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...?
Cancel all housing benefits.
The benefit - so to speak - of Housing Benefit accrues mostly to landlords, and drives up rents for everyone.
So I tend to agree that it would be better if it didn't exist.
Let's ignore for a moment, though, the impacts of this on, for example, disabled people living in flats paid for by Housing Benefit, or... for that matter... on the solvency of banks who have made loans to providers of social housing.
As I said, ignoring all the short term effects, it is worth remembering that Central Government doesn't pay Housing Benefit. That is paid by Local Authorities.
So, it would have no direct impact on the Central Government spending and the deficit. It would - however - mean that Council Tax would be able to come down.
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...?
Cancel all housing benefits.
The benefit - so to speak - of Housing Benefit accrues mostly to landlords, and drives up rents for everyone.
So I tend to agree that it would be better if it didn't exist.
Let's ignore for a moment, though, the impacts of this on, for example, disabled people living in flats paid for by Housing Benefit, or... for that matter... on the solvency of banks who have made loans to providers of social housing.
As I said, ignoring all the short term effects, it is worth remembering that Central Government doesn't pay Housing Benefit. That is paid by Local Authorities.
So, it would have no direct impact on the Central Government spending and the deficit. It would - however - mean that Council Tax would be able to come down.
Scrapping HB is one sure fire way to kick off major civil disorder.
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...?
Cancel all housing benefits.
The benefit - so to speak - of Housing Benefit accrues mostly to landlords, and drives up rents for everyone.
So I tend to agree that it would be better if it didn't exist.
Let's ignore for a moment, though, the impacts of this on, for example, disabled people living in flats paid for by Housing Benefit, or... for that matter... on the solvency of banks who have made loans to providers of social housing.
As I said, ignoring all the short term effects, it is worth remembering that Central Government doesn't pay Housing Benefit. That is paid by Local Authorities.
So, it would have no direct impact on the Central Government spending and the deficit. It would - however - mean that Council Tax would be able to come down.
Yes, obviously you would need safeguards but in principle it's an activity that the state should not be engaged in and should be phased out as quickly as possible.
The effect it has of making housing more expensive for people who work is particularly pernicious.
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...?
Cancel all housing benefits.
Are you talking just the housing component of UC? Or unearned CGT on house price rises and scrapping and recovering right to buy and help to buy subsidies as well?
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.
The first iteration (Cameron and Osborne) was the correct iteration for the time, as we now forget when they came to power we were potentially facing complete and total ruin due to the financial crisis.
Cameron's mistake was getting caught up in the Brexit dilemma but he and Osborne were pursuing the best economic policy for that time.
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.
On this reading, I predict that you'll be able to chalk up Starmerism as another failed variant of 'Conservatism'. The problem isn't the party in power but the consensus that has dominated government thinking since the Blair era.
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.
On this reading, I predict that you'll be able to chalk up Starmerism as another failed variant of 'Conservatism'. The problem isn't the party in power but the consensus that has dominated government thinking since the Blair era.
How exactly has that differed from the consensus since the Thatcher era?
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...?
Cancel all housing benefits.
Are you talking just the housing component of UC? Or unearned CGT on house price rises and scrapping and recovering right to buy and help to buy subsidies as well?
- Yes to scrapping help to buy subsidies - Neutral on right to buy for council tenants. - No to CGT on house price rises. Instead attack the cause of house price rises by removing government subsidies for the market.
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.
On this reading, I predict that you'll be able to chalk up Starmerism as another failed variant of 'Conservatism'. The problem isn't the party in power but the consensus that has dominated government thinking since the Blair era.
How exactly has that differed from the consensus since the Thatcher era?
Thatcher didn't think that mass immigration was the way to run the economy.
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?
"everything above 2 on reform the whole lot gets added to the conservatives PV at the General Election."
Really? Are you aware that when Brexit/Reform achieved 2.1% in 2019 it was while standing down in every Conservative-held seat, which works out at 4% in every seat they chose to contest?
So given that this time it's pretty clear that they intend to contest every seat at the GE, what makes you so confident that Brexit/Reform will in 2024 massively underperform compared to 2019 and average only 2% rather than 4% in the seats they contest?
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.
On this reading, I predict that you'll be able to chalk up Starmerism as another failed variant of 'Conservatism'. The problem isn't the party in power but the consensus that has dominated government thinking since the Blair era.
How exactly has that differed from the consensus since the Thatcher era?
Thatcher didn't think that mass immigration was the way to run the economy.
Wages for working people as low as possible at all costs. A different way of achieving the same aim.
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.
That sounds like the ideal way to sustain a modern economy! If you could just print some more free money too - that'd really seal the deal.
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?
Are you also refusing to accept paragraphs and newlines into your life?
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.
On this reading, I predict that you'll be able to chalk up Starmerism as another failed variant of 'Conservatism'. The problem isn't the party in power but the consensus that has dominated government thinking since the Blair era.
How exactly has that differed from the consensus since the Thatcher era?
Thatcher didn't think that mass immigration was the way to run the economy.
Wages for working people as low as possible at all costs. A different way of achieving the same aim.
I don't think that that's a fair characterisation of Thatcherism, but let's put that aside for the sake of argument.
It's a much more pernicious way of achieving that aim because it doesn't just hold down wages but also directly drives up housing costs.
The interesting thing about the 2024/2029 Parliament will be how Labour governs with very little money to spend.
Will they tax more? Will they cut services? We've not had a Labour government with no money to spend since 74-79... that didn't end well for Lab to say the least.
The interesting thing about the 2024/2029 Parliament will be how Labour governs with very little money to spend.
Will they tax more? Will the cut services? We've not had a Labour government with no money to spend since 74-79... that didn't end well for Lab to say the least, lol.
Boils down to two things, I reckon.
First is how much "we knew things were bad, but until we entered Downing Street, we couldn't have imagined how bad a mess the Tories would leave for us to clear up" Reeves can get away with in the first month. In the short term, that gives her a fair bit of cover to do some pretty grim stuff. (And yes, it is somewhat dishonest, because it's obvious that Hunt's budget plans are based on an impossible set of assumptions about spending. But the government are being dishonest as well, so morally it's a wash.)
Second is whether she can find the first baby step that enables a second larger step that enables something else and so on. Planning and getting stuff built, especially houses and all that needs to go with them, is trailled as a biggie. Not dicking around with trade with the rest of Europe (even if they are twits to remain in the EU, that's the will of their people and UK policy needs to accept the consequences of that) ought to be another, even if it's more under the radar.
The important thing is that it doesn't matter if they're unpopular in 2026. The key date is 2028/9. (One of Sunak's problems has been that he had to splash the cash in 2020/1, which has meant tightening as the election has approached.)
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?
"everything above 2 on reform the whole lot gets added to the conservatives PV at the General Election."
Really? Are you aware that when Brexit/Reform achieved 2.1% in 2019 it was while standing down in every Conservative-held seat, which works out at 4% in every seat they chose to contest?
So given that this time it's pretty clear that they intend to contest every seat at the GE, what makes you so confident that Brexit/Reform will in 2024 massively underperform compared to 2019 and average only 2% rather than 4% in the seats they contest?
“what makes you so confident”
The psyche of the nation. Have I not explained it clearly enough?
“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”
“ 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”
You are attracted to people with scars. And in a face off to the death you join the largest, most vociferous crowd.
Even 66 days out it’s obvious what the psyche of the Nation will be on the day it votes. Obvious because the psyche of the nation won’t just fall there that day in happenstance - it’s honed in like a laser guided missile using ancient science. Nay not even science no longer, but crafted to an art form in this modern era. Burn your spreadsheet Wulfy, it will never convince you how and why Reform get just 2% in the main one and all the rest end up back with the Conservatives where it was last time. Your spreadsheet hasn’t a clue how to predict elections now science to art form + technology is the king.
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...?
Cancel all housing benefits.
Are you talking just the housing component of UC? Or unearned CGT on house price rises and scrapping and recovering right to buy and help to buy subsidies as well?
- Yes to scrapping help to buy subsidies - Neutral on right to buy for council tenants. - No to CGT on house price rises. Instead attack the cause of house price rises by removing government subsidies for the market.
Help to Buy subsidies just raise house prices, and advantage one set of buyers over another. It's very basic economics and it's sad the government doesn't realise this.
Right to Buy: candidly, the numbers on this are now absolutely tiny.
CGT: adding it would only discourage people from trading down when they no longer need the space. So I think you're absolutely right there.
I do think you also need to look at Stamp Duty. At the very least it needs to be waived for people buying smaller properties.
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?
Are you also refusing to accept paragraphs and newlines into your life?
Even tired, drunk and emotional this anniversary my post makes perfect sense to me as I read it out loud.
Oh. Or maybe because of. 🤦♀️
I’ll tap out. My friend Stodge had hit nail on head: time will soon tell…
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...?
Cancel all housing benefits.
Are you talking just the housing component of UC? Or unearned CGT on house price rises and scrapping and recovering right to buy and help to buy subsidies as well?
- Yes to scrapping help to buy subsidies - Neutral on right to buy for council tenants. - No to CGT on house price rises. Instead attack the cause of house price rises by removing government subsidies for the market.
Help to Buy subsidies just raise house prices, and advantage one set of buyers over another. It's very basic economics and it's sad the government doesn't realise this.
Right to Buy: candidly, the numbers on this are now absolutely tiny.
CGT: adding it would only discourage people from trading down when they no longer need the space. So I think you're absolutely right there.
I do think you also need to look at Stamp Duty. At the very least it needs to be waived for people buying smaller properties.
I think the government knew exactly what they were doing with help to buy.
It helped those who already had houses by further inflating the market (older and more likely to vote Conservative) and it helped their mates the property developers and construction industry who make up as much as 20% of donations to the Conservative party.
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...?
Cancel all housing benefits.
Are you talking just the housing component of UC? Or unearned CGT on house price rises and scrapping and recovering right to buy and help to buy subsidies as well?
- Yes to scrapping help to buy subsidies - Neutral on right to buy for council tenants. - No to CGT on house price rises. Instead attack the cause of house price rises by removing government subsidies for the market.
Help to Buy subsidies just raise house prices, and advantage one set of buyers over another. It's very basic economics and it's sad the government doesn't realise this.
Right to Buy: candidly, the numbers on this are now absolutely tiny.
CGT: adding it would only discourage people from trading down when they no longer need the space. So I think you're absolutely right there.
I do think you also need to look at Stamp Duty. At the very least it needs to be waived for people buying smaller properties.
Of course the govt realise Help to Buy raises house prices. That helps the people who vote Tory at the expense of the people who don't which is tickety boo for them. And they can also convince the nice but dim non houseowners that they are tackling the problem too.
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?
"everything above 2 on reform the whole lot gets added to the conservatives PV at the General Election."
Really? Are you aware that when Brexit/Reform achieved 2.1% in 2019 it was while standing down in every Conservative-held seat, which works out at 4% in every seat they chose to contest?
So given that this time it's pretty clear that they intend to contest every seat at the GE, what makes you so confident that Brexit/Reform will in 2024 massively underperform compared to 2019 and average only 2% rather than 4% in the seats they contest?
“what makes you so confident”
The psyche of the nation. Have I not explained it clearly enough?
“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”
“ 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”
You are attracted to people with scars. And in a face off to the death you join the largest, most vociferous crowd.
Even 66 days out it’s obvious what the psyche of the Nation will be on the day it votes. Obvious because the psyche of the nation won’t just fall there that day in happenstance - it’s honed in like a laser guided missile using ancient science. Nay not even science no longer, but crafted to an art form in this modern era. Burn your spreadsheet Wulfy, it will never convince you how and why Reform get just 2% in the main one and all the rest end up back with the Conservatives where it was last time. Your spreadsheet hasn’t a clue how to predict elections now science to art form + technology is the king.
Two important (and linked) factors.
First, in 2019 the Brexit Party stood down in a lot of seats- they only ran 276 candidates in the end, mostly in pretty hopeless Labour and Lib Dem held seats. The southern golf club bore wing of their support couldn't vote for Farage's lot, because the party didn't put up candidates in the end.
Second, the stereotypical Faragist voter hated May, loved Boris and really hates Sunak. That was a large part of the reason for the stand down last time. Now it could, in theory, happen again, but why should it? What on earth can Rishi dangle in front of Nigel to get his practical endorsement?
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.
On this reading, I predict that you'll be able to chalk up Starmerism as another failed variant of 'Conservatism'. The problem isn't the party in power but the consensus that has dominated government thinking since the Blair era.
Just because you don't like a series of governments doesn't mean that there has been consensus between them.
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.
On this reading, I predict that you'll be able to chalk up Starmerism as another failed variant of 'Conservatism'. The problem isn't the party in power but the consensus that has dominated government thinking since the Blair era.
Just because you don't like a series of governments doesn't mean that there has been consensus between them.
Of course the govt realise Help to Buy raises house prices. That helps the people who vote Tory at the expense of the people who don't which is tickety boo for them. And they can also convince the nice but dim non houseowners that they are tackling the problem too.
Under a new joint venture with the Council of Mortgage Lenders - first revealed last year by SocietyGuardian.co.uk - first-time buyers will be offered interest free loans for the purchase of an equity share in a new home.
The scheme is part of Labour's drive to become "the modern party of home ownership".
Typically, purchasers will be given interest-free loans to cover a quarter of the cost of a new home.
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...?
Cancel all housing benefits.
Not possible unless you build enough social housing to accommodate those who couldn't afford even to rent in the private sector otherwise
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...?
Cancel all housing benefits.
Are you talking just the housing component of UC? Or unearned CGT on house price rises and scrapping and recovering right to buy and help to buy subsidies as well?
- Yes to scrapping help to buy subsidies - Neutral on right to buy for council tenants. - No to CGT on house price rises. Instead attack the cause of house price rises by removing government subsidies for the market.
Help to Buy subsidies just raise house prices, and advantage one set of buyers over another. It's very basic economics and it's sad the government doesn't realise this.
Right to Buy: candidly, the numbers on this are now absolutely tiny.
CGT: adding it would only discourage people from trading down when they no longer need the space. So I think you're absolutely right there.
I do think you also need to look at Stamp Duty. At the very least it needs to be waived for people buying smaller properties.
I think the government knew exactly what they were doing with help to buy.
It helped those who already had houses by further inflating the market (older and more likely to vote Conservative) and it helped their mates the property developers and construction industry who make up as much as 20% of donations to the Conservative party.
Those builders may not be so keen now that the Competitions watchdog had been turned on the big builders. That isn't the droids they were looking 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?
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.
On this reading, I predict that you'll be able to chalk up Starmerism as another failed variant of 'Conservatism'. The problem isn't the party in power but the consensus that has dominated government thinking since the Blair era.
Nah. I don't think Starmer's particularly cut from the same cloth. Though he'll find things very difficult due to the mess he inherits from the Tories.
The test is whether Labour can build, build, build. Which will require largely ignoring the counterproductive arguments from the right of recent times (and abandonment of the field by the left). Invest - and don't let the treasury block what's needed - it'l save money in the end. Reform regulation and practices - and don't let vested interests get in the way. We need more houses and infrastructure. And innovative businesses to set up in places with both where costs aren't prohibitive. Finally, somehow unpick the damage done by Brexit and the vandals that promoted it without understanding what they were doing in a way that creates a settlement that stops being a ball and chain around the economy.
Get there, and it won't solve everything. Demographics are demographics. We've wasted 20 years on lots of things. But it'll be a start that may take some of the pressure off and allow governments a wider range of choices in the future.
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?
"everything above 2 on reform the whole lot gets added to the conservatives PV at the General Election."
Really? Are you aware that when Brexit/Reform achieved 2.1% in 2019 it was while standing down in every Conservative-held seat, which works out at 4% in every seat they chose to contest?
So given that this time it's pretty clear that they intend to contest every seat at the GE, what makes you so confident that Brexit/Reform will in 2024 massively underperform compared to 2019 and average only 2% rather than 4% in the seats they contest?
“what makes you so confident”
The psyche of the nation. Have I not explained it clearly enough?
“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”
“ 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”
You are attracted to people with scars. And in a face off to the death you join the largest, most vociferous crowd.
Even 66 days out it’s obvious what the psyche of the Nation will be on the day it votes. Obvious because the psyche of the nation won’t just fall there that day in happenstance - it’s honed in like a laser guided missile using ancient science. Nay not even science no longer, but crafted to an art form in this modern era. Burn your spreadsheet Wulfy, it will never convince you how and why Reform get just 2% in the main one and all the rest end up back with the Conservatives where it was last time. Your spreadsheet hasn’t a clue how to predict elections now science to art form + technology is the king.
Two important (and linked) factors.
First, in 2019 the Brexit Party stood down in a lot of seats- they only ran 276 candidates in the end, mostly in pretty hopeless Labour and Lib Dem held seats. The southern golf club bore wing of their support couldn't vote for Farage's lot, because the party didn't put up candidates in the end.
Second, the stereotypical Faragist voter hated May, loved Boris and really hates Sunak. That was a large part of the reason for the stand down last time. Now it could, in theory, happen again, but why should it? What on earth can Rishi dangle in front of Nigel to get his practical endorsement?
I sense a peerage would be needed this time....... lets face it, folk have received one for far far less.....
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.
It's a bit early for Milei to be cited the example of success. He also has 254% inflation in January, and has slashed social support such as stopping funding to the 38 000 public kitchens for the poor.
He does have some ideas that may be applicable here, perhaps we could do the same as his dollarisation of the economy by abolishing Sterling in favour of the Euro?
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.
It's a bit early for Milei to be cited the example of success. He also has 254% inflation in January, and has slashed social support such as stopping funding to the 38 000 public kitchens for the poor.
He does have some ideas that may be applicable here, perhaps we could do the same as his dollarisation of the economy by abolishing Sterling in favour of the Euro?
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.
It's a bit early for Milei to be cited the example of success. He also has 254% inflation in January, and has slashed social support such as stopping funding to the 38 000 public kitchens for the poor.
He does have some ideas that may be applicable here, perhaps we could do the same as his dollarisation of the economy by abolishing Sterling in favour of the Euro?
The Argentine economy has been run on TurboTruss Economics for decades - print money to keep every special interest happy. Add in defaults at regular intervals…
Plus some really funky stuff. A pile of money that the government was taking in was on the fixed* exchange rates. But then they got even cleverer and sold the future profit on that gag to the banks. Which were “encouraged” to buy this err… investment. So the banks will probably explode in the near future….
Even by the standards of say, Peru**, the result was an economy rather like the bar in Goodfellas - everyone was stealing from everyone else until the only thing left to do was burn the place for insurance.
*Fixed in every sense of the word. **Peruvian economics is like Russia under Yeltsin. Except with less competence.
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.
Baldwin never interested me so haven’t studied him but that’s not my recollection of his policies?
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 played a small part in the civil partnership concept (a friend of mine was developing policy on the topic for Blair).
It’s not a question of being dragged along. Fundamentally a gay couple should have the same legal rights as a heterosexual one.
But language is important and the “civil partnership” was a way of getting support from a large group of voters who are nervous about radical change.
After a few years they realised that that world hadn’t ended and were willing to change their stance.
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 suspect it’s to try and differentiate between Islamists and Muslims.
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...?
Cancel all housing benefits.
Are you talking just the housing component of UC? Or unearned CGT on house price rises and scrapping and recovering right to buy and help to buy subsidies as well?
The issue with CGT on house price rises is that it means that each time people move they have to go to a less expensive property. So they don’t move.
But you should have rollover relief - ie you get full relief on any money that is reinvested into a principal private residence within, say, 36 months but that any money that you take off the table should be taxed as a gain
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...?
Cancel all housing benefits.
Are you talking just the housing component of UC? Or unearned CGT on house price rises and scrapping and recovering right to buy and help to buy subsidies as well?
- Yes to scrapping help to buy subsidies - Neutral on right to buy for council tenants. - No to CGT on house price rises. Instead attack the cause of house price rises by removing government subsidies for the market.
Of course one of the key drivers of over investment and price rises in residential housing is the fact the gains are tax free…
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...?
Cancel all housing benefits.
Are you talking just the housing component of UC? Or unearned CGT on house price rises and scrapping and recovering right to buy and help to buy subsidies as well?
- Yes to scrapping help to buy subsidies - Neutral on right to buy for council tenants. - No to CGT on house price rises. Instead attack the cause of house price rises by removing government subsidies for the market.
Help to Buy subsidies just raise house prices, and advantage one set of buyers over another. It's very basic economics and it's sad the government doesn't realise this.
Right to Buy: candidly, the numbers on this are now absolutely tiny.
CGT: adding it would only discourage people from trading down when they no longer need the space. So I think you're absolutely right there.
I do think you also need to look at Stamp Duty. At the very least it needs to be waived for people buying smaller properties.
I have 4 empty bedrooms at home. I should trade down but can’t afford / don’t want to pay the stamp duty.
That’s sub-optimal for me (the house is too large) and sub-optimal for society (housing space is under utilised) but it’s tax that is forcing that outcome
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...?
Cancel all housing benefits.
Are you talking just the housing component of UC? Or unearned CGT on house price rises and scrapping and recovering right to buy and help to buy subsidies as well?
- Yes to scrapping help to buy subsidies - Neutral on right to buy for council tenants. - No to CGT on house price rises. Instead attack the cause of house price rises by removing government subsidies for the market.
Help to Buy subsidies just raise house prices, and advantage one set of buyers over another. It's very basic economics and it's sad the government doesn't realise this.
Right to Buy: candidly, the numbers on this are now absolutely tiny.
CGT: adding it would only discourage people from trading down when they no longer need the space. So I think you're absolutely right there.
I do think you also need to look at Stamp Duty. At the very least it needs to be waived for people buying smaller properties.
I have 4 empty bedrooms at home. I should trade down but can’t afford / don’t want to pay the stamp duty.
That’s sub-optimal for me (the house is too large) and sub-optimal for society (housing space is under utilised) but it’s tax that is forcing that outcome
Surely you pay stamp duty on the future purchase, not the sale. If you buy somewhere cheap enough, you won't pay much.
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...?
Cancel all housing benefits.
Are you talking just the housing component of UC? Or unearned CGT on house price rises and scrapping and recovering right to buy and help to buy subsidies as well?
- Yes to scrapping help to buy subsidies - Neutral on right to buy for council tenants. - No to CGT on house price rises. Instead attack the cause of house price rises by removing government subsidies for the market.
Help to Buy subsidies just raise house prices, and advantage one set of buyers over another. It's very basic economics and it's sad the government doesn't realise this.
Right to Buy: candidly, the numbers on this are now absolutely tiny.
CGT: adding it would only discourage people from trading down when they no longer need the space. So I think you're absolutely right there.
I do think you also need to look at Stamp Duty. At the very least it needs to be waived for people buying smaller properties.
I have 4 empty bedrooms at home. I should trade down but can’t afford / don’t want to pay the stamp duty.
That’s sub-optimal for me (the house is too large) and sub-optimal for society (housing space is under utilised) but it’s tax that is forcing that outcome
We live in a 3 bed detached family home. Just two of us, we should probably trade down but to what ? 2 bed bungalows round here are around the same price. A park home has punitive service charges tans the rises are not capped and retirement flats are an absolute money pit with so many restrictive terms and if you try to sell one it’s a nightmare.
Newcastle council proceed with its assault on the elderly and marginalised in society by forcing through Cashless car parks. Great if you have a smartphone. Sadly many do not.
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...?
Cancel all housing benefits.
The benefit - so to speak - of Housing Benefit accrues mostly to landlords, and drives up rents for everyone.
So I tend to agree that it would be better if it didn't exist.
Let's ignore for a moment, though, the impacts of this on, for example, disabled people living in flats paid for by Housing Benefit, or... for that matter... on the solvency of banks who have made loans to providers of social housing.
As I said, ignoring all the short term effects, it is worth remembering that Central Government doesn't pay Housing Benefit. That is paid by Local Authorities.
So, it would have no direct impact on the Central Government spending and the deficit. It would - however - mean that Council Tax would be able to come down.
It is administered by councils but paid for by central government.
Newcastle council proceed with its assault on the elderly and marginalised in society by forcing through Cashless car parks. Great if you have a smartphone. Sadly many do not.
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?
Comments
So I tend to agree that it would be better if it didn't exist.
Let's ignore for a moment, though, the impacts of this on, for example, disabled people living in flats paid for by Housing Benefit, or... for that matter... on the solvency of banks who have made loans to providers of social housing.
As I said, ignoring all the short term effects, it is worth remembering that Central Government doesn't pay Housing Benefit. That is paid by Local Authorities.
So, it would have no direct impact on the Central Government spending and the deficit. It would - however - mean that Council Tax would be able to come down.
Neil Henderson
@hendopolis
·
2m
EXPRESS: Get him back! Tories rally round ‘race row’ Lee Anderson #TomorrowsPapersToday
The effect it has of making housing more expensive for people who work is particularly pernicious.
Or unearned CGT on house price rises and scrapping and recovering right to buy and help to buy subsidies as well?
Cameron's mistake was getting caught up in the Brexit dilemma but he and Osborne were pursuing the best economic policy for that time.
- Neutral on right to buy for council tenants.
- No to CGT on house price rises. Instead attack the cause of house price rises by removing government subsidies for the market.
Really? Are you aware that when Brexit/Reform achieved 2.1% in 2019 it was while standing down in every Conservative-held seat, which works out at 4% in every seat they chose to contest?
So given that this time it's pretty clear that they intend to contest every seat at the GE, what makes you so confident that Brexit/Reform will in 2024 massively underperform compared to 2019 and average only 2% rather than 4% in the seats they contest?
A different way of achieving the same aim.
It's a much more pernicious way of achieving that aim because it doesn't just hold down wages but also directly drives up housing costs.
Will they tax more? Will they cut services? We've not had a Labour government with no money to spend since 74-79... that didn't end well for Lab to say the least.
First is how much "we knew things were bad, but until we entered Downing Street, we couldn't have imagined how bad a mess the Tories would leave for us to clear up" Reeves can get away with in the first month. In the short term, that gives her a fair bit of cover to do some pretty grim stuff.
(And yes, it is somewhat dishonest, because it's obvious that Hunt's budget plans are based on an impossible set of assumptions about spending. But the government are being dishonest as well, so morally it's a wash.)
Second is whether she can find the first baby step that enables a second larger step that enables something else and so on. Planning and getting stuff built, especially houses and all that needs to go with them, is trailled as a biggie. Not dicking around with trade with the rest of Europe (even if they are twits to remain in the EU, that's the will of their people and UK policy needs to accept the consequences of that) ought to be another, even if it's more under the radar.
The important thing is that it doesn't matter if they're unpopular in 2026. The key date is 2028/9. (One of Sunak's problems has been that he had to splash the cash in 2020/1, which has meant tightening as the election has approached.)
The psyche of the nation. Have I not explained it clearly enough?
“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”
“ 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”
You are attracted to people with scars. And in a face off to the death you join the largest, most vociferous crowd.
Even 66 days out it’s obvious what the psyche of the Nation will be on the day it votes. Obvious because the psyche of the nation won’t just fall there that day in happenstance - it’s honed in like a laser guided missile using ancient science. Nay not even science no longer, but crafted to an art form in this modern era.
Burn your spreadsheet Wulfy, it will never convince you how and why Reform get just 2% in the main one and all the rest end up back with the Conservatives where it was last time. Your spreadsheet hasn’t a clue how to predict elections now science to art form + technology is the king.
Right to Buy: candidly, the numbers on this are now absolutely tiny.
CGT: adding it would only discourage people from trading down when they no longer need the space. So I think you're absolutely right there.
I do think you also need to look at Stamp Duty. At the very least it needs to be waived for people buying smaller properties.
Oh. Or maybe because of. 🤦♀️
I’ll tap out. My friend Stodge had hit nail on head: time will soon tell…
It helped those who already had houses by further inflating the market (older and more likely to vote Conservative) and it helped their mates the property developers and construction industry who make up as much as 20% of donations to the Conservative party.
First, in 2019 the Brexit Party stood down in a lot of seats- they only ran 276 candidates in the end, mostly in pretty hopeless Labour and Lib Dem held seats. The southern golf club bore wing of their support couldn't vote for Farage's lot, because the party didn't put up candidates in the end.
Second, the stereotypical Faragist voter hated May, loved Boris and really hates Sunak. That was a large part of the reason for the stand down last time. Now it could, in theory, happen again, but why should it? What on earth can Rishi dangle in front of Nigel to get his practical endorsement?
2005: Chancellor offers help to first-time buyers
Under a new joint venture with the Council of Mortgage Lenders - first revealed last year by SocietyGuardian.co.uk - first-time buyers will be offered interest free loans for the purchase of an equity share in a new home.
The scheme is part of Labour's drive to become "the modern party of home ownership".
Typically, purchasers will be given interest-free loans to cover a quarter of the cost of a new home.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68400504
The test is whether Labour can build, build, build. Which will require largely ignoring the counterproductive arguments from the right of recent times (and abandonment of the field by the left). Invest - and don't let the treasury block what's needed - it'l save money in the end. Reform regulation and practices - and don't let vested interests get in the way. We need more houses and infrastructure. And innovative businesses to set up in places with both where costs aren't prohibitive. Finally, somehow unpick the damage done by Brexit and the vandals that promoted it without understanding what they were doing in a way that creates a settlement that stops being a ball and chain around the economy.
Get there, and it won't solve everything. Demographics are demographics. We've wasted 20 years on lots of things. But it'll be a start that may take some of the pressure off and allow governments a wider range of choices in the future.
He does have some ideas that may be applicable here, perhaps we could do the same as his dollarisation of the economy by abolishing Sterling in favour of the Euro?
Plus some really funky stuff. A pile of money that the government was taking in was on the fixed* exchange rates. But then they got even cleverer and sold the future profit on that gag to the banks. Which were “encouraged” to buy this err… investment. So the banks will probably explode in the near future….
Even by the standards of say, Peru**, the result was an economy rather like the bar in Goodfellas - everyone was stealing from everyone else until the only thing left to do was burn the place for insurance.
*Fixed in every sense of the word.
**Peruvian economics is like Russia under Yeltsin. Except with less competence.
All I hear on the airwaves is, 'is what he said racist?' . Surely its 'is what he said sectarianism?'
It’s not a question of being dragged along. Fundamentally a gay couple should have the same legal rights as a heterosexual one.
But language is important and the “civil partnership” was a way of getting support from a large group of voters who are nervous about radical change.
After a few years they realised that that world hadn’t ended and were willing to change their stance.
There’s nothing unprincipled about that approach
But you should have rollover relief - ie you get full relief on any money that is reinvested into a principal private residence within, say, 36 months but that any money that you take off the table should be taxed as a gain
That’s sub-optimal for me (the house is too large) and sub-optimal for society (housing space is under utilised) but it’s tax that is forcing that outcome
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-68407084
Tate being discussed on here yesterday.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/feb/26/labour-to-help-schools-develop-male-influencers-to-combat-tate-misogyny
We will stay here.
https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/newcastle-council-claims-not-sustainable-28691686