Boris Johnson is no longer expected to join Tory election campaign trail because party is facing decimation in the red wall seats he won in 2019 and there are fears he will not appeal to voters in the south
Johnson is instead expected to go on his second summer holiday within the next few days and is not due back in the UK until July 3
Sunak did not tell Johnson that he was planning a snap election and has not spoken to him for the duration of the campaign
Allies of Sunak are said to be concerned that Johnson could prove to be a distraction because of the ‘media circus’ that would surround him if he spent a day on the campaign trail
Tory strategist: ‘What’s the point of sending him to the red wall when the focus of the campaign is to defend 150 seats in the south?
‘This is not a campaign that is looking to win seats in the red wall. This is a fight for survival. If you look at the seats we’re targeting they don’t have Boris Johnson supporters’
In the past ten days the prime minister has spent his time in seats with an average Conservative majority of 15,000, up from 10,000 in the first two weeks of the campaign
Thanks Scott and Paste. You are pointless.
Ignore Horse Scott, I for one like the twitter posts, saves me the bother of hooking into twitter.
(One request though, please post the tweet link each time.)
Does anyone know how to scott & paste the tweet text and URL at the same time? Asking for a friend...
Apple supports a 3rd party app called iClip. I've been in IT for decades and it is the single most productive tool I have come across.
Boris Johnson is no longer expected to join Tory election campaign trail because party is facing decimation in the red wall seats he won in 2019 and there are fears he will not appeal to voters in the south
Johnson is instead expected to go on his second summer holiday within the next few days and is not due back in the UK until July 3
Sunak did not tell Johnson that he was planning a snap election and has not spoken to him for the duration of the campaign
Allies of Sunak are said to be concerned that Johnson could prove to be a distraction because of the ‘media circus’ that would surround him if he spent a day on the campaign trail
Tory strategist: ‘What’s the point of sending him to the red wall when the focus of the campaign is to defend 150 seats in the south?
‘This is not a campaign that is looking to win seats in the red wall. This is a fight for survival. If you look at the seats we’re targeting they don’t have Boris Johnson supporters’
In the past ten days the prime minister has spent his time in seats with an average Conservative majority of 15,000, up from 10,000 in the first two weeks of the campaign
Thanks Scott and Paste. You are pointless.
Ignore Horse Scott, I for one like the twitter posts, saves me the bother of hooking into twitter.
(One request though, please post the tweet link each time.)
For goodness sake, I already posted it! With link!
If Sunak is spending his time in seats with majorities of 15,000 that implies that the private polling is as bad as the worst of the public polling right?
Are the Tories now as unpopular as Labour in 2019? Really?
Much worse.
Are they really though? I mean, in 2019 Labour had destroyed itself, was led by a historically unpopular leader and was being racist. Are the Tories really as bad as that?
Their unpopularity is much worse, because unlike Labour in 2019 the Tories have also lost a substantial portion of their previously tribal vote.
Their competence may also be worse at this point, though Sunak would still be a better pick than Corbyn.
I am saying, do they deserve it?
I think they are terrible and I will happily see the back of them but I struggle to see how they are more unpopular than Labour 2019, that's all.
Boris Johnson is no longer expected to join Tory election campaign trail because party is facing decimation in the red wall seats he won in 2019 and there are fears he will not appeal to voters in the south
Johnson is instead expected to go on his second summer holiday within the next few days and is not due back in the UK until July 3
Sunak did not tell Johnson that he was planning a snap election and has not spoken to him for the duration of the campaign
Allies of Sunak are said to be concerned that Johnson could prove to be a distraction because of the ‘media circus’ that would surround him if he spent a day on the campaign trail
Tory strategist: ‘What’s the point of sending him to the red wall when the focus of the campaign is to defend 150 seats in the south?
‘This is not a campaign that is looking to win seats in the red wall. This is a fight for survival. If you look at the seats we’re targeting they don’t have Boris Johnson supporters’
In the past ten days the prime minister has spent his time in seats with an average Conservative majority of 15,000, up from 10,000 in the first two weeks of the campaign
Thanks Scott and Paste. You are pointless.
Ignore Horse Scott, I for one like the twitter posts, saves me the bother of hooking into twitter.
(One request though, please post the tweet link each time.)
Does anyone know how to scott & paste the tweet text and URL at the same time? Asking for a friend...
Apple supports a 3rd party app called iClip. I've been in IT for decades and it is the single most productive tool I have come across.
Thanks. I'll look it up.
You can literally just copy the Twitter text using the Twitter app, then copy and paste the link via the share command and put it below. It takes like two seconds.
If Sunak is spending his time in seats with majorities of 15,000 that implies that the private polling is as bad as the worst of the public polling right?
Are the Tories now as unpopular as Labour in 2019? Really?
Given the Tories seem to be totally unorganised and clueless, it would be dangerous to read too much into their actions. This isn't the Tories of 2015, who had a very clear plan, organised social media campaigns and high quality private polling.
Mind you his comments will not I imagine win over many Tories to Labour but might have a few leftwingers spitting out their herbal tea and going Green.
'Mr Caudwell said he had donated to the Conservatives in 2019 “because I couldn’t possibly stand a Corbyn government, and I am still of exactly the same view there.”
He praised Sir Keir's attempts to get rid of what he called "the loony Left" which he claimed had focused on "extreme socialist policies", instead of "creating a wealthy Britain".
"We can't tax rich people in order to help the poor because they'll go off to Monaco and other places, we have to create real genuine wealth.”
Sir Jim who moved to Monaco to save - checks - £4bn in taxes.
And he's lecturing other people about paying their taxes?
What a total fucking scumbag.
Just to add: if you move your taxable residence away from the UK to avoid paying taxes, no fucking way should you be allowed to vote.
Do you mean that you would have no voters who are not tax-resident in the UK, or would you introduce some sort of test to judge whether people had moved abroad for other reasons?
Candidly, I don't think I should be allowed to vote. I am not tax resident in the UK. (Albeit I pay more tax in the US than I would have done in the UK, so it certainly hasn't been done for tax reasons.)
If Sunak is spending his time in seats with majorities of 15,000 that implies that the private polling is as bad as the worst of the public polling right?
Are the Tories now as unpopular as Labour in 2019? Really?
Given the Tories seem to be totally unorganised and clueless, it would be dangerous to read too much into their actions. This isn't the Tories of 2015, who had a very clear plan, organised social media campaigns and high quality private polling.
I have asked before, were the Tories in 2019 actually good or was it just because of Labour they looked competent.
Boris Johnson is no longer expected to join Tory election campaign trail because party is facing decimation in the red wall seats he won in 2019 and there are fears he will not appeal to voters in the south
Johnson is instead expected to go on his second summer holiday within the next few days and is not due back in the UK until July 3
Sunak did not tell Johnson that he was planning a snap election and has not spoken to him for the duration of the campaign
Allies of Sunak are said to be concerned that Johnson could prove to be a distraction because of the ‘media circus’ that would surround him if he spent a day on the campaign trail
Tory strategist: ‘What’s the point of sending him to the red wall when the focus of the campaign is to defend 150 seats in the south?
‘This is not a campaign that is looking to win seats in the red wall. This is a fight for survival. If you look at the seats we’re targeting they don’t have Boris Johnson supporters’
In the past ten days the prime minister has spent his time in seats with an average Conservative majority of 15,000, up from 10,000 in the first two weeks of the campaign
Thanks Scott and Paste. You are pointless.
Ignore Horse Scott, I for one like the twitter posts, saves me the bother of hooking into twitter.
(One request though, please post the tweet link each time.)
Does anyone know how to scott & paste the tweet text and URL at the same time? Asking for a friend...
Apple supports a 3rd party app called iClip. I've been in IT for decades and it is the single most productive tool I have come across.
Thanks. I'll look it up.
You can literally just copy the Twitter text using the Twitter app, then copy and paste the link via the share command and put it below. It takes like two seconds.
Right, but I'm trying to do it in one. I have the RSI.
If Sunak is spending his time in seats with majorities of 15,000 that implies that the private polling is as bad as the worst of the public polling right?
Are the Tories now as unpopular as Labour in 2019? Really?
Given the Tories seem to be totally unorganised and clueless, it would be dangerous to read too much into their actions. This isn't the Tories of 2015, who had a very clear plan, organised social media campaigns and high quality private polling.
I have asked before, were the Tories in 2019 actually good or was it just because of Labour they looked competent.
I think there was a plan. The "Get Brexit Done" and "Levelling Up" might have been cynical, but they came from a place of some thought and planning.
Boris Johnson is no longer expected to join Tory election campaign trail because party is facing decimation in the red wall seats he won in 2019 and there are fears he will not appeal to voters in the south
Johnson is instead expected to go on his second summer holiday within the next few days and is not due back in the UK until July 3
Sunak did not tell Johnson that he was planning a snap election and has not spoken to him for the duration of the campaign
Allies of Sunak are said to be concerned that Johnson could prove to be a distraction because of the ‘media circus’ that would surround him if he spent a day on the campaign trail
Tory strategist: ‘What’s the point of sending him to the red wall when the focus of the campaign is to defend 150 seats in the south?
‘This is not a campaign that is looking to win seats in the red wall. This is a fight for survival. If you look at the seats we’re targeting they don’t have Boris Johnson supporters’
In the past ten days the prime minister has spent his time in seats with an average Conservative majority of 15,000, up from 10,000 in the first two weeks of the campaign
Thanks Scott and Paste. You are pointless.
Ignore Horse Scott, I for one like the twitter posts, saves me the bother of hooking into twitter.
(One request though, please post the tweet link each time.)
Does anyone know how to scott & paste the tweet text and URL at the same time? Asking for a friend...
Apple supports a 3rd party app called iClip. I've been in IT for decades and it is the single most productive tool I have come across.
Thanks. I'll look it up.
You can literally just copy the Twitter text using the Twitter app, then copy and paste the link via the share command and put it below. It takes like two seconds.
Right, but I'm trying to do it in one. I have the RSI.
Understood but if that doesn't work, you can just do it as one. I would imagine Scott is just doing one part of, i.e. sharing and not putting the link as I said.
Mind you his comments will not I imagine win over many Tories to Labour but might have a few leftwingers spitting out their herbal tea and going Green.
'Mr Caudwell said he had donated to the Conservatives in 2019 “because I couldn’t possibly stand a Corbyn government, and I am still of exactly the same view there.”
He praised Sir Keir's attempts to get rid of what he called "the loony Left" which he claimed had focused on "extreme socialist policies", instead of "creating a wealthy Britain".
"We can't tax rich people in order to help the poor because they'll go off to Monaco and other places, we have to create real genuine wealth.”
Sir Jim who moved to Monaco to save - checks - £4bn in taxes.
And he's lecturing other people about paying their taxes?
What a total fucking scumbag.
Just to add: if you move your taxable residence away from the UK to avoid paying taxes, no fucking way should you be allowed to vote.
Do you mean that you would have no voters who are not tax-resident in the UK, or would you introduce some sort of test to judge whether people had moved abroad for other reasons?
Personally, I think the vote should be restricted to those who are both British citizens and British taxpayers.
I would allow voting local elections for people who are not British citizens, but have indefinite leave to remain, and who are tax resident. (See, I'm all heart, I am.)
If Sunak is spending his time in seats with majorities of 15,000 that implies that the private polling is as bad as the worst of the public polling right?
Are the Tories now as unpopular as Labour in 2019? Really?
Much worse.
Are they really though? I mean, in 2019 Labour had destroyed itself, was led by a historically unpopular leader and was being racist. Are the Tories really as bad as that?
Their unpopularity is much worse, because unlike Labour in 2019 the Tories have also lost a substantial portion of their previously tribal vote.
Their competence may also be worse at this point, though Sunak would still be a better pick than Corbyn.
I am saying, do they deserve it?
I think they are terrible and I will happily see the back of them but I struggle to see how they are more unpopular than Labour 2019, that's all.
They probably don't deserve to lose quite as badly as they will, but that's the risk they took by angering the right whilst also abandoning the centre, and serially failing to deliver - creating a perfect storm.
Labour never forgot to please at least some people even if it was a smaller segment than they should have aimed for.
UK - Next General Election - Liberal Democrats U/O 59.5 Seats
Odds don't seem great however - currently 1.83 for over 59.5 seats. The 'Most Seats Without Labour' for the Lib Dems is 4.7 - if they get 60+ seats they'll have quite a good chance of coming 2nd.
I just sold 56 on the spreads, fwiw.
Makes my Spread position long 402 for Labour, short 56 (for 1.5x amount) on Lib Dem.
As was with my Labour long it's my intent to average into this short as it goes against me, although wouldn't surprise me if like that long I don't actually get the opportunity to. Consequently both positions small.
Boris Johnson is no longer expected to join Tory election campaign trail because party is facing decimation in the red wall seats he won in 2019 and there are fears he will not appeal to voters in the south
Johnson is instead expected to go on his second summer holiday within the next few days and is not due back in the UK until July 3
Sunak did not tell Johnson that he was planning a snap election and has not spoken to him for the duration of the campaign
Allies of Sunak are said to be concerned that Johnson could prove to be a distraction because of the ‘media circus’ that would surround him if he spent a day on the campaign trail
Tory strategist: ‘What’s the point of sending him to the red wall when the focus of the campaign is to defend 150 seats in the south?
‘This is not a campaign that is looking to win seats in the red wall. This is a fight for survival. If you look at the seats we’re targeting they don’t have Boris Johnson supporters’
In the past ten days the prime minister has spent his time in seats with an average Conservative majority of 15,000, up from 10,000 in the first two weeks of the campaign
Thanks Scott and Paste. You are pointless.
Ignore Horse Scott, I for one like the twitter posts, saves me the bother of hooking into twitter.
(One request though, please post the tweet link each time.)
For goodness sake, I already posted it! With link!
Ah ok - I missed your version, sorry. Proof, if it were needed, that I don't read every post on PB.
Boris Johnson is no longer expected to join Tory election campaign trail because party is facing decimation in the red wall seats he won in 2019 and there are fears he will not appeal to voters in the south
Johnson is instead expected to go on his second summer holiday within the next few days and is not due back in the UK until July 3
Sunak did not tell Johnson that he was planning a snap election and has not spoken to him for the duration of the campaign
Allies of Sunak are said to be concerned that Johnson could prove to be a distraction because of the ‘media circus’ that would surround him if he spent a day on the campaign trail
Tory strategist: ‘What’s the point of sending him to the red wall when the focus of the campaign is to defend 150 seats in the south?
‘This is not a campaign that is looking to win seats in the red wall. This is a fight for survival. If you look at the seats we’re targeting they don’t have Boris Johnson supporters’
In the past ten days the prime minister has spent his time in seats with an average Conservative majority of 15,000, up from 10,000 in the first two weeks of the campaign
Thanks Scott and Paste. You are pointless.
Ignore Horse Scott, I for one like the twitter posts, saves me the bother of hooking into twitter.
(One request though, please post the tweet link each time.)
For goodness sake, I already posted it! With link!
Ah ok - I missed your version, sorry. Proof, if it were needed, that I don't read every post on PB.
That's okay, I will take it as horsing around. I am not against Scott posting, I am against him posting literally the same thing as others but with no links.
During a radio interview on Tuesday, Sir Keir was asked what he meant by working people.
“People who earn their living, rely on our [public] services and don’t really have the ability to write a cheque when they get into trouble,” he told LBC.
“So the sort of people I’m meeting pretty well every day now. It’s quite a big group because these days there are many people obviously not so well off.”
Two-thirds of working-age households have savings of more than £1,000 - considered the minimum “rainy day” fund - according to the Resolution Foundation.
I'm often right. But, not enough people want to hear it in the next 2 weeks, and time is running out.
Think very carefully how you mark your ballot. Because, after that, you're stuck with it for a full 5 years.
Do you want to look yourself in the mirror that whole time knowing you voted for it?
Don't worry, I and the rest of my close family are voting Tory, not that it will do much good in Woking.
I'm curious as to what Labour have planned. If they scrap ISAs or something, then fine, I don't like it, but whatever. If they decide to help themselves to savings I already have, then that's theft.
Mind you his comments will not I imagine win over many Tories to Labour but might have a few leftwingers spitting out their herbal tea and going Green.
'Mr Caudwell said he had donated to the Conservatives in 2019 “because I couldn’t possibly stand a Corbyn government, and I am still of exactly the same view there.”
He praised Sir Keir's attempts to get rid of what he called "the loony Left" which he claimed had focused on "extreme socialist policies", instead of "creating a wealthy Britain".
"We can't tax rich people in order to help the poor because they'll go off to Monaco and other places, we have to create real genuine wealth.”
Sir Jim who moved to Monaco to save - checks - £4bn in taxes.
And he's lecturing other people about paying their taxes?
What a total fucking scumbag.
Just to add: if you move your taxable residence away from the UK to avoid paying taxes, no fucking way should you be allowed to vote.
Do you mean that you would have no voters who are not tax-resident in the UK, or would you introduce some sort of test to judge whether people had moved abroad for other reasons?
Personally, I think the vote should be restricted to those who are both British citizens and British taxpayers.
I would allow voting local elections for people who are not British citizens, but have indefinite leave to remain, and who are tax resident. (See, I'm all heart, I am.)
I've only ever not voted once when I was eligible to vote. On that occasion (local elections) a work meeting took me out of town early enough that I couldn't vote before I left, but I should have been home in time to vote, except that the train was delayed.
So I would find it hard to forego voting in this general election, though I suspect that I am struggling to come up with a convincing reason for why I should be eligible to vote. I still care about Britain, and I want the best for it, and my daughter and other members of my wider family live there (but they can vote for themselves), but I'm not going to be directly affected by the policies of the next British government.
I am generally quite comfortable with a wider franchise, even if it doesn't always make sense.
But I'm unlikely to return to live in Britain. Hmm.
I remember some time ago you called me out for mental health issues when I started posting like this. I am now worried about your welfare. Hope you can get some help.
He's joking. It's a sign of mental health. You're welcome
I pretended I was joking too but actually I wasn't. Casino's recent posts are a pattern of behaviour and I am concerned. I do hope he can get help.
I hope you can too, you're clearly in need of a friend. But that won't be me.
Putting aside Chomsky politics, his academic work is really interesting. But with LLMs, there is real debate in academic circles if actually it was all wrong.
Indeed. But he's still a giant in the field of linguistics. Even if he was almost entirely wrong. He pushed the study forward in a similar way to Freud in Psychiatry. By producing a revolutionary theory which fit with available evidence at the time.
How was he wrong in hindsight?
Largely AIUI his critique of Behaviourism, which was the dominant idea of the time. The idea that an input led to a predictable output mentally. He united several fields of study and brought them together under Cognitive Science (the study of the mind). He was far from alone in this, but on language acquisition, his field, his was the strongest critique. The idea that we are pre programmed with grammar and the tools for language before birth has been chipped away at. And recent AI advances suggest he was entirely wrong. But nobody is going back to behaviourism. He's super important in the antithesis bit of the Hegelian Thesis/antithesis/synthesis theory of mind. Epigenetics and particularly inherited trauma bear some of his major ideas out.
TL:DR. The mind's a lot more complex than all that.
As someone in a LD target seat at the upper end of LD expectations (Maidenhead) this feels too low the LDs. Maidenhead is looking knife-edge and if we do win it - the LD seat total is likely to be 55-70. I’m hearing that Godalming and Ash is NOT looking good for Hunt.
Policy #8 is essentially where I am at. Basically the whole Britain joining Europe thing was done arse over backwards. T'other way would work.
I have a vague recollection of reading a sci-fi story where a European Federation was formed with an elected President, and the people voted in the British Monarch pretty much on the basis it was to be a purely ceremonial position, so it just seemed like the best fit.
Google is no help, so I may have just imagined it.
Possibly. I notice most of the MRPs are saying South Northants will go Labour despite it being Con 63%, Lab 21% last time. I struggle to believe that will happen.
Possibly. I notice most of the MRPs are saying South Northants will go Labour despite it being Con 63%, Lab 21% last time. I struggle to believe that will happen.
Tories are fighting like ferrets in a sack - they've just deposed the Council leader, who was facing serious domestic violence allegations, suspending a senior councillor in the process. The ex-leader of Northampton Borough Council is now an Indy standing against the Tories here. There was a lot of disquiet over the controversial PCC Stephen Mold who was forced out by his own party. Labour won the PCC contest in May. And credible rumours that Andrea Leadsom was leading a no-confidence push against Rishi Sunak.
So yes it's the sort of seat you could never imagine going red, but there's lots of new housing and about as bad a backdrop as you could get to the Tory defence here. It's not a slam dunk for the Tories this time.
Possibly. I notice most of the MRPs are saying South Northants will go Labour despite it being Con 63%, Lab 21% last time. I struggle to believe that will happen.
They are being misused. Constituency-level predictions based on MRPs should be rejected for the same reason sub-samples are. Not enough information.
Otherwise, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't consider their national findings useful. Certainly better than standard polling + baxtering.
Possibly. I notice most of the MRPs are saying South Northants will go Labour despite it being Con 63%, Lab 21% last time. I struggle to believe that will happen.
They are being misused. Constituency-level predictions based on MRPs should be rejected for the same reason sub-samples are. Not enough information.
Otherwise, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't consider their national findings useful. Certainly better than standard polling + baxtering.
Yeah, I said earlier that these weird MRP constituency forecasts had more than a whiff of subsampling about them.
Not only is garden-variety subsampling slipping back in on this site - in a big way - we now have PBers doubling down with MRP forecasts: subsamples’ evil cousins.
Possibly. I notice most of the MRPs are saying South Northants will go Labour despite it being Con 63%, Lab 21% last time. I struggle to believe that will happen.
They are being misused. Constituency-level predictions based on MRPs should be rejected for the same reason sub-samples are. Not enough information.
Otherwise, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't consider their national findings useful. Certainly better than standard polling + baxtering.
As someone in a LD target seat at the upper end of LD expectations (Maidenhead) this feels too low the LDs. Maidenhead is looking knife-edge and if we do win it - the LD seat total is likely to be 55-70. I’m hearing that Godalming and Ash is NOT looking good for Hunt.
I expect the LDs will clean up in most of those types of seats in the Home Counties.
Possibly. I notice most of the MRPs are saying South Northants will go Labour despite it being Con 63%, Lab 21% last time. I struggle to believe that will happen.
It could be wrong. But is your struggle more than just a gut feeling? If the Tories are at around 20% nationally then sure they will retain many seats with such a large majority, but they will probably also lose some seats like that too, purely on the basis that they will have deeper drops in some areas than others.
Possibly. I notice most of the MRPs are saying South Northants will go Labour despite it being Con 63%, Lab 21% last time. I struggle to believe that will happen.
They are being misused. Constituency-level predictions based on MRPs should be rejected for the same reason sub-samples are. Not enough information.
Otherwise, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't consider their national findings useful. Certainly better than standard polling + baxtering.
16 sleeps to the exit poll!
Speak for yourself, those of us who have occasional bouts of insomnia may only have 12-14 sleeps worthy of the name.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
That just proves how irredeemably lower middle class you are
No, seriously, the posh are left wing. It's not a joke. The gags about Guardian journalists' backgrounds are not a spoof
Marina Hyde has been mentioned on this thread:
"Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire,[1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford.["
She's not just posh she's absurdly rich, I know this personally
I'm sure these people exist, but the point is that you can name them because there are so few of them. They probably all work for the Guardian. I've never met any of them. But I've met a never ending line of posh right wingers, because there are so many more of them (maybe you should get a job in finance). One thing you need to bear in mind is that you are extremely right wing. So people you think of as lefties (despite them eg working for the Tory party) are not lefties on any reasonable definition of the word. It's the same mindset that sees Corbynites call Labour moderate red Tories etc.
In what way am I "extreme rightwing"? Genuinely curious
Dude are you serious?
How many actual "hard" right posters do we have on here? Plenty of disgruntled conservatives, some sitting this one out, a few voting Labour to send a message, a few reluctantly voting Conservative for fear of worse (Farage, or a massive Labour majority).
But I'm struggling to think of anyone who's actually declared for Reform. Including Leon.
With Reform at ~18% in the polls, it's a sign of how detached PB demographics are from reality. Either that, or there are a lot of 'shy reformers' out there.
I'm former Tory, voting Reform this time.
Live in what was a very marginal Tory/Lab seat (2019 went Tory by ~600votes).
I might still consider voting Tory if I lived somewhere were a) the Tory might conceivably win and b) the Tory candidate appeared to be an actual Tory, not a CCHQ planted wet, however at this point I'm not sure I would unless the Tory candidate was exceptional.
I would rather have the current Tories, poor as they are than Labour (who is going to be truly dreadful), but that's not realistically on offer, so the next best thing is to smash the Tories to powder, get them replaced or merged into Reform so that when the pendulum swings back again (it will do - Starmer has no more answers to our current woes than Sunak, and is likely to be equally unpopular in 5 years time) we get a government that's willing to do some of the radical stuff the country needs.
What would I actually like the government to do?
Net Zero Migration - stop undercutting lower paid workers with imported labour, whilst putting massive extra pressure on housing and services. Employ an illegal immigrant - if they shop you £100k fine, they get £20k and leave to remain. All small boat arrivals to Rwanda (no exceptions), we oversee their asylum claim, if accepted we provide them with safe free accommodation in Rwanda for 5 years, plus 5 years of whatever welfare eltitlements a native Rwandan gets (I can't see there being many takers).
Partial short-term fix for the NHS - adjust the value of a QALY down (I.e. rationing healthcare by price/benifit ratio) sufficiently to clear current waiting lists (I. e. rationing by queuing) in a sane amount of time. The main virtue of this is that the lost treatments are those with the least "bang for buck" rather than random.
Longer term fix for the NHS - lots more training places, funded in such a way that staff are tied to the NHS for long periods afterwards, or pay for the cost of training in full.
Massive reform of the tax code - bin the lot and start again. Max 500 pages of 12pt text in plain English as an end result. Take out all the bizarre cliff edges etc in income tax, replace with a marginal sliding scale in 5% increments every £5k up to a maximum rate of 50% over £50k. Abolish NI (both employer and employee). Largely treat all income the same regardless of earned/unearned.
Planning to be zonal - you can build what you like (subject to building regs) in zone. Building regs to be taken back to those of approx 25 years ago for things like energy efficiency (adding ~£100k to the cost of a house to knock ~£1k a year off the electric/gas bill is insane).
Ditch net zero as currently instituted - it's only popular because people believe the lies about the costs. Look at Nuke*/Tidal/Gas as the main sources of electricity for the medium term.
*only if we get someone competent to do it, like buying off the peg designs by the Koreans, rather than bespoke disasters like HPC from the French
Possibly. I notice most of the MRPs are saying South Northants will go Labour despite it being Con 63%, Lab 21% last time. I struggle to believe that will happen.
They are being misused. Constituency-level predictions based on MRPs should be rejected for the same reason sub-samples are. Not enough information.
Otherwise, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't consider their national findings useful. Certainly better than standard polling + baxtering.
There just doesn't seem the possibility of having enough data on individual constituencies to have reliable predictions at that level, but the enhanced complexity of the process making it a step up from basic baxtering makes it tempting to regard it as more persuasive than even the producers would claim them to be.
Like advances in AI being genuine, but not justifying the level of immediate transformative prediction that people will then attribute to it.
Possibly. I notice most of the MRPs are saying South Northants will go Labour despite it being Con 63%, Lab 21% last time. I struggle to believe that will happen.
They are being misused. Constituency-level predictions based on MRPs should be rejected for the same reason sub-samples are. Not enough information.
Otherwise, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't consider their national findings useful. Certainly better than standard polling + baxtering.
Yeah, I said earlier that these weird MRP constituency forecasts had more than a whiff of subsampling about them.
Not only is garden-variety subsampling slipping back in on this site - in a big way - we now have PBers doubling down with MRP forecasts: subsamples’ evil cousins.
Enough.
I suppose what is interesting about the constituency polling is you can see where particularly areas buck the demographic trends.
I've created my own very rudimentary MRP. What that finds is the conditions necessary for a Conservative victory are rare - you need very high home ownership, large numbers of old people, high wealth all concentrated in a very small area. But most constituencies are actually quite mixed and balanced groups of people.
The idea that there are lots of Tory fortresses that will survive the onslaught is wrong, IMO. The FPTP slope is very steep, on both sides of the distribution. Hence why I think the Conservatives could end up in the high 20s and still get wiped out, a few special cases aside.
Possibly. I notice most of the MRPs are saying South Northants will go Labour despite it being Con 63%, Lab 21% last time. I struggle to believe that will happen.
They are being misused. Constituency-level predictions based on MRPs should be rejected for the same reason sub-samples are. Not enough information.
Otherwise, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't consider their national findings useful. Certainly better than standard polling + baxtering.
Yeah, I said earlier that these weird MRP constituency forecasts had more than a whiff of subsampling about them.
Not only is garden-variety subsampling slipping back in on this site - in a big way - we now have PBers doubling down with MRP forecasts: subsamples’ evil cousins.
Enough.
One reason for these discussions is because the tactical voting websites lean heavily on the MRP predictions at a constituency level. This makes them relevant to talk about especially if they are useless, because by influencing tactical voting they can influence the result.
One interesting little tidbit from the opinion polls. Not sure it's a subsample as such, more a detail about how heavily the raw sample has to be weighted. In the Deltapoll, which is based on a sample of 1383, the raw sample only has 431 respondents who recall voting Tory in 2019, which is then weighted to their target of 535. This means they undersampled 2019 Tories by nearly 20% in the raw sample. For 2019 Lib Dems, it's even worse. 73 respondents on the raw sample were weighted to 141. No-one wants to admit to voting for PM Jo Swinson. I didn't think she was that bad.
The risk here is that the missing 2019 Tories from the sample might be a population that will behave differently to those willing to respond to an opinion poll.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
That just proves how irredeemably lower middle class you are
No, seriously, the posh are left wing. It's not a joke. The gags about Guardian journalists' backgrounds are not a spoof
Marina Hyde has been mentioned on this thread:
"Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire,[1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford.["
She's not just posh she's absurdly rich, I know this personally
I'm sure these people exist, but the point is that you can name them because there are so few of them. They probably all work for the Guardian. I've never met any of them. But I've met a never ending line of posh right wingers, because there are so many more of them (maybe you should get a job in finance). One thing you need to bear in mind is that you are extremely right wing. So people you think of as lefties (despite them eg working for the Tory party) are not lefties on any reasonable definition of the word. It's the same mindset that sees Corbynites call Labour moderate red Tories etc.
In what way am I "extreme rightwing"? Genuinely curious
Dude are you serious?
How many actual "hard" right posters do we have on here? Plenty of disgruntled conservatives, some sitting this one out, a few voting Labour to send a message, a few reluctantly voting Conservative for fear of worse (Farage, or a massive Labour majority).
But I'm struggling to think of anyone who's actually declared for Reform. Including Leon.
With Reform at ~18% in the polls, it's a sign of how detached PB demographics are from reality. Either that, or there are a lot of 'shy reformers' out there.
I'm former Tory, voting Reform this time.
Live in what was a very marginal Tory/Lab seat (2019 went Tory by ~600votes).
I might still consider voting Tory if I lived somewhere were a) the Tory might conceivably win and b) the Tory candidate appeared to be an actual Tory, not a CCHQ planted wet, however at this point I'm not sure I would unless the Tory candidate was exceptional.
I would rather have the current Tories, poor as they are than Labour (who is going to be truly dreadful), but that's not realistically on offer, so the next best thing is to smash the Tories to powder, get them replaced or merged into Reform so that when the pendulum swings back again (it will do - Starmer has no more answers to our current woes than Sunak, and is likely to be equally unpopular in 5 years time) we get a government that's willing to do some of the radical stuff the country needs.
What would I actually like the government to do?
Net Zero Migration - stop undercutting lower paid workers with imported labour, whilst putting massive extra pressure on housing and services. Employ an illegal immigrant - if they shop you £100k fine, they get £20k and leave to remain. All small boat arrivals to Rwanda (no exceptions), we oversee their asylum claim, if accepted we provide them with safe free accommodation in Rwanda for 5 years, plus 5 years of whatever welfare eltitlements a native Rwandan gets (I can't see there being many takers).
Partial short-term fix for the NHS - adjust the value of a QALY down (I.e. rationing healthcare by price/benifit ratio) sufficiently to clear current waiting lists (I. e. rationing by queuing) in a sane amount of time. The main virtue of this is that the lost treatments are those with the least "bang for buck" rather than random.
Longer term fix for the NHS - lots more training places, funded in such a way that staff are tied to the NHS for long periods afterwards, or pay for the cost of training in full.
Massive reform of the tax code - bin the lot and start again. Max 500 pages of 12pt text in plain English as an end result. Take out all the bizarre cliff edges etc in income tax, replace with a marginal sliding scale in 5% increments every £5k up to a maximum rate of 50% over £50k. Abolish NI (both employer and employee). Largely treat all income the same regardless of earned/unearned.
Planning to be zonal - you can build what you like (subject to building regs) in zone. Building regs to be taken back to those of approx 25 years ago for things like energy efficiency (adding ~£100k to the cost of a house to knock ~£1k a year off the electric/gas bill is insane).
Ditch net zero as currently instituted - it's only popular because people believe the lies about the costs. Look at Nuke*/Tidal/Gas as the main sources of electricity for the medium term.
*only if we get someone competent to do it, like buying off the peg designs by the Koreans, rather than bespoke disasters like HPC from the French
Now Reform aren't anyw
I agree with a lot of that, but I don't think Reform are the people who are going to implement that.
With that said, there is no world in which nuclear is economic. The only reason to have any is for national security reasons, and then you have to accept that a portion of your electricity is going to be very expensive.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
That just proves how irredeemably lower middle class you are
No, seriously, the posh are left wing. It's not a joke. The gags about Guardian journalists' backgrounds are not a spoof
Marina Hyde has been mentioned on this thread:
"Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire,[1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford.["
She's not just posh she's absurdly rich, I know this personally
I'm sure these people exist, but the point is that you can name them because there are so few of them. They probably all work for the Guardian. I've never met any of them. But I've met a never ending line of posh right wingers, because there are so many more of them (maybe you should get a job in finance). One thing you need to bear in mind is that you are extremely right wing. So people you think of as lefties (despite them eg working for the Tory party) are not lefties on any reasonable definition of the word. It's the same mindset that sees Corbynites call Labour moderate red Tories etc.
In what way am I "extreme rightwing"? Genuinely curious
Dude are you serious?
How many actual "hard" right posters do we have on here? Plenty of disgruntled conservatives, some sitting this one out, a few voting Labour to send a message, a few reluctantly voting Conservative for fear of worse (Farage, or a massive Labour majority).
But I'm struggling to think of anyone who's actually declared for Reform. Including Leon.
With Reform at ~18% in the polls, it's a sign of how detached PB demographics are from reality. Either that, or there are a lot of 'shy reformers' out there.
I'm former Tory, voting Reform this time.
Live in what was a very marginal Tory/Lab seat (2019 went Tory by ~600votes).
I might still consider voting Tory if I lived somewhere were a) the Tory might conceivably win and b) the Tory candidate appeared to be an actual Tory, not a CCHQ planted wet, however at this point I'm not sure I would unless the Tory candidate was exceptional.
I would rather have the current Tories, poor as they are than Labour (who is going to be truly dreadful), but that's not realistically on offer, so the next best thing is to smash the Tories to powder, get them replaced or merged into Reform so that when the pendulum swings back again (it will do - Starmer has no more answers to our current woes than Sunak, and is likely to be equally unpopular in 5 years time) we get a government that's willing to do some of the radical stuff the country needs.
What would I actually like the government to do?
Net Zero Migration - stop undercutting lower paid workers with imported labour, whilst putting massive extra pressure on housing and services. Employ an illegal immigrant - if they shop you £100k fine, they get £20k and leave to remain. All small boat arrivals to Rwanda (no exceptions), we oversee their asylum claim, if accepted we provide them with safe free accommodation in Rwanda for 5 years, plus 5 years of whatever welfare eltitlements a native Rwandan gets (I can't see there being many takers).
Partial short-term fix for the NHS - adjust the value of a QALY down (I.e. rationing healthcare by price/benifit ratio) sufficiently to clear current waiting lists (I. e. rationing by queuing) in a sane amount of time. The main virtue of this is that the lost treatments are those with the least "bang for buck" rather than random.
Longer term fix for the NHS - lots more training places, funded in such a way that staff are tied to the NHS for long periods afterwards, or pay for the cost of training in full.
Massive reform of the tax code - bin the lot and start again. Max 500 pages of 12pt text in plain English as an end result. Take out all the bizarre cliff edges etc in income tax, replace with a marginal sliding scale in 5% increments every £5k up to a maximum rate of 50% over £50k. Abolish NI (both employer and employee). Largely treat all income the same regardless of earned/unearned.
Planning to be zonal - you can build what you like (subject to building regs) in zone. Building regs to be taken back to those of approx 25 years ago for things like energy efficiency (adding ~£100k to the cost of a house to knock ~£1k a year off the electric/gas bill is insane).
Ditch net zero as currently instituted - it's only popular because people believe the lies about the costs. Look at Nuke*/Tidal/Gas as the main sources of electricity for the medium term.
*only if we get someone competent to do it, like buying off the peg designs by the Koreans, rather than bespoke disasters like HPC from the French
Now Reform aren't anyw
Vanilla lost my final paragraph, then wouldn't let me edit... I was going to say:
Now Reform aren't anywhere on some of these, and even propose virtually the opposite on some, but they are closer to this list than any of the others particularly on immigration (which is key, because it's currently an out of control Ponzi scheme rapidly reaching the point of unsustainabliy, and the longer it's left unchecked the nastier the final crash will be). The system needs shaking up, by far the best route to that is killing the Tory Party and install Farage (flawed though he is) as LOTO.
Possibly. I notice most of the MRPs are saying South Northants will go Labour despite it being Con 63%, Lab 21% last time. I struggle to believe that will happen.
They are being misused. Constituency-level predictions based on MRPs should be rejected for the same reason sub-samples are. Not enough information.
Otherwise, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't consider their national findings useful. Certainly better than standard polling + baxtering.
Yeah, I said earlier that these weird MRP constituency forecasts had more than a whiff of subsampling about them.
Not only is garden-variety subsampling slipping back in on this site - in a big way - we now have PBers doubling down with MRP forecasts: subsamples’ evil cousins.
Enough.
I suppose what is interesting about the constituency polling is you can see where particularly areas buck the demographic trends.
I've created my own very rudimentary MRP. What that finds is the conditions necessary for a Conservative victory are rare - you need very high home ownership, large numbers of old people, high wealth all concentrated in a very small area. But most constituencies are actually quite mixed and balanced groups of people.
The idea that there are lots of Tory fortresses that will survive the onslaught is wrong, IMO. The FPTP slope is very steep, on both sides of the distribution. Hence why I think the Conservatives could end up in the high 20s and still get wiped out, a few special cases aside.
If the Tories got to the high 20s, Labour would be down to 40% or below and of course the LDs are polling below their 1997 levels too and the SNP are down on 2019 with Reform now polling third. So in the high 20s the Tories could get 200 seats
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
That just proves how irredeemably lower middle class you are
No, seriously, the posh are left wing. It's not a joke. The gags about Guardian journalists' backgrounds are not a spoof
Marina Hyde has been mentioned on this thread:
"Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire,[1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford.["
She's not just posh she's absurdly rich, I know this personally
I'm sure these people exist, but the point is that you can name them because there are so few of them. They probably all work for the Guardian. I've never met any of them. But I've met a never ending line of posh right wingers, because there are so many more of them (maybe you should get a job in finance). One thing you need to bear in mind is that you are extremely right wing. So people you think of as lefties (despite them eg working for the Tory party) are not lefties on any reasonable definition of the word. It's the same mindset that sees Corbynites call Labour moderate red Tories etc.
In what way am I "extreme rightwing"? Genuinely curious
Dude are you serious?
How many actual "hard" right posters do we have on here? Plenty of disgruntled conservatives, some sitting this one out, a few voting Labour to send a message, a few reluctantly voting Conservative for fear of worse (Farage, or a massive Labour majority).
But I'm struggling to think of anyone who's actually declared for Reform. Including Leon.
With Reform at ~18% in the polls, it's a sign of how detached PB demographics are from reality. Either that, or there are a lot of 'shy reformers' out there.
I'm former Tory, voting Reform this time.
Live in what was a very marginal Tory/Lab seat (2019 went Tory by ~600votes).
I might still consider voting Tory if I lived somewhere were a) the Tory might conceivably win and b) the Tory candidate appeared to be an actual Tory, not a CCHQ planted wet, however at this point I'm not sure I would unless the Tory candidate was exceptional.
I would rather have the current Tories, poor as they are than Labour (who is going to be truly dreadful), but that's not realistically on offer, so the next best thing is to smash the Tories to powder, get them replaced or merged into Reform so that when the pendulum swings back again (it will do - Starmer has no more answers to our current woes than Sunak, and is likely to be equally unpopular in 5 years time) we get a government that's willing to do some of the radical stuff the country needs.
What would I actually like the government to do?
Net Zero Migration - stop undercutting lower paid workers with imported labour, whilst putting massive extra pressure on housing and services. Employ an illegal immigrant - if they shop you £100k fine, they get £20k and leave to remain. All small boat arrivals to Rwanda (no exceptions), we oversee their asylum claim, if accepted we provide them with safe free accommodation in Rwanda for 5 years, plus 5 years of whatever welfare eltitlements a native Rwandan gets (I can't see there being many takers).
Partial short-term fix for the NHS - adjust the value of a QALY down (I.e. rationing healthcare by price/benifit ratio) sufficiently to clear current waiting lists (I. e. rationing by queuing) in a sane amount of time. The main virtue of this is that the lost treatments are those with the least "bang for buck" rather than random.
Longer term fix for the NHS - lots more training places, funded in such a way that staff are tied to the NHS for long periods afterwards, or pay for the cost of training in full.
Massive reform of the tax code - bin the lot and start again. Max 500 pages of 12pt text in plain English as an end result. Take out all the bizarre cliff edges etc in income tax, replace with a marginal sliding scale in 5% increments every £5k up to a maximum rate of 50% over £50k. Abolish NI (both employer and employee). Largely treat all income the same regardless of earned/unearned.
Planning to be zonal - you can build what you like (subject to building regs) in zone. Building regs to be taken back to those of approx 25 years ago for things like energy efficiency (adding ~£100k to the cost of a house to knock ~£1k a year off the electric/gas bill is insane).
Ditch net zero as currently instituted - it's only popular because people believe the lies about the costs. Look at Nuke*/Tidal/Gas as the main sources of electricity for the medium term.
*only if we get someone competent to do it, like buying off the peg designs by the Koreans, rather than bespoke disasters like HPC from the French
Now Reform aren't anyw
I agree with a lot of that, but I don't think Reform are the people who are going to implement that.
With that said, there is no world in which nuclear is economic. The only reason to have any is for national security reasons, and then you have to accept that a portion of your electricity is going to be very expensive.
If it were not for nuclear power then Ukraine would likely be struggling with an even worse electricity deficit. Although Russia have proved to be willing to hit all manner of targets contrary to the generally accepted rules of war, they have actually held back from blowing up any of Ukraine's nuclear power plants, and so those can still generate electricity, while many of the thermal power plants have been wrecked.
As someone in a LD target seat at the upper end of LD expectations (Maidenhead) this feels too low the LDs. Maidenhead is looking knife-edge and if we do win it - the LD seat total is likely to be 55-70. I’m hearing that Godalming and Ash is NOT looking good for Hunt.
I expect the LDs will clean up in most of those types of seats in the Home Counties.
They would have done under Boris or Truss, against Sunak and Hunt much less certain.
Boris had more appeal than them in the redwall but they have more appeal than him in the bluewall
Possibly. I notice most of the MRPs are saying South Northants will go Labour despite it being Con 63%, Lab 21% last time. I struggle to believe that will happen.
They are being misused. Constituency-level predictions based on MRPs should be rejected for the same reason sub-samples are. Not enough information.
Otherwise, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't consider their national findings useful. Certainly better than standard polling + baxtering.
Yeah, I said earlier that these weird MRP constituency forecasts had more than a whiff of subsampling about them.
Not only is garden-variety subsampling slipping back in on this site - in a big way - we now have PBers doubling down with MRP forecasts: subsamples’ evil cousins.
Enough.
I suppose what is interesting about the constituency polling is you can see where particularly areas buck the demographic trends.
I've created my own very rudimentary MRP. What that finds is the conditions necessary for a Conservative victory are rare - you need very high home ownership, large numbers of old people, high wealth all concentrated in a very small area. But most constituencies are actually quite mixed and balanced groups of people.
The idea that there are lots of Tory fortresses that will survive the onslaught is wrong, IMO. The FPTP slope is very steep, on both sides of the distribution. Hence why I think the Conservatives could end up in the high 20s and still get wiped out, a few special cases aside.
If the Tories got to the high 20s, Labour would be down to 40% or below and of course the LDs are polling below their 1997 levels too and the SNP are down on 2019 with Reform now polling third. So in the high 20s the Tories could get 200 seats
Not if Reform's vote doesn't materialise. You could have:
Labour 46 Conservative 26 Reform 8 LD 14 Green 4 SNP 2
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
That just proves how irredeemably lower middle class you are
No, seriously, the posh are left wing. It's not a joke. The gags about Guardian journalists' backgrounds are not a spoof
Marina Hyde has been mentioned on this thread:
"Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire,[1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford.["
She's not just posh she's absurdly rich, I know this personally
I'm sure these people exist, but the point is that you can name them because there are so few of them. They probably all work for the Guardian. I've never met any of them. But I've met a never ending line of posh right wingers, because there are so many more of them (maybe you should get a job in finance). One thing you need to bear in mind is that you are extremely right wing. So people you think of as lefties (despite them eg working for the Tory party) are not lefties on any reasonable definition of the word. It's the same mindset that sees Corbynites call Labour moderate red Tories etc.
In what way am I "extreme rightwing"? Genuinely curious
Dude are you serious?
How many actual "hard" right posters do we have on here? Plenty of disgruntled conservatives, some sitting this one out, a few voting Labour to send a message, a few reluctantly voting Conservative for fear of worse (Farage, or a massive Labour majority).
But I'm struggling to think of anyone who's actually declared for Reform. Including Leon.
With Reform at ~18% in the polls, it's a sign of how detached PB demographics are from reality. Either that, or there are a lot of 'shy reformers' out there.
I'm former Tory, voting Reform this time.
Live in what was a very marginal Tory/Lab seat (2019 went Tory by ~600votes).
I might still consider voting Tory if I lived somewhere were a) the Tory might conceivably win and b) the Tory candidate appeared to be an actual Tory, not a CCHQ planted wet, however at this point I'm not sure I would unless the Tory candidate was exceptional.
I would rather have the current Tories, poor as they are than Labour (who is going to be truly dreadful), but that's not realistically on offer, so the next best thing is to smash the Tories to powder, get them replaced or merged into Reform so that when the pendulum swings back again (it will do - Starmer has no more answers to our current woes than Sunak, and is likely to be equally unpopular in 5 years time) we get a government that's willing to do some of the radical stuff the country needs.
What would I actually like the government to do?
Net Zero Migration - stop undercutting lower paid workers with imported labour, whilst putting massive extra pressure on housing and services. Employ an illegal immigrant - if they shop you £100k fine, they get £20k and leave to remain. All small boat arrivals to Rwanda (no exceptions), we oversee their asylum claim, if accepted we provide them with safe free accommodation in Rwanda for 5 years, plus 5 years of whatever welfare eltitlements a native Rwandan gets (I can't see there being many takers).
Partial short-term fix for the NHS - adjust the value of a QALY down (I.e. rationing healthcare by price/benifit ratio) sufficiently to clear current waiting lists (I. e. rationing by queuing) in a sane amount of time. The main virtue of this is that the lost treatments are those with the least "bang for buck" rather than random.
Longer term fix for the NHS - lots more training places, funded in such a way that staff are tied to the NHS for long periods afterwards, or pay for the cost of training in full.
Massive reform of the tax code - bin the lot and start again. Max 500 pages of 12pt text in plain English as an end result. Take out all the bizarre cliff edges etc in income tax, replace with a marginal sliding scale in 5% increments every £5k up to a maximum rate of 50% over £50k. Abolish NI (both employer and employee). Largely treat all income the same regardless of earned/unearned.
Planning to be zonal - you can build what you like (subject to building regs) in zone. Building regs to be taken back to those of approx 25 years ago for things like energy efficiency (adding ~£100k to the cost of a house to knock ~£1k a year off the electric/gas bill is insane).
Ditch net zero as currently instituted - it's only popular because people believe the lies about the costs. Look at Nuke*/Tidal/Gas as the main sources of electricity for the medium term.
*only if we get someone competent to do it, like buying off the peg designs by the Koreans, rather than bespoke disasters like HPC from the French
Now Reform aren't anyw
Vanilla lost my final paragraph, then wouldn't let me edit... I was going to say:
Now Reform aren't anywhere on some of these, and even propose virtually the opposite on some, but they are closer to this list than any of the others particularly on immigration (which is key, because it's currently an out of control Ponzi scheme rapidly reaching the point of unsustainabliy, and the longer it's left unchecked the nastier the final crash will be). The system needs shaking up, by far the best route to that is killing the Tory Party and install Farage (flawed though he is) as LOTO.
I deduce that you live in the High Peak constituency.
Possibly. I notice most of the MRPs are saying South Northants will go Labour despite it being Con 63%, Lab 21% last time. I struggle to believe that will happen.
It could be wrong. But is your struggle more than just a gut feeling? If the Tories are at around 20% nationally then sure they will retain many seats with such a large majority, but they will probably also lose some seats like that too, purely on the basis that they will have deeper drops in some areas than others.
Possibly. I notice most of the MRPs are saying South Northants will go Labour despite it being Con 63%, Lab 21% last time. I struggle to believe that will happen.
They are being misused. Constituency-level predictions based on MRPs should be rejected for the same reason sub-samples are. Not enough information.
Otherwise, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't consider their national findings useful. Certainly better than standard polling + baxtering.
Yeah, I said earlier that these weird MRP constituency forecasts had more than a whiff of subsampling about them.
Not only is garden-variety subsampling slipping back in on this site - in a big way - we now have PBers doubling down with MRP forecasts: subsamples’ evil cousins.
Enough.
I suppose what is interesting about the constituency polling is you can see where particularly areas buck the demographic trends.
I've created my own very rudimentary MRP. What that finds is the conditions necessary for a Conservative victory are rare - you need very high home ownership, large numbers of old people, high wealth all concentrated in a very small area. But most constituencies are actually quite mixed and balanced groups of people.
The idea that there are lots of Tory fortresses that will survive the onslaught is wrong, IMO. The FPTP slope is very steep, on both sides of the distribution. Hence why I think the Conservatives could end up in the high 20s and still get wiped out, a few special cases aside.
If the Tories got to the high 20s, Labour would be down to 40% or below and of course the LDs are polling below their 1997 levels too and the SNP are down on 2019 with Reform now polling third. So in the high 20s the Tories could get 200 seats
Not if Reform's vote doesn't materialise. You could have:
Labour 46 Conservative 26 Reform 8 LD 14 Green 4 SNP 2
Except it is materialising and taking some working class ex Labour voters too as UKIP did in 2015
Sunak today: "Labour will tax your savings" Sunak 13 June: "If you think Labour will win, start saving."
I wonder if there will be a bit of a tax shortfall next year from things like dividend tax - my accountant says virtually every small business he deals with is bringing forward revenue/extracting cash by any means possible to pay tax on it at current rates rather than risk whatever Labour might do - e.g. I've maxed out my 8.75% dividend allowance 2 years in a row and dumped the money back in the business via my directors loan (I'm currently in an expansion phase having gone from employing 2 staff to 5 in 2 years and taking virtually no money out of the business) on the basis that Labour will probably raise tax rates, and are very unlikely to lower them.
Possibly. I notice most of the MRPs are saying South Northants will go Labour despite it being Con 63%, Lab 21% last time. I struggle to believe that will happen.
They are being misused. Constituency-level predictions based on MRPs should be rejected for the same reason sub-samples are. Not enough information.
Otherwise, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't consider their national findings useful. Certainly better than standard polling + baxtering.
Yeah, I said earlier that these weird MRP constituency forecasts had more than a whiff of subsampling about them.
Not only is garden-variety subsampling slipping back in on this site - in a big way - we now have PBers doubling down with MRP forecasts: subsamples’ evil cousins.
Enough.
I suppose what is interesting about the constituency polling is you can see where particularly areas buck the demographic trends.
I've created my own very rudimentary MRP. What that finds is the conditions necessary for a Conservative victory are rare - you need very high home ownership, large numbers of old people, high wealth all concentrated in a very small area. But most constituencies are actually quite mixed and balanced groups of people.
The idea that there are lots of Tory fortresses that will survive the onslaught is wrong, IMO. The FPTP slope is very steep, on both sides of the distribution. Hence why I think the Conservatives could end up in the high 20s and still get wiped out, a few special cases aside.
If the Tories got to the high 20s, Labour would be down to 40% or below and of course the LDs are polling below their 1997 levels too and the SNP are down on 2019 with Reform now polling third. So in the high 20s the Tories could get 200 seats
Not if Reform's vote doesn't materialise. You could have:
Labour 46 Conservative 26 Reform 8 LD 14 Green 4 SNP 2
Except it is materialising and taking some working class ex Labour voters too as UKIP did in 2015
We shall see! I think that's the most interesting part of this election. Even if the Tories do end up with less than 100 seats, a respectable vote share would give them something to work with over the next 5 years.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
That just proves how irredeemably lower middle class you are
No, seriously, the posh are left wing. It's not a joke. The gags about Guardian journalists' backgrounds are not a spoof
Marina Hyde has been mentioned on this thread:
"Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire,[1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford.["
She's not just posh she's absurdly rich, I know this personally
I'm sure these people exist, but the point is that you can name them because there are so few of them. They probably all work for the Guardian. I've never met any of them. But I've met a never ending line of posh right wingers, because there are so many more of them (maybe you should get a job in finance). One thing you need to bear in mind is that you are extremely right wing. So people you think of as lefties (despite them eg working for the Tory party) are not lefties on any reasonable definition of the word. It's the same mindset that sees Corbynites call Labour moderate red Tories etc.
In what way am I "extreme rightwing"? Genuinely curious
Dude are you serious?
How many actual "hard" right posters do we have on here? Plenty of disgruntled conservatives, some sitting this one out, a few voting Labour to send a message, a few reluctantly voting Conservative for fear of worse (Farage, or a massive Labour majority).
But I'm struggling to think of anyone who's actually declared for Reform. Including Leon.
With Reform at ~18% in the polls, it's a sign of how detached PB demographics are from reality. Either that, or there are a lot of 'shy reformers' out there.
I'll fess up. I might vote Reform. It's either Starmer for laughs or Reform to kill the Tories
But in what universe is Reform "far right"? They aren't even "hard right" by mainland European standards. Indeed they sometimes struggle to be rightwing, so far has the Overton Window shifted
Their big thing is immigration, Are they going to shoot the boats and drown people (as has been happening off the EU shores)? No. They want to "tow boats back to France". That may be a dream, but it ain't the Shoah. As for overall immigration, they want "net zero" - in a recent interview Farage admitted that might still mean "600,000 immigrants" but they want to keep the incomings and outgoings balanced and the population stable, for a while, as our infrastructure cannot sustain explosive growth (and looking at our rivers, they have a point)
That's it. That's Britain's "Nazi party" - gently towing boats and trying not to destroy rivers. Wow. Practically Treblinka
You do know that net zero migration is completely mental, yes? We'd be better off with Truss and PM and Corbyn as Chancellor. You want runaway inflation and the collapse of half the public and private services in the country? That's what Farage is offering.
To be fair being 'completely mental' is not necessarily the same as being far right. Some of Corbyn's ideas, plenty of the Green ideas and even some of the main party ideas can be considerd 'completely mental' but they would not be considered right wing.
You are conflating two completely separate, although not always exclusive, arguments.
No argument from me. There's a problem with identifying racist authoritarians as right wing and identifying hardcore liberals as left wing. My only point here is zero NET migration is completely loopy.
So what is YOUR target for net migration, or do you have no target at all? Do you let everyone in? Let no one in? What is it? Come on, try and answer, if you come up with something coherent and articulate and sensible you might even get a column on "The National" paying £15 per 1000 words
Rejoin EU, freedom of movement.
5 words, that'll be 7.5 pence, please.
But only for nice white Europeans?
You're better than that quip. EU freedom of movement isn't conditional on race.
No but it is conditional on being a citizen of a predominantly white and wealthy bloc of countries. If people are so in favour of freedom of movement then it should not apply only to those fortunate enough to live in a small caucasian portion of the first world.
That’s entirely illogical. Why are the only options free movement within the British Isles or free movement in the whole world?
Because fredom of movement within a smaller bloc such as the EU generally precludes freedom of movement from the rest of the world. Why should we limit ourselves to just those fortunate enough to be born in the EU?
Possibly. I notice most of the MRPs are saying South Northants will go Labour despite it being Con 63%, Lab 21% last time. I struggle to believe that will happen.
They are being misused. Constituency-level predictions based on MRPs should be rejected for the same reason sub-samples are. Not enough information.
Otherwise, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't consider their national findings useful. Certainly better than standard polling + baxtering.
Yeah, I said earlier that these weird MRP constituency forecasts had more than a whiff of subsampling about them.
Not only is garden-variety subsampling slipping back in on this site - in a big way - we now have PBers doubling down with MRP forecasts: subsamples’ evil cousins.
Enough.
I suppose what is interesting about the constituency polling is you can see where particularly areas buck the demographic trends.
I've created my own very rudimentary MRP. What that finds is the conditions necessary for a Conservative victory are rare - you need very high home ownership, large numbers of old people, high wealth all concentrated in a very small area. But most constituencies are actually quite mixed and balanced groups of people.
The idea that there are lots of Tory fortresses that will survive the onslaught is wrong, IMO. The FPTP slope is very steep, on both sides of the distribution. Hence why I think the Conservatives could end up in the high 20s and still get wiped out, a few special cases aside.
If the Tories got to the high 20s, Labour would be down to 40% or below and of course the LDs are polling below their 1997 levels too and the SNP are down on 2019 with Reform now polling third. So in the high 20s the Tories could get 200 seats
Not if Reform's vote doesn't materialise. You could have:
Labour 46 Conservative 26 Reform 8 LD 14 Green 4 SNP 2
Who is left to vote for the Tories?
Want right-wing policies, rather than right-wing hot air and centre left action? - vote Reform. Want social liberalism with a hint of fiscal responsibility? - vote Lib Dem. Want spend spend spend and tax tax tax? I'm fairly sure that nice Mr Starmer will deliver. Want competency? - vote Count Bin Face.
There just isn't a very large block of people who want the country to be run fractionally to the right of the Lib Dems by a bloke so competent he can't organise an umbrella when making a planned speech in the rain, who is also randomly claiming he'll do 15 different contradictory things he's suddenly thought of if re-elected, despite his party having been in power for the last 14 years. The current Tory party have systematically annoyed virtually every segment of their voting coalition, why on earth do they expect anybody to vote for them.
Possibly. I notice most of the MRPs are saying South Northants will go Labour despite it being Con 63%, Lab 21% last time. I struggle to believe that will happen.
They are being misused. Constituency-level predictions based on MRPs should be rejected for the same reason sub-samples are. Not enough information.
Otherwise, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't consider their national findings useful. Certainly better than standard polling + baxtering.
Yeah, I said earlier that these weird MRP constituency forecasts had more than a whiff of subsampling about them.
Not only is garden-variety subsampling slipping back in on this site - in a big way - we now have PBers doubling down with MRP forecasts: subsamples’ evil cousins.
Enough.
I suppose what is interesting about the constituency polling is you can see where particularly areas buck the demographic trends.
I've created my own very rudimentary MRP. What that finds is the conditions necessary for a Conservative victory are rare - you need very high home ownership, large numbers of old people, high wealth all concentrated in a very small area. But most constituencies are actually quite mixed and balanced groups of people.
The idea that there are lots of Tory fortresses that will survive the onslaught is wrong, IMO. The FPTP slope is very steep, on both sides of the distribution. Hence why I think the Conservatives could end up in the high 20s and still get wiped out, a few special cases aside.
If the Tories got to the high 20s, Labour would be down to 40% or below and of course the LDs are polling below their 1997 levels too and the SNP are down on 2019 with Reform now polling third. So in the high 20s the Tories could get 200 seats
Not if Reform's vote doesn't materialise. You could have:
Labour 46 Conservative 26 Reform 8 LD 14 Green 4 SNP 2
Who is left to vote for the Tories?
Want right-wing policies, rather than right-wing hot air and centre left action? - vote Reform. Want social liberalism with a hint of fiscal responsibility? - vote Lib Dem. Want spend spend spend and tax tax tax? I'm fairly sure that nice Mr Starmer will deliver. Want competency? - vote Count Bin Face.
There just isn't a very large block of people who want the country to be run fractionally to the right of the Lib Dems by a bloke so competent he can't organise an umbrella when making a planned speech in the rain, who is also randomly claiming he'll do 15 different contradictory things he's suddenly thought of if re-elected, despite his party having been in power for the last 14 years. The current Tory party have systematically annoyed virtually every segment of their voting coalition, why on earth do they expect anybody to vote for them.
I think they will hit mid-high 20s because much of the Reform/Green vote won't bother to vote. Low turnout, basically. There are plenty of people like BigG who will always vote Conservative.
Possibly. I notice most of the MRPs are saying South Northants will go Labour despite it being Con 63%, Lab 21% last time. I struggle to believe that will happen.
They are being misused. Constituency-level predictions based on MRPs should be rejected for the same reason sub-samples are. Not enough information.
Otherwise, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't consider their national findings useful. Certainly better than standard polling + baxtering.
Yeah, I said earlier that these weird MRP constituency forecasts had more than a whiff of subsampling about them.
Not only is garden-variety subsampling slipping back in on this site - in a big way - we now have PBers doubling down with MRP forecasts: subsamples’ evil cousins.
Enough.
I suppose what is interesting about the constituency polling is you can see where particularly areas buck the demographic trends.
I've created my own very rudimentary MRP. What that finds is the conditions necessary for a Conservative victory are rare - you need very high home ownership, large numbers of old people, high wealth all concentrated in a very small area. But most constituencies are actually quite mixed and balanced groups of people.
The idea that there are lots of Tory fortresses that will survive the onslaught is wrong, IMO. The FPTP slope is very steep, on both sides of the distribution. Hence why I think the Conservatives could end up in the high 20s and still get wiped out, a few special cases aside.
The idea of the Tories being in high 20s in terms of share of the vote and almost getting wiped out in terms of seats is something that doesn't make any sense at all in my opinion.
Possibly. I notice most of the MRPs are saying South Northants will go Labour despite it being Con 63%, Lab 21% last time. I struggle to believe that will happen.
They are being misused. Constituency-level predictions based on MRPs should be rejected for the same reason sub-samples are. Not enough information.
Otherwise, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't consider their national findings useful. Certainly better than standard polling + baxtering.
Yeah, I said earlier that these weird MRP constituency forecasts had more than a whiff of subsampling about them.
Not only is garden-variety subsampling slipping back in on this site - in a big way - we now have PBers doubling down with MRP forecasts: subsamples’ evil cousins.
Enough.
I suppose what is interesting about the constituency polling is you can see where particularly areas buck the demographic trends.
I've created my own very rudimentary MRP. What that finds is the conditions necessary for a Conservative victory are rare - you need very high home ownership, large numbers of old people, high wealth all concentrated in a very small area. But most constituencies are actually quite mixed and balanced groups of people.
The idea that there are lots of Tory fortresses that will survive the onslaught is wrong, IMO. The FPTP slope is very steep, on both sides of the distribution. Hence why I think the Conservatives could end up in the high 20s and still get wiped out, a few special cases aside.
If the Tories got to the high 20s, Labour would be down to 40% or below and of course the LDs are polling below their 1997 levels too and the SNP are down on 2019 with Reform now polling third. So in the high 20s the Tories could get 200 seats
Not if Reform's vote doesn't materialise. You could have:
Labour 46 Conservative 26 Reform 8 LD 14 Green 4 SNP 2
Who is left to vote for the Tories?
Want right-wing policies, rather than right-wing hot air and centre left action? - vote Reform. Want social liberalism with a hint of fiscal responsibility? - vote Lib Dem. Want spend spend spend and tax tax tax? I'm fairly sure that nice Mr Starmer will deliver. Want competency? - vote Count Bin Face.
There just isn't a very large block of people who want the country to be run fractionally to the right of the Lib Dems by a bloke so competent he can't organise an umbrella when making a planned speech in the rain, who is also randomly claiming he'll do 15 different contradictory things he's suddenly thought of if re-elected, despite his party having been in power for the last 14 years. The current Tory party have systematically annoyed virtually every segment of their voting coalition, why on earth do they expect anybody to vote for them.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
That just proves how irredeemably lower middle class you are
No, seriously, the posh are left wing. It's not a joke. The gags about Guardian journalists' backgrounds are not a spoof
Marina Hyde has been mentioned on this thread:
"Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire,[1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford.["
She's not just posh she's absurdly rich, I know this personally
I'm sure these people exist, but the point is that you can name them because there are so few of them. They probably all work for the Guardian. I've never met any of them. But I've met a never ending line of posh right wingers, because there are so many more of them (maybe you should get a job in finance). One thing you need to bear in mind is that you are extremely right wing. So people you think of as lefties (despite them eg working for the Tory party) are not lefties on any reasonable definition of the word. It's the same mindset that sees Corbynites call Labour moderate red Tories etc.
In what way am I "extreme rightwing"? Genuinely curious
Dude are you serious?
How many actual "hard" right posters do we have on here? Plenty of disgruntled conservatives, some sitting this one out, a few voting Labour to send a message, a few reluctantly voting Conservative for fear of worse (Farage, or a massive Labour majority).
But I'm struggling to think of anyone who's actually declared for Reform. Including Leon.
With Reform at ~18% in the polls, it's a sign of how detached PB demographics are from reality. Either that, or there are a lot of 'shy reformers' out there.
I'm former Tory, voting Reform this time.
Live in what was a very marginal Tory/Lab seat (2019 went Tory by ~600votes).
I might still consider voting Tory if I lived somewhere were a) the Tory might conceivably win and b) the Tory candidate appeared to be an actual Tory, not a CCHQ planted wet, however at this point I'm not sure I would unless the Tory candidate was exceptional.
I would rather have the current Tories, poor as they are than Labour (who is going to be truly dreadful), but that's not realistically on offer, so the next best thing is to smash the Tories to powder, get them replaced or merged into Reform so that when the pendulum swings back again (it will do - Starmer has no more answers to our current woes than Sunak, and is likely to be equally unpopular in 5 years time) we get a government that's willing to do some of the radical stuff the country needs.
What would I actually like the government to do?
Net Zero Migration - stop undercutting lower paid workers with imported labour, whilst putting massive extra pressure on housing and services. Employ an illegal immigrant - if they shop you £100k fine, they get £20k and leave to remain. All small boat arrivals to Rwanda (no exceptions), we oversee their asylum claim, if accepted we provide them with safe free accommodation in Rwanda for 5 years, plus 5 years of whatever welfare eltitlements a native Rwandan gets (I can't see there being many takers).
Partial short-term fix for the NHS - adjust the value of a QALY down (I.e. rationing healthcare by price/benifit ratio) sufficiently to clear current waiting lists (I. e. rationing by queuing) in a sane amount of time. The main virtue of this is that the lost treatments are those with the least "bang for buck" rather than random.
Longer term fix for the NHS - lots more training places, funded in such a way that staff are tied to the NHS for long periods afterwards, or pay for the cost of training in full.
Massive reform of the tax code - bin the lot and start again. Max 500 pages of 12pt text in plain English as an end result. Take out all the bizarre cliff edges etc in income tax, replace with a marginal sliding scale in 5% increments every £5k up to a maximum rate of 50% over £50k. Abolish NI (both employer and employee). Largely treat all income the same regardless of earned/unearned.
Planning to be zonal - you can build what you like (subject to building regs) in zone. Building regs to be taken back to those of approx 25 years ago for things like energy efficiency (adding ~£100k to the cost of a house to knock ~£1k a year off the electric/gas bill is insane).
Ditch net zero as currently instituted - it's only popular because people believe the lies about the costs. Look at Nuke*/Tidal/Gas as the main sources of electricity for the medium term.
*only if we get someone competent to do it, like buying off the peg designs by the Koreans, rather than bespoke disasters like HPC from the French
Now Reform aren't anyw
I agree with a lot of that, but I don't think Reform are the people who are going to implement that.
With that said, there is no world in which nuclear is economic. The only reason to have any is for national security reasons, and then you have to accept that a portion of your electricity is going to be very expensive.
If it were not for nuclear power then Ukraine would likely be struggling with an even worse electricity deficit. Although Russia have proved to be willing to hit all manner of targets contrary to the generally accepted rules of war, they have actually held back from blowing up any of Ukraine's nuclear power plants, and so those can still generate electricity, while many of the thermal power plants have been wrecked.
Possibly. I notice most of the MRPs are saying South Northants will go Labour despite it being Con 63%, Lab 21% last time. I struggle to believe that will happen.
They are being misused. Constituency-level predictions based on MRPs should be rejected for the same reason sub-samples are. Not enough information.
Otherwise, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't consider their national findings useful. Certainly better than standard polling + baxtering.
Yeah, I said earlier that these weird MRP constituency forecasts had more than a whiff of subsampling about them.
Not only is garden-variety subsampling slipping back in on this site - in a big way - we now have PBers doubling down with MRP forecasts: subsamples’ evil cousins.
Enough.
I suppose what is interesting about the constituency polling is you can see where particularly areas buck the demographic trends.
I've created my own very rudimentary MRP. What that finds is the conditions necessary for a Conservative victory are rare - you need very high home ownership, large numbers of old people, high wealth all concentrated in a very small area. But most constituencies are actually quite mixed and balanced groups of people.
The idea that there are lots of Tory fortresses that will survive the onslaught is wrong, IMO. The FPTP slope is very steep, on both sides of the distribution. Hence why I think the Conservatives could end up in the high 20s and still get wiped out, a few special cases aside.
The idea of the Tories being in high 20s in terms of share of the vote and almost getting wiped out in terms of seats is something that doesn't make any sense at all in my opinion.
Yes, I might be overstating it. Not a wipe out, but still around 100 seats perhaps.
Interesting fact: at the 1983 election the Labour vote fell most heavily in their weakest areas, and held up best in their strongest seats, which is the opposite of what might have been expected. That's why they managed to hold 209 seats (out of 260) despite their vote share dropping by nearly 10% to 27.6%.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
Some of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. But agriculture actually extends surprisingly far north - further north in Finland than anywhere else on earth. There is agriculture inside the Arctic Circle. Winters are unproductive, obviously, but Northern Finland in summer is surprisimgly fertile.
Their food security tops even Republic of Ireland apparently.
UK agri sector is about 1% of the economy. Oddly this doesn't matter if you are wanting to eat and there is no food around. One of the epic fails of just looking at GDP and suchlike is that not all economic activity is properly measurable by its price, but only by its value. Diamonds are expensive, potatoes and bread are cheap. Potatoes and bread have far greater value.
We don't live in an autarky. Potatoes and bread can be imported.
Mind you his comments will not I imagine win over many Tories to Labour but might have a few leftwingers spitting out their herbal tea and going Green.
'Mr Caudwell said he had donated to the Conservatives in 2019 “because I couldn’t possibly stand a Corbyn government, and I am still of exactly the same view there.”
He praised Sir Keir's attempts to get rid of what he called "the loony Left" which he claimed had focused on "extreme socialist policies", instead of "creating a wealthy Britain".
"We can't tax rich people in order to help the poor because they'll go off to Monaco and other places, we have to create real genuine wealth.”
Sir Jim who moved to Monaco to save - checks - £4bn in taxes.
And he's lecturing other people about paying their taxes?
What a total fucking scumbag.
That's his point isn't it? "We can't tax rich people in order to help the poor because they'll go off to Monaco and other places, we have to create real genuine wealth.”
Mind you his comments will not I imagine win over many Tories to Labour but might have a few leftwingers spitting out their herbal tea and going Green.
'Mr Caudwell said he had donated to the Conservatives in 2019 “because I couldn’t possibly stand a Corbyn government, and I am still of exactly the same view there.”
He praised Sir Keir's attempts to get rid of what he called "the loony Left" which he claimed had focused on "extreme socialist policies", instead of "creating a wealthy Britain".
"We can't tax rich people in order to help the poor because they'll go off to Monaco and other places, we have to create real genuine wealth.”
Sir Jim who moved to Monaco to save - checks - £4bn in taxes.
And he's lecturing other people about paying their taxes?
What a total fucking scumbag.
That's his point isn't it? "We can't tax rich people in order to help the poor because they'll go off to Monaco and other places, we have to create real genuine wealth.”
But is he a working person by Starmer's definition?
If Sunak is spending his time in seats with majorities of 15,000 that implies that the private polling is as bad as the worst of the public polling right?
Are the Tories now as unpopular as Labour in 2019? Really?
Given the Tories seem to be totally unorganised and clueless, it would be dangerous to read too much into their actions. This isn't the Tories of 2015, who had a very clear plan, organised social media campaigns and high quality private polling.
I have asked before, were the Tories in 2019 actually good or was it just because of Labour they looked competent.
I think there was a plan. The "Get Brexit Done" and "Levelling Up" might have been cynical, but they came from a place of some thought and planning.
Not much evidence of any constructive thinking or planning about the practicalities of delivering what those slogans promised.
If Sunak is spending his time in seats with majorities of 15,000 that implies that the private polling is as bad as the worst of the public polling right?
Are the Tories now as unpopular as Labour in 2019? Really?
Given the Tories seem to be totally unorganised and clueless, it would be dangerous to read too much into their actions. This isn't the Tories of 2015, who had a very clear plan, organised social media campaigns and high quality private polling.
I have asked before, were the Tories in 2019 actually good or was it just because of Labour they looked competent.
I think there was a plan. The "Get Brexit Done" and "Levelling Up" might have been cynical, but they came from a place of some thought and planning.
Not much evidence of any constructive thinking or planning about the practicalities of delivering what those slogans promised.
Well no. But that wasn't the what we were talking about. It a discussion of campaigning.
Levelling up money is yet another scandal waiting to be properly exposed. I think the stupid stone chessboards with no pieces to actually play games are the tip of the iceberg.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
That just proves how irredeemably lower middle class you are
No, seriously, the posh are left wing. It's not a joke. The gags about Guardian journalists' backgrounds are not a spoof
Marina Hyde has been mentioned on this thread:
"Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire,[1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford.["
She's not just posh she's absurdly rich, I know this personally
I'm sure these people exist, but the point is that you can name them because there are so few of them. They probably all work for the Guardian. I've never met any of them. But I've met a never ending line of posh right wingers, because there are so many more of them (maybe you should get a job in finance). One thing you need to bear in mind is that you are extremely right wing. So people you think of as lefties (despite them eg working for the Tory party) are not lefties on any reasonable definition of the word. It's the same mindset that sees Corbynites call Labour moderate red Tories etc.
In what way am I "extreme rightwing"? Genuinely curious
Dude are you serious?
How many actual "hard" right posters do we have on here? Plenty of disgruntled conservatives, some sitting this one out, a few voting Labour to send a message, a few reluctantly voting Conservative for fear of worse (Farage, or a massive Labour majority).
But I'm struggling to think of anyone who's actually declared for Reform. Including Leon.
With Reform at ~18% in the polls, it's a sign of how detached PB demographics are from reality. Either that, or there are a lot of 'shy reformers' out there.
I'll fess up. I might vote Reform. It's either Starmer for laughs or Reform to kill the Tories
But in what universe is Reform "far right"? They aren't even "hard right" by mainland European standards. Indeed they sometimes struggle to be rightwing, so far has the Overton Window shifted
Their big thing is immigration, Are they going to shoot the boats and drown people (as has been happening off the EU shores)? No. They want to "tow boats back to France". That may be a dream, but it ain't the Shoah. As for overall immigration, they want "net zero" - in a recent interview Farage admitted that might still mean "600,000 immigrants" but they want to keep the incomings and outgoings balanced and the population stable, for a while, as our infrastructure cannot sustain explosive growth (and looking at our rivers, they have a point)
That's it. That's Britain's "Nazi party" - gently towing boats and trying not to destroy rivers. Wow. Practically Treblinka
You do know that net zero migration is completely mental, yes? We'd be better off with Truss and PM and Corbyn as Chancellor. You want runaway inflation and the collapse of half the public and private services in the country? That's what Farage is offering.
To be fair being 'completely mental' is not necessarily the same as being far right. Some of Corbyn's ideas, plenty of the Green ideas and even some of the main party ideas can be considerd 'completely mental' but they would not be considered right wing.
You are conflating two completely separate, although not always exclusive, arguments.
No argument from me. There's a problem with identifying racist authoritarians as right wing and identifying hardcore liberals as left wing. My only point here is zero NET migration is completely loopy.
So what is YOUR target for net migration, or do you have no target at all? Do you let everyone in? Let no one in? What is it? Come on, try and answer, if you come up with something coherent and articulate and sensible you might even get a column on "The National" paying £15 per 1000 words
Rejoin EU, freedom of movement.
5 words, that'll be 7.5 pence, please.
But only for nice white Europeans?
You're better than that quip. EU freedom of movement isn't conditional on race.
No but it is conditional on being a citizen of a predominantly white and wealthy bloc of countries. If people are so in favour of freedom of movement then it should not apply only to those fortunate enough to live in a small caucasian portion of the first world.
That’s entirely illogical. Why are the only options free movement within the British Isles or free movement in the whole world?
Because fredom of movement within a smaller bloc such as the EU generally precludes freedom of movement from the rest of the world. Why should we limit ourselves to just those fortunate enough to be born in the EU?
The answer to that lies in the immigration numbers before and after Brexit.
Within the EU freedom of movement is reasonably practical. The UK unilaterally declaring worldwide FOM probably isn't. Though it would be an interesting experiment.
Mind you his comments will not I imagine win over many Tories to Labour but might have a few leftwingers spitting out their herbal tea and going Green.
'Mr Caudwell said he had donated to the Conservatives in 2019 “because I couldn’t possibly stand a Corbyn government, and I am still of exactly the same view there.”
He praised Sir Keir's attempts to get rid of what he called "the loony Left" which he claimed had focused on "extreme socialist policies", instead of "creating a wealthy Britain".
"We can't tax rich people in order to help the poor because they'll go off to Monaco and other places, we have to create real genuine wealth.”
Sir Jim who moved to Monaco to save - checks - £4bn in taxes.
And he's lecturing other people about paying their taxes?
What a total fucking scumbag.
That's his point isn't it? "We can't tax rich people in order to help the poor because they'll go off to Monaco and other places, we have to create real genuine wealth.”
But is he a working person by Starmer's definition?
Tbh the whole Ratcliffe endorsement looks unhelpful. In the modern parlance, he is saying the quiet bit out loud.
Mind you his comments will not I imagine win over many Tories to Labour but might have a few leftwingers spitting out their herbal tea and going Green.
'Mr Caudwell said he had donated to the Conservatives in 2019 “because I couldn’t possibly stand a Corbyn government, and I am still of exactly the same view there.”
He praised Sir Keir's attempts to get rid of what he called "the loony Left" which he claimed had focused on "extreme socialist policies", instead of "creating a wealthy Britain".
"We can't tax rich people in order to help the poor because they'll go off to Monaco and other places, we have to create real genuine wealth.”
Sir Jim who moved to Monaco to save - checks - £4bn in taxes.
And he's lecturing other people about paying their taxes?
What a total fucking scumbag.
That's his point isn't it? "We can't tax rich people in order to help the poor because they'll go off to Monaco and other places, we have to create real genuine wealth.”
But is he a working person by Starmer's definition?
Tbh the whole Ratcliffe endorsement looks unhelpful. In the modern parlance, he is saying the quiet bit out loud.
Ratcliffe and Caudwell are not exactly the sort of people I would imagine Starmer is comfortable with their beliefs. They aren't exactly the John Lewis Partnership of business people.
The latest edition of The News Agents podcast has an interesting discussion with former Sun editor David Yelland.
Murdoch's Sun newspaper backing used to be 'a moment' in every UK general election campaign.
Famously backing Blair in 97. Switching allegiance to Cameron over Brown in 2010.
But this time around we have heard practically nothing. Is that because Murdoch hasn't made his mind up? Or because the enthusiasm for either candidate simply isn't there? Or is it a recognition that the power newspapers wield on the voter is waning?
We speak to former Sun editor David Yelland, host of When it Hits The Fan about the role old and new media plays in politics now. And whether the Murdoch clan themselves may be moving on...
Among other things: newspaper readers are old; fears the Murdoch clan might sell their British newspapers; the Sun might back Labour but they are leaving it very late and there is no policy alignment; papers are already fighting the next election.
The latest edition of The News Agents podcast has an interesting discussion with former Sun editor David Yelland.
Murdoch's Sun newspaper backing used to be 'a moment' in every UK general election campaign.
Famously backing Blair in 97. Switching allegiance to Cameron over Brown in 2010.
But this time around we have heard practically nothing. Is that because Murdoch hasn't made his mind up? Or because the enthusiasm for either candidate simply isn't there? Or is it a recognition that the power newspapers wield on the voter is waning?
We speak to former Sun editor David Yelland, host of When it Hits The Fan about the role old and new media plays in politics now. And whether the Murdoch clan themselves may be moving on...
Among other things: newspaper readers are old; fears the Murdoch clan might sell their British newspapers; the Sun might back Labour but they are leaving it very late and there is no policy alignment; papers are already fighting the next election.
It is noticeable that the Sun have tried to do the YouTube thing for the GE and it is flopping massively.
It is a bit late to address the header but 115 Tory seats are predicted which is more than the conventional betting suggests. Conservative seats bands are best priced as:-
The latest edition of The News Agents podcast has an interesting discussion with former Sun editor David Yelland.
Murdoch's Sun newspaper backing used to be 'a moment' in every UK general election campaign.
Famously backing Blair in 97. Switching allegiance to Cameron over Brown in 2010.
But this time around we have heard practically nothing. Is that because Murdoch hasn't made his mind up? Or because the enthusiasm for either candidate simply isn't there? Or is it a recognition that the power newspapers wield on the voter is waning?
We speak to former Sun editor David Yelland, host of When it Hits The Fan about the role old and new media plays in politics now. And whether the Murdoch clan themselves may be moving on...
Among other things: newspaper readers are old; fears the Murdoch clan might sell their British newspapers; the Sun might back Labour but they are leaving it very late and there is no policy alignment; papers are already fighting the next election.
It is noticeable that the Sun have tried to do the YouTube thing for the GE and it is flopping massively.
Yes. Podcasts, and video'd podcasts, are the new media frenzy and everyone is trying it, after the visible success of Global (LBC, Capital, Heart, Classic FM and other radio stations) and Goalhanger (The Rest Is...; and the corporate representation of Gary Lineker) and, of course, innumerable independents. Arguably Americans like Joe Rogan led the way.
The latest edition of The News Agents podcast has an interesting discussion with former Sun editor David Yelland.
Murdoch's Sun newspaper backing used to be 'a moment' in every UK general election campaign.
Famously backing Blair in 97. Switching allegiance to Cameron over Brown in 2010.
But this time around we have heard practically nothing. Is that because Murdoch hasn't made his mind up? Or because the enthusiasm for either candidate simply isn't there? Or is it a recognition that the power newspapers wield on the voter is waning?
We speak to former Sun editor David Yelland, host of When it Hits The Fan about the role old and new media plays in politics now. And whether the Murdoch clan themselves may be moving on...
Among other things: newspaper readers are old; fears the Murdoch clan might sell their British newspapers; the Sun might back Labour but they are leaving it very late and there is no policy alignment; papers are already fighting the next election.
It is noticeable that the Sun have tried to do the YouTube thing for the GE and it is flopping massively.
Yes. Podcasts, and video'd podcasts, are the new media frenzy and everyone is trying it, after the visible success of Global (LBC, Capital, Heart, Classic FM and other radio stations) and Goalhanger (The Rest Is...; and the corporate representation of Gary Lineker) and, of course, innumerable independents. Arguably Americans like Joe Rogan led the way.
I actually think it hurts to have an established media brand in that space. I don't think people realised that the likes of the NewsAgents is part of a massive corporate entity.
Its all about fake authenticity, hence why there is this weird trend for podcasts to sit there with hand mics when they are filming this thing on multiple cameras in 4k in a very expensive custom built studio e.g. they could have pro level sound if they wanted.
Policy #8 is essentially where I am at. Basically the whole Britain joining Europe thing was done arse over backwards. T'other way would work.
I have a vague recollection of reading a sci-fi story where a European Federation was formed with an elected President, and the people voted in the British Monarch pretty much on the basis it was to be a purely ceremonial position, so it just seemed like the best fit.
Google is no help, so I may have just imagined it.
@kle4 , It might be "The Wire Continuum" by Stephen Baxter/Arthur C Clarke, 1998, originally published in Playboy, later in the The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke, see https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?81708
My copy is hardback and therefore boxed, so cannot confirm, apols
Survival rates for prostate, bowel, breast and cervical cancer are only just reaching levels that other nations achieved in the early 2000s, according to the most recent figures available.
Experts at Macmillan Cancer Support, which produced the analysis, warned that survival rates were “stuck in the noughties”, trailing decades behind countries such as Denmark and Norway.
Is this another function of the fact the UK population is just far less healthy than some other parts of Europe, same with COVID deaths early on. Being a fatty was very bad for COVID, it can't be good for surviving cancer either.
Survival rates for prostate, bowel, breast and cervical cancer are only just reaching levels that other nations achieved in the early 2000s, according to the most recent figures available.
Experts at Macmillan Cancer Support, which produced the analysis, warned that survival rates were “stuck in the noughties”, trailing decades behind countries such as Denmark and Norway.
Is this another function of the fact the UK population is just far less healthy than some other parts of Europe, same with COVID deaths early on. Being a fatty was very bad for COVID, it can't be good for surviving cancer either.
In recent years, we have seen smoking drop off a cliff and had the 2-week cancer pathway or whatever they call it, as well as increased screening for various cancers, at least among oldies (the NHS seems obsessed with looking up my bottom). It may be this is why we are now catching up our nordic neighbours.
I wonder if any of the descendants of the tribes who artefacts these are important have been contacted. I wouldn't be surprised in we are in the territory of white guilt causes over-reaction and seeing potential for huge offence to be caused, and if you actually ask the people and they just shrug and say but that was 250+ years ago, we don't care anymore / women have different roles.
Survival rates for prostate, bowel, breast and cervical cancer are only just reaching levels that other nations achieved in the early 2000s, according to the most recent figures available.
Experts at Macmillan Cancer Support, which produced the analysis, warned that survival rates were “stuck in the noughties”, trailing decades behind countries such as Denmark and Norway.
Is this another function of the fact the UK population is just far less healthy than some other parts of Europe, same with COVID deaths early on. Being a fatty was very bad for COVID, it can't be good for surviving cancer either.
The link between obesity and cancer is startling. I'll try and dig out some stats but I was really surprised by them last time I had a look. The NHS should be shouting from the rooftops about it.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
That just proves how irredeemably lower middle class you are
No, seriously, the posh are left wing. It's not a joke. The gags about Guardian journalists' backgrounds are not a spoof
Marina Hyde has been mentioned on this thread:
"Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire,[1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford.["
She's not just posh she's absurdly rich, I know this personally
I'm sure these people exist, but the point is that you can name them because there are so few of them. They probably all work for the Guardian. I've never met any of them. But I've met a never ending line of posh right wingers, because there are so many more of them (maybe you should get a job in finance). One thing you need to bear in mind is that you are extremely right wing. So people you think of as lefties (despite them eg working for the Tory party) are not lefties on any reasonable definition of the word. It's the same mindset that sees Corbynites call Labour moderate red Tories etc.
In what way am I "extreme rightwing"? Genuinely curious
Dude are you serious?
How many actual "hard" right posters do we have on here? Plenty of disgruntled conservatives, some sitting this one out, a few voting Labour to send a message, a few reluctantly voting Conservative for fear of worse (Farage, or a massive Labour majority).
But I'm struggling to think of anyone who's actually declared for Reform. Including Leon.
With Reform at ~18% in the polls, it's a sign of how detached PB demographics are from reality. Either that, or there are a lot of 'shy reformers' out there.
I'll fess up. I might vote Reform. It's either Starmer for laughs or Reform to kill the Tories
But in what universe is Reform "far right"? They aren't even "hard right" by mainland European standards. Indeed they sometimes struggle to be rightwing, so far has the Overton Window shifted
Their big thing is immigration, Are they going to shoot the boats and drown people (as has been happening off the EU shores)? No. They want to "tow boats back to France". That may be a dream, but it ain't the Shoah. As for overall immigration, they want "net zero" - in a recent interview Farage admitted that might still mean "600,000 immigrants" but they want to keep the incomings and outgoings balanced and the population stable, for a while, as our infrastructure cannot sustain explosive growth (and looking at our rivers, they have a point)
That's it. That's Britain's "Nazi party" - gently towing boats and trying not to destroy rivers. Wow. Practically Treblinka
You do know that net zero migration is completely mental, yes? We'd be better off with Truss and PM and Corbyn as Chancellor. You want runaway inflation and the collapse of half the public and private services in the country? That's what Farage is offering.
To be fair being 'completely mental' is not necessarily the same as being far right. Some of Corbyn's ideas, plenty of the Green ideas and even some of the main party ideas can be considerd 'completely mental' but they would not be considered right wing.
You are conflating two completely separate, although not always exclusive, arguments.
No argument from me. There's a problem with identifying racist authoritarians as right wing and identifying hardcore liberals as left wing. My only point here is zero NET migration is completely loopy.
So what is YOUR target for net migration, or do you have no target at all? Do you let everyone in? Let no one in? What is it? Come on, try and answer, if you come up with something coherent and articulate and sensible you might even get a column on "The National" paying £15 per 1000 words
Rejoin EU, freedom of movement.
5 words, that'll be 7.5 pence, please.
But only for nice white Europeans?
You're better than that quip. EU freedom of movement isn't conditional on race.
No but it is conditional on being a citizen of a predominantly white and wealthy bloc of countries. If people are so in favour of freedom of movement then it should not apply only to those fortunate enough to live in a small caucasian portion of the first world.
That’s entirely illogical. Why are the only options free movement within the British Isles or free movement in the whole world?
Because fredom of movement within a smaller bloc such as the EU generally precludes freedom of movement from the rest of the world. Why should we limit ourselves to just those fortunate enough to be born in the EU?
The answer to that lies in the immigration numbers before and after Brexit.
Within the EU freedom of movement is reasonably practical. The UK unilaterally declaring worldwide FOM probably isn't. Though it would be an interesting experiment.
Not an argument that would work with me I'm afraid as I have always been in favour of freedom of movement on a world rather than regional basis.
In practice it would need modification of how we run things as a society. So whilst anyone could come here to work - if they could find work - they would have absolutely no entitlement to any form of Government support if they were not a British national. They would either be independently wealthy, be able to earn a living or would have to leave. It would of course also be illegal for any business to pay a foreigner less than they pay a Briton for the same job.
Any form of criminality would result in immediate deportation. Same if they were homeless or without means of support. By the way this last is already the case for many European countries. If you turn up in France, even if just for a holiday, you have to prove you have sufficient funds for your stay. 35 Euros a day per person if staying with friends or family, 65 Euros a day if you have a prebooked hotel and 120 Euros a day if you have no pre-booking.
But anyone with a job/offer here or with independent means of support should be free to travel here.
Of course we should also fulfill our duties in terms of asylum quotas etc but that would be above and beyond the frredom of movement for those with income.
No one will ever accept it of course. Both sides, left and right, even those who purport to be in favour of freedom of movement, blanch at the idea of it being genuinely free from Government interference. But that doesn't mean I can't advocate for it in principle.
Survival rates for prostate, bowel, breast and cervical cancer are only just reaching levels that other nations achieved in the early 2000s, according to the most recent figures available.
Experts at Macmillan Cancer Support, which produced the analysis, warned that survival rates were “stuck in the noughties”, trailing decades behind countries such as Denmark and Norway.
Is this another function of the fact the UK population is just far less healthy than some other parts of Europe, same with COVID deaths early on. Being a fatty was very bad for COVID, it can't be good for surviving cancer either.
The link between obesity and cancer is startling. I'll try and dig out some stats but I was really surprised by them last time I had a look. The NHS should be shouting from the rooftops about it.
Another thing that Boris got lazy over. We had a couple of months after his brush with death and then kicked it off the pitch like Peter Kay in the John Smiths advert.
Survival rates for prostate, bowel, breast and cervical cancer are only just reaching levels that other nations achieved in the early 2000s, according to the most recent figures available.
Experts at Macmillan Cancer Support, which produced the analysis, warned that survival rates were “stuck in the noughties”, trailing decades behind countries such as Denmark and Norway.
Is this another function of the fact the UK population is just far less healthy than some other parts of Europe, same with COVID deaths early on. Being a fatty was very bad for COVID, it can't be good for surviving cancer either.
The link between obesity and cancer is startling. I'll try and dig out some stats but I was really surprised by them last time I had a look. The NHS should be shouting from the rooftops about it.
Another thing that Boris got lazy over. We had a couple of months after his brush with death and then kicked it off the pitch like Peter Kay in the John Smiths advert.
I know I bang on about it but demographics are a relatively minor threat to the NHS. It's this spiralling relationship between chronic conditions and technology that means the costs keep going up.
We have an deeply unhealthy population, and the NHS is brilliant at keeping it alive.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
That just proves how irredeemably lower middle class you are
No, seriously, the posh are left wing. It's not a joke. The gags about Guardian journalists' backgrounds are not a spoof
Marina Hyde has been mentioned on this thread:
"Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire,[1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford.["
She's not just posh she's absurdly rich, I know this personally
I'm sure these people exist, but the point is that you can name them because there are so few of them. They probably all work for the Guardian. I've never met any of them. But I've met a never ending line of posh right wingers, because there are so many more of them (maybe you should get a job in finance). One thing you need to bear in mind is that you are extremely right wing. So people you think of as lefties (despite them eg working for the Tory party) are not lefties on any reasonable definition of the word. It's the same mindset that sees Corbynites call Labour moderate red Tories etc.
In what way am I "extreme rightwing"? Genuinely curious
Dude are you serious?
How many actual "hard" right posters do we have on here? Plenty of disgruntled conservatives, some sitting this one out, a few voting Labour to send a message, a few reluctantly voting Conservative for fear of worse (Farage, or a massive Labour majority).
But I'm struggling to think of anyone who's actually declared for Reform. Including Leon.
With Reform at ~18% in the polls, it's a sign of how detached PB demographics are from reality. Either that, or there are a lot of 'shy reformers' out there.
I'll fess up. I might vote Reform. It's either Starmer for laughs or Reform to kill the Tories
But in what universe is Reform "far right"? They aren't even "hard right" by mainland European standards. Indeed they sometimes struggle to be rightwing, so far has the Overton Window shifted
Their big thing is immigration, Are they going to shoot the boats and drown people (as has been happening off the EU shores)? No. They want to "tow boats back to France". That may be a dream, but it ain't the Shoah. As for overall immigration, they want "net zero" - in a recent interview Farage admitted that might still mean "600,000 immigrants" but they want to keep the incomings and outgoings balanced and the population stable, for a while, as our infrastructure cannot sustain explosive growth (and looking at our rivers, they have a point)
That's it. That's Britain's "Nazi party" - gently towing boats and trying not to destroy rivers. Wow. Practically Treblinka
You do know that net zero migration is completely mental, yes? We'd be better off with Truss and PM and Corbyn as Chancellor. You want runaway inflation and the collapse of half the public and private services in the country? That's what Farage is offering.
To be fair being 'completely mental' is not necessarily the same as being far right. Some of Corbyn's ideas, plenty of the Green ideas and even some of the main party ideas can be considerd 'completely mental' but they would not be considered right wing.
You are conflating two completely separate, although not always exclusive, arguments.
No argument from me. There's a problem with identifying racist authoritarians as right wing and identifying hardcore liberals as left wing. My only point here is zero NET migration is completely loopy.
So what is YOUR target for net migration, or do you have no target at all? Do you let everyone in? Let no one in? What is it? Come on, try and answer, if you come up with something coherent and articulate and sensible you might even get a column on "The National" paying £15 per 1000 words
Rejoin EU, freedom of movement.
5 words, that'll be 7.5 pence, please.
But only for nice white Europeans?
You're better than that quip. EU freedom of movement isn't conditional on race.
No but it is conditional on being a citizen of a predominantly white and wealthy bloc of countries. If people are so in favour of freedom of movement then it should not apply only to those fortunate enough to live in a small caucasian portion of the first world.
That’s entirely illogical. Why are the only options free movement within the British Isles or free movement in the whole world?
Because fredom of movement within a smaller bloc such as the EU generally precludes freedom of movement from the rest of the world. Why should we limit ourselves to just those fortunate enough to be born in the EU?
The answer to that lies in the immigration numbers before and after Brexit.
Within the EU freedom of movement is reasonably practical. The UK unilaterally declaring worldwide FOM probably isn't. Though it would be an interesting experiment.
Oh and to answer your first point. Of course the Government had no control over the immigration numbers before Brexit. They did afterwards. They made an active choice to increase immigration. This would be something to be lauded if they hadn't at the same time lied about it and pretended they were trying to reduce it - and blamed it all on the3% of immigrants who came over in small boats.
Survival rates for prostate, bowel, breast and cervical cancer are only just reaching levels that other nations achieved in the early 2000s, according to the most recent figures available.
Experts at Macmillan Cancer Support, which produced the analysis, warned that survival rates were “stuck in the noughties”, trailing decades behind countries such as Denmark and Norway.
Is this another function of the fact the UK population is just far less healthy than some other parts of Europe, same with COVID deaths early on. Being a fatty was very bad for COVID, it can't be good for surviving cancer either.
The link between obesity and cancer is startling. I'll try and dig out some stats but I was really surprised by them last time I had a look. The NHS should be shouting from the rooftops about it.
These new anti-obesity wonder drugs should help with this, and indirectly with diabetes (currently rocketing) as well as cancer.
As someone in a LD target seat at the upper end of LD expectations (Maidenhead) this feels too low the LDs. Maidenhead is looking knife-edge and if we do win it - the LD seat total is likely to be 55-70. I’m hearing that Godalming and Ash is NOT looking good for Hunt.
Good morning.
Well I’ve heard that too: that Hunt is going to be well beaten. I’m just up the road in Woking.
However, he is campaigning very hard. And maybe the MRP knows differently.
Survival rates for prostate, bowel, breast and cervical cancer are only just reaching levels that other nations achieved in the early 2000s, according to the most recent figures available.
Experts at Macmillan Cancer Support, which produced the analysis, warned that survival rates were “stuck in the noughties”, trailing decades behind countries such as Denmark and Norway.
Is this another function of the fact the UK population is just far less healthy than some other parts of Europe, same with COVID deaths early on. Being a fatty was very bad for COVID, it can't be good for surviving cancer either.
The link between obesity and cancer is startling. I'll try and dig out some stats but I was really surprised by them last time I had a look. The NHS should be shouting from the rooftops about it.
These new anti-obesity wonder drugs should help with this, and indirectly with diabetes (currently rocketing) as well as cancer.
It might just be another example of that escalation in costs though. We'll end up with most of the population, including children, on prescription drugs.
UK fears financial turmoil at IT giant could have ‘severe’ effect on PIP and NHS
The Government has held secret talks over the financial turmoil facing a major contractor that could spark severe disruption to public services, i can reveal.
Concerns are growing about cashflow issues affecting French IT giant Atos, which has almost a billion pounds’ worth of UK government contracts.
p.s. re Tugendhat, if the tories do go to a 1997 or worse, remember what happened after that one. The young new darling of the party, William Hague, took on the leadership at the wrong time and when the inevitable happened in 2001, he went.
Hague should have backed Howard in 1997, let him take the 2001 landslide defeat, then he would likely have been the next leader not IDS. He could have cut Labour's majority in 2005, been young enough to stay leader and then beaten Brown in 2010 and become PM rather than Cameron. He did everything CV wise to become PM but tactically made a huge error politically.
I suspect Barclay is more likely the next Tory leader than Tugendhat anyway once it gets to the members
Wasn't Howard stuffed by Widdy's 'Something of the night' barb?
Yes, and with more than a smattering of anti-semitism.
Not that the anti-semitism was confined to the far right (Widdecombe). Labour had a poster of Howard as Fagin which they later pulled after a backlash. Also one as a flying pig.
Comments
I think they are terrible and I will happily see the back of them but I struggle to see how they are more unpopular than Labour 2019, that's all.
I do recall Douglas Carswell trying to get some attention by Periscoping things (no, I don't remember what Periscope was either).
Just was wondering how many seats you thought the Tories might win.
I would allow voting local elections for people who are not British citizens, but have indefinite leave to remain, and who are tax resident. (See, I'm all heart, I am.)
Labour never forgot to please at least some people even if it was a smaller segment than they should have aimed for.
What you thinking for Labour?
There are so many questions in your thing, I don't have answers for most to be honest.
Makes my Spread position long 402 for Labour, short 56 (for 1.5x amount) on Lib Dem.
As was with my Labour long it's my intent to average into this short as it goes against me, although wouldn't surprise me if like that long I don't actually get the opportunity to. Consequently both positions small.
I will put 401 and 152 as Labour/Tory respectively.
Definitely worth consideration
So I would find it hard to forego voting in this general election, though I suspect that I am struggling to come up with a convincing reason for why I should be eligible to vote. I still care about Britain, and I want the best for it, and my daughter and other members of my wider family live there (but they can vote for themselves), but I'm not going to be directly affected by the policies of the next British government.
I am generally quite comfortable with a wider franchise, even if it doesn't always make sense.
But I'm unlikely to return to live in Britain. Hmm.
Sunak 13 June: "If you think Labour will win, start saving."
Google is no help, so I may have just imagined it.
So yes it's the sort of seat you could never imagine going red, but there's lots of new housing and about as bad a backdrop as you could get to the Tory defence here. It's not a slam dunk for the Tories this time.
Otherwise, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't consider their national findings useful. Certainly better than standard polling + baxtering.
Not only is garden-variety subsampling slipping back in on this site - in a big way - we now have PBers doubling down with MRP forecasts: subsamples’ evil cousins.
Enough.
Live in what was a very marginal Tory/Lab seat (2019 went Tory by ~600votes).
I might still consider voting Tory if I lived somewhere were a) the Tory might conceivably win and b) the Tory candidate appeared to be an actual Tory, not a CCHQ planted wet, however at this point I'm not sure I would unless the Tory candidate was exceptional.
I would rather have the current Tories, poor as they are than Labour (who is going to be truly dreadful), but that's not realistically on offer, so the next best thing is to smash the Tories to powder, get them replaced or merged into Reform so that when the pendulum swings back again (it will do - Starmer has no more answers to our current woes than Sunak, and is likely to be equally unpopular in 5 years time) we get a government that's willing to do some of the radical stuff the country needs.
What would I actually like the government to do?
Net Zero Migration - stop undercutting lower paid workers with imported labour, whilst putting massive extra pressure on housing and services.
Employ an illegal immigrant - if they shop you £100k fine, they get £20k and leave to remain.
All small boat arrivals to Rwanda (no exceptions), we oversee their asylum claim, if accepted we provide them with safe free accommodation in Rwanda for 5 years, plus 5 years of whatever welfare eltitlements a native Rwandan gets (I can't see there being many takers).
Partial short-term fix for the NHS - adjust the value of a QALY down (I.e. rationing healthcare by price/benifit ratio) sufficiently to clear current waiting lists (I. e. rationing by queuing) in a sane amount of time. The main virtue of this is that the lost treatments are those with the least "bang for buck" rather than random.
Longer term fix for the NHS - lots more training places, funded in such a way that staff are tied to the NHS for long periods afterwards, or pay for the cost of training in full.
Massive reform of the tax code - bin the lot and start again. Max 500 pages of 12pt text in plain English as an end result. Take out all the bizarre cliff edges etc in income tax, replace with a marginal sliding scale in 5% increments every £5k up to a maximum rate of 50% over £50k. Abolish NI (both employer and employee). Largely treat all income the same regardless of earned/unearned.
Planning to be zonal - you can build what you like (subject to building regs) in zone. Building regs to be taken back to those of approx 25 years ago for things like energy efficiency (adding ~£100k to the cost of a house to knock ~£1k a year off the electric/gas bill is insane).
Ditch net zero as currently instituted - it's only popular because people believe the lies about the costs. Look at Nuke*/Tidal/Gas as the main sources of electricity for the medium term.
*only if we get someone competent to do it, like buying off the peg designs by the Koreans, rather than bespoke disasters like HPC from the French
Now Reform aren't anyw
Like advances in AI being genuine, but not justifying the level of immediate transformative prediction that people will then attribute to it.
I've created my own very rudimentary MRP. What that finds is the conditions necessary for a Conservative victory are rare - you need very high home ownership, large numbers of old people, high wealth all concentrated in a very small area. But most constituencies are actually quite mixed and balanced groups of people.
The idea that there are lots of Tory fortresses that will survive the onslaught is wrong, IMO. The FPTP slope is very steep, on both sides of the distribution. Hence why I think the Conservatives could end up in the high 20s and still get wiped out, a few special cases aside.
One interesting little tidbit from the opinion polls. Not sure it's a subsample as such, more a detail about how heavily the raw sample has to be weighted. In the Deltapoll, which is based on a sample of 1383, the raw sample only has 431 respondents who recall voting Tory in 2019, which is then weighted to their target of 535. This means they undersampled 2019 Tories by nearly 20% in the raw sample. For 2019 Lib Dems, it's even worse. 73 respondents on the raw sample were weighted to 141. No-one wants to admit to voting for PM Jo Swinson. I didn't think she was that bad.
The risk here is that the missing 2019 Tories from the sample might be a population that will behave differently to those willing to respond to an opinion poll.
With that said, there is no world in which nuclear is economic. The only reason to have any is for national security reasons, and then you have to accept that a portion of your electricity is going to be very expensive.
Now Reform aren't anywhere on some of these, and even propose virtually the opposite on some, but they are closer to this list than any of the others particularly on immigration (which is key, because it's currently an out of control Ponzi scheme rapidly reaching the point of unsustainabliy, and the longer it's left unchecked the nastier the final crash will be).
The system needs shaking up, by far the best route to that is killing the Tory Party and install Farage (flawed though he is) as LOTO.
Boris had more appeal than them in the redwall but they have more appeal than him in the bluewall
Labour 46
Conservative 26
Reform 8
LD 14
Green 4
SNP 2
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c722gl8rzdro
Want right-wing policies, rather than right-wing hot air and centre left action? - vote Reform.
Want social liberalism with a hint of fiscal responsibility? - vote Lib Dem.
Want spend spend spend and tax tax tax? I'm fairly sure that nice Mr Starmer will deliver.
Want competency? - vote Count Bin Face.
There just isn't a very large block of people who want the country to be run fractionally to the right of the Lib Dems by a bloke so competent he can't organise an umbrella when making a planned speech in the rain, who is also randomly claiming he'll do 15 different contradictory things he's suddenly thought of if re-elected, despite his party having been in power for the last 14 years.
The current Tory party have systematically annoyed virtually every segment of their voting coalition, why on earth do they expect anybody to vote for them.
So the question is this; hegemony or survival?
https://twitter.com/LehmannsGloves/status/1803119024949080262
Levelling up money is yet another scandal waiting to be properly exposed. I think the stupid stone chessboards with no pieces to actually play games are the tip of the iceberg.
Within the EU freedom of movement is reasonably practical. The UK unilaterally declaring worldwide FOM probably isn't.
Though it would be an interesting experiment.
Murdoch's Sun newspaper backing used to be 'a moment' in every UK general election campaign.
Famously backing Blair in 97. Switching allegiance to Cameron over Brown in 2010.
But this time around we have heard practically nothing. Is that because Murdoch hasn't made his mind up? Or because the enthusiasm for either candidate simply isn't there? Or is it a recognition that the power newspapers wield on the voter is waning?
We speak to former Sun editor David Yelland, host of When it Hits The Fan about the role old and new media plays in politics now. And whether the Murdoch clan themselves may be moving on...
Later, is Boris Johnson a help or a hindrance as he tries to endorse individual Tory candidates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv36A04cXIw
Among other things: newspaper readers are old; fears the Murdoch clan might sell their British newspapers; the Sun might back Labour but they are leaving it very late and there is no policy alignment; papers are already fighting the next election.
0-49 9/2
50-99 6/5
100-49 9/4
150-199 8/1
https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/next-uk-general-election/conservatives-seats
Its all about fake authenticity, hence why there is this weird trend for podcasts to sit there with hand mics when they are filming this thing on multiple cameras in 4k in a very expensive custom built studio e.g. they could have pro level sound if they wanted.
My copy is hardback and therefore boxed, so cannot confirm, apols
Experts at Macmillan Cancer Support, which produced the analysis, warned that survival rates were “stuck in the noughties”, trailing decades behind countries such as Denmark and Norway.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/19/uk-cancer-care-is-20-years-behind-europe/
Is this another function of the fact the UK population is just far less healthy than some other parts of Europe, same with COVID deaths early on. Being a fatty was very bad for COVID, it can't be good for surviving cancer either.
A second museum’s guidelines may restrict public access to artefacts because of cultural sensitivities about women viewing them.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/18/second-museum-keep-males-only-artefacts-from-public-view/
In practice it would need modification of how we run things as a society. So whilst anyone could come here to work - if they could find work - they would have absolutely no entitlement to any form of Government support if they were not a British national. They would either be independently wealthy, be able to earn a living or would have to leave. It would of course also be illegal for any business to pay a foreigner less than they pay a Briton for the same job.
Any form of criminality would result in immediate deportation. Same if they were homeless or without means of support. By the way this last is already the case for many European countries. If you turn up in France, even if just for a holiday, you have to prove you have sufficient funds for your stay. 35 Euros a day per person if staying with friends or family, 65 Euros a day if you have a prebooked hotel and 120 Euros a day if you have no pre-booking.
But anyone with a job/offer here or with independent means of support should be free to travel here.
Of course we should also fulfill our duties in terms of asylum quotas etc but that would be above and beyond the frredom of movement for those with income.
No one will ever accept it of course. Both sides, left and right, even those who purport to be in favour of freedom of movement, blanch at the idea of it being genuinely free from Government interference. But that doesn't mean I can't advocate for it in principle.
We have an deeply unhealthy population, and the NHS is brilliant at keeping it alive.
Well I’ve heard that too: that Hunt is going to be well beaten. I’m just up the road in Woking.
However, he is campaigning very hard. And maybe the MRP knows differently.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/euro2024-england-serbia-fans-police-33042194
The Government has held secret talks over the financial turmoil facing a major contractor that could spark severe disruption to public services, i can reveal.
Concerns are growing about cashflow issues affecting French IT giant Atos, which has almost a billion pounds’ worth of UK government contracts.
The extent of the financial difficulties faced by Atos’s UK arm are not known but the French parent company admitted in April that it was facing a wall of debt amounting to €3.9bn (£3.3bn).
https://inews.co.uk/news/uk-fears-financial-turmoil-it-giant-severe-effect-pip-nhs-3110917
Not that the anti-semitism was confined to the far right (Widdecombe). Labour had a poster of Howard as Fagin which they later pulled after a backlash. Also one as a flying pig.