terms, with the Tory Party, like crack addicts, then demanding a bigger purer hit each time to deal with the low caused by the last episode of failure.
the tories have shown (through total weakness) that the largest tax take since WW" has delivered even chitter public services - They could not have been more socialist than Arthur Scargill . If you subsidise anything you get more of it like benefits - try incentivising work and enterprise
If you want to incentivise work, then tax work less, and tax wealth, property and land more.
Impossible when the majority of votes are cast by people aged over 55 and most of them are sitting on hugely valuable houses or are expecting to inherit them.
As democratic government evolved in the nineteenth century, theorists of the time believed that it would never survive mass enfranchisement because the poor would vote to help themselves to the wealth of the rich, who would not stand for it. They clearly failed to foresee a future in which the wealthy would use their votes to starve the poor to death. Yet here we are: out of control asset prices and rents, and a state being progressively hollowed out as it collapses under the weight of need which the increasingly immiserated cohorts of the working poor cannot afford to fund, whilst no potential government that would dare to resolve the situation by relieving the rich of some meaningful portion of their loot can find the votes to get itself elected - hence the ridiculous pantomime of Blue Tories and Red Tories pretending to be really different to each other that we are to be subjected to at some point in the next ten months or so.
Thus we have, simultaneously, a plague of damp and mouldy slum housing, a collapsing healthcare system, schools which are falling down and being replaced with sheds through lack of cash, and food banks sprouting like ugly weeds in every corner of the country, whilst the average pensioner now has a higher income than the average worker after deducting housing costs, and a full fifth of pensioner households are millionaires.
This is full scale class warfare in which the contemporary versions of the peers and landed gentry - corporate executives, robber landlords, wealthy elderly homeowners and their heirs - have taken middle and low income households completely to the cleaners through taxation and rents. We essentially live in a neo-Hanoverian settlement in which the impoverishment of one half of the population to enrich the other half through extraction is legitimised periodically at the ballot box. Our democracy cannot do anything about this because it would require the winners of the current system to vote against their own interests, which they won't do, and they control too many votes to be overcome. The situation is, I'm afraid, completely hopeless.
Anyone who thinks that we've had our 'real conservatism' (meaning right-wing politics) is deluding themselves.
The people who think that 'LibLabCon' are a liberal monoparty are a lot closer to the truth than the people who think the Tories are borderline far-right.
Yes, the Overton window is quite narrow. Which means there is loads of room for other, better ideas. The problem is the policy detail. From time to time someone on PB will suggest a proper right wing conservative idea of, say, cutting state managed expenditure by 10%. Which is great. 10% can't be much. But it generally comes unstuck on where exactly the £100 billion cut will fall, since real options would be of the scale of 'abolish the state pension' and 'halve the work the NHS does'.
This is the litany of the Mail. The Conservatives have led the Government for nearly 14 years yet are berated for not being "Conservative". Indeed, one might argue Boris Johnson was about the least Conservative person out there though he used the Conservative Party as a vehicle for his personal advancement.
We keep hearing this tired old refrain about "conservative" policies - that means tax cuts, nothing else, sometimes spending cuts (though never for the armed forces, police, schools or the NHS) but usually tax cuts.
If you cut taxes, you're a Conservative - Reeves could cut taxes, would that make her a Conservative? I suspect not.
I don't even know what "right wing politics" looks like - it's like an excuse, a justification for the oncoming storm.
A Tory former government minister has claimed that there are religious “no-go areas” in Birmingham and east London, sparking a fresh row over Islamophobia.
Paul Scully, an MP who ran to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate, made the remarks during a discussion about allegations of anti-Muslim sentiments within the party.
It comes as Rishi Sunak is under pressure over his handling of comments by Lee Anderson, who was stripped of the Tory whip after claiming that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan.
In an interview with BBC London, Mr Scully, the London minister from 2021 to 2022, made reference to parts of the capital and Birmingham with high Muslim populations.
He said: “The point I am trying to make is if you look at parts of Tower Hamlets, for example, where there are no-go areas, parts of Birmingham Sparkhill, where there are no-go areas, mainly because of doctrine, mainly because of people using, abusing in many ways, their religion to… because it is not the doctrine of Islam, to espouse what some of these people are saying. That, I think, is the concern that needs to be addressed.”
There was an immediate backlash, with Andy Street, the Tory West Midlands mayor, urging “those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs”.
He posted on X, formerly Twitter:
The idea that Birmingham has a ‘no-go’ zone is news to me, and I suspect the good people of Sparkhill.
It really is time for those in Westminster to stop the nonsense slurs and experience the real world.
I for one am proud to lead the most diverse place in Britain.
On a post on social media platform Nextdoor asking if LGBTQ+ people in Tower Hamlets feel safe, a commenter who is listed as from Arnold Circus said: "I’m feeling less and less safe.
"Holding hands with my partner is something we now only do in busy places. I’ve even started to receive abuse walking on my own, which does influence which route I walk home, which roads I’ll choose to take.”
To be honest, I see more same sex couples (not in that way) hold hands in Turkey or India than I do here.
I'm not sure, outside of places like Brighton, it's particularly common anywhere in the UK.
In India, they're probably just male buddies, not in a relationship!
Anyone who thinks that we've had our 'real conservatism' (meaning right-wing politics) is deluding themselves.
The people who think that 'LibLabCon' are a liberal monoparty are a lot closer to the truth than the people who think the Tories are borderline far-right.
Yes, the Overton window is quite narrow. Which means there is loads of room for other, better ideas. The problem is the policy detail. From time to time someone on PB will suggest a proper right wing conservative idea of, say, cutting state managed expenditure by 10%. Which is great. 10% can't be much. But it generally comes unstuck on where exactly the £100 billion cut will fall, since real options would be of the scale of 'abolish the state pension' and 'halve the work the NHS does'.
This is the litany of the Mail. The Conservatives have led the Government for nearly 14 years yet are berated for not being "Conservative". Indeed, one might argue Boris Johnson was about the least Conservative person out there though he used the Conservative Party as a vehicle for his personal advancement.
We keep hearing this tired old refrain about "conservative" policies - that means tax cuts, nothing else, sometimes spending cuts (though never for the armed forces, police, schools or the NHS) but usually tax cuts.
If you cut taxes, you're a Conservative - Reeves could cut taxes, would that make her a Conservative? I suspect not.
I don't even know what "right wing politics" looks like - it's like an excuse, a justification for the oncoming storm.
Agree. Any politics worth the name has a set of fundamental political, philosophical and ethical principles, and a series of general policies which together make sense of reality and present a vision intended to be a good one for the future, so good that a plurality of people will vote for it.
I can just about discern the Labour one for now, I think I have a reasonable idea what would be the One Nation Tory one, but I have literally no idea what the 'right wing Tory' or Reform one looks like when looked at as a whole as opposed to manic stuff on single issues.
TV is such an unforgiving medium when it shows you as you were ten years ago. TissuePrice was just 30 when this evening's episode of only connect first aired. And Victoria C was also in her 30s. "Si la jeunesse savait …", but they did, they did … and they could!
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
That pinpoints the issue the Tory party faces. It has become multiple parties in one. It’s a strong case for PR.
While there is always a case for PR, all it does is push the 'no majority' problem down the line. We have, like most countries, a plurality of political positions. PR faithfully (look at Israel) respects this and has them all separately getting seats, Great.
At that point the compromises necessary to majority government kick in.
All we do is stick the compromises up the line a bit, by compressing them not by post election horse trading, but pre election conjuring.
And in the end it is the voters who choose to have a 2 party system. There is a choice....Farage, Gallaway, Lozza, Binhead, Davey, the rays of sunshine that make up the SNP....
The big problem I have with discussions about electoral systems is that everyone starts off with a conclusion (my team doing really well), and then works back from there.
That's not how democracy works. If it is democracy, voters fix the conclusions; you can't work backwards. This is why so many people hate it. It actually gives power to people they think don't count.
FPTP gives thumping majorities to parties that 60% didn't vote for.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
That pinpoints the issue the Tory party faces. It has become multiple parties in one. It’s a strong case for PR.
Has it really? CCHQ is strongly centrist* oriented, and since CCHQ attempts to control the selection process, that leads to centrist MPs, centrist ministers, and centrist peers. I cannot really see that the permeation of centrism within the party goes much further than that. I appreciate that some party activists are also centrists, but they seem to be to be the sort of hanger on types who harbour ambitions of being selected as MPs. In other words all centrist influence stems from patronage within the party aparatus. Nobody pounds pavements because they dream of a future for their kids where the country will do exactly what the the Labour Party want to do but with a posher accent.
*I use the neutral term centrist, though personally I find the centrist agenda extreme and loopy.
I guess everyone looks left-wing when you're out on the far right.
Every one of my friends and relations who are normally Conservative voters (and living in rural Dorset, that's quite a lot) and who have expressed any kind of opinion, seem to be exasperated and dejected by the mess the Tories have got into.
I think some will switch to Labour/LDs/Green but many will just abstain this time at least.
I doubt a move to the populist right would attract any back at all.
Just my opinion. I am biased, no doubt.
I don't recognise myself as 'far right'. I deplore racism, and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. I want our Government to behave no less or more chauvinistically than that of Switzerland, France or Germany. I support a mixed economy - I don't support privatisation of the BBC, or the selling off of the NHS. Those are not far right opinions, they are right opinions.
The thing I am not is 'centrist' - I don't look at the prevailing political trends and say 'I'm going to put myself in the middle of that' - because to do that would be completely meaningless and give me no actual conscience, no ability to distinguish what is right, wrong, sensible or foolish using my own brain.
Conservative centrists do not, in my experience, "look at the prevailing political trends and say 'I'm going to put myself in the middle of that' ". Right of centre centrists (and I am proud to be one) look for moderate practical and pragmatic solutions. It is the populists (of both right and left) who are constantly looking to the "prevailing political trends" and attempt to find a position that angers their opponents. Populism is a dangerous and disastrous path. It was personified by Boris Johnson who was without doubt the most incompetent, dishonest and unsuitable person ever to have held high office, and the Tory Party has to live with the consequences of that ridiculous appointment for years to come.
15 years ago, the centrist position on gay marriage was that civil partnerships should be allowed but that marriage was a sacred bond between man and woman and should remain so. Hillary Clinton espoused this opinion. Today, anyone who objects to gay marriage would be classified as homophobic. That shows me that the prior position was always just a 'let's be reasonable guys' triangulation, and that as campaigners have moved the agenda in one direction, centrists have gone along with it, just in the slightly slower lane. This is not an argument against gay marriage, just an argument that centrism is nothing. It is an empty belief system. Real wisdom is immutable; it doesn't just get swept along every few years.
Whilst I think you’re a complete fruitloop, I agree with you about centrism. I think hard about stuff and come to some fairly left wing conclusions. I can vote for a Labour Party run by Starmer because it is the least-worst option, but you’re right that it represents triangulation not wisdom.
Thing is, though, that’s how democracy works. And, whilst I’m pretty confident I’m right in my left wing conclusions and you’re a fruitloop, neither of us are good candidates for having political power as we could only achieve our wise ambitions through anti- or non-democratic means. And democracy is more important than untrammelled growth/a blissfully equal society*.
For fans of the populist "right", the next party to advance looks to be Chega in Portugal.
The country votes on March 10th and it could be a recipe for political chaos as the governing Socialists are set to suffer a big reverse at the hands of the Democratic Alliance (those with long memories will remember the AD from earlier elections) of Social Democrats, Christian Democrats and Monarchists even though said group is only polling about there they polled in the last election just over two years ago.
Chega have more than doubled their share from 7% to 18% while the Socialists have fallen from 42% to 29% - among the minor parties both the centre-right Liberal Initiative and the Left Bloc have made small gains.
Chega means Enough! and that tells you a lot about them. They are very socially conservative and the question is whether the Democratic Alliance (ADN) want anything to do with them after the election. The support of Liberal Initiative for a broad centre-right Government looks likely but I suspect Luis Montenegro who took over as PSD leader after the 2022 election defeat. He couldn't have reckoned on the spectacular implosion of the Socialists (remind you of anyone?) and has taken full advantage but electorally the centre-right is becalmed on about a third of the vote.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
That pinpoints the issue the Tory party faces. It has become multiple parties in one. It’s a strong case for PR.
Has it really? CCHQ is strongly centrist* oriented, and since CCHQ attempts to control the selection process, that leads to centrist MPs, centrist ministers, and centrist peers. I cannot really see that the permeation of centrism within the party goes much further than that. I appreciate that some party activists are also centrists, but they seem to be to be the sort of hanger on types who harbour ambitions of being selected as MPs. In other words all centrist influence stems from patronage within the party aparatus. Nobody pounds pavements because they dream of a future for their kids where the country will do exactly what the the Labour Party want to do but with a posher accent.
*I use the neutral term centrist, though personally I find the centrist agenda extreme and loopy.
I guess everyone looks left-wing when you're out on the far right.
Every one of my friends and relations who are normally Conservative voters (and living in rural Dorset, that's quite a lot) and who have expressed any kind of opinion, seem to be exasperated and dejected by the mess the Tories have got into.
I think some will switch to Labour/LDs/Green but many will just abstain this time at least.
I doubt a move to the populist right would attract any back at all.
Just my opinion. I am biased, no doubt.
I don't recognise myself as 'far right'. I deplore racism, and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. I want our Government to behave no less or more chauvinistically than that of Switzerland, France or Germany. I support a mixed economy - I don't support privatisation of the BBC, or the selling off of the NHS. Those are not far right opinions, they are right opinions.
The thing I am not is 'centrist' - I don't look at the prevailing political trends and say 'I'm going to put myself in the middle of that' - because to do that would be completely meaningless and give me no actual conscience, no ability to distinguish what is right, wrong, sensible or foolish using my own brain.
Conservative centrists do not, in my experience, "look at the prevailing political trends and say 'I'm going to put myself in the middle of that' ". Right of centre centrists (and I am proud to be one) look for moderate practical and pragmatic solutions. It is the populists (of both right and left) who are constantly looking to the "prevailing political trends" and attempt to find a position that angers their opponents. Populism is a dangerous and disastrous path. It was personified by Boris Johnson who was without doubt the most incompetent, dishonest and unsuitable person ever to have held high office, and the Tory Party has to live with the consequences of that ridiculous appointment for years to come.
15 years ago, the centrist position on gay marriage was that civil partnerships should be allowed but that marriage was a sacred bond between man and woman and should remain so. Hillary Clinton espoused this opinion. Today, anyone who objects to gay marriage would be classified as homophobic. That shows me that the prior position was always just a 'let's be reasonable guys' triangulation, and that as campaigners have moved the agenda in one direction, centrists have gone along with it, just in the slightly slower lane. This is not an argument against gay marriage, just an argument that centrism is nothing. It is an empty belief system. Real wisdom is immutable; it doesn't just get swept along every few years.
Whilst I think you’re a complete fruitloop, I agree with you about centrism. I think hard about stuff and come to some fairly left wing conclusions. I can vote for a Labour Party run by Starmer because it is the least-worst option, but you’re right that it represents triangulation not wisdom.
Thing is, though, that’s how democracy works. And, whilst I’m pretty confident I’m right in my left wing conclusions and you’re a fruitloop, neither of us are good candidates for having political power as we could only achieve our wise ambitions through anti- or non-democratic means. And democracy is more important than untrammelled growth/a blissfully equal society*.
*delete as appropriate.
So confident in the correctness of your conclusions that you feel the need to resort to personal attacks at a rate of one per paragraph.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
You assume that people will vote according to their identity their whole lives long. I think people will vote based on an assessment of who is going to form a Government that will be more beneficial to them, and will change their allegiances accordingly in ways hitherto unimagined. Quite apart from the fact that the big state approach is rapidly running out of road affordability-wise.
I don't assume people will vote according to their identities their whole lives long. What we have seen in recent times though is that the long-established trend of people shifting right as they age has stopped for those born from the late 80s onwards and gone into reverse.
I agree, people will vote for a government that they feel will be beneficial to them - but after 14 years of Tories it's not looking like the right at the moment - and likely won't be for a while, without changes, as the right are largely to blame for policies that were billed as doing the things you claim to want, but failed on their own terms.
Austerity was supposed to cut the state. It didn't work because the politically easiest bits to do and way of doing it (salami slicing, protecting spending universal spending on the elderly, cancelling investment, lumping cuts onto local government, and pay freezes) merely stored up problems for later - when they will cost you.
Then Brexit was supposed to cut immigration, and free us from the tyranny of bureaucracy, making us all richer in the process. But of course immigration is up, businesses face more red tape than ever and we're poorer. Again. The Tory right got what it lusted after, we found out it doesn't work. So like any good addict, their answer is to demand more of it.
And therein lies the problem - a smaller state and lower immigration are perfectly valid goals. But by putting the cart before the horse and believing in magical answers rather than hard work and sometimes counterintuitive thinking. It ends up in the mess we have now of making absolutely everyone unhappy.
You've had your 'real conservatism' it's just like real communism. It fails, then its proponents claim it's never been tried.
Anyone who thinks that we've had our 'real conservatism' (meaning right-wing politics) is deluding themselves.
The people who think that 'LibLabCon' are a liberal monoparty are a lot closer to the truth than the people who think the Tories are borderline far-right.
Yes, the Overton window is quite narrow. Which means there is loads of room for other, better ideas. The problem is the policy detail. From time to time someone on PB will suggest a proper right wing conservative idea of, say, cutting state managed expenditure by 10%. Which is great. 10% can't be much. But it generally comes unstuck on where exactly the £100 billion cut will fall, since real options would be of the scale of 'abolish the state pension' and 'halve the work the NHS does'.
Indeed:
How do you cut spending by 10%?
Debt interest can't change. Pension liabilities could be changed, but not if you wish to get elected. By international standards we don't spend much on health. On defence we're probably underspending.
And every year we have more old people, who need more care.
It's well worth reading Nigel Lawson's excellent View From Number Eleven: he goes through all these things. And his view then - which is not a stupid one - is that you get low taxes and expenditure in a three part process:
(1) You balance the books (even if that means more tax in the short term), which means that your debt servicing costs come down (2) You increase the retirement age / move more responsibility for your dotage onto the individual (3) You hold departments to inflation linked rises, so their spending is falling in real terms
Once you have done this, you get government spending coming down as a percentage of GDP, and then you can start looking to cut taxes.
For fans of the populist "right", the next party to advance looks to be Chega in Portugal.
The country votes on March 10th and it could be a recipe for political chaos as the governing Socialists are set to suffer a big reverse at the hands of the Democratic Alliance (those with long memories will remember the AD from earlier elections) of Social Democrats, Christian Democrats and Monarchists even though said group is only polling about there they polled in the last election just over two years ago.
Chega have more than doubled their share from 7% to 18% while the Socialists have fallen from 42% to 29% - among the minor parties both the centre-right Liberal Initiative and the Left Bloc have made small gains.
Chega means Enough! and that tells you a lot about them. They are very socially conservative and the question is whether the Democratic Alliance (ADN) want anything to do with them after the election. The support of Liberal Initiative for a broad centre-right Government looks likely but I suspect Luis Montenegro who took over as PSD leader after the 2022 election defeat. He couldn't have reckoned on the spectacular implosion of the Socialists (remind you of anyone?) and has taken full advantage but electorally the centre-right is becalmed on about a third of the vote.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
That pinpoints the issue the Tory party faces. It has become multiple parties in one. It’s a strong case for PR.
Has it really? CCHQ is strongly centrist* oriented, and since CCHQ attempts to control the selection process, that leads to centrist MPs, centrist ministers, and centrist peers. I cannot really see that the permeation of centrism within the party goes much further than that. I appreciate that some party activists are also centrists, but they seem to be to be the sort of hanger on types who harbour ambitions of being selected as MPs. In other words all centrist influence stems from patronage within the party aparatus. Nobody pounds pavements because they dream of a future for their kids where the country will do exactly what the the Labour Party want to do but with a posher accent.
*I use the neutral term centrist, though personally I find the centrist agenda extreme and loopy.
I guess everyone looks left-wing when you're out on the far right.
Every one of my friends and relations who are normally Conservative voters (and living in rural Dorset, that's quite a lot) and who have expressed any kind of opinion, seem to be exasperated and dejected by the mess the Tories have got into.
I think some will switch to Labour/LDs/Green but many will just abstain this time at least.
I doubt a move to the populist right would attract any back at all.
Just my opinion. I am biased, no doubt.
I don't recognise myself as 'far right'. I deplore racism, and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. I want our Government to behave no less or more chauvinistically than that of Switzerland, France or Germany. I support a mixed economy - I don't support privatisation of the BBC, or the selling off of the NHS. Those are not far right opinions, they are right opinions.
The thing I am not is 'centrist' - I don't look at the prevailing political trends and say 'I'm going to put myself in the middle of that' - because to do that would be completely meaningless and give me no actual conscience, no ability to distinguish what is right, wrong, sensible or foolish using my own brain.
Conservative centrists do not, in my experience, "look at the prevailing political trends and say 'I'm going to put myself in the middle of that' ". Right of centre centrists (and I am proud to be one) look for moderate practical and pragmatic solutions. It is the populists (of both right and left) who are constantly looking to the "prevailing political trends" and attempt to find a position that angers their opponents. Populism is a dangerous and disastrous path. It was personified by Boris Johnson who was without doubt the most incompetent, dishonest and unsuitable person ever to have held high office, and the Tory Party has to live with the consequences of that ridiculous appointment for years to come.
15 years ago, the centrist position on gay marriage was that civil partnerships should be allowed but that marriage was a sacred bond between man and woman and should remain so. Hillary Clinton espoused this opinion. Today, anyone who objects to gay marriage would be classified as homophobic. That shows me that the prior position was always just a 'let's be reasonable guys' triangulation, and that as campaigners have moved the agenda in one direction, centrists have gone along with it, just in the slightly slower lane. This is not an argument against gay marriage, just an argument that centrism is nothing. It is an empty belief system. Real wisdom is immutable; it doesn't just get swept along every few years.
Whilst I think you’re a complete fruitloop, I agree with you about centrism. I think hard about stuff and come to some fairly left wing conclusions. I can vote for a Labour Party run by Starmer because it is the least-worst option, but you’re right that it represents triangulation not wisdom.
Thing is, though, that’s how democracy works. And, whilst I’m pretty confident I’m right in my left wing conclusions and you’re a fruitloop, neither of us are good candidates for having political power as we could only achieve our wise ambitions through anti- or non-democratic means. And democracy is more important than untrammelled growth/a blissfully equal society*.
*delete as appropriate.
So confident in the correctness of your conclusions that you feel the need to resort to personal attacks at a rate of one per paragraph.
Sorry, that was meant in a far more light-hearted and self-deprecating tone than it came across. I was intending to make fun of myself as much as you, but missed the mark.
I did think there was some political subtlety and nuance about Anderson's comments and they've certainly caused a few ructions including taking the steam out of Tice's speech at the Reform UK conference but the other possibility is there are creatures as yet undiscovered in the Amazonian rainforest which have more political nous and Anderson was doing what a politician usually never does - saying what he thinks.
To her credit (and I won't say that often) Susan Hall has come to Khan's defence and while there may be a few in the Outer suburbs who would agree with Anderson, but Hall knows among the voters she needs to win to capture the mayoralty Anderson's comments will have gone down like a lump of cold sick.
How it plays "in the provinces" makes no odds to her - she isn't running to be Mayor of Provincial England.
This evening's two polls show Labour in the low to mid-40s and the Conservatives in the low to mid 20s - the Lab/LD/Green vs Con/Reform vote sits at 60-33 or 61-35.
Some will assert the Reform vote is basically a Conservative vote - I'm much less convinced. There's no polling evidence for that claim nor, listening to Tice, is there a scintilla of respect for Sunak. I suspect Tice wants as big as Conservative defeat as possible so Reform can take over the remnants and pivot the Conservative Party back to the kind of positions it occupied in the 1930s - a revived form of narrow nationalism chasing the ephemeral populist vote.
I’m not sure you understand how politics works. Firstly I explain why politics is won from the Right, right - the right has an analogous thing within the psyche being a set of unconscious fight and death collection of attributes and potentials - this thing being more complex than the thing of the left as that the right have a host of the thing images, whereas the left thing consists only of one dominant image, and secondly I explain battle is won by the host of thing images if it helps get the most boudterpus crowd on the streets by explains to you that both Jesus supporters who wanted change, and the Current leaders of council who wanted status quo could get supporters out on the streets in rival protests in that constituency Jesus opponents could get the bigger amount of support on the streets denouncing him and all those abetting his terrorism, is how it works. It’s not about being able to walk down certain roads at all some call no go zone it’s about you can get protestors out there working on the host images. So to prove I’m right, firstly much the same way Ali romps home miles ahead in Rochdale, whats the coming General Election about? If it boils down to one issue almost a referendum - who governs Britain: democracy or Militant Islam? people will come out and vote for democracy that will massively win, the Conservatives obviously on the side of defending British Democracy from militant Islam take over will easily win that General Election as that’s the biggest in the constituency, Labours only chance is if the General Election is about other things. When Ali comes in miles ahead in Rochdale this “ Some will assert the Reform vote is basically a Conservative vote - I'm much less convinced. There's no polling evidence for that claim“ you realise is huge mistake of yours and everything above 2 on reform the whole lot gets added to the conservatives PV at the General Election.
Are you also refusing to accept the General Election is May 2nd despite the obvious fact the fire will now be out by July burning at this rate?
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
You assume that people will vote according to their identity their whole lives long. I think people will vote based on an assessment of who is going to form a Government that will be more beneficial to them, and will change their allegiances accordingly in ways hitherto unimagined. Quite apart from the fact that the big state approach is rapidly running out of road affordability-wise.
I don't assume people will vote according to their identities their whole lives long. What we have seen in recent times though is that the long-established trend of people shifting right as they age has stopped for those born from the late 80s onwards and gone into reverse.
I agree, people will vote for a government that they feel will be beneficial to them - but after 14 years of Tories it's not looking like the right at the moment - and likely won't be for a while, without changes, as the right are largely to blame for policies that were billed as doing the things you claim to want, but failed on their own terms.
Austerity was supposed to cut the state. It didn't work because the politically easiest bits to do and way of doing it (salami slicing, protecting spending universal spending on the elderly, cancelling investment, lumping cuts onto local government, and pay freezes) merely stored up problems for later - when they will cost you.
Then Brexit was supposed to cut immigration, and free us from the tyranny of bureaucracy, making us all richer in the process. But of course immigration is up, businesses face more red tape than ever and we're poorer. Again. The Tory right got what it lusted after, we found out it doesn't work. So like any good addict, their answer is to demand more of it.
And therein lies the problem - a smaller state and lower immigration are perfectly valid goals. But by putting the cart before the horse and believing in magical answers rather than hard work and sometimes counterintuitive thinking. It ends up in the mess we have now of making absolutely everyone unhappy.
You've had your 'real conservatism' it's just like real communism. It fails, then its proponents claim it's never been tried.
Brexit was meant to allow the Government to cut immigration, and it has allowed it - the Government has chosen not to. Brexit was meant to allow us to cut red tape, and it has allowed us to do that - the Government and its agencies have chosen to keep EU laws and red tape. We're not poorer; I believe that even with the bungs we outrageously coughed up at the end, leaving has improved the Government's fiscal position considerably. Tories who 'lusted after' Brexit haven't found that it hasn't worked, they've found that their own Government is shit. It's understandable that they're frustrated and perhaps surprising that they're not in open revolt.
Regarding Cameron and Osborne's austerity policies, I don't really have any defence to make.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
That pinpoints the issue the Tory party faces. It has become multiple parties in one. It’s a strong case for PR.
Has it really? CCHQ is strongly centrist* oriented, and since CCHQ attempts to control the selection process, that leads to centrist MPs, centrist ministers, and centrist peers. I cannot really see that the permeation of centrism within the party goes much further than that. I appreciate that some party activists are also centrists, but they seem to be to be the sort of hanger on types who harbour ambitions of being selected as MPs. In other words all centrist influence stems from patronage within the party aparatus. Nobody pounds pavements because they dream of a future for their kids where the country will do exactly what the the Labour Party want to do but with a posher accent.
*I use the neutral term centrist, though personally I find the centrist agenda extreme and loopy.
I guess everyone looks left-wing when you're out on the far right.
Every one of my friends and relations who are normally Conservative voters (and living in rural Dorset, that's quite a lot) and who have expressed any kind of opinion, seem to be exasperated and dejected by the mess the Tories have got into.
I think some will switch to Labour/LDs/Green but many will just abstain this time at least.
I doubt a move to the populist right would attract any back at all.
Just my opinion. I am biased, no doubt.
I don't recognise myself as 'far right'. I deplore racism, and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. I want our Government to behave no less or more chauvinistically than that of Switzerland, France or Germany. I support a mixed economy - I don't support privatisation of the BBC, or the selling off of the NHS. Those are not far right opinions, they are right opinions.
The thing I am not is 'centrist' - I don't look at the prevailing political trends and say 'I'm going to put myself in the middle of that' - because to do that would be completely meaningless and give me no actual conscience, no ability to distinguish what is right, wrong, sensible or foolish using my own brain.
Conservative centrists do not, in my experience, "look at the prevailing political trends and say 'I'm going to put myself in the middle of that' ". Right of centre centrists (and I am proud to be one) look for moderate practical and pragmatic solutions. It is the populists (of both right and left) who are constantly looking to the "prevailing political trends" and attempt to find a position that angers their opponents. Populism is a dangerous and disastrous path. It was personified by Boris Johnson who was without doubt the most incompetent, dishonest and unsuitable person ever to have held high office, and the Tory Party has to live with the consequences of that ridiculous appointment for years to come.
15 years ago, the centrist position on gay marriage was that civil partnerships should be allowed but that marriage was a sacred bond between man and woman and should remain so. Hillary Clinton espoused this opinion. Today, anyone who objects to gay marriage would be classified as homophobic. That shows me that the prior position was always just a 'let's be reasonable guys' triangulation, and that as campaigners have moved the agenda in one direction, centrists have gone along with it, just in the slightly slower lane. This is not an argument against gay marriage, just an argument that centrism is nothing. It is an empty belief system. Real wisdom is immutable; it doesn't just get swept along every few years.
Whilst I think you’re a complete fruitloop, I agree with you about centrism. I think hard about stuff and come to some fairly left wing conclusions. I can vote for a Labour Party run by Starmer because it is the least-worst option, but you’re right that it represents triangulation not wisdom.
Thing is, though, that’s how democracy works. And, whilst I’m pretty confident I’m right in my left wing conclusions and you’re a fruitloop, neither of us are good candidates for having political power as we could only achieve our wise ambitions through anti- or non-democratic means. And democracy is more important than untrammelled growth/a blissfully equal society*.
*delete as appropriate.
So confident in the correctness of your conclusions that you feel the need to resort to personal attacks at a rate of one per paragraph.
Sorry, that was meant in a far more light-hearted and self-deprecating tone than it came across. I was intending to make fun of myself as much as you, but missed the mark.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
You assume that people will vote according to their identity their whole lives long. I think people will vote based on an assessment of who is going to form a Government that will be more beneficial to them, and will change their allegiances accordingly in ways hitherto unimagined. Quite apart from the fact that the big state approach is rapidly running out of road affordability-wise.
I don't assume people will vote according to their identities their whole lives long. What we have seen in recent times though is that the long-established trend of people shifting right as they age has stopped for those born from the late 80s onwards and gone into reverse.
I agree, people will vote for a government that they feel will be beneficial to them - but after 14 years of Tories it's not looking like the right at the moment - and likely won't be for a while, without changes, as the right are largely to blame for policies that were billed as doing the things you claim to want, but failed on their own terms.
Austerity was supposed to cut the state. It didn't work because the politically easiest bits to do and way of doing it (salami slicing, protecting spending universal spending on the elderly, cancelling investment, lumping cuts onto local government, and pay freezes) merely stored up problems for later - when they will cost you.
Then Brexit was supposed to cut immigration, and free us from the tyranny of bureaucracy, making us all richer in the process. But of course immigration is up, businesses face more red tape than ever and we're poorer. Again. The Tory right got what it lusted after, we found out it doesn't work. So like any good addict, their answer is to demand more of it.
And therein lies the problem - a smaller state and lower immigration are perfectly valid goals. But by putting the cart before the horse and believing in magical answers rather than hard work and sometimes counterintuitive thinking. It ends up in the mess we have now of making absolutely everyone unhappy.
You've had your 'real conservatism' it's just like real communism. It fails, then its proponents claim it's never been tried.
Anyone who thinks that we've had our 'real conservatism' (meaning right-wing politics) is deluding themselves.
The people who think that 'LibLabCon' are a liberal monoparty are a lot closer to the truth than the people who think the Tories are borderline far-right.
Yes, the Overton window is quite narrow. Which means there is loads of room for other, better ideas. The problem is the policy detail. From time to time someone on PB will suggest a proper right wing conservative idea of, say, cutting state managed expenditure by 10%. Which is great. 10% can't be much. But it generally comes unstuck on where exactly the £100 billion cut will fall, since real options would be of the scale of 'abolish the state pension' and 'halve the work the NHS does'.
Indeed:
How do you cut spending by 10%?
Debt interest can't change. Pension liabilities could be changed, but not if you wish to get elected. By international standards we don't spend much on health. On defence we're probably underspending.
And every year we have more old people, who need more care.
It's well worth reading Nigel Lawson's excellent View From Number Eleven: he goes through all these things. And his view then - which is not a stupid one - is that you get low taxes and expenditure in a three part process:
(1) You balance the books (even if that means more tax in the short term), which means that your debt servicing costs come down (2) You increase the retirement age / move more responsibility for your dotage onto the individual (3) You hold departments to inflation linked rises, so their spending is falling in real terms
Once you have done this, you get government spending coming down as a percentage of GDP, and then you can start looking to cut taxes.
Milei is the model. Pick things that the government shouldn't be doing and stop doing them. He's already achieved a budgetary surplus.
I want a set of policies that will create the conditions we need to grow the economy, start to return power to people and families, and protect our security. I happen to believe that conservative policies will do that - hence I support parties that will enact them. It's not about where you are on a made-up right left spectrum, it's about finding solutions and convincing the public that they're right.
I think you'll find many who now support Labour would support most of that. The truth is in office both Conservative and Labour don't give power to anyone but simply take more for themselves. Indeed, Johnson even by-passed Parliament and parliamentary scrutiny in the name of giving more power to Ministers and Whitehall.
That ultimately is why I see Conservative and Labour as this country's two biggest problems.
As far as security and economic growth is concerned, Starmer, Davey and even Tice would all agree - politics is usually about means rather than ends. Many would indeed argue a conservative-minded person should be quite relaxed about a Labour Government led by Starmer with Reeves as Chancellor.
Oh absolutely. The Tory faction that actually prioritises a low tax environment above everything else will be horrified, but the faction that is most interested in defending the right of the already wealthy to accumulate loot and pass it on tax-free to their heirs will find little to object to in the next Labour government. They strike me very much as a Camerosborne tribute act: an ever increasing share of national wealth to be spaffed on elderly hand outs and house price inflation, paid for by more austerity and steeper rents and mortgages for everyone else.
There are more public spending cuts and fiscal drag on income taxation coming after the next election, regardless of who wins it, and the campaign will be a tissue of lies to cover up the real nature of the choice that is coming: between two virtually indistinguishable teams of suits planning to manage decline in a near-identical fashion. We might as well not bother TBH.
Would you increase taxes on the wealthy (perhaps via a land value tax or an increased VAT rate on luxury goods?) and would you reduce pensions to existing pensioners? Yes you can defer paying out the State pension to 70 or further and that will probably happen but the sheer number of people reaching that age will increase pressure on welfare spending.
Depending on who you believe, we either have full employment or under employment but if we want to grow the economy, how do we do it? Import more labour to fill the vacancies (they will need somewhere to live and spend) or hope AI or capital investment or investment in other forms of technology and automaton will spur a new phase of growth?
I suspect none of the current political leaders would accept they are "managing decline" - indeed there's plenty of evidence we are living better lives than ever before but the perception is one of "decline". What would the opposite of "managing decline" look like? I need to visualise what this would look like in order to work out how we could get there.
The triple lock has to go - so long as it exists the rate of inflation if pensioner incomes will continue to outstrip that of earned incomes, which is completely unsustainable - and the wider economy has to be rebalanced from property speculation towards productive investment, and from prioritising rent seeking to prioritising living standards. That means investment in infrastructure, housebuilding and education, a modest reduction in income taxation and a steep rise in the taxation of capital gains and especially of property and inheritances. Death duties should be levied on most estates and a land value tax should be introduced.
There is simply no way that a prosperous society can be created from a settlement in which an anaemic economy full of low wage workers struggling to cope with exorbitant living costs is gamed, so that the static amount of available wealth is simply transferred from the poor to the rich, whilst the state shrivels and falls down around us.
I did think there was some political subtlety and nuance about Anderson's comments and they've certainly caused a few ructions including taking the steam out of Tice's speech at the Reform UK conference but the other possibility is there are creatures as yet undiscovered in the Amazonian rainforest which have more political nous and Anderson was doing what a politician usually never does - saying what he thinks.
To her credit (and I won't say that often) Susan Hall has come to Khan's defence and while there may be a few in the Outer suburbs who would agree with Anderson, but Hall knows among the voters she needs to win to capture the mayoralty Anderson's comments will have gone down like a lump of cold sick.
How it plays "in the provinces" makes no odds to her - she isn't running to be Mayor of Provincial England.
This evening's two polls show Labour in the low to mid-40s and the Conservatives in the low to mid 20s - the Lab/LD/Green vs Con/Reform vote sits at 60-33 or 61-35.
Some will assert the Reform vote is basically a Conservative vote - I'm much less convinced. There's no polling evidence for that claim nor, listening to Tice, is there a scintilla of respect for Sunak. I suspect Tice wants as big as Conservative defeat as possible so Reform can take over the remnants and pivot the Conservative Party back to the kind of positions it occupied in the 1930s - a revived form of narrow nationalism chasing the ephemeral populist vote.
I’m not sure you understand how politics works. Firstly I explain why politics is won from the Right, right - the right has an analogous thing within the psyche being a set of unconscious fight and death collection of attributes and potentials - this thing being more complex than the thing of the left as that the right have a host of the thing images, whereas the left thing consists only of one dominant image, and secondly I explain battle is won by the host of thing images if it helps get the most boudterpus crowd on the streets by explains to you that both Jesus supporters who wanted change, and the Current leaders of council who wanted status quo could get supporters out on the streets in rival protests in that constituency Jesus opponents could get the bigger amount of support on the streets denouncing him and all those abetting his terrorism, is how it works. It’s not about being able to walk down certain roads at all some call no go zone it’s about you can get protestors out there working on the host images. So to prove I’m right, firstly much the same way Ali romps home miles ahead in Rochdale, whats the coming General Election about? If it boils down to one issue almost a referendum - who governs Britain: democracy or Militant Islam? people will come out and vote for democracy that will massively win, the Conservatives obviously on the side of defending British Democracy from militant Islam take over will easily win that General Election as that’s the biggest in the constituency, Labours only chance is if the General Election is about other things. When Ali comes in miles ahead in Rochdale this “ Some will assert the Reform vote is basically a Conservative vote - I'm much less convinced. There's no polling evidence for that claim“ you realise is huge mistake of yours and everything above 2 on reform the whole lot gets added to the conservatives PV at the General Election.
Are you also refusing to accept the General Election is May 2nd despite the obvious fact the fire will now be out by July burning at this rate?
For now, I'm just going to have to agree to disagree with you.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
You assume that people will vote according to their identity their whole lives long. I think people will vote based on an assessment of who is going to form a Government that will be more beneficial to them, and will change their allegiances accordingly in ways hitherto unimagined. Quite apart from the fact that the big state approach is rapidly running out of road affordability-wise.
I don't assume people will vote according to their identities their whole lives long. What we have seen in recent times though is that the long-established trend of people shifting right as they age has stopped for those born from the late 80s onwards and gone into reverse.
I agree, people will vote for a government that they feel will be beneficial to them - but after 14 years of Tories it's not looking like the right at the moment - and likely won't be for a while, without changes, as the right are largely to blame for policies that were billed as doing the things you claim to want, but failed on their own terms.
Austerity was supposed to cut the state. It didn't work because the politically easiest bits to do and way of doing it (salami slicing, protecting spending universal spending on the elderly, cancelling investment, lumping cuts onto local government, and pay freezes) merely stored up problems for later - when they will cost you.
Then Brexit was supposed to cut immigration, and free us from the tyranny of bureaucracy, making us all richer in the process. But of course immigration is up, businesses face more red tape than ever and we're poorer. Again. The Tory right got what it lusted after, we found out it doesn't work. So like any good addict, their answer is to demand more of it.
And therein lies the problem - a smaller state and lower immigration are perfectly valid goals. But by putting the cart before the horse and believing in magical answers rather than hard work and sometimes counterintuitive thinking. It ends up in the mess we have now of making absolutely everyone unhappy.
You've had your 'real conservatism' it's just like real communism. It fails, then its proponents claim it's never been tried.
Anyone who thinks that we've had our 'real conservatism' (meaning right-wing politics) is deluding themselves.
The people who think that 'LibLabCon' are a liberal monoparty are a lot closer to the truth than the people who think the Tories are borderline far-right.
Yes, the Overton window is quite narrow. Which means there is loads of room for other, better ideas. The problem is the policy detail. From time to time someone on PB will suggest a proper right wing conservative idea of, say, cutting state managed expenditure by 10%. Which is great. 10% can't be much. But it generally comes unstuck on where exactly the £100 billion cut will fall, since real options would be of the scale of 'abolish the state pension' and 'halve the work the NHS does'.
80 to 100bn goes to the Bank of England to indemnify them against losses on their QT programme. I'd put an immediate halt to that. That was easy. The next 100bn is a bit trickier but not that tricky.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
You assume that people will vote according to their identity their whole lives long. I think people will vote based on an assessment of who is going to form a Government that will be more beneficial to them, and will change their allegiances accordingly in ways hitherto unimagined. Quite apart from the fact that the big state approach is rapidly running out of road affordability-wise.
I don't assume people will vote according to their identities their whole lives long. What we have seen in recent times though is that the long-established trend of people shifting right as they age has stopped for those born from the late 80s onwards and gone into reverse.
I agree, people will vote for a government that they feel will be beneficial to them - but after 14 years of Tories it's not looking like the right at the moment - and likely won't be for a while, without changes, as the right are largely to blame for policies that were billed as doing the things you claim to want, but failed on their own terms.
Austerity was supposed to cut the state. It didn't work because the politically easiest bits to do and way of doing it (salami slicing, protecting spending universal spending on the elderly, cancelling investment, lumping cuts onto local government, and pay freezes) merely stored up problems for later - when they will cost you.
Then Brexit was supposed to cut immigration, and free us from the tyranny of bureaucracy, making us all richer in the process. But of course immigration is up, businesses face more red tape than ever and we're poorer. Again. The Tory right got what it lusted after, we found out it doesn't work. So like any good addict, their answer is to demand more of it.
And therein lies the problem - a smaller state and lower immigration are perfectly valid goals. But by putting the cart before the horse and believing in magical answers rather than hard work and sometimes counterintuitive thinking. It ends up in the mess we have now of making absolutely everyone unhappy.
You've had your 'real conservatism' it's just like real communism. It fails, then its proponents claim it's never been tried.
Anyone who thinks that we've had our 'real conservatism' (meaning right-wing politics) is deluding themselves.
The people who think that 'LibLabCon' are a liberal monoparty are a lot closer to the truth than the people who think the Tories are borderline far-right.
Yes, the Overton window is quite narrow. Which means there is loads of room for other, better ideas. The problem is the policy detail. From time to time someone on PB will suggest a proper right wing conservative idea of, say, cutting state managed expenditure by 10%. Which is great. 10% can't be much. But it generally comes unstuck on where exactly the £100 billion cut will fall, since real options would be of the scale of 'abolish the state pension' and 'halve the work the NHS does'.
Indeed:
How do you cut spending by 10%?
Debt interest can't change. Pension liabilities could be changed, but not if you wish to get elected. By international standards we don't spend much on health. On defence we're probably underspending.
And every year we have more old people, who need more care.
It's well worth reading Nigel Lawson's excellent View From Number Eleven: he goes through all these things. And his view then - which is not a stupid one - is that you get low taxes and expenditure in a three part process:
(1) You balance the books (even if that means more tax in the short term), which means that your debt servicing costs come down (2) You increase the retirement age / move more responsibility for your dotage onto the individual (3) You hold departments to inflation linked rises, so their spending is falling in real terms
Once you have done this, you get government spending coming down as a percentage of GDP, and then you can start looking to cut taxes.
Milei is the model. Pick things that the government shouldn't be doing and stop doing them. He's already achieved a budgetary surplus.
Out of interest what has he stopped doing that has created this surplus?
I note Susan Hall uses the approved Conservative Party jargon of "anti-Muslim hatred" rather than saying "Islamophobia". God knows why they feel the need to quibble over this. Kemi Badenoch tried explaining.
Badenoch clearly thinks she's done a gotcha. But I would ask how this has anything to do with Lee Anderson? Is he anti-Muslim, Islamophobic, both, neither? And what difference does it make?
I would also question her motive for making the distinction. Why is anti-semitism a thing (which she calls out regularly), and Islamophobia not, given they have identical meanings, but slightly different etymologies? I suspect it is less a question of anti OK, phobia not OK, than Jew OK, Muslim not OK.
It's a bit like someone saying "that guy can't possibly be antisemitic because he's an arab and arabs are semites". We all know what antisemitic means. Call it something else if you like. Maybe it will catch on, but quibbling over semantics isn't a good look.
Actually I think separating attacks on a religion from attacks on the people that adhere to it can be justified, up to a point. But you need to be consistent in your treatment of the different religions, and in practice it's not always clear what's being attacked: the religion or the adherents.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
You assume that people will vote according to their identity their whole lives long. I think people will vote based on an assessment of who is going to form a Government that will be more beneficial to them, and will change their allegiances accordingly in ways hitherto unimagined. Quite apart from the fact that the big state approach is rapidly running out of road affordability-wise.
I don't assume people will vote according to their identities their whole lives long. What we have seen in recent times though is that the long-established trend of people shifting right as they age has stopped for those born from the late 80s onwards and gone into reverse.
I agree, people will vote for a government that they feel will be beneficial to them - but after 14 years of Tories it's not looking like the right at the moment - and likely won't be for a while, without changes, as the right are largely to blame for policies that were billed as doing the things you claim to want, but failed on their own terms.
Austerity was supposed to cut the state. It didn't work because the politically easiest bits to do and way of doing it (salami slicing, protecting spending universal spending on the elderly, cancelling investment, lumping cuts onto local government, and pay freezes) merely stored up problems for later - when they will cost you.
Then Brexit was supposed to cut immigration, and free us from the tyranny of bureaucracy, making us all richer in the process. But of course immigration is up, businesses face more red tape than ever and we're poorer. Again. The Tory right got what it lusted after, we found out it doesn't work. So like any good addict, their answer is to demand more of it.
And therein lies the problem - a smaller state and lower immigration are perfectly valid goals. But by putting the cart before the horse and believing in magical answers rather than hard work and sometimes counterintuitive thinking. It ends up in the mess we have now of making absolutely everyone unhappy.
You've had your 'real conservatism' it's just like real communism. It fails, then its proponents claim it's never been tried.
Anyone who thinks that we've had our 'real conservatism' (meaning right-wing politics) is deluding themselves.
The people who think that 'LibLabCon' are a liberal monoparty are a lot closer to the truth than the people who think the Tories are borderline far-right.
Yes, the Overton window is quite narrow. Which means there is loads of room for other, better ideas. The problem is the policy detail. From time to time someone on PB will suggest a proper right wing conservative idea of, say, cutting state managed expenditure by 10%. Which is great. 10% can't be much. But it generally comes unstuck on where exactly the £100 billion cut will fall, since real options would be of the scale of 'abolish the state pension' and 'halve the work the NHS does'.
Indeed:
How do you cut spending by 10%?
Debt interest can't change. Pension liabilities could be changed, but not if you wish to get elected. By international standards we don't spend much on health. On defence we're probably underspending.
And every year we have more old people, who need more care.
It's well worth reading Nigel Lawson's excellent View From Number Eleven: he goes through all these things. And his view then - which is not a stupid one - is that you get low taxes and expenditure in a three part process:
(1) You balance the books (even if that means more tax in the short term), which means that your debt servicing costs come down (2) You increase the retirement age / move more responsibility for your dotage onto the individual (3) You hold departments to inflation linked rises, so their spending is falling in real terms
Once you have done this, you get government spending coming down as a percentage of GDP, and then you can start looking to cut taxes.
Milei is the model. Pick things that the government shouldn't be doing and stop doing them. He's already achieved a budgetary surplus.
Out of interest what has he stopped doing that has created this surplus?
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
You assume that people will vote according to their identity their whole lives long. I think people will vote based on an assessment of who is going to form a Government that will be more beneficial to them, and will change their allegiances accordingly in ways hitherto unimagined. Quite apart from the fact that the big state approach is rapidly running out of road affordability-wise.
I don't assume people will vote according to their identities their whole lives long. What we have seen in recent times though is that the long-established trend of people shifting right as they age has stopped for those born from the late 80s onwards and gone into reverse.
I agree, people will vote for a government that they feel will be beneficial to them - but after 14 years of Tories it's not looking like the right at the moment - and likely won't be for a while, without changes, as the right are largely to blame for policies that were billed as doing the things you claim to want, but failed on their own terms.
Austerity was supposed to cut the state. It didn't work because the politically easiest bits to do and way of doing it (salami slicing, protecting spending universal spending on the elderly, cancelling investment, lumping cuts onto local government, and pay freezes) merely stored up problems for later - when they will cost you.
Then Brexit was supposed to cut immigration, and free us from the tyranny of bureaucracy, making us all richer in the process. But of course immigration is up, businesses face more red tape than ever and we're poorer. Again. The Tory right got what it lusted after, we found out it doesn't work. So like any good addict, their answer is to demand more of it.
And therein lies the problem - a smaller state and lower immigration are perfectly valid goals. But by putting the cart before the horse and believing in magical answers rather than hard work and sometimes counterintuitive thinking. It ends up in the mess we have now of making absolutely everyone unhappy.
You've had your 'real conservatism' it's just like real communism. It fails, then its proponents claim it's never been tried.
Anyone who thinks that we've had our 'real conservatism' (meaning right-wing politics) is deluding themselves.
The people who think that 'LibLabCon' are a liberal monoparty are a lot closer to the truth than the people who think the Tories are borderline far-right.
Yes, the Overton window is quite narrow. Which means there is loads of room for other, better ideas. The problem is the policy detail. From time to time someone on PB will suggest a proper right wing conservative idea of, say, cutting state managed expenditure by 10%. Which is great. 10% can't be much. But it generally comes unstuck on where exactly the £100 billion cut will fall, since real options would be of the scale of 'abolish the state pension' and 'halve the work the NHS does'.
Indeed:
How do you cut spending by 10%?
Debt interest can't change. Pension liabilities could be changed, but not if you wish to get elected. By international standards we don't spend much on health. On defence we're probably underspending.
And every year we have more old people, who need more care.
It's well worth reading Nigel Lawson's excellent View From Number Eleven: he goes through all these things. And his view then - which is not a stupid one - is that you get low taxes and expenditure in a three part process:
(1) You balance the books (even if that means more tax in the short term), which means that your debt servicing costs come down (2) You increase the retirement age / move more responsibility for your dotage onto the individual (3) You hold departments to inflation linked rises, so their spending is falling in real terms
Once you have done this, you get government spending coming down as a percentage of GDP, and then you can start looking to cut taxes.
Milei is the model. Pick things that the government shouldn't be doing and stop doing them. He's already achieved a budgetary surplus.
"You hold departments to inflation linked rises, so their spending is falling in real terms"
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
You assume that people will vote according to their identity their whole lives long. I think people will vote based on an assessment of who is going to form a Government that will be more beneficial to them, and will change their allegiances accordingly in ways hitherto unimagined. Quite apart from the fact that the big state approach is rapidly running out of road affordability-wise.
I don't assume people will vote according to their identities their whole lives long. What we have seen in recent times though is that the long-established trend of people shifting right as they age has stopped for those born from the late 80s onwards and gone into reverse.
I agree, people will vote for a government that they feel will be beneficial to them - but after 14 years of Tories it's not looking like the right at the moment - and likely won't be for a while, without changes, as the right are largely to blame for policies that were billed as doing the things you claim to want, but failed on their own terms.
Austerity was supposed to cut the state. It didn't work because the politically easiest bits to do and way of doing it (salami slicing, protecting spending universal spending on the elderly, cancelling investment, lumping cuts onto local government, and pay freezes) merely stored up problems for later - when they will cost you.
Then Brexit was supposed to cut immigration, and free us from the tyranny of bureaucracy, making us all richer in the process. But of course immigration is up, businesses face more red tape than ever and we're poorer. Again. The Tory right got what it lusted after, we found out it doesn't work. So like any good addict, their answer is to demand more of it.
And therein lies the problem - a smaller state and lower immigration are perfectly valid goals. But by putting the cart before the horse and believing in magical answers rather than hard work and sometimes counterintuitive thinking. It ends up in the mess we have now of making absolutely everyone unhappy.
You've had your 'real conservatism' it's just like real communism. It fails, then its proponents claim it's never been tried.
Anyone who thinks that we've had our 'real conservatism' (meaning right-wing politics) is deluding themselves.
The people who think that 'LibLabCon' are a liberal monoparty are a lot closer to the truth than the people who think the Tories are borderline far-right.
Yes, the Overton window is quite narrow. Which means there is loads of room for other, better ideas. The problem is the policy detail. From time to time someone on PB will suggest a proper right wing conservative idea of, say, cutting state managed expenditure by 10%. Which is great. 10% can't be much. But it generally comes unstuck on where exactly the £100 billion cut will fall, since real options would be of the scale of 'abolish the state pension' and 'halve the work the NHS does'.
Indeed:
How do you cut spending by 10%?
Debt interest can't change. Pension liabilities could be changed, but not if you wish to get elected. By international standards we don't spend much on health. On defence we're probably underspending.
And every year we have more old people, who need more care.
It's well worth reading Nigel Lawson's excellent View From Number Eleven: he goes through all these things. And his view then - which is not a stupid one - is that you get low taxes and expenditure in a three part process:
(1) You balance the books (even if that means more tax in the short term), which means that your debt servicing costs come down (2) You increase the retirement age / move more responsibility for your dotage onto the individual (3) You hold departments to inflation linked rises, so their spending is falling in real terms
Once you have done this, you get government spending coming down as a percentage of GDP, and then you can start looking to cut taxes.
Milei is the model. Pick things that the government shouldn't be doing and stop doing them. He's already achieved a budgetary surplus.
Which brings you directly back to the question of what functions and services the British state is meant to cease providing. Which are...?
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
You assume that people will vote according to their identity their whole lives long. I think people will vote based on an assessment of who is going to form a Government that will be more beneficial to them, and will change their allegiances accordingly in ways hitherto unimagined. Quite apart from the fact that the big state approach is rapidly running out of road affordability-wise.
I don't assume people will vote according to their identities their whole lives long. What we have seen in recent times though is that the long-established trend of people shifting right as they age has stopped for those born from the late 80s onwards and gone into reverse.
I agree, people will vote for a government that they feel will be beneficial to them - but after 14 years of Tories it's not looking like the right at the moment - and likely won't be for a while, without changes, as the right are largely to blame for policies that were billed as doing the things you claim to want, but failed on their own terms.
Austerity was supposed to cut the state. It didn't work because the politically easiest bits to do and way of doing it (salami slicing, protecting spending universal spending on the elderly, cancelling investment, lumping cuts onto local government, and pay freezes) merely stored up problems for later - when they will cost you.
Then Brexit was supposed to cut immigration, and free us from the tyranny of bureaucracy, making us all richer in the process. But of course immigration is up, businesses face more red tape than ever and we're poorer. Again. The Tory right got what it lusted after, we found out it doesn't work. So like any good addict, their answer is to demand more of it.
And therein lies the problem - a smaller state and lower immigration are perfectly valid goals. But by putting the cart before the horse and believing in magical answers rather than hard work and sometimes counterintuitive thinking. It ends up in the mess we have now of making absolutely everyone unhappy.
You've had your 'real conservatism' it's just like real communism. It fails, then its proponents claim it's never been tried.
Anyone who thinks that we've had our 'real conservatism' (meaning right-wing politics) is deluding themselves.
The people who think that 'LibLabCon' are a liberal monoparty are a lot closer to the truth than the people who think the Tories are borderline far-right.
Yes, the Overton window is quite narrow. Which means there is loads of room for other, better ideas. The problem is the policy detail. From time to time someone on PB will suggest a proper right wing conservative idea of, say, cutting state managed expenditure by 10%. Which is great. 10% can't be much. But it generally comes unstuck on where exactly the £100 billion cut will fall, since real options would be of the scale of 'abolish the state pension' and 'halve the work the NHS does'.
80 to 100bn goes to the Bank of England to indemnify them against losses on their QT programme. I'd put an immediate halt to that. That was easy. The next 100bn is a bit trickier but not that tricky.
That's not really a spending cut, though.
It's money in one pocket, and out another, given that the BoE is owned 100% by HMG.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
You assume that people will vote according to their identity their whole lives long. I think people will vote based on an assessment of who is going to form a Government that will be more beneficial to them, and will change their allegiances accordingly in ways hitherto unimagined. Quite apart from the fact that the big state approach is rapidly running out of road affordability-wise.
I don't assume people will vote according to their identities their whole lives long. What we have seen in recent times though is that the long-established trend of people shifting right as they age has stopped for those born from the late 80s onwards and gone into reverse.
I agree, people will vote for a government that they feel will be beneficial to them - but after 14 years of Tories it's not looking like the right at the moment - and likely won't be for a while, without changes, as the right are largely to blame for policies that were billed as doing the things you claim to want, but failed on their own terms.
Austerity was supposed to cut the state. It didn't work because the politically easiest bits to do and way of doing it (salami slicing, protecting spending universal spending on the elderly, cancelling investment, lumping cuts onto local government, and pay freezes) merely stored up problems for later - when they will cost you.
Then Brexit was supposed to cut immigration, and free us from the tyranny of bureaucracy, making us all richer in the process. But of course immigration is up, businesses face more red tape than ever and we're poorer. Again. The Tory right got what it lusted after, we found out it doesn't work. So like any good addict, their answer is to demand more of it.
And therein lies the problem - a smaller state and lower immigration are perfectly valid goals. But by putting the cart before the horse and believing in magical answers rather than hard work and sometimes counterintuitive thinking. It ends up in the mess we have now of making absolutely everyone unhappy.
You've had your 'real conservatism' it's just like real communism. It fails, then its proponents claim it's never been tried.
Anyone who thinks that we've had our 'real conservatism' (meaning right-wing politics) is deluding themselves.
The people who think that 'LibLabCon' are a liberal monoparty are a lot closer to the truth than the people who think the Tories are borderline far-right.
Yes, the Overton window is quite narrow. Which means there is loads of room for other, better ideas. The problem is the policy detail. From time to time someone on PB will suggest a proper right wing conservative idea of, say, cutting state managed expenditure by 10%. Which is great. 10% can't be much. But it generally comes unstuck on where exactly the £100 billion cut will fall, since real options would be of the scale of 'abolish the state pension' and 'halve the work the NHS does'.
80 to 100bn goes to the Bank of England to indemnify them against losses on their QT programme. I'd put an immediate halt to that. That was easy. The next 100bn is a bit trickier but not that tricky.
Sounds good. Are you going to let Starmer and Reeves know they have an extra £100 billion that the Tories have forgotten? BTW, obviously this is great but how is you know this but Hunt and Reeves don't?
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
You assume that people will vote according to their identity their whole lives long. I think people will vote based on an assessment of who is going to form a Government that will be more beneficial to them, and will change their allegiances accordingly in ways hitherto unimagined. Quite apart from the fact that the big state approach is rapidly running out of road affordability-wise.
I don't assume people will vote according to their identities their whole lives long. What we have seen in recent times though is that the long-established trend of people shifting right as they age has stopped for those born from the late 80s onwards and gone into reverse.
I agree, people will vote for a government that they feel will be beneficial to them - but after 14 years of Tories it's not looking like the right at the moment - and likely won't be for a while, without changes, as the right are largely to blame for policies that were billed as doing the things you claim to want, but failed on their own terms.
Austerity was supposed to cut the state. It didn't work because the politically easiest bits to do and way of doing it (salami slicing, protecting spending universal spending on the elderly, cancelling investment, lumping cuts onto local government, and pay freezes) merely stored up problems for later - when they will cost you.
Then Brexit was supposed to cut immigration, and free us from the tyranny of bureaucracy, making us all richer in the process. But of course immigration is up, businesses face more red tape than ever and we're poorer. Again. The Tory right got what it lusted after, we found out it doesn't work. So like any good addict, their answer is to demand more of it.
And therein lies the problem - a smaller state and lower immigration are perfectly valid goals. But by putting the cart before the horse and believing in magical answers rather than hard work and sometimes counterintuitive thinking. It ends up in the mess we have now of making absolutely everyone unhappy.
You've had your 'real conservatism' it's just like real communism. It fails, then its proponents claim it's never been tried.
Anyone who thinks that we've had our 'real conservatism' (meaning right-wing politics) is deluding themselves.
The people who think that 'LibLabCon' are a liberal monoparty are a lot closer to the truth than the people who think the Tories are borderline far-right.
Yes, the Overton window is quite narrow. Which means there is loads of room for other, better ideas. The problem is the policy detail. From time to time someone on PB will suggest a proper right wing conservative idea of, say, cutting state managed expenditure by 10%. Which is great. 10% can't be much. But it generally comes unstuck on where exactly the £100 billion cut will fall, since real options would be of the scale of 'abolish the state pension' and 'halve the work the NHS does'.
Indeed:
How do you cut spending by 10%?
Debt interest can't change. Pension liabilities could be changed, but not if you wish to get elected. By international standards we don't spend much on health. On defence we're probably underspending.
And every year we have more old people, who need more care.
It's well worth reading Nigel Lawson's excellent View From Number Eleven: he goes through all these things. And his view then - which is not a stupid one - is that you get low taxes and expenditure in a three part process:
(1) You balance the books (even if that means more tax in the short term), which means that your debt servicing costs come down (2) You increase the retirement age / move more responsibility for your dotage onto the individual (3) You hold departments to inflation linked rises, so their spending is falling in real terms
Once you have done this, you get government spending coming down as a percentage of GDP, and then you can start looking to cut taxes.
Milei is the model. Pick things that the government shouldn't be doing and stop doing them. He's already achieved a budgetary surplus.
"You hold departments to inflation linked rises, so their spending is falling in real terms"
Eh?
I mean relative to the size of the economy: i.e. they're falling as a percentage of GDP.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
That pinpoints the issue the Tory party faces. It has become multiple parties in one. It’s a strong case for PR.
While there is always a case for PR, all it does is push the 'no majority' problem down the line. We have, like most countries, a plurality of political positions. PR faithfully (look at Israel) respects this and has them all separately getting seats, Great.
At that point the compromises necessary to majority government kick in.
All we do is stick the compromises up the line a bit, by compressing them not by post election horse trading, but pre election conjuring.
And in the end it is the voters who choose to have a 2 party system. There is a choice....Farage, Gallaway, Lozza, Binhead, Davey, the rays of sunshine that make up the SNP....
The big problem I have with discussions about electoral systems is that everyone starts off with a conclusion (my team doing really well), and then works back from there.
That's not how democracy works. If it is democracy, voters fix the conclusions; you can't work backwards. This is why so many people hate it. It actually gives power to people they think don't count.
FPTP gives thumping majorities to parties that 60% didn't vote for.
Sometimes Tory. Sometimes Labour.
That is a bit shite.
Yes, our system (others exist) means that a plurality of support can get to run the country. Those rules govern how our voters and parties function. That plurality always represents a wide section of voters, because with a two party system our parties are internal coalitions. Because usually those two parties are centrist, there is usually a fairly high degree of 'losers consent' in our system. Most centrist voters are fairly content with either party. (Labour lost that recently, the Tories have lost it now. But there are self regulating systems which will see it right in time.)
At the moment we live in strange times where not all this works. But you still can't beat a system where all can vote, all can politically organise and all can stand for election.
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
You assume that people will vote according to their identity their whole lives long. I think people will vote based on an assessment of who is going to form a Government that will be more beneficial to them, and will change their allegiances accordingly in ways hitherto unimagined. Quite apart from the fact that the big state approach is rapidly running out of road affordability-wise.
I don't assume people will vote according to their identities their whole lives long. What we have seen in recent times though is that the long-established trend of people shifting right as they age has stopped for those born from the late 80s onwards and gone into reverse.
I agree, people will vote for a government that they feel will be beneficial to them - but after 14 years of Tories it's not looking like the right at the moment - and likely won't be for a while, without changes, as the right are largely to blame for policies that were billed as doing the things you claim to want, but failed on their own terms.
Austerity was supposed to cut the state. It didn't work because the politically easiest bits to do and way of doing it (salami slicing, protecting spending universal spending on the elderly, cancelling investment, lumping cuts onto local government, and pay freezes) merely stored up problems for later - when they will cost you.
Then Brexit was supposed to cut immigration, and free us from the tyranny of bureaucracy, making us all richer in the process. But of course immigration is up, businesses face more red tape than ever and we're poorer. Again. The Tory right got what it lusted after, we found out it doesn't work. So like any good addict, their answer is to demand more of it.
And therein lies the problem - a smaller state and lower immigration are perfectly valid goals. But by putting the cart before the horse and believing in magical answers rather than hard work and sometimes counterintuitive thinking. It ends up in the mess we have now of making absolutely everyone unhappy.
You've had your 'real conservatism' it's just like real communism. It fails, then its proponents claim it's never been tried.
Anyone who thinks that we've had our 'real conservatism' (meaning right-wing politics) is deluding themselves.
The people who think that 'LibLabCon' are a liberal monoparty are a lot closer to the truth than the people who think the Tories are borderline far-right.
Yes, the Overton window is quite narrow. Which means there is loads of room for other, better ideas. The problem is the policy detail. From time to time someone on PB will suggest a proper right wing conservative idea of, say, cutting state managed expenditure by 10%. Which is great. 10% can't be much. But it generally comes unstuck on where exactly the £100 billion cut will fall, since real options would be of the scale of 'abolish the state pension' and 'halve the work the NHS does'.
Indeed:
How do you cut spending by 10%?
Debt interest can't change. Pension liabilities could be changed, but not if you wish to get elected. By international standards we don't spend much on health. On defence we're probably underspending.
And every year we have more old people, who need more care.
It's well worth reading Nigel Lawson's excellent View From Number Eleven: he goes through all these things. And his view then - which is not a stupid one - is that you get low taxes and expenditure in a three part process:
(1) You balance the books (even if that means more tax in the short term), which means that your debt servicing costs come down (2) You increase the retirement age / move more responsibility for your dotage onto the individual (3) You hold departments to inflation linked rises, so their spending is falling in real terms
Once you have done this, you get government spending coming down as a percentage of GDP, and then you can start looking to cut taxes.
Milei is the model. Pick things that the government shouldn't be doing and stop doing them. He's already achieved a budgetary surplus.
Which brings you directly back to the question of what functions and services the British state is meant to cease providing. Which are...?
Does anyone actually rate/support 30p Lee? He seems to be a laughing stock in his own party, and indeed his own seat of Ashfield.
What exactly is the point of him?
He certainly has a constituency. I follow Khan on FB and every single thing he posts, however anodyne, has a legion of posts underneath it from various angry looking elderly white people saying that they no longer recognise London, would never go to London because it isn't safe, and accusing Khan of being some kind of Muslim extremist or hater of white people, generally peppered with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Of course they may all be fake profiles created by the Russians but I doubt it.
We are just seeing the development of the next front in British politics developing, in anticipation of a Labour government.
A large subset of 2019 Tory voters might not vote for the Tories again, but they are I suspect highly persuadable to vote for a new right wing brand over the Labour Party, if given the opportunity.
The 2019 realignment might not have developed to the Tories' advantage, but those voters are still out there, and they're not Starmerites.
Under PR maybe, under FPTP Reform are still polling on average worse than UKIP got in 2015.
Plus if Sunak and Hunt lose the next general election and the next Conservative leader is an ERG favoured rightwinger like Badenoch, Braverman, Patel or Jenrick they will mostly return to the Tory fold
I think it remains to be seen quite how badly the Tory brand has been damaged.
I am starting to subscribe to a theory that the brand itself might be shot. Other voices on the right may then fill that void.
The Labour brand has looked bust perhaps beyond repair in the early 1980s and again under Corbyn. I don't think there is anything that could not be repaired in the Tory ranks by having 630 One Nation moderates standing for election in 2028 under Tugendhat or Hunt.
Aside from being completely deluded, this comment is grotesquely anti-democratic. Does the strand of people within the UK who don't actually believe in an ever-expanding state, immigration in the hundreds of thousands, and green economic asphyxia to benefit the coal-guzzling manufacturing states not need to be represented? Should they just shut up and vote Tommy Tugend because he's been obliging enough to wear a blue rosette?
Well, you need PR then. The question isn't about whether those people deserve democratic representation (everyone does - and always gets it, of a form), but how and whether the Tories can win an election. There are millions who were rather fond of Jeremy Corbyn. But millions more who loathed him. Similarly, there are no doubt plenty who agree with that view but plenty more who for various reasons are profoundly turned off by it or question whether it works as sold.
The Tories, as one of the big two, are trying to win by building the widest coalition possible. Going the Reform route would be, errr, brave, considering political, economic and demographic trends right now.
You assume that people will vote according to their identity their whole lives long. I think people will vote based on an assessment of who is going to form a Government that will be more beneficial to them, and will change their allegiances accordingly in ways hitherto unimagined. Quite apart from the fact that the big state approach is rapidly running out of road affordability-wise.
I don't assume people will vote according to their identities their whole lives long. What we have seen in recent times though is that the long-established trend of people shifting right as they age has stopped for those born from the late 80s onwards and gone into reverse.
I agree, people will vote for a government that they feel will be beneficial to them - but after 14 years of Tories it's not looking like the right at the moment - and likely won't be for a while, without changes, as the right are largely to blame for policies that were billed as doing the things you claim to want, but failed on their own terms.
Austerity was supposed to cut the state. It didn't work because the politically easiest bits to do and way of doing it (salami slicing, protecting spending universal spending on the elderly, cancelling investment, lumping cuts onto local government, and pay freezes) merely stored up problems for later - when they will cost you.
Then Brexit was supposed to cut immigration, and free us from the tyranny of bureaucracy, making us all richer in the process. But of course immigration is up, businesses face more red tape than ever and we're poorer. Again. The Tory right got what it lusted after, we found out it doesn't work. So like any good addict, their answer is to demand more of it.
And therein lies the problem - a smaller state and lower immigration are perfectly valid goals. But by putting the cart before the horse and believing in magical answers rather than hard work and sometimes counterintuitive thinking. It ends up in the mess we have now of making absolutely everyone unhappy.
You've had your 'real conservatism' it's just like real communism. It fails, then its proponents claim it's never been tried.
Anyone who thinks that we've had our 'real conservatism' (meaning right-wing politics) is deluding themselves.
The people who think that 'LibLabCon' are a liberal monoparty are a lot closer to the truth than the people who think the Tories are borderline far-right.
You rather prove my point. You'd hear the same 'LibLabCon' guff from posters here since it first appeared. Since 2010 we've had various, very different, iterations of Conservatism and several things that the right actively campaigned for (then got upset about as not providing the sunlit uplands promised).
We've had Cameron and Osborne's socially liberal austerity - which had the ultimate aim of shrinking the state to allow room for tax cuts. But came a cropper because it did leave people in some areas left behind, and had to cut in a counterproductive way to protect disgruntled (elderly) key voters.
Then we had Brexit and May's 'Erdington Conservatism' which broadly kept Cameron/Osborne's fiscal framework, dropped its more liberal noises, and aimed to get through Brexit.
We've had Boris' cake and eat it Conservatism - the most successful electorally but fundamentally based on the lie that oodles of cash and tax cuts would both be achieved through Boosterism and Brexit. A night on the tiles that had to come to an end with an awful hangover.
We had Truss - the closest to what the right of the party's fever dreams. Big tax cuts. A war on woke. It was an unmitigated disaster.
Now we have Sunak, who has tried to appease the right with his rhetoric, but keeps running up against reality.
At some point, it's more rational to see the problem not as "Conservatism is not being done right" but with the modern version of the creed itself. The junkie has to admit there's a problem. Not demand more of the higher grade stuff by doing Truss 2: Electoral Boogaloo and trying unfunded tax cuts again.
The truth is, it keeps failing because, in its full fat form, it's both unpopular and incoherent. Smaller state + Demonstrative social conservatism and anti-immigration sentiment is like Corbynism in reverse. There's a small number of people who like the package - but a much bigger group who are irrevocably put off by one bit or other. It also doesn't add up.
A big reason immigration is so high is desperation to hold down state spending while improving GDP figures. If you want to reduce it while not collapsing public services, you likely need to pay carers, nurses, even teachers now, more to get people training/retraining and staying in those jobs. If you want taxes down you have to do some things that people don't like but boost growth. And so on. There are trade-offs modern Tories won't admit exist.
Hence why the Tories have flailed around for 14 years trying to find the magic formula while fixing nothing and then complaining that 'Real Conservatism' has never been tried.
Comments
They get smashed again in 2028/2029? As only center right/left parties win elections?
(I wouldn’t go to Birmingham, but that’s because it’s Birmingham, not because of Muslims…)
Though that's far from certain given the state of the polls!
On a post on social media platform Nextdoor asking if LGBTQ+ people in Tower Hamlets feel safe, a commenter who is listed as from Arnold Circus said: "I’m feeling less and less safe.
"Holding hands with my partner is something we now only do in busy places. I’ve even started to receive abuse walking on my own, which does influence which route I walk home, which roads I’ll choose to take.”
The infighting cannot have helped.
And 2023 profits were down 22% IIRC.
I want a set of policies that will create the conditions we need to grow the economy, start to return power to people and families, and protect our security. I happen to believe that conservative policies will do that - hence I support parties that will enact them. It's not about where you are on a made-up right left spectrum, it's about finding solutions and convincing the public that they're right.
However, I’d be happy if you want to come down and we could take part in a Pride march through the borough. Let’s see if Kemi Badenoch will come along.
Even if I have just spent two hours shouting at them for refusing to accept they've put the wrong date on one of their own bills.
That said, I think they will recover. I quite admire Sir Kier Boring, but fundamentally he leads the Labour Party. They have as many fruitcakes as the Tories with huge dollops of hypocrisy and naivety thrown in. They will fuck up big time as they always do.
57% rise in homophobic hate crime in Tower Hamlets
Neoliberal maybe?
For what it's worth, I think Neoliberalism has been found out and had its day. These things swing into and out of fashion.
It's the very opposite of a no-go area.
You're the sort of person who favoured the redevelopment of Euston in the 1960s and demolition of the Doric Arch.
Closest I can think of is “tea party” but that movement had some very American traits like religiosity and strong views on abortion.
I'm not sure, outside of places like Brighton, it's particularly common anywhere in the UK.
I did think there was some political subtlety and nuance about Anderson's comments and they've certainly caused a few ructions including taking the steam out of Tice's speech at the Reform UK conference but the other possibility is there are creatures as yet undiscovered in the Amazonian rainforest which have more political nous and Anderson was doing what a politician usually never does - saying what he thinks.
To her credit (and I won't say that often) Susan Hall has come to Khan's defence and while there may be a few in the Outer suburbs who would agree with Anderson, but Hall knows among the voters she needs to win to capture the mayoralty Anderson's comments will have gone down like a lump of cold sick.
How it plays "in the provinces" makes no odds to her - she isn't running to be Mayor of Provincial England.
This evening's two polls show Labour in the low to mid-40s and the Conservatives in the low to mid 20s - the Lab/LD/Green vs Con/Reform vote sits at 60-33 or 61-35.
Some will assert the Reform vote is basically a Conservative vote - I'm much less convinced. There's no polling evidence for that claim nor, listening to Tice, is there a scintilla of respect for Sunak. I suspect Tice wants as big as Conservative defeat as possible so Reform can take over the remnants and pivot the Conservative Party back to the kind of positions it occupied in the 1930s - a revived form of narrow nationalism chasing the ephemeral populist vote.
So... there's that.
I get the impression it goes through phases. In the 70s and early 80s it was generally used about areas with large black populations, then in the late 80s and 90s it seemed to focus much more on lawless “youth” of whatever colour. Now it’s Muslim areas. But the same sentiment.
I don’t know whether it’s ever been true. It’s probably always contained some grain of truth (ie places outsiders might feel nervous walking in), but probably also more an extrapolation of someone’s sense of unease into something bigger.
That ultimately is why I see Conservative and Labour as this country's two biggest problems.
As far as security and economic growth is concerned, Starmer, Davey and even Tice would all agree - politics is usually about means rather than ends. Many would indeed argue a conservative-minded person should be quite relaxed about a Labour Government led by Starmer with Reeves as Chancellor.
Last word on my response to Lee Anderson's comments. As someone who has stood up and indeed championed British Muslims for a decade to end up as seen as espousing division and likened to Katie Hopkins, I'll bow out of the conversation and leave the two sides to argue...
I've always said language matters. So does perception and if moderates are pushed to one side or another, nothing will be resolved. I'm out.
https://twitter.com/scullyp/status/1762146826671595799
As an aside - is it now easier to stand as a candidate ID-wise than it is to vote for one? I don't see anything on the Electoral Commission or Parliament website saying otherwise.
We're not talking about Euston. We're talking about a host of small towns, and even villages, that were once rail served. Often the old station site is perfect and available. Often it is not. These new stations cost millions - and it is important to site them so they get as many new passengers as possible. If you get more passengers on a new site, why be beholden to the old? I' not talking about moving currently-open stations (though that does happen, see below); but new stations. Often the villages and towns have grown since then, and the natural axis of the settlement might be different.
Also note that rail companies sometimes moved stations in ye olden days as traffic and other factors came into play.
And if an old site was reopened, the old buildings might be demolished, as I think happened at the new Ilkeston station (though the old station at the site had a different name). Modern regulations need platforms to be wider; access to be different, and if you're building new, there are no grandfather rights.
As a modern example of stations moving, Bromsgrove station - which was still open - was moved a few years back. So I think was Rochester at about the same time.
The question is how do you evolve the political culture so it transcends the voting system and provides good governance supported by adequate and appropriate levels of scrutiny ? Indeed, one might argue the example of other systems shows populist or personality-led parties can achieve much more under PR than FPTP which in theory favours parties which are broad based coalitions.
That old bell, presage of a train, had just sounded through Oxford station; and the undergraduates who were waiting there, gay figures in tweed or flannel, moved to the margin of the platform and gazed idly up the line. Young and careless, in the glow of the afternoon sunshine, they struck a sharp note of incongruity with the worn boards they stood on, with the fading signals and grey eternal walls of that antique station, which, familiar to them and insignificant, does yet whisper to the tourist the last enchantments of the Middle Age.
I would also question her motive for making the distinction. Why is anti-semitism a thing (which she calls out regularly), and Islamophobia not, given they have identical meanings, but slightly different etymologies? I suspect it is less a question of anti OK, phobia not OK, than Jew OK, Muslim not OK.
I don't know what a "no-go" area looks like. Londonderry had one until Operation Motorman and there have always been areas of every town and city you don't visit alone at night but above and beyond that, what was Scully implying?
A "no-go" area for whom? I'm a White British person in East Ham so I'm a minority but am I harrassed or abused in the High Street? To be blunt, it's busy and bustling but that's all.
There are more public spending cuts and fiscal drag on income taxation coming after the next election, regardless of who wins it, and the campaign will be a tissue of lies to cover up the real nature of the choice that is coming: between two virtually indistinguishable teams of suits planning to manage decline in a near-identical fashion. We might as well not bother TBH.
I agree, people will vote for a government that they feel will be beneficial to them - but after 14 years of Tories it's not looking like the right at the moment - and likely won't be for a while, without changes, as the right are largely to blame for policies that were billed as doing the things you claim to want, but failed on their own terms.
Austerity was supposed to cut the state. It didn't work because the politically easiest bits to do and way of doing it (salami slicing, protecting spending universal spending on the elderly, cancelling investment, lumping cuts onto local government, and pay freezes) merely stored up problems for later - when they will cost you.
Then Brexit was supposed to cut immigration, and free us from the tyranny of bureaucracy, making us all richer in the process. But of course immigration is up, businesses face more red tape than ever and we're poorer. Again. The Tory right got what it lusted after, we found out it doesn't work. So like any good addict, their answer is to demand more of it.
And therein lies the problem - a smaller state and lower immigration are perfectly valid goals. But by putting the cart before the horse and believing in magical answers rather than hard work and sometimes counterintuitive thinking. It ends up in the mess we have now of making absolutely everyone unhappy.
You've had your 'real conservatism' it's just like real communism. It fails, then its proponents claim it's never been tried.
I think if an old station is empty or otherwise easily reused then fine, but kicking people out of their home is a bit draconian when there are other options available.
The people who think that 'LibLabCon' are a liberal monoparty are a lot closer to the truth than the people who think the Tories are borderline far-right.
IIRC the Doric Arch, once well outside the station, was where one of the platforms now is. Now I believe it should have been rebuilt elsewhere, and not just rent asunder and demolished. But it could not stay where it was.
Depending on who you believe, we either have full employment or under employment but if we want to grow the economy, how do we do it? Import more labour to fill the vacancies (they will need somewhere to live and spend) or hope AI or capital investment or investment in other forms of technology and automaton will spur a new phase of growth?
I suspect none of the current political leaders would accept they are "managing decline" - indeed there's plenty of evidence we are living better lives than ever before but the perception is one of "decline". What would the opposite of "managing decline" look like? I need to visualise what this would look like in order to work out how we could get there.
It upsets me more than it should do. Grim place to start a journey.
As democratic government evolved in the nineteenth century, theorists of the time believed that it would never survive mass enfranchisement because the poor would vote to help themselves to the wealth of the rich, who would not stand for it. They clearly failed to foresee a future in which the wealthy would use their votes to starve the poor to death. Yet here we are: out of control asset prices and rents, and a state being progressively hollowed out as it collapses under the weight of need which the increasingly immiserated cohorts of the working poor cannot afford to fund, whilst no potential government that would dare to resolve the situation by relieving the rich of some meaningful portion of their loot can find the votes to get itself elected - hence the ridiculous pantomime of Blue Tories and Red Tories pretending to be really different to each other that we are to be subjected to at some point in the next ten months or so.
Thus we have, simultaneously, a plague of damp and mouldy slum housing, a collapsing healthcare system, schools which are falling down and being replaced with sheds through lack of cash, and food banks sprouting like ugly weeds in every corner of the country, whilst the average pensioner now has a higher income than the average worker after deducting housing costs, and a full fifth of pensioner households are millionaires.
This is full scale class warfare in which the contemporary versions of the peers and landed gentry - corporate executives, robber landlords, wealthy elderly homeowners and their heirs - have taken middle and low income households completely to the cleaners through taxation and rents. We essentially live in a neo-Hanoverian settlement in which the impoverishment of one half of the population to enrich the other half through extraction is legitimised periodically at the ballot box. Our democracy cannot do anything about this because it would require the winners of the current system to vote against their own interests, which they won't do, and they control too many votes to be overcome. The situation is, I'm afraid, completely hopeless.
We keep hearing this tired old refrain about "conservative" policies - that means tax cuts, nothing else, sometimes spending cuts (though never for the armed forces, police, schools or the NHS) but usually tax cuts.
If you cut taxes, you're a Conservative - Reeves could cut taxes, would that make her a Conservative? I suspect not.
I don't even know what "right wing politics" looks like - it's like an excuse, a justification for the oncoming storm.
I can just about discern the Labour one for now, I think I have a reasonable idea what would be the One Nation Tory one, but I have literally no idea what the 'right wing Tory' or Reform one looks like when looked at as a whole as opposed to manic stuff on single issues.
Sometimes Tory. Sometimes Labour.
That is a bit shite.
Thing is, though, that’s how democracy works. And, whilst I’m pretty confident I’m right in my left wing conclusions and you’re a fruitloop, neither of us are good candidates for having political power as we could only achieve our wise ambitions through anti- or non-democratic means. And democracy is more important than untrammelled growth/a blissfully equal society*.
*delete as appropriate.
The country votes on March 10th and it could be a recipe for political chaos as the governing Socialists are set to suffer a big reverse at the hands of the Democratic Alliance (those with long memories will remember the AD from earlier elections) of Social Democrats, Christian Democrats and Monarchists even though said group is only polling about there they polled in the last election just over two years ago.
Chega have more than doubled their share from 7% to 18% while the Socialists have fallen from 42% to 29% - among the minor parties both the centre-right Liberal Initiative and the Left Bloc have made small gains.
Chega means Enough! and that tells you a lot about them. They are very socially conservative and the question is whether the Democratic Alliance (ADN) want anything to do with them after the election. The support of Liberal Initiative for a broad centre-right Government looks likely but I suspect Luis Montenegro who took over as PSD leader after the 2022 election defeat. He couldn't have reckoned on the spectacular implosion of the Socialists (remind you of anyone?) and has taken full advantage but electorally the centre-right is becalmed on about a third of the vote.
It's going to be interesting.
How do you cut spending by 10%?
Debt interest can't change. Pension liabilities could be changed, but not if you wish to get elected. By international standards we don't spend much on health. On defence we're probably underspending.
And every year we have more old people, who need more care.
It's well worth reading Nigel Lawson's excellent View From Number Eleven: he goes through all these things. And his view then - which is not a stupid one - is that you get low taxes and expenditure in a three part process:
(1) You balance the books (even if that means more tax in the short term), which means that your debt servicing costs come down
(2) You increase the retirement age / move more responsibility for your dotage onto the individual
(3) You hold departments to inflation linked rises, so their spending is falling in real terms
Once you have done this, you get government spending coming down as a percentage of GDP, and then you can start looking to cut taxes.
Are you also refusing to accept the General Election is May 2nd despite the obvious fact the fire will now be out by July burning at this rate?
Regarding Cameron and Osborne's austerity policies, I don't really have any defence to make.
There is simply no way that a prosperous society can be created from a settlement in which an anaemic economy full of low wage workers struggling to cope with exorbitant living costs is gamed, so that the static amount of available wealth is simply transferred from the poor to the rich, whilst the state shrivels and falls down around us.
You have a hypothesis. Time will tell.
Eh?
It's money in one pocket, and out another, given that the BoE is owned 100% by HMG.
Emerson College Polling
@EmersonPolling
MICHIGAN POLL with
@thehill
Trump 46%
Biden 44%
10% undecided
https://twitter.com/EmersonPolling/status/1762162072006041610
At the moment we live in strange times where not all this works. But you still can't beat a system where all can vote, all can politically organise and all can stand for election.
We've had Cameron and Osborne's socially liberal austerity - which had the ultimate aim of shrinking the state to allow room for tax cuts. But came a cropper because it did leave people in some areas left behind, and had to cut in a counterproductive way to protect disgruntled (elderly) key voters.
Then we had Brexit and May's 'Erdington Conservatism' which broadly kept Cameron/Osborne's fiscal framework, dropped its more liberal noises, and aimed to get through Brexit.
We've had Boris' cake and eat it Conservatism - the most successful electorally but fundamentally based on the lie that oodles of cash and tax cuts would both be achieved through Boosterism and Brexit. A night on the tiles that had to come to an end with an awful hangover.
We had Truss - the closest to what the right of the party's fever dreams. Big tax cuts. A war on woke. It was an unmitigated disaster.
Now we have Sunak, who has tried to appease the right with his rhetoric, but keeps running up against reality.
At some point, it's more rational to see the problem not as "Conservatism is not being done right" but with the modern version of the creed itself. The junkie has to admit there's a problem. Not demand more of the higher grade stuff by doing Truss 2: Electoral Boogaloo and trying unfunded tax cuts again.
The truth is, it keeps failing because, in its full fat form, it's both unpopular and incoherent. Smaller state + Demonstrative social conservatism and anti-immigration sentiment is like Corbynism in reverse. There's a small number of people who like the package - but a much bigger group who are irrevocably put off by one bit or other. It also doesn't add up.
A big reason immigration is so high is desperation to hold down state spending while improving GDP figures. If you want to reduce it while not collapsing public services, you likely need to pay carers, nurses, even teachers now, more to get people training/retraining and staying in those jobs. If you want taxes down you have to do some things that people don't like but boost growth. And so on. There are trade-offs modern Tories won't admit exist.
Hence why the Tories have flailed around for 14 years trying to find the magic formula while fixing nothing and then complaining that 'Real Conservatism' has never been tried.