I don’t quite know how to make this point, but it’s a serious one. Liz Truss generally comes across to me as a bit childish, lacking the kind of seriousness or gravitas you would normally expect. It seems to be a disease that has infected some on the right. They seem to want to shock and provoke rather than effect change. It’s a subtle thing, but they’re a long way from the kind of intellectual heft that sat behind the Thatcherite revolution.
Not just Truss. The British right loved Beano Boris, and grumily tolerated May and Sunak, who at least tried to be responsible national leaders. Or see the Spectator; yes it sells by the truckload but that's in part because it's given up on being a serious journal of right wing thinking and is now almost entirely there to make people think "OMG what are they going to say now?" Which is an excellent sales strategy, but a terrible way to run a country.
Let us hope that Boring Old PM Starmer can Make Britain Boring Again.
May I join in the chorus.
Reform Uk is the Party of childish politics, of wishful thinking. Farage is an essentially unserious politician, in it for the laughs.
True to an extent but Farage did bring Brexit and should not be underestimated
A careful reading of their manifesto shows us that underestimating him his impossible. It was the worst policy platform of any party and would see the economy curl up and die. Surprised fewer people talked about it, but therein lies the truth. Farage is a wrecking ball, not a builder. You vote for him if you prefer a pile of rubble over what we have now.
"see the economy curl up and die" - I join you in being unconvinced by Reformonomics. But I am baffled that the Greens appear to get a free pass. Their economics appear to me to be more insane than anyone else's. My middle class school friends have engaged in a quick whatsapp discussion of the results, all earnestly pronouncing on how worrying it is that Reform have got 4 (now 5 of course) MPs, and have all had serious talks with their children about the dangers of snake oil salesmen. But they seem breezily unconcerned about Greens getting the same number and the Islamic sectarians getting another 4 (or 5, if you include Corbyn). Both of these strike me as far more extreme and worrying developments than Reform's handful. (Though granted Reform probably got more votes than the total of the rag tag and bobtails of the far left.)
Fair. Reform deserve greater scrutiny because they receive greater coverage. If the Greens get an uptick in coverage then I agree, I'd expect a much more robust examination of their (often loopy) economic policies.
The level of delusion from the Green party is on another scale. I remember for a while they had a thing 'vote for policies', the suggestion being that you could just vote for policies you like, like massive increases in government spending, but without any mechanism to pay for it. Their policy on defence was also until recently to just reduce spending to avoid anything other defending ourselves. All this time people I know, educated to PHD level, would vote for this and stand as candidates, believing themselves to be enlightened. I always just regarded them as populists in the same manner as Trump, Corbyn, UKIP etc.
It is very revealing that the green party get a free pass. They just actually seem to get humoured, like they are idealistic children, only now they run Council's and have MP's. The disparity with how the reform party are treated is massive and unfortunately revealing of a deep cultural bias.
My great fear really is that Rayner isn’t capable of policy delivery, perhaps similar to the way Prescott essentially blocked up the plumbing of his critical portfolios in the New Labour years.
I respect Rayner immensely as a politician, but there’s just no background of delivery I’m aware of.
Exactly , got there like Prescott by climbing the greasy pole in the unions, no real experience of real business and likely to be as big a dud as Prescott was. Labour always need a union rep as deputy to keep the wolves happy.
Robert Jenrick is the first leadership contender to break cover. He says the last government “insulted the public” by failing to deal with immigration. He sets out his stall here:
The first that needs to be slapped around the head with an inflated puffer fish, as a reality check.
You stand fuck-all chance, Jenrick. Anybody synonymous with scandal condemns the Conservative Partyin 2029 to 2024 take 2. We need a clean skin.
Who are you curious about for leader?
Claire Courtinho fits the bill for whats needed, of those re-elected.
Although let's see who gets Rishi's seat when he does a runner over the summer. I'd still stick with Mordaunt - if she gets it.
Thanks. Interesting. Maybe a bit early for Courtnho I would have thought. Maybe a shadow chancellor???
Historically the winning strategy seems to be to find an obvious, PM in waiting rather than skipping a generation for the sake of it.
Is Mourdaunt your Blair, Cameron or Starmer figure? If she is, can she control the right and the Mail? That has been her Achilles heel.
The Tories will be looking for a Blair when realistically they need a Kinnock.
Like Napoleon, they have two fight two big battles in succession, against the LibDems in the Home Counties and against Labour everywhere else, and win them both while preventing their troops deserting off the right of the field.
I strongly suspect immigration will be a horror show for Labour, to the point even the LibDems will be taking the piss out of them. It's all Reform has. Give it a couple of years and even that will no longer be their redoubt. Then people will look at what is left - and walk away.
I don’t quite know how to make this point, but it’s a serious one. Liz Truss generally comes across to me as a bit childish, lacking the kind of seriousness or gravitas you would normally expect. It seems to be a disease that has infected some on the right. They seem to want to shock and provoke rather than effect change. It’s a subtle thing, but they’re a long way from the kind of intellectual heft that sat behind the Thatcherite revolution.
Spot on.
Before wittering about immigration or whatever, the Tories need to think hard about the 4 things they have lacked or deliberately abandoned in recent years.
1. An understanding of Burkean principles - the idea that conservatism is about preserving the best of what we have built but also about building on that for the next generations - to leave the country in a better state than they found it. So it is not enough to focus only on one elderly generation but to remember those that are and those to come and to make life and opportunities better for them. (Why in God's name did a Conservative government kill off Sure Start? - to give just one example.)
2. Chesterton's Fence: you don't just randomly and angrily attack and destroy institutions and conventions just because they stand in your way. You are meant to be grown ups not tantruming toddlers. The attacks on the rule of law, on any standards of integrity and political decency, on independent institutions etc was pathetic, dangerous and, well, unconservative. See point 1.
3. Competence: obvious but forgotten. Just try to do your tasks well. Good administration, thinking about the consequences, thinking ahead, getting advice, planning, sorting out mistakes, learning from them, small practical improvements instead of snake oil promises backed by nothing more than bullshit etc. You forgot that. You will have to relearn this and try to demonstrate it where you can - in how you run your party and whatever councils you control. It will take time and you won't be listened to for a long time. But unless you do start doing this now, forget the rest.
4. Character: the single most important factor. The moral character, the integrity, the honesty of those who lead your party and those in it and how they behave says more about you than any manifesto. You chose some dreadful leaders in a Faustian pact which has well and truly bitten you on the arse. You abandoned all standards of political decency. You allowed corruption and shadiness and spivs in public office to fester. You gave the impression that duty and public service were jokes. The one abiding image for your years in power was parties in Downing Street while a widowed queen sat alone at her husband's funeral. That image stood for many who did their job while you treated their old-fashioned virtues with contempt. Really, how dare you call yourself conservative and behave like that.
Get these right. Then you can start worrying about policies. The current government will eventually make mistakes in all these areas. (I mean, Jacqui Smith, really?) But they won't listen to you until you've admitted you fucked things up and have changed.
Available for consultation at £1,3750 per hour + VAT or its euro equivalent. An absolute bargain.
Excellent post.
Yes, agree with much of this. I'd like to see a bit more of a philosophical background to conservatism, but the outcome of that should not be 'tack right' or 'tack left' but 'tack competent'. Burkean principles strike me as a good place to start. Pragmatism is all very well and good, but at its extreme, and without being rooted in some sort of 'why are we doing this' philosophy - and we saw this at the end of the Brown years as much as at the end of the Sunak years - it can result in doing whatever random half-thought through thing a focus group threw up.
Unlike Casino (I think?), my view is that Penny wouldn't have been the right solution. She tried to articulate a vision for Conservatism in her book, but none of it struck me as terribly convincing.
Part of the Conservatives problem is that there are fewer and fewer Conservatives in public life. This isn't an original thought, though I forget who it is on here has articulated it previously. Why is this? Partly it's because the left has been quite successful in making public life difficult for Conservatives, and partly it's because Conservatives have walked away from public life. There's a bit of chicken and egg about which of these came first.
No, I agree with you on Penny. Similar reason.
Ah, apologies - I must have been thinking of someone else.
The answer with immigration is to reclassify temporary visitors as VISITORS rather than immigrants. These temporary immigrants include students and their families - and young people on 2 year work visas currently from Australia but why not from the EU.
I quite like the idea, but that only deals with the headline numbers, it doesn't deal with the consequences. The consequences of high immigration/long-stay visits are still felt until we actually start building stuff in numbers that will beat demand and fill the humongous deficit we have allowed to grow. Labour's current proposals are of a scale that will make little material difference, we need to be far more ambitious.
Robert Jenrick is the first leadership contender to break cover. He says the last government “insulted the public” by failing to deal with immigration. He sets out his stall here:
A position somewhat undermined by his having been a minister with responsibility for (checks notes) immigration.
And also another step into irrelevance.
They created a wedge issue - then found themselves on the wrong side of the wedge. It goes back to Cameron and his foolish "under 100,000" pledge - another reaction to Farage like his Brexit referendum. The issue is not "immigration" but "population" - and the houses and services the population needs. Anyone proposing to "cut immigration" should start off by telling us who they are going to stop coming. NHS staff? Students?
Centrists here of both Tory and Libdem persuasion are still having more vapours about Farage winning five seats compared with Labours 400 odd I see.
I guess when you have had a monopoly of the right wing in parliament since the 1661 general election, a rival party of the right breaking through the first past the post wall and winning five seats as well as knocking you into third place in a lot of seats you held until this week is going to seem a bit existensial.
They do not like it.
Labour + Green + SDLP + WPB + Plaid + SNP (33.7% + 6.7% + 0.7% + 0.7% + 0.3% + 2.5) = 44.6%
I know the LDs/Alliance really really really want to count all their 12.6% of voters to the Left-wing block, but they're not. If I was being really generous I'd give them 60% of them and 40% to the Right-wing block. That'd still get you to only 51.1% v 44.2%, and that's on a reduced turnout where many Tories stayed at home.
Point is the country is still split into two-voter blocks. And there's not an awful lot between them, save the mathematics of FPTP, which computed into the landslide.
A lot can change quickly.
The Lib Dems absolutely do go into the box with Labour while the other box represents performative anti-woke culture war politics, Brexit and cancelling HS2. They certainly go in any box that is opposite to parties like TUV and the DUP. Im surprised you’d want to associate the Tory brand with those, or Reform.
On the other hand the SNP sit in a different box altogether. You can’t lump them in with Labour when they are their chief rivals.
Back from an election week spent on the Isle of Man. Now, I'm sure @Leon has been from Point of Aire to the Calf of Man but it was my first visit.
It's a curious place - all the trappings of modernity are there and yet Douglas feels like it's still in the 1970s - the bookies open fromn 10am to 6.30pm only. Friday was Tynwald Day, a public holiday, and the majority of shops and Government buildings closed.
"Quaint" wouldn't be the correct word but it's the nearest I can get to. I'm sure @Sunil_Prasannan has covered these but the steam railway to Port Erin, the Manx Electric Railway to Ramsey and the Snaefell Mountain Railway are delightful if not easy on the behind (wooden benches). The buses are German, comfortable and dare one say it, equally teutonic in their punctuality.
And yet, Douglas is quiet at night - the old fashioned hotels and b&bs along the Promenade cater for their guests with carvery restaurants and lounges and the (mostly) older clientele seem to prefer to stay put rather than venture out. They get cruise ships - Celebrity Silhouette called in with its 2000 passengers and the town got noticeably busier. There are some very good places to eat though the prices aren't far off London which again might explain why the hotels do so well.
Robert Jenrick is the first leadership contender to break cover. He says the last government “insulted the public” by failing to deal with immigration. He sets out his stall here:
It would have been better for your Party, Carlotta, if the Election had produced a more cleansing result. It would then have had less detritus like Jenrick to clear out before reconstruction begins.
I worry about the members, Peter.
They usually go for the most tub-thumping and dogmatic one. It really doesn't help.
I doubt they've learned many (any) lessons from this defeat.
I think there's an argument that this is the right way to go. They need to rebuild the base first and stop all the members defecting, and lose elections with a purist in charge until they get it out of their system.
One place Labour went wrong was putting a (relative) moderate up first, which pushed everything back by an entire parliament. If they'd picked Corbyn right away they could have got it out of their system in 2015 then got back into office in 2020.
Or, we could get it out of our system now - given we've just massively lost an election, near catastrophically - and go professional straight away.
The Conservatives aren't going to recover unless they can inspire and recruit some young people. Money is also going to be a problem, their costs are based on a pre-2024 Conservative party in government - why would anyone now contribute to the Conservatives? Their councillor numbers are likely to decline further. I cannot see a way back for them - though admit I am not inclined to look very hard for one.
The first thing the Tories should do is come out in favour of votes at 16. It’s going to happen now (wrongly, in my view, but thems the breaks) and the worst thing they could do is immediately signal to that generation that they don’t actually want their votes. And really try and listen to and engage with those voters. I am not quite at the Leon level of thinking all young voters are ready to support the far right, but there is I think a willingness of younger generations to be more open minded about their political choices than perhaps the millennial generation before them (who for now have largely become comfortable centre-leftists).
Robert Jenrick is the first leadership contender to break cover. He says the last government “insulted the public” by failing to deal with immigration. He sets out his stall here:
The first that needs to be slapped around the head with an inflated puffer fish, as a reality check.
You stand fuck-all chance, Jenrick. Anybody synonymous with scandal condemns the Conservative Partyin 2029 to 2024 take 2. We need a clean skin.
Who are you curious about for leader?
Claire Courtinho fits the bill for whats needed, of those re-elected.
Although let's see who gets Rishi's seat when he does a runner over the summer. I'd still stick with Mordaunt - if she gets it.
Courtinho and Badenoch are potentials but it is inevitable that such a leap for either would be uncertain. As an orange book liberal you need to appeal to the likes of me and so far I like both. Mordaunt possibly but I'm not convinced.
Mordaunt, sadly, just isn't intellectual enough.
Only sad gits with a crush think Mordaunt is anything other than a dumb donkey. She could not run a bath.
So Suellas winning campaign message is to leave the ECHR . Some Tories seem to think that they can just become more Reform .
Ignoring that a section of Tory voters will jump ship if they keep going further right .
I imagine the 4,000,000 are the most uneducated and politically illiterate in the country. It's unlikely they'll move in any direction because of ideology. It'll be interesting when the psephologists have done their work on the election but I'd be surprised if that's not the case
Well this one has an honours degree in a subkect involving a lot of complex maths and is entitled to use the Designation Chartered xxxxx.
One of the others I know of is a public sector worker who graduated not long ago.
Your sneering attitude to millions of voters crystallises the reason why Reform came third in this election, votes wise, half a million ahead of the lib dems.
I don’t quite know how to make this point, but it’s a serious one. Liz Truss generally comes across to me as a bit childish, lacking the kind of seriousness or gravitas you would normally expect. It seems to be a disease that has infected some on the right. They seem to want to shock and provoke rather than effect change. It’s a subtle thing, but they’re a long way from the kind of intellectual heft that sat behind the Thatcherite revolution.
You can be well educated, good at debating, good at public speaking, and still fundamentally be a stupid and unserious person who has poor reasoning skills. Truss it that to me.
Like football, politics is a team game, and a good team needs people to do the thinking, to do the selling, and to do the delivery, with a good manager bringing everything together. Any individual politician can't tick all the boxes, but they do need to have conspicuous strengths in one of those three areas, ideally not be critically weak in any of them, and the guy or gal at the top needs to be a good leader.
Is there anyone particularly upset by the election? A lot of upsides across the political spectrum: Labour won a landslide Tories still breathing Best LibDem result in a century RefUK on the board Greens won 4 seats SNP routed
Any downsides?
yes, the second of your points...
It would have been joyous to see ELE. But that would almost certainly have elevated Farage and his mob - surely a worse outcome than what we have.
Also, just enough of the nutters survived in the Tory Party to ensure that the crazy circus carries on even longer. We have seen parties suffer a catastrophic drop in support and spend some time rebuilding before being competitive again. That is the Tories most likely scenario. Can't rule out another oscillation in 2029 that sees them sweep back - in today's politics everything is possible.
But the other scenario is to copy the Liberals a century ago. A crushing defeat followed by division, infighting and absolute self-destructive idiocy. Leading to another hammering into an even smaller total in the elections that follow. 121 may prove to be an impossible target in the next election...
Five party politics is awful, particularly in FPTP.
No
We rehearsed all the FPTP arguments during the AV referendum, but here we go again.
FPTP works perfectly well regardless of the number of parties.
I now have a Lib Dem MP because more of my neighbours voted for them than any other candidate, in what was previously one of the safest Tory seats in the Country.
It matters not a jot how many people in Clacton, or Skegness, voted for ReFUK
My local MP is the one local people voted for.
I've read over your post several times, and I can't actually detect an argument for anything. You say it works well, and your evidence is... that you have an MP of some party because they got a plurality where you live? Ok, but that's just a description of how it works, not a defence of it.
By the same token I could say murder is perfectly fine: I know some guy who poured petrol through a guy's letterbox and followed it up with a match, and the guy in the house died. See? Murder works.
In the case of Yitsak Rabin, sadly murder worked all to well.
Centrists here of both Tory and Libdem persuasion are still having more vapours about Farage winning five seats compared with Labours 400 odd I see.
I guess when you have had a monopoly of the right wing in parliament since the 1661 general election, a rival party of the right breaking through the first past the post wall and winning five seats as well as knocking you into third place in a lot of seats you held until this week is going to seem a bit existensial.
They do not like it.
Labour + Green + SDLP + WPB + Plaid + SNP (33.7% + 6.7% + 0.7% + 0.7% + 0.3% + 2.5) = 44.6%
I know the LDs/Alliance really really really want to count all their 12.6% of voters to the Left-wing block, but they're not. If I was being really generous I'd give them 60% of them and 40% to the Right-wing block. That'd still get you to only 51.1% v 44.2%, and that's on a reduced turnout where many Tories stayed at home.
Point is the country is still split into two-voter blocks. And there's not an awful lot between them, save the mathematics of FPTP, which computed into the landslide.
A lot can change quickly.
Reform aren't a right-wing bloc party, sorry. They compete against Tories and promise magic money tree for the NHS.
I don’t quite know how to make this point, but it’s a serious one. Liz Truss generally comes across to me as a bit childish, lacking the kind of seriousness or gravitas you would normally expect. It seems to be a disease that has infected some on the right. They seem to want to shock and provoke rather than effect change. It’s a subtle thing, but they’re a long way from the kind of intellectual heft that sat behind the Thatcherite revolution.
Spot on.
Before wittering about immigration or whatever, the Tories need to think hard about the 4 things they have lacked or deliberately abandoned in recent years.
1. An understanding of Burkean principles - the idea that conservatism is about preserving the best of what we have built but also about building on that for the next generations - to leave the country in a better state than they found it. So it is not enough to focus only on one elderly generation but to remember those that are and those to come and to make life and opportunities better for them. (Why in God's name did a Conservative government kill off Sure Start? - to give just one example.)
2. Chesterton's Fence: you don't just randomly and angrily attack and destroy institutions and conventions just because they stand in your way. You are meant to be grown ups not tantruming toddlers. The attacks on the rule of law, on any standards of integrity and political decency, on independent institutions etc was pathetic, dangerous and, well, unconservative. See point 1.
3. Competence: obvious but forgotten. Just try to do your tasks well. Good administration, thinking about the consequences, thinking ahead, getting advice, planning, sorting out mistakes, learning from them, small practical improvements instead of snake oil promises backed by nothing more than bullshit etc. You forgot that. You will have to relearn this and try to demonstrate it where you can - in how you run your party and whatever councils you control. It will take time and you won't be listened to for a long time. But unless you do start doing this now, forget the rest.
4. Character: the single most important factor. The moral character, the integrity, the honesty of those who lead your party and those in it and how they behave says more about you than any manifesto. You chose some dreadful leaders in a Faustian pact which has well and truly bitten you on the arse. You abandoned all standards of political decency. You allowed corruption and shadiness and spivs in public office to fester. You gave the impression that duty and public service were jokes. The one abiding image for your years in power was parties in Downing Street while a widowed queen sat alone at her husband's funeral. That image stood for many who did their job while you treated their old-fashioned virtues with contempt. Really, how dare you call yourself conservative and behave like that.
Get these right. Then you can start worrying about policies. The current government will eventually make mistakes in all these areas. (I mean, Jacqui Smith, really?) But they won't listen to you until you've admitted you fucked things up and have changed.
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Excellent post.
Indeed it is. The LibDems aren't obviously weak in any of those areas and bring considerable strengths to the table. Which is why they're a real long-term threat to what was always considered conservative England in the south, particularly as the turning of the generations brings more broad-minded social and cultural attitudes to the fore.
I’m quite pleased with Starmer’s last 2 days. I hope this continues. He seems to have managed to wrest the discussion away from the pointless arguments of the campaign to some more substantive issues and a focus on delivery.
This is where Labour need to act first. Don’t allow a vacuum to develop. They can help to shift the Overton window if they have a good first month or two. And when I say shift the window, I don’t mean necessarily leftward but rather away from gesture politics and towards competence-based politics.
Is there anyone particularly upset by the election? A lot of upsides across the political spectrum: Labour won a landslide Tories still breathing Best LibDem result in a century RefUK on the board Greens won 4 seats SNP routed
Any downsides?
yes, the second of your points...
It would have been joyous to see ELE. But that would almost certainly have elevated Farage and his mob - surely a worse outcome than what we have.
Also, just enough of the nutters survived in the Tory Party to ensure that the crazy circus carries on even longer. We have seen parties suffer a catastrophic drop in support and spend some time rebuilding before being competitive again. That is the Tories most likely scenario. Can't rule out another oscillation in 2029 that sees them sweep back - in today's politics everything is possible.
But the other scenario is to copy the Liberals a century ago. A crushing defeat followed by division, infighting and absolute self-destructive idiocy. Leading to another hammering into an even smaller total in the elections that follow. 121 may prove to be an impossible target in the next election...
If we had had proportional representation then Farage would have got 100 MPs, most of them having no political experience and paper candidates who would have been a disaster and probably imploded the party within 18 months.
FPTP keeps a party out until it reaches a critical mass and has now ensured that Farage only has his most able leiutenants in Parliament, with five years to professionalise the party.
PR enthusiasts should be careful what they wish for.
I don’t quite know how to make this point, but it’s a serious one. Liz Truss generally comes across to me as a bit childish, lacking the kind of seriousness or gravitas you would normally expect. It seems to be a disease that has infected some on the right. They seem to want to shock and provoke rather than effect change. It’s a subtle thing, but they’re a long way from the kind of intellectual heft that sat behind the Thatcherite revolution.
Not just Truss. The British right loved Beano Boris, and grumily tolerated May and Sunak, who at least tried to be responsible national leaders. Or see the Spectator; yes it sells by the truckload but that's in part because it's given up on being a serious journal of right wing thinking and is now almost entirely there to make people think "OMG what are they going to say now?" Which is an excellent sales strategy, but a terrible way to run a country.
Let us hope that Boring Old PM Starmer can Make Britain Boring Again.
May I join in the chorus.
Reform Uk is the Party of childish politics, of wishful thinking. Farage is an essentially unserious politician, in it for the laughs.
True to an extent but Farage did bring Brexit and should not be underestimated
A careful reading of their manifesto shows us that underestimating him his impossible. It was the worst policy platform of any party and would see the economy curl up and die. Surprised fewer people talked about it, but therein lies the truth. Farage is a wrecking ball, not a builder. You vote for him if you prefer a pile of rubble over what we have now.
I have no doubt you are correct, but the rise of Reform and the right in Europe is not something easily dismissed
I have no regrets voting for Labour and think Starmer will do a decent job. I am impressed with the emphasis on honesty and integrity, after the Boris era. But I think the assumption that everything is now 'back to normal' is quite severely mistaken.
I do think that the greatest threat to democracy is not the Reform party but the dismissal and ostracisation of the Reform party. They should be able to represent their voters on things like 'woke' , 'immigration', 'net zero' , 'low traffic zones' without being slandered or defamed because amongst all the misinformation on every point there is something of value which Labour should take in to account. The 'woke' stuff has gone way too far. Illegal immigration is a massive problem and the asylum system is a failure. Net Zero imposes costs on working people which are too casually shrugged off. If the governing party can take this in to account then it defuses the threat from the reform party. If it goes full on culture war against the 'far right' as many of its MP's/members/supporters would like then it just perpetuates the polarisation and appeal of the Reform party.
You can't converse with conspiracy theorists without making yourself look like one too. Perfectly sensible Tories like Mark Harper made that mistake, undermining his own government's policies. It also leads to people like IDS siding with criminals.
Woke has had next to zero impact on most people's lives. Legal immigration is a material issue, not illegal immigration. Net Zero is the only path to growth for the UK, not protecting 20th century technologies and special interests. Cheap, secure British Energy for the British Economy.
If the Tories engage in the kind of paranoid culture battles you suggest, they'll just lose even more votes to Reform (the real deal) or the Lib Dems (the sensible alternative).
Does 'woke' impact peoples lives? Perhaps not a lot so far. But the desecration of our universities will certainly do so in the long term.
Centrists here of both Tory and Libdem persuasion are still having more vapours about Farage winning five seats compared with Labours 400 odd I see.
I guess when you have had a monopoly of the right wing in parliament since the 1661 general election, a rival party of the right breaking through the first past the post wall and winning five seats as well as knocking you into third place in a lot of seats you held until this week is going to seem a bit existensial.
They do not like it.
Labour + Green + SDLP + WPB + Plaid + SNP (33.7% + 6.7% + 0.7% + 0.7% + 0.3% + 2.5) = 44.6%
I know the LDs/Alliance really really really want to count all their 12.6% of voters to the Left-wing block, but they're not. If I was being really generous I'd give them 60% of them and 40% to the Right-wing block. That'd still get you to only 51.1% v 44.2%, and that's on a reduced turnout where many Tories stayed at home.
Point is the country is still split into two-voter blocks. And there's not an awful lot between them, save the mathematics of FPTP, which computed into the landslide.
A lot can change quickly.
Is the country split into two blocks ? The evidence of this election is that it’s a lot more complicated than that.
There’s not a lot, other than the artificial constraints of FPTP, which makes for only two tribes,
Centrists here of both Tory and Libdem persuasion are still having more vapours about Farage winning five seats compared with Labours 400 odd I see.
I guess when you have had a monopoly of the right wing in parliament since the 1661 general election, a rival party of the right breaking through the first past the post wall and winning five seats as well as knocking you into third place in a lot of seats you held until this week is going to seem a bit existensial.
They do not like it.
Labour + Green + SDLP + WPB + Plaid + SNP (33.7% + 6.7% + 0.7% + 0.7% + 0.3% + 2.5) = 44.6%
I know the LDs/Alliance really really really want to count all their 12.6% of voters to the Left-wing block, but they're not. If I was being really generous I'd give them 60% of them and 40% to the Right-wing block. That'd still get you to only 51.1% v 44.2%, and that's on a reduced turnout where many Tories stayed at home.
Point is the country is still split into two-voter blocks. And there's not an awful lot between them, save the mathematics of FPTP, which computed into the landslide.
A lot can change quickly.
Reform aren't a right-wing bloc party, sorry. They compete against Tories and promise magic money tree for the NHS.
I thought Reform were more free-marketeering on the NHS? Indeed I think that’s their biggest weakness. The Tories could probably have turned off vast swathes of voters from Reform if they’d spent some time attacking their NHS policy.
I fully expect Farage to tack leftwards on that in the next Parliament to shut that attack line down.
Robert Jenrick is the first leadership contender to break cover. He says the last government “insulted the public” by failing to deal with immigration. He sets out his stall here:
The first that needs to be slapped around the head with an inflated puffer fish, as a reality check.
You stand fuck-all chance, Jenrick. Anybody synonymous with scandal condemns the Conservative Partyin 2029 to 2024 take 2. We need a clean skin.
Who are you curious about for leader?
Claire Courtinho fits the bill for whats needed, of those re-elected.
Although let's see who gets Rishi's seat when he does a runner over the summer. I'd still stick with Mordaunt - if she gets it.
Thanks. Interesting. Maybe a bit early for Courtnho I would have thought. Maybe a shadow chancellor???
Historically the winning strategy seems to be to find an obvious, PM in waiting rather than skipping a generation for the sake of it.
Is Mourdaunt your Blair, Cameron or Starmer figure? If she is, can she control the right and the Mail? That has been her Achilles heel.
We could have had Mordaunt. Almost certainly would, if the Mail hadn't been so determined to do the bidding of others in putting the boot in. The Mail has an enormous amount of responsibility for what went wrong at the top of Government in recent years. Not that they will ever take any of that responsibility.
Courtinho would have five years to show her mettle before going before the voters. I suspect she would play well with women, especially those we lost to the LibDems, whilst building the case for a Conservative Party aimed at growth, one that was no longer "fuck business".
This last point is key. The scandals and the melodrama and the crayon policies are all distractions from the reason the Tories got smashed.
Fuck Business.
You may consider that to be a throw away line from Boris, but it neatly summarised the policy agenda of Tory government over the last decade.
If the Tories can step away from knee-jerk populism aimed at voters who don't understand economics, and go back to a sound economic base which will be a popular sell to those voters, it can recover. And would *deserve* to recover. So much of why this country is so broken is because we have had a government who implemented a fuck business agenda.
Borrow. Invest. Gain a return on the investment. Grow. Employ. Tax revenues increase. People have cash to spend. Feel good is tangible and our communities aren't shuttered and crumbling.
I put a few London bets on a month ago as follows:
Harrow East – CON 9/4 Ruislip, Northwood & Pinner – CON 4/5 Bromley & Biggin Hill – CON 11/8 Croydon East – CON 10/1 Croydon South – CON 2/1 Sutton & Cheam – LD 11/10 Romford – CON 6/4
I make that six out of seven - Croydon East always a bit of a long shot. Total return to a 1 point stake - 15.1 points so essentially backing a 14/1 winner but I'll take that all day every day.
And the Sunday Rawnsley, as this morning's rain tries to clear:
The outcome of this election may have been foretold, but that makes it no less momentous. This is a dazzling achievement by Sir Keir, the more so for being such a vindication of a strategy that very few people outside a tight circle of friends and allies ever completely trusted.
It is true that Sir Keir has had a large number of assists from the Tories, but he wouldn’t have won this scale of majority without the drive to turn his party into an electable alternative to Conservative rule. This makes it a highly personal triumph. This victory magnifies his authority over Labour and the government will not have much to fear from opposition parties anytime soon.
This regime change is being greeted with enthusiasm in Whitehall, not so much for reasons of ideological sympathy, but because it is more professionally satisfying for civil servants to work for a stable government with a sense of direction allied to the power to get stuff done.
The euphoria is tempered by trepidation. Sue Gray, Sir Keir’s chief of staff, has a “shit list” of emergencies that could erupt during the infancy of this government, ranging from universities and more councils going bankrupt to a full-blown crisis in prisons. Government debt relative to output is at its largest in 60 years. Taxes as a proportion of GDP are heading towards the highest level since 1948. At the same time, critical public services are either on their knees or on the floor.
This was a revenge election in which voters expressed visceral loathing for the Tories much more evidently than they did any love for Labour. Sir Keir is at Number 10 on the back of a vote share that fell short of 34%. There’s never been a lower score for a majority-winning party since 1832. So while the victory looks commanding, the mandate feels brittle. Sir Keir sits atop a skyscraper majority, but its foundations are built on clay. The answer to that is not easy, but it is obvious. Sir Keir will have to set about earning this majority by using it to deliver.
He has astonished all those in his own party and beyond it who were once so sceptical that he was the man to take Labour back into power. Now he must confound the many doubters already noisily questioning whether his government will be equal to the towering challenges that have become Labour’s responsibility.
Robert Jenrick is the first leadership contender to break cover. He says the last government “insulted the public” by failing to deal with immigration. He sets out his stall here:
A position somewhat undermined by his having been a minister with responsibility for (checks notes) immigration.
And also another step into irrelevance.
They created a wedge issue - then found themselves on the wrong side of the wedge. It goes back to Cameron and his foolish "under 100,000" pledge - another reaction to Farage like his Brexit referendum. The issue is not "immigration" but "population" - and the houses and services the population needs. Anyone proposing to "cut immigration" should start off by telling us who they are going to stop coming. NHS staff? Students?
We had 67,000 asylum claims last year, so on Cameron's pledge we would have to have very little net migration to stay under 100,000 per year. Almost certainly that would be lower than the numbers we would want merely to staff essential services.
Now unless we want to turn away all refugees through the schemes we have for places like Hong Kong and Ukraine, and all people arriving and making asylum claims with completely legitimate reasons, then we are going to almost certainly have migration north of 100,000 per year indefinitely. Maybe somewhere in the 200,000 - 300,000 region assuming we still want other types of migrants for high-skill jobs, academic studies, etc.
So once we arrive at a necessary and unavoidable level of migration we basically need to ask one question. Where is everyone going to live and how much stuff do we need to build for them? That's the thing that we need to work on to make immigration work. Keep building at a much faster rate and we will at least make immigration sustainable and less of a resource problem.
The answer with immigration is to reclassify temporary visitors as VISITORS rather than immigrants. These temporary immigrants include students and their families - and young people on 2 year work visas currently from Australia but why not from the EU.
How many of those temporary "students" actually go home, rather than use their time here to either slip into the black economy or extend their courses until they get a work visa and can claim residence?
Maybe a lot, but I think it’s really important to be clear about the different types of immigrant, legal and illegal.
We need a revised vocabulary of immigration.
Tag the illegals/no visa so you know where they are and can be easily deported. Hunt them down if the tags are removed. They have been pussyfooting about since the 90's and teh result is just thousands more economic migrants / ne'er do wells flooding into the country. It cannot go on there are not enough 5 star hotels to put them all up. Should havemassive sheds full of immigration staff processing them in a couple of days, then ship out the illegals etc immediately.
Centrists here of both Tory and Libdem persuasion are still having more vapours about Farage winning five seats compared with Labours 400 odd I see.
I guess when you have had a monopoly of the right wing in parliament since the 1661 general election, a rival party of the right breaking through the first past the post wall and winning five seats as well as knocking you into third place in a lot of seats you held until this week is going to seem a bit existensial.
They do not like it.
Labour + Green + SDLP + WPB + Plaid + SNP (33.7% + 6.7% + 0.7% + 0.7% + 0.3% + 2.5) = 44.6%
I know the LDs/Alliance really really really want to count all their 12.6% of voters to the Left-wing block, but they're not. If I was being really generous I'd give them 60% of them and 40% to the Right-wing block. That'd still get you to only 51.1% v 44.2%, and that's on a reduced turnout where many Tories stayed at home.
Point is the country is still split into two-voter blocks. And there's not an awful lot between them, save the mathematics of FPTP, which computed into the landslide.
A lot can change quickly.
Reform aren't a right-wing bloc party, sorry. They compete against Tories and promise magic money tree for the NHS.
In some ways they are the anti-establishment mirror of the SNP.
Both parties argue that their constituents’ needs cannot be met within the current Westminster setup. SNP from the left(ish) and independence perspective, Reform from the right.
One says independence is the solution, the other says - what? The Nietschian superman I suppose.
So you can’t group either into blocs with others because they are constitutionally set apart. But you can group many Reform voters into a potential pool with the Tories.
I don’t quite know how to make this point, but it’s a serious one. Liz Truss generally comes across to me as a bit childish, lacking the kind of seriousness or gravitas you would normally expect. It seems to be a disease that has infected some on the right. They seem to want to shock and provoke rather than effect change. It’s a subtle thing, but they’re a long way from the kind of intellectual heft that sat behind the Thatcherite revolution.
Not just Truss. The British right loved Beano Boris, and grumily tolerated May and Sunak, who at least tried to be responsible national leaders. Or see the Spectator; yes it sells by the truckload but that's in part because it's given up on being a serious journal of right wing thinking and is now almost entirely there to make people think "OMG what are they going to say now?" Which is an excellent sales strategy, but a terrible way to run a country.
Let us hope that Boring Old PM Starmer can Make Britain Boring Again.
May I join in the chorus.
Reform Uk is the Party of childish politics, of wishful thinking. Farage is an essentially unserious politician, in it for the laughs.
True to an extent but Farage did bring Brexit and should not be underestimated
A careful reading of their manifesto shows us that underestimating him his impossible. It was the worst policy platform of any party and would see the economy curl up and die. Surprised fewer people talked about it, but therein lies the truth. Farage is a wrecking ball, not a builder. You vote for him if you prefer a pile of rubble over what we have now.
I have no doubt you are correct, but the rise of Reform and the right in Europe is not something easily dismissed
I have no regrets voting for Labour and think Starmer will do a decent job. I am impressed with the emphasis on honesty and integrity, after the Boris era. But I think the assumption that everything is now 'back to normal' is quite severely mistaken.
I do think that the greatest threat to democracy is not the Reform party but the dismissal and ostracisation of the Reform party. They should be able to represent their voters on things like 'woke' , 'immigration', 'net zero' , 'low traffic zones' without being slandered or defamed because amongst all the misinformation on every point there is something of value which Labour should take in to account. The 'woke' stuff has gone way too far. Illegal immigration is a massive problem and the asylum system is a failure. Net Zero imposes costs on working people which are too casually shrugged off. If the governing party can take this in to account then it defuses the threat from the reform party. If it goes full on culture war against the 'far right' as many of its MP's/members/supporters would like then it just perpetuates the polarisation and appeal of the Reform party.
You can't converse with conspiracy theorists without making yourself look like one too. Perfectly sensible Tories like Mark Harper made that mistake, undermining his own government's policies. It also leads to people like IDS siding with criminals.
Woke has had next to zero impact on most people's lives. Legal immigration is a material issue, not illegal immigration. Net Zero is the only path to growth for the UK, not protecting 20th century technologies and special interests. Cheap, secure British Energy for the British Economy.
If the Tories engage in the kind of paranoid culture battles you suggest, they'll just lose even more votes to Reform (the real deal) or the Lib Dems (the sensible alternative).
Does 'woke' impact peoples lives? Perhaps not a lot so far. But the desecration of our universities will certainly do so in the long term.
It certainly does, as in this example of the desecration of universities.
Centrists here of both Tory and Libdem persuasion are still having more vapours about Farage winning five seats compared with Labours 400 odd I see.
I guess when you have had a monopoly of the right wing in parliament since the 1661 general election, a rival party of the right breaking through the first past the post wall and winning five seats as well as knocking you into third place in a lot of seats you held until this week is going to seem a bit existensial.
They do not like it.
Labour + Green + SDLP + WPB + Plaid + SNP (33.7% + 6.7% + 0.7% + 0.7% + 0.3% + 2.5) = 44.6%
I know the LDs/Alliance really really really want to count all their 12.6% of voters to the Left-wing block, but they're not. If I was being really generous I'd give them 60% of them and 40% to the Right-wing block. That'd still get you to only 51.1% v 44.2%, and that's on a reduced turnout where many Tories stayed at home.
Point is the country is still split into two-voter blocks. And there's not an awful lot between them, save the mathematics of FPTP, which computed into the landslide.
A lot can change quickly.
Reform aren't a right-wing bloc party, sorry. They compete against Tories and promise magic money tree for the NHS.
I thought Reform were more free-marketeering on the NHS? Indeed I think that’s their biggest weakness. The Tories could probably have turned off vast swathes of voters from Reform if they’d spent some time attacking their NHS policy.
I fully expect Farage to tack leftwards on that in the next Parliament to shut that attack line down.
He will see how Labour get on I suspect.
His policy if moving to a French type system is excellent in principle.
However in practice I fear it would degenerate into a US style system in short order as Britain seems institutionally incapable of avoiding extremes (as anyone who has been to a private equity owned chain vet (now most of them) will testify.
Hence most will opt for a communist health service until such time as it irretrievably implodes.
Personally I expect little change but a continuing drift to employer funded private health insurance and pressure building for fees for such to be tax deductable as they are in the rest of the world.
Centrists here of both Tory and Libdem persuasion are still having more vapours about Farage winning five seats compared with Labours 400 odd I see.
I guess when you have had a monopoly of the right wing in parliament since the 1661 general election, a rival party of the right breaking through the first past the post wall and winning five seats as well as knocking you into third place in a lot of seats you held until this week is going to seem a bit existensial.
They do not like it.
Labour + Green + SDLP + WPB + Plaid + SNP (33.7% + 6.7% + 0.7% + 0.7% + 0.3% + 2.5) = 44.6%
I know the LDs/Alliance really really really want to count all their 12.6% of voters to the Left-wing block, but they're not. If I was being really generous I'd give them 60% of them and 40% to the Right-wing block. That'd still get you to only 51.1% v 44.2%, and that's on a reduced turnout where many Tories stayed at home.
Point is the country is still split into two-voter blocks. And there's not an awful lot between them, save the mathematics of FPTP, which computed into the landslide.
A lot can change quickly.
Exactly jsut look at 2019 , the buffoon was up against an idiot and we got 5 more years of the Tories, Labour can easily go the same way.
I put a few London bets on a month ago as follows:
Harrow East – CON 9/4 Ruislip, Northwood & Pinner – CON 4/5 Bromley & Biggin Hill – CON 11/8 Croydon East – CON 10/1 Croydon South – CON 2/1 Sutton & Cheam – LD 11/10 Romford – CON 6/4
I make that six out of seven - Croydon East always a bit of a long shot. Total return to a 1 point stake - 15.1 points so essentially backing a 14/1 winner but I'll take that all day every day.
I disagreed with your analysis on Croydon East but delighted about all the others. Good betting.
Is there anyone particularly upset by the election? A lot of upsides across the political spectrum: Labour won a landslide Tories still breathing Best LibDem result in a century RefUK on the board Greens won 4 seats SNP routed
Any downsides?
yes, the second of your points...
It would have been joyous to see ELE. But that would almost certainly have elevated Farage and his mob - surely a worse outcome than what we have.
Also, just enough of the nutters survived in the Tory Party to ensure that the crazy circus carries on even longer. We have seen parties suffer a catastrophic drop in support and spend some time rebuilding before being competitive again. That is the Tories most likely scenario. Can't rule out another oscillation in 2029 that sees them sweep back - in today's politics everything is possible.
But the other scenario is to copy the Liberals a century ago. A crushing defeat followed by division, infighting and absolute self-destructive idiocy. Leading to another hammering into an even smaller total in the elections that follow. 121 may prove to be an impossible target in the next election...
If we had had proportional representation then Farage would have got 100 MPs, most of them having no political experience and paper candidates who would have been a disaster and probably imploded the party within 18 months.
FPTP keeps a party out until it reaches a critical mass and has now ensured that Farage only has his most able leiutenants in Parliament, with five years to professionalise the party.
PR enthusiasts should be careful what they wish for.
I support PR for two simple reasons: 1) In a democracy you should get what you vote for. Every vote should count equally. As a matter of principle it is an aberation that Reform won so many votes and so few seats 2) The best way to defeat any extreme is to expose it to scrutiny. Reform won 4.1m votes - 14.3%. If it has won 93 seats instead of 5 it would not have been a force at the next election. So many of those additional MPs would have been catastrophic for Reform. So many crazy people with appalling ideas and disgusting opinions. With them in the Commons we would have examined Faragism, been repelled by it and seen it off. Instead it continues to fester away in society.
I don’t quite know how to make this point, but it’s a serious one. Liz Truss generally comes across to me as a bit childish, lacking the kind of seriousness or gravitas you would normally expect. It seems to be a disease that has infected some on the right. They seem to want to shock and provoke rather than effect change. It’s a subtle thing, but they’re a long way from the kind of intellectual heft that sat behind the Thatcherite revolution.
Not just Truss. The British right loved Beano Boris, and grumily tolerated May and Sunak, who at least tried to be responsible national leaders. Or see the Spectator; yes it sells by the truckload but that's in part because it's given up on being a serious journal of right wing thinking and is now almost entirely there to make people think "OMG what are they going to say now?" Which is an excellent sales strategy, but a terrible way to run a country.
Let us hope that Boring Old PM Starmer can Make Britain Boring Again.
May I join in the chorus.
Reform Uk is the Party of childish politics, of wishful thinking. Farage is an essentially unserious politician, in it for the laughs.
True to an extent but Farage did bring Brexit and should not be underestimated
A careful reading of their manifesto shows us that underestimating him his impossible. It was the worst policy platform of any party and would see the economy curl up and die. Surprised fewer people talked about it, but therein lies the truth. Farage is a wrecking ball, not a builder. You vote for him if you prefer a pile of rubble over what we have now.
"see the economy curl up and die" - I join you in being unconvinced by Reformonomics. But I am baffled that the Greens appear to get a free pass. Their economics appear to me to be more insane than anyone else's. My middle class school friends have engaged in a quick whatsapp discussion of the results, all earnestly pronouncing on how worrying it is that Reform have got 4 (now 5 of course) MPs, and have all had serious talks with their children about the dangers of snake oil salesmen. But they seem breezily unconcerned about Greens getting the same number and the Islamic sectarians getting another 4 (or 5, if you include Corbyn). Both of these strike me as far more extreme and worrying developments than Reform's handful. (Though granted Reform probably got more votes than the total of the rag tag and bobtails of the far left.)
Fair. Reform deserve greater scrutiny because they receive greater coverage. If the Greens get an uptick in coverage then I agree, I'd expect a much more robust examination of their (often loopy) economic policies.
The level of delusion from the Green party is on another scale. I remember for a while they had a thing 'vote for policies', the suggestion being that you could just vote for policies you like, like massive increases in government spending, but without any mechanism to pay for it. Their policy on defence was also until recently to just reduce spending to avoid anything other defending ourselves. All this time people I know, educated to PHD level, would vote for this and stand as candidates, believing themselves to be enlightened. I always just regarded them as populists in the same manner as Trump, Corbyn, UKIP etc.
It is very revealing that the green party get a free pass. They just actually seem to get humoured, like they are idealistic children, only now they run Council's and have MP's. The disparity with how the reform party are treated is massive and unfortunately revealing of a deep cultural bias.
To be fair on the Greens, they were up front about the need for tax rises to fund their policies. That's better than what we got from Labour and the Conservatives (or Reform).
That's not to say their policies were sensible. But I liked the honesty.
I’m quite pleased with Starmer’s last 2 days. I hope this continues. He seems to have managed to wrest the discussion away from the pointless arguments of the campaign to some more substantive issues and a focus on delivery.
This is where Labour need to act first. Don’t allow a vacuum to develop. They can help to shift the Overton window if they have a good first month or two. And when I say shift the window, I don’t mean necessarily leftward but rather away from gesture politics and towards competence-based politics.
I don’t quite know how to make this point, but it’s a serious one. Liz Truss generally comes across to me as a bit childish, lacking the kind of seriousness or gravitas you would normally expect. It seems to be a disease that has infected some on the right. They seem to want to shock and provoke rather than effect change. It’s a subtle thing, but they’re a long way from the kind of intellectual heft that sat behind the Thatcherite revolution.
Not just Truss. The British right loved Beano Boris, and grumily tolerated May and Sunak, who at least tried to be responsible national leaders. Or see the Spectator; yes it sells by the truckload but that's in part because it's given up on being a serious journal of right wing thinking and is now almost entirely there to make people think "OMG what are they going to say now?" Which is an excellent sales strategy, but a terrible way to run a country.
Let us hope that Boring Old PM Starmer can Make Britain Boring Again.
May I join in the chorus.
Reform Uk is the Party of childish politics, of wishful thinking. Farage is an essentially unserious politician, in it for the laughs.
True to an extent but Farage did bring Brexit and should not be underestimated
A careful reading of their manifesto shows us that underestimating him his impossible. It was the worst policy platform of any party and would see the economy curl up and die. Surprised fewer people talked about it, but therein lies the truth. Farage is a wrecking ball, not a builder. You vote for him if you prefer a pile of rubble over what we have now.
"see the economy curl up and die" - I join you in being unconvinced by Reformonomics. But I am baffled that the Greens appear to get a free pass. Their economics appear to me to be more insane than anyone else's. My middle class school friends have engaged in a quick whatsapp discussion of the results, all earnestly pronouncing on how worrying it is that Reform have got 4 (now 5 of course) MPs, and have all had serious talks with their children about the dangers of snake oil salesmen. But they seem breezily unconcerned about Greens getting the same number and the Islamic sectarians getting another 4 (or 5, if you include Corbyn). Both of these strike me as far more extreme and worrying developments than Reform's handful. (Though granted Reform probably got more votes than the total of the rag tag and bobtails of the far left.)
Fair. Reform deserve greater scrutiny because they receive greater coverage. If the Greens get an uptick in coverage then I agree, I'd expect a much more robust examination of their (often loopy) economic policies.
The level of delusion from the Green party is on another scale. I remember for a while they had a thing 'vote for policies', the suggestion being that you could just vote for policies you like, like massive increases in government spending, but without any mechanism to pay for it. Their policy on defence was also until recently to just reduce spending to avoid anything other defending ourselves. All this time people I know, educated to PHD level, would vote for this and stand as candidates, believing themselves to be enlightened. I always just regarded them as populists in the same manner as Trump, Corbyn, UKIP etc.
It is very revealing that the green party get a free pass. They just actually seem to get humoured, like they are idealistic children, only now they run Council's and have MP's. The disparity with how the reform party are treated is massive and unfortunately revealing of a deep cultural bias.
To be fair on the Greens, they were up front about the need for tax rises to fund their policies. That's better than what we got from Labour and the Conservatives (or Reform).
That's not to say their policies were sensible. But I liked the honesty.
I don’t quite know how to make this point, but it’s a serious one. Liz Truss generally comes across to me as a bit childish, lacking the kind of seriousness or gravitas you would normally expect. It seems to be a disease that has infected some on the right. They seem to want to shock and provoke rather than effect change. It’s a subtle thing, but they’re a long way from the kind of intellectual heft that sat behind the Thatcherite revolution.
Not just Truss. The British right loved Beano Boris, and grumily tolerated May and Sunak, who at least tried to be responsible national leaders. Or see the Spectator; yes it sells by the truckload but that's in part because it's given up on being a serious journal of right wing thinking and is now almost entirely there to make people think "OMG what are they going to say now?" Which is an excellent sales strategy, but a terrible way to run a country.
Let us hope that Boring Old PM Starmer can Make Britain Boring Again.
May I join in the chorus.
Reform Uk is the Party of childish politics, of wishful thinking. Farage is an essentially unserious politician, in it for the laughs.
True to an extent but Farage did bring Brexit and should not be underestimated
A careful reading of their manifesto shows us that underestimating him his impossible. It was the worst policy platform of any party and would see the economy curl up and die. Surprised fewer people talked about it, but therein lies the truth. Farage is a wrecking ball, not a builder. You vote for him if you prefer a pile of rubble over what we have now.
I have no doubt you are correct, but the rise of Reform and the right in Europe is not something easily dismissed
I have no regrets voting for Labour and think Starmer will do a decent job. I am impressed with the emphasis on honesty and integrity, after the Boris era. But I think the assumption that everything is now 'back to normal' is quite severely mistaken.
I do think that the greatest threat to democracy is not the Reform party but the dismissal and ostracisation of the Reform party. They should be able to represent their voters on things like 'woke' , 'immigration', 'net zero' , 'low traffic zones' without being slandered or defamed because amongst all the misinformation on every point there is something of value which Labour should take in to account. The 'woke' stuff has gone way too far. Illegal immigration is a massive problem and the asylum system is a failure. Net Zero imposes costs on working people which are too casually shrugged off. If the governing party can take this in to account then it defuses the threat from the reform party. If it goes full on culture war against the 'far right' as many of its MP's/members/supporters would like then it just perpetuates the polarisation and appeal of the Reform party.
You can't converse with conspiracy theorists without making yourself look like one too. Perfectly sensible Tories like Mark Harper made that mistake, undermining his own government's policies. It also leads to people like IDS siding with criminals.
Woke has had next to zero impact on most people's lives. Legal immigration is a material issue, not illegal immigration. Net Zero is the only path to growth for the UK, not protecting 20th century technologies and special interests. Cheap, secure British Energy for the British Economy.
If the Tories engage in the kind of paranoid culture battles you suggest, they'll just lose even more votes to Reform (the real deal) or the Lib Dems (the sensible alternative).
Does 'woke' impact peoples lives? Perhaps not a lot so far. But the desecration of our universities will certainly do so in the long term.
Affects my blood pressure having to listen to the tossers.
So Suellas winning campaign message is to leave the ECHR . Some Tories seem to think that they can just become more Reform .
Ignoring that a section of Tory voters will jump ship if they keep going further right .
I imagine the 4,000,000 are the most uneducated and politically illiterate in the country. It's unlikely they'll move in any direction because of ideology. It'll be interesting when the psephologists have done their work on the election but I'd be surprised if that's not the case
I’m not sure that someone who was schooled at the intellectual vacuum of Millfield, didn’t do a degree and has a career that is dependent on artistic talent rather than academic prowess should really be throwing around insults at millions of people about their education.
Its a good job you can take a good photo otherwise your remaining skills would leave you in a bit of a pickle.
Is there anyone particularly upset by the election? A lot of upsides across the political spectrum: Labour won a landslide Tories still breathing Best LibDem result in a century RefUK on the board Greens won 4 seats SNP routed
Any downsides?
yes, the second of your points...
It would have been joyous to see ELE. But that would almost certainly have elevated Farage and his mob - surely a worse outcome than what we have.
Also, just enough of the nutters survived in the Tory Party to ensure that the crazy circus carries on even longer. We have seen parties suffer a catastrophic drop in support and spend some time rebuilding before being competitive again. That is the Tories most likely scenario. Can't rule out another oscillation in 2029 that sees them sweep back - in today's politics everything is possible.
But the other scenario is to copy the Liberals a century ago. A crushing defeat followed by division, infighting and absolute self-destructive idiocy. Leading to another hammering into an even smaller total in the elections that follow. 121 may prove to be an impossible target in the next election...
If we had had proportional representation then Farage would have got 100 MPs, most of them having no political experience and paper candidates who would have been a disaster and probably imploded the party within 18 months.
FPTP keeps a party out until it reaches a critical mass and has now ensured that Farage only has his most able leiutenants in Parliament, with five years to professionalise the party.
PR enthusiasts should be careful what they wish for.
I support PR for two simple reasons: 1) In a democracy you should get what you vote for. Every vote should count equally. As a matter of principle it is an aberation that Reform won so many votes and so few seats 2) The best way to defeat any extreme is to expose it to scrutiny. Reform won 4.1m votes - 14.3%. If it has won 93 seats instead of 5 it would not have been a force at the next election. So many of those additional MPs would have been catastrophic for Reform. So many crazy people with appalling ideas and disgusting opinions. With them in the Commons we would have examined Faragism, been repelled by it and seen it off. Instead it continues to fester away in society.
The main objections to PR are all variations on the theme of not liking list systems, which is an absolutely fair point except that the obvious PR solution is STV in multi member constituencies, which doesn’t have a list system.
Isn't it interesting that so many people seem to think the Tories NEED to do what they personally WANT the Tories to do.
I think the Tories have options. I don't know which they will choose. At one end they could try the full Matthew Goodwin patriotic/social democratic realignment or alternatively revert to a sort of George Osborne win back those wealthier seats. Or something in the middle. It isn't that obvious. Not least because we don't really know what Starmer is likely to be and where he will likely make himself vulnerable. There will also be events, dear boy, events......
Blair it appears has been writing in the Sunday Times that if you want to deal with Reform, get control of migration. Pretty obvious but I'm amazed at the number of people who think right wing populism is just some irrational spasm that's come out of nowhere. It's a result of countries losing control of their borders and struggling to maintain internal unity as a result of multiculturalism.
My great fear really is that Rayner isn’t capable of policy delivery, perhaps similar to the way Prescott essentially blocked up the plumbing of his critical portfolios in the New Labour years.
I respect Rayner immensely as a politician, but there’s just no background of delivery I’m aware of.
Exactly , got there like Prescott by climbing the greasy pole in the unions, no real experience of real business and likely to be as big a dud as Prescott was. Labour always need a union rep as deputy to keep the wolves happy.
Yes. it's absolutely disgusting that a working class woman like Rayner, with a trades union background of all things, should end up as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. Honestly, what were they thinking? Have they forgotten their history?
My great fear really is that Rayner isn’t capable of policy delivery, perhaps similar to the way Prescott essentially blocked up the plumbing of his critical portfolios in the New Labour years.
I respect Rayner immensely as a politician, but there’s just no background of delivery I’m aware of.
Exactly , got there like Prescott by climbing the greasy pole in the unions, no real experience of real business and likely to be as big a dud as Prescott was. Labour always need a union rep as deputy to keep the wolves happy.
It isn't the politicians that deliver, it is the Civil Servants. I think that Rayner will work well with the Civil Service.
I don’t quite know how to make this point, but it’s a serious one. Liz Truss generally comes across to me as a bit childish, lacking the kind of seriousness or gravitas you would normally expect. It seems to be a disease that has infected some on the right. They seem to want to shock and provoke rather than effect change. It’s a subtle thing, but they’re a long way from the kind of intellectual heft that sat behind the Thatcherite revolution.
Not just Truss. The British right loved Beano Boris, and grumily tolerated May and Sunak, who at least tried to be responsible national leaders. Or see the Spectator; yes it sells by the truckload but that's in part because it's given up on being a serious journal of right wing thinking and is now almost entirely there to make people think "OMG what are they going to say now?" Which is an excellent sales strategy, but a terrible way to run a country.
Let us hope that Boring Old PM Starmer can Make Britain Boring Again.
May I join in the chorus.
Reform Uk is the Party of childish politics, of wishful thinking. Farage is an essentially unserious politician, in it for the laughs.
True to an extent but Farage did bring Brexit and should not be underestimated
A careful reading of their manifesto shows us that underestimating him his impossible. It was the worst policy platform of any party and would see the economy curl up and die. Surprised fewer people talked about it, but therein lies the truth. Farage is a wrecking ball, not a builder. You vote for him if you prefer a pile of rubble over what we have now.
I have no doubt you are correct, but the rise of Reform and the right in Europe is not something easily dismissed
I have no regrets voting for Labour and think Starmer will do a decent job. I am impressed with the emphasis on honesty and integrity, after the Boris era. But I think the assumption that everything is now 'back to normal' is quite severely mistaken.
I do think that the greatest threat to democracy is not the Reform party but the dismissal and ostracisation of the Reform party. They should be able to represent their voters on things like 'woke' , 'immigration', 'net zero' , 'low traffic zones' without being slandered or defamed because amongst all the misinformation on every point there is something of value which Labour should take in to account. The 'woke' stuff has gone way too far. Illegal immigration is a massive problem and the asylum system is a failure. Net Zero imposes costs on working people which are too casually shrugged off. If the governing party can take this in to account then it defuses the threat from the reform party. If it goes full on culture war against the 'far right' as many of its MP's/members/supporters would like then it just perpetuates the polarisation and appeal of the Reform party.
You can't converse with conspiracy theorists without making yourself look like one too. Perfectly sensible Tories like Mark Harper made that mistake, undermining his own government's policies. It also leads to people like IDS siding with criminals.
Woke has had next to zero impact on most people's lives. Legal immigration is a material issue, not illegal immigration. Net Zero is the only path to growth for the UK, not protecting 20th century technologies and special interests. Cheap, secure British Energy for the British Economy.
If the Tories engage in the kind of paranoid culture battles you suggest, they'll just lose even more votes to Reform (the real deal) or the Lib Dems (the sensible alternative).
Does 'woke' impact peoples lives? Perhaps not a lot so far. But the desecration of our universities will certainly do so in the long term.
Affects my blood pressure having to listen to the tossers.
Woke is responsible for the pressure on the NHS. Millions of Daily Mail readers pushed to the edge of a heart attack by rainbow lanyards and vegan sausage rolls.
Centrists here of both Tory and Libdem persuasion are still having more vapours about Farage winning five seats compared with Labours 400 odd I see.
I guess when you have had a monopoly of the right wing in parliament since the 1661 general election, a rival party of the right breaking through the first past the post wall and winning five seats as well as knocking you into third place in a lot of seats you held until this week is going to seem a bit existensial.
They do not like it.
Labour + Green + SDLP + WPB + Plaid + SNP (33.7% + 6.7% + 0.7% + 0.7% + 0.3% + 2.5) = 44.6%
I know the LDs/Alliance really really really want to count all their 12.6% of voters to the Left-wing block, but they're not. If I was being really generous I'd give them 60% of them and 40% to the Right-wing block. That'd still get you to only 51.1% v 44.2%, and that's on a reduced turnout where many Tories stayed at home.
Point is the country is still split into two-voter blocks. And there's not an awful lot between them, save the mathematics of FPTP, which computed into the landslide.
A lot can change quickly.
Reform aren't a right-wing bloc party, sorry. They compete against Tories and promise magic money tree for the NHS.
It's because Casino is thinking of the culture war, not economics (although resists the logic therein of putting the LibDems firmly on the left, because it would upset his sums). Economically, Reform voters and some of the MPs will be firmly left - the irony is that they're led by free-market libertarians like Farage and Tice.
So Suellas winning campaign message is to leave the ECHR . Some Tories seem to think that they can just become more Reform .
Ignoring that a section of Tory voters will jump ship if they keep going further right .
I imagine the 4,000,000 are the most uneducated and politically illiterate in the country. It's unlikely they'll move in any direction because of ideology. It'll be interesting when the psephologists have done their work on the election but I'd be surprised if that's not the case
Well this one has an honours degree in a subkect involving a lot of complex maths and is entitled to use the Designation Chartered xxxxx.
One of the others I know of is a public sector worker who graduated not long ago.
Your sneering attitude to millions of voters crystallises the reason why Reform came third in this election, votes wise, half a million ahead of the lib dems.
It may be sneering but it’s largely true. Farage and his blackshirts now has a presence in the HoC. It may only be 5 seats but it is a bridgehead.
The 4 million people who voted for these fascists are largely uneducated, lazy, xenophobic, bigoted and not willing to take any personal responsibility. Instead Farage has used these people (by telling these folk it’s the immigrants that are the issue; nothing to do with how lazy and thick they are) to further his political aims.
Is there anyone particularly upset by the election? A lot of upsides across the political spectrum: Labour won a landslide Tories still breathing Best LibDem result in a century RefUK on the board Greens won 4 seats SNP routed
Any downsides?
yes, the second of your points...
It would have been joyous to see ELE. But that would almost certainly have elevated Farage and his mob - surely a worse outcome than what we have.
Also, just enough of the nutters survived in the Tory Party to ensure that the crazy circus carries on even longer. We have seen parties suffer a catastrophic drop in support and spend some time rebuilding before being competitive again. That is the Tories most likely scenario. Can't rule out another oscillation in 2029 that sees them sweep back - in today's politics everything is possible.
But the other scenario is to copy the Liberals a century ago. A crushing defeat followed by division, infighting and absolute self-destructive idiocy. Leading to another hammering into an even smaller total in the elections that follow. 121 may prove to be an impossible target in the next election...
If we had had proportional representation then Farage would have got 100 MPs, most of them having no political experience and paper candidates who would have been a disaster and probably imploded the party within 18 months.
FPTP keeps a party out until it reaches a critical mass and has now ensured that Farage only has his most able leiutenants in Parliament, with five years to professionalise the party.
PR enthusiasts should be careful what they wish for.
I support PR for two simple reasons: 1) In a democracy you should get what you vote for. Every vote should count equally. As a matter of principle it is an aberation that Reform won so many votes and so few seats 2) The best way to defeat any extreme is to expose it to scrutiny. Reform won 4.1m votes - 14.3%. If it has won 93 seats instead of 5 it would not have been a force at the next election. So many of those additional MPs would have been catastrophic for Reform. So many crazy people with appalling ideas and disgusting opinions. With them in the Commons we would have examined Faragism, been repelled by it and seen it off. Instead it continues to fester away in society.
But in PR we get governments that nobody votes for. That is the trade-off. Let’s say you like party policy X and Y, so you vote for that party. You then have to hope that party forms part of a coalition and doesn’t ditch X and Y in favour of A and B.
Centrists here of both Tory and Libdem persuasion are still having more vapours about Farage winning five seats compared with Labours 400 odd I see.
I guess when you have had a monopoly of the right wing in parliament since the 1661 general election, a rival party of the right breaking through the first past the post wall and winning five seats as well as knocking you into third place in a lot of seats you held until this week is going to seem a bit existensial.
They do not like it.
Labour + Green + SDLP + WPB + Plaid + SNP (33.7% + 6.7% + 0.7% + 0.7% + 0.3% + 2.5) = 44.6%
I know the LDs/Alliance really really really want to count all their 12.6% of voters to the Left-wing block, but they're not. If I was being really generous I'd give them 60% of them and 40% to the Right-wing block. That'd still get you to only 51.1% v 44.2%, and that's on a reduced turnout where many Tories stayed at home.
Point is the country is still split into two-voter blocks. And there's not an awful lot between them, save the mathematics of FPTP, which computed into the landslide.
A lot can change quickly.
Is the country split into two blocks ? The evidence of this election is that it’s a lot more complicated than that.
There’s not a lot, other than the artificial constraints of FPTP, which makes for only two tribes,
Yes, it's certainly more complicated than that, and voters exist along a spectrum with a great many of them possessing inherently contradictory views on a range of subjects.
Taking my subject of the morning, the Green Party, as an obvious example, how many Green voters are actually left-leaning? You just have to look at the four seats they actually won - two urban cores, two very rural - to appreciate that the party is both viewed as authentic (the commonality between its voters in both locations will doubtless be a strong interest in the environment, and the voters will believe the Greens care about this,) and yet, at the same time, can present two faces.
The Trotskyite trans activist-green voters of Bristol and the Love Your Weekend with Alan Titchmarsh-green voters of North Herefordshire would doubtless disagree on rather a lot if they were forced to pit their interests against one another, but the Greens are a small insurgent party in no danger of coming to power, so the potential for conflict simply doesn't arise. It doesn't matter if you're fiscally dry or a tax and spend socialist, all that's really important is caring about the world not being consumed by fire and that all the little birds, bees and cute fluffy animals should live. Most people can agree on this.
The graph looks interesting. But how should it be interpreted? The vertical axis appears to measure the deviation of constituency labour shares from the national average (though can't be sure in the absence of explanatory notes). However it does not represent the swing away from the Conservatives because there is no comparator from an earlier election. With the y-axis understood to be Lab shares in 2024, the constituency-level correlation between that and the percentage of mortgage payers suggests that mortage payers tended to vote Labour in 2024. But we do not know how that compares with the previous election. The tendency might be less than or greater than before. In any event the lowess smoother is a distraction, the point is made just as easily with a straight line drawn through the point cloud, or even without one.
The y axis can't be "Labour shares in 2024" because it goes from -40 to plus 40, and even the Tories didn't manage to find a way to score a negative vote total. My guess from the axis label "Lab1924sh" is that it is "labour vote share in 2024 - labour vote share in 2019" or something of that sort. At any rate it must be some figure calculated from a change between the two elections.
Glad I'm not the only one to not fully get the y axis. Thought I was being dim. But now @geoffw has outed himself as uncertain, I know it can't be that
It isn't clear though. I accept it is interesting if it is what @pm215 says
As to events locally, Sir Stephen Timms was safely returned in East Ham but lost a third of his vote share. There are some obvious parallels with 2005 though this is slightly worse than that for Timms.
Tahir Mirza of the Newham Independents got 18% and came in second (the Respect candidate in 2005 got 21%). The other big winner was the Greens who came third quadrupling their vote share despite doing nothing in the constituency and I'm sure they will be second next time and will be starting to challenge at Council level. The Conservative was fourth with 10% - their worst result since the constituency was re-created in 1997.
Reform, the Liberal Democrats and both Independents all lost their deposits and turnout slumped from 66% to 48%. Having enjoyed majorities of over 30,000, Timms now has less than 13,000 in hand.
A similar result in West Ham & Beckton with James Asser getting home by 9,250 with his vote share falling from 70% to 45%. Sophia Naqvi for the Newham Independents got 20% but I know the Newham Independents put a lot more effort into this seat than East Ham and I think they may just have hit the glass ceiling of pro-Palestine support. The Greens were again third going from 2.5% to 11% and now look the principal opposition to Labour in the future. The Conservative got 10% in fourth but Reform did better polling 8% in fifth - the constituency has a larger WWC element down around Silvertown and the Docks than East Ham.
In Stratford & Bow, the Greens put in the work and finished second as Labour fell from 70% to 44%. The Conservative vote halved and their candidate finished fourth behind the Workers' Party. The Greens went from 4% to 17%.
Looking to the 2026 locals, I suspect the Greens will be targeting Labour votes across the borough - whether the Newham Independents will be as strong a force by then I've no clue. Only Timms got above 50% so it could well be we'll see a midterm collapse in Labour support at Council level from which the Greens look set to be the main beneficiaries.
Is there anyone particularly upset by the election? A lot of upsides across the political spectrum: Labour won a landslide Tories still breathing Best LibDem result in a century RefUK on the board Greens won 4 seats SNP routed
Any downsides?
yes, the second of your points...
It would have been joyous to see ELE. But that would almost certainly have elevated Farage and his mob - surely a worse outcome than what we have.
Also, just enough of the nutters survived in the Tory Party to ensure that the crazy circus carries on even longer. We have seen parties suffer a catastrophic drop in support and spend some time rebuilding before being competitive again. That is the Tories most likely scenario. Can't rule out another oscillation in 2029 that sees them sweep back - in today's politics everything is possible.
But the other scenario is to copy the Liberals a century ago. A crushing defeat followed by division, infighting and absolute self-destructive idiocy. Leading to another hammering into an even smaller total in the elections that follow. 121 may prove to be an impossible target in the next election...
If we had had proportional representation then Farage would have got 100 MPs, most of them having no political experience and paper candidates who would have been a disaster and probably imploded the party within 18 months.
FPTP keeps a party out until it reaches a critical mass and has now ensured that Farage only has his most able leiutenants in Parliament, with five years to professionalise the party.
PR enthusiasts should be careful what they wish for.
I support PR for two simple reasons: 1) In a democracy you should get what you vote for. Every vote should count equally. As a matter of principle it is an aberation that Reform won so many votes and so few seats 2) The best way to defeat any extreme is to expose it to scrutiny. Reform won 4.1m votes - 14.3%. If it has won 93 seats instead of 5 it would not have been a force at the next election. So many of those additional MPs would have been catastrophic for Reform. So many crazy people with appalling ideas and disgusting opinions. With them in the Commons we would have examined Faragism, been repelled by it and seen it off. Instead it continues to fester away in society.
But in PR we get governments that nobody votes for. That is the trade-off. Let’s say you like party policy X and Y, so you vote for that party. You then have to hope that party forms part of a coalition and doesn’t ditch X and Y in favour of A and B.
You have to hope that for governments elected under FPTP.
My great fear really is that Rayner isn’t capable of policy delivery, perhaps similar to the way Prescott essentially blocked up the plumbing of his critical portfolios in the New Labour years.
I respect Rayner immensely as a politician, but there’s just no background of delivery I’m aware of.
Exactly , got there like Prescott by climbing the greasy pole in the unions, no real experience of real business and likely to be as big a dud as Prescott was. Labour always need a union rep as deputy to keep the wolves happy.
Yes. it's absolutely disgusting that a working class woman like Rayner, with a trades union background of all things, should end up as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. Honestly, what were they thinking? Have they forgotten their history?
That is their problem , they are stuck on their history.
Isn't it interesting that so many people seem to think the Tories NEED to do what they personally WANT the Tories to do.
I think the Tories have options. I don't know which they will choose. At one end they could try the full Matthew Goodwin patriotic/social democratic realignment or alternatively revert to a sort of George Osborne win back those wealthier seats. Or something in the middle. It isn't that obvious. Not least because we don't really know what Starmer is likely to be and where he will likely make himself vulnerable. There will also be events, dear boy, events......
Blair it appears has been writing in the Sunday Times that if you want to deal with Reform, get control of migration. Pretty obvious but I'm amazed at the number of people who think right wing populism is just some irrational spasm that's come out of nowhere. It's a result of countries losing control of their borders and struggling to maintain internal unity as a result of multiculturalism.
That is describing approaches they could take to implementing what they *need* to do - which is to develop a coherent vision and, eventually, policy platform that they can bang on about for years in order to establish themselves as a competent alternativr government. The danger is mistaking that for the tactical stuff.
So Suellas winning campaign message is to leave the ECHR . Some Tories seem to think that they can just become more Reform .
Ignoring that a section of Tory voters will jump ship if they keep going further right .
I imagine the 4,000,000 are the most uneducated and politically illiterate in the country. It's unlikely they'll move in any direction because of ideology. It'll be interesting when the psephologists have done their work on the election but I'd be surprised if that's not the case
Well this one has an honours degree in a subkect involving a lot of complex maths and is entitled to use the Designation Chartered xxxxx.
One of the others I know of is a public sector worker who graduated not long ago.
Your sneering attitude to millions of voters crystallises the reason why Reform came third in this election, votes wise, half a million ahead of the lib dems.
It may be sneering but it’s largely true. Farage and his blackshirts now has a presence in the HoC. It may only be 5 seats but it is a bridgehead.
The 4 million people who voted for these fascists are largely uneducated, lazy, xenophobic, bigoted and not willing to take any personal responsibility. Instead Farage has used these people (by telling these folk it’s the immigrants that are the issue; nothing to do with how lazy and thick they are) to further his political aims.
Calling them all the names under the sun won’t get those voters back into supporting mainstream parties. Do you want a rump of disaffected people disconnected from society and getting progressively more angry in this country? I don’t. And the only way we can stop that from happening is from engaging with them and discussing their concerns - some of which are legitimate but will not be solved by political extremism.
Robert Jenrick is the first leadership contender to break cover. He says the last government “insulted the public” by failing to deal with immigration. He sets out his stall here:
The first that needs to be slapped around the head with an inflated puffer fish, as a reality check.
You stand fuck-all chance, Jenrick. Anybody synonymous with scandal condemns the Conservative Partyin 2029 to 2024 take 2. We need a clean skin.
Who are you curious about for leader?
Claire Courtinho fits the bill for whats needed, of those re-elected.
Although let's see who gets Rishi's seat when he does a runner over the summer. I'd still stick with Mordaunt - if she gets it.
Thanks. Interesting. Maybe a bit early for Courtnho I would have thought. Maybe a shadow chancellor???
Historically the winning strategy seems to be to find an obvious, PM in waiting rather than skipping a generation for the sake of it.
Is Mourdaunt your Blair, Cameron or Starmer figure? If she is, can she control the right and the Mail? That has been her Achilles heel.
We could have had Mordaunt. Almost certainly would, if the Mail hadn't been so determined to do the bidding of others in putting the boot in. The Mail has an enormous amount of responsibility for what went wrong at the top of Government in recent years. Not that they will ever take any of that responsibility.
Courtinho would have five years to show her mettle before going before the voters. I suspect she would play well with women, especially those we lost to the LibDems, whilst building the case for a Conservative Party aimed at growth, one that was no longer "fuck business".
This last point is key. The scandals and the melodrama and the crayon policies are all distractions from the reason the Tories got smashed.
Fuck Business.
You may consider that to be a throw away line from Boris, but it neatly summarised the policy agenda of Tory government over the last decade.
If the Tories can step away from knee-jerk populism aimed at voters who don't understand economics, and go back to a sound economic base which will be a popular sell to those voters, it can recover. And would *deserve* to recover. So much of why this country is so broken is because we have had a government who implemented a fuck business agenda.
Borrow. Invest. Gain a return on the investment. Grow. Employ. Tax revenues increase. People have cash to spend. Feel good is tangible and our communities aren't shuttered and crumbling.
Whither capitalism?
That depends on what you mean by 'business'.
Business comes in a multitude of types.
The business I work for invests and trains and produces and exports.
The businesses which are sucking the life out of Morrisons, Asda and some of the utilities are very different.
I'm not sure that the Conservatives understand the difference or if they do would not prefer the second type.
I don’t quite know how to make this point, but it’s a serious one. Liz Truss generally comes across to me as a bit childish, lacking the kind of seriousness or gravitas you would normally expect. It seems to be a disease that has infected some on the right. They seem to want to shock and provoke rather than effect change. It’s a subtle thing, but they’re a long way from the kind of intellectual heft that sat behind the Thatcherite revolution.
Not just Truss. The British right loved Beano Boris, and grumily tolerated May and Sunak, who at least tried to be responsible national leaders. Or see the Spectator; yes it sells by the truckload but that's in part because it's given up on being a serious journal of right wing thinking and is now almost entirely there to make people think "OMG what are they going to say now?" Which is an excellent sales strategy, but a terrible way to run a country.
Let us hope that Boring Old PM Starmer can Make Britain Boring Again.
May I join in the chorus.
Reform Uk is the Party of childish politics, of wishful thinking. Farage is an essentially unserious politician, in it for the laughs.
True to an extent but Farage did bring Brexit and should not be underestimated
A careful reading of their manifesto shows us that underestimating him his impossible. It was the worst policy platform of any party and would see the economy curl up and die. Surprised fewer people talked about it, but therein lies the truth. Farage is a wrecking ball, not a builder. You vote for him if you prefer a pile of rubble over what we have now.
I have no doubt you are correct, but the rise of Reform and the right in Europe is not something easily dismissed
I have no regrets voting for Labour and think Starmer will do a decent job. I am impressed with the emphasis on honesty and integrity, after the Boris era. But I think the assumption that everything is now 'back to normal' is quite severely mistaken.
I do think that the greatest threat to democracy is not the Reform party but the dismissal and ostracisation of the Reform party. They should be able to represent their voters on things like 'woke' , 'immigration', 'net zero' , 'low traffic zones' without being slandered or defamed because amongst all the misinformation on every point there is something of value which Labour should take in to account. The 'woke' stuff has gone way too far. Illegal immigration is a massive problem and the asylum system is a failure. Net Zero imposes costs on working people which are too casually shrugged off. If the governing party can take this in to account then it defuses the threat from the reform party. If it goes full on culture war against the 'far right' as many of its MP's/members/supporters would like then it just perpetuates the polarisation and appeal of the Reform party.
You can't converse with conspiracy theorists without making yourself look like one too. Perfectly sensible Tories like Mark Harper made that mistake, undermining his own government's policies. It also leads to people like IDS siding with criminals.
Woke has had next to zero impact on most people's lives. Legal immigration is a material issue, not illegal immigration. Net Zero is the only path to growth for the UK, not protecting 20th century technologies and special interests. Cheap, secure British Energy for the British Economy.
If the Tories engage in the kind of paranoid culture battles you suggest, they'll just lose even more votes to Reform (the real deal) or the Lib Dems (the sensible alternative).
Does 'woke' impact peoples lives? Perhaps not a lot so far. But the desecration of our universities will certainly do so in the long term.
Affects my blood pressure having to listen to the tossers.
Woke is responsible for the pressure on the NHS. Millions of Daily Mail readers pushed to the edge of a heart attack by rainbow lanyards and vegan sausage rolls.
I will not mention "venison" as it upsets one of our esteemed posters.
I put a few London bets on a month ago as follows:
Harrow East – CON 9/4 Ruislip, Northwood & Pinner – CON 4/5 Bromley & Biggin Hill – CON 11/8 Croydon East – CON 10/1 Croydon South – CON 2/1 Sutton & Cheam – LD 11/10 Romford – CON 6/4
I make that six out of seven - Croydon East always a bit of a long shot. Total return to a 1 point stake - 15.1 points so essentially backing a 14/1 winner but I'll take that all day every day.
Just a shame you had to go all the way to the Isle of Man to be sufficiently incognito to find a bookmaker to take the bets?
Signifies only a knife edge election, rather than a foregone conclusion, to me.
It does also shine a light on this week’s UK election turnout. And the strength of the minor parties. It was a free hit election with not much riding on it.
i have not posted for a long time but have been a lurker on and off. Hello everyone and best wishes to Mike Smithson and good luck to TSE.
i do think the post election 'not that bad' talk from some Tories is misjudged.
1 A record low number of seats. 2 Big names very contaminated 3 Apparent refusal on some parts to recognise the last few years were a clown show 4 Libdems now free to target a whole load more blue wall seats 5 Membership propensity to elect a flag waving dud 6 Lost young people and govt have the wherewithal for the sort of planning reform that Cummings knew the Tories needed but failed to do 7 Starmer looks like a capable administrator to me (time will tell) 8 Misogyny a very bad look- Rayner, comments on the dress sense of new cabinet and Sunaks wife. People notice. 9 Outflanked on the right with The Four Roubles now in parliament. Suspect the ECHR wont be much of an issue as if you do not create mad policy you tend not to bash up against it. 10 Immigration likely to be addressed by wide-scale European coordinated response over the next few years. Not by war with France etc. 11 Covid procurement issues may come to light.
I think Iain Martins analysis about this being a significant leftward shift is bang on - but i do not see much evidence of that having been taken onboard. Early days I suppose.
Centrists here of both Tory and Libdem persuasion are still having more vapours about Farage winning five seats compared with Labours 400 odd I see.
I guess when you have had a monopoly of the right wing in parliament since the 1661 general election, a rival party of the right breaking through the first past the post wall and winning five seats as well as knocking you into third place in a lot of seats you held until this week is going to seem a bit existensial.
They do not like it.
Labour + Green + SDLP + WPB + Plaid + SNP (33.7% + 6.7% + 0.7% + 0.7% + 0.3% + 2.5) = 44.6%
I know the LDs/Alliance really really really want to count all their 12.6% of voters to the Left-wing block, but they're not. If I was being really generous I'd give them 60% of them and 40% to the Right-wing block. That'd still get you to only 51.1% v 44.2%, and that's on a reduced turnout where many Tories stayed at home.
Point is the country is still split into two-voter blocks. And there's not an awful lot between them, save the mathematics of FPTP, which computed into the landslide.
A lot can change quickly.
Reform aren't a right-wing bloc party, sorry. They compete against Tories and promise magic money tree for the NHS.
In some ways they are the anti-establishment mirror of the SNP.
Both parties argue that their constituents’ needs cannot be met within the current Westminster setup. SNP from the left(ish), Reform from the right.
One says independence is the solution, the other says - what? The Nietschian superman I suppose.
So you can’t group either into blocs with others because they are constitutionally set apart.
Plaid, not so much. More like SDLP, for now.
You can group them in in terms of whom they would support in government. So right now in mid 2024, the LDs would support a Labour-led government but almost certainly not a Conservative one. Reform would probably be the opposite way around. SNP would probably find it slightly tricky to support Labour but would never, ever support the Tories.
Casino is missing the point to a certain extent when he tries to split the Lib Dems down a 60-40 line and use that to keep them out of the left bloc. The Lib Dems would, in a hung parliament, have elevated Starmer with zero hesitation. He's right in that this reality can change but there's no sign of that any time soon.
Except they’ll be opposing them on quite a lot of stuff in this parliament, and they were part of a coalition with the Tories a decade back.
All Casino is effectively saying is that FPTP is the way it should be. That’s a circular argument, not one of principle.
Centrists here of both Tory and Libdem persuasion are still having more vapours about Farage winning five seats compared with Labours 400 odd I see.
I guess when you have had a monopoly of the right wing in parliament since the 1661 general election, a rival party of the right breaking through the first past the post wall and winning five seats as well as knocking you into third place in a lot of seats you held until this week is going to seem a bit existensial.
They do not like it.
Labour + Green + SDLP + WPB + Plaid + SNP (33.7% + 6.7% + 0.7% + 0.7% + 0.3% + 2.5) = 44.6%
I know the LDs/Alliance really really really want to count all their 12.6% of voters to the Left-wing block, but they're not. If I was being really generous I'd give them 60% of them and 40% to the Right-wing block. That'd still get you to only 51.1% v 44.2%, and that's on a reduced turnout where many Tories stayed at home.
Point is the country is still split into two-voter blocks. And there's not an awful lot between them, save the mathematics of FPTP, which computed into the landslide.
A lot can change quickly.
Reform aren't a right-wing bloc party, sorry. They compete against Tories and promise magic money tree for the NHS.
It's because Casino is thinking of the culture war, not economics (although resists the logic therein of putting the LibDems firmly on the left, because it would upset his sums). Economically, Reform voters and some of the MPs will be firmly left - the irony is that they're led by free-market libertarians like Farage and Tice.
Are Farage and Tice really free-market libertarians? I think I might fit that description but I'm a long way from them.
@MichaelDnes1 It’s a truth universally acknowledged that road pricing is political suicide.
But what if it wasn’t? And what if I knew people who’d almost proved it?
Come with me, and try to avoid losing a trillion dollars as we go.🧵
Interesting thread. TLDR is - bring in road pricing on vehicles registered from a point in the future onwards and people won't complain. But, now is the time to act. Soon it will be too late not impose road pricing on existing vehicles and that will be unpopular.
I have to say, I'm not sure it would be accepted just like that, but it would certainly have a better chance than getting to 2028 and going "oh, what are we going to do?"
My great fear really is that Rayner isn’t capable of policy delivery, perhaps similar to the way Prescott essentially blocked up the plumbing of his critical portfolios in the New Labour years.
I respect Rayner immensely as a politician, but there’s just no background of delivery I’m aware of.
Exactly , got there like Prescott by climbing the greasy pole in the unions, no real experience of real business and likely to be as big a dud as Prescott was. Labour always need a union rep as deputy to keep the wolves happy.
It isn't the politicians that deliver, it is the Civil Servants. I think that Rayner will work well with the Civil Service.
Hard for her to be worse than two jags. Though both have property as a hobby so who knows.
My great fear really is that Rayner isn’t capable of policy delivery, perhaps similar to the way Prescott essentially blocked up the plumbing of his critical portfolios in the New Labour years.
I respect Rayner immensely as a politician, but there’s just no background of delivery I’m aware of.
Exactly , got there like Prescott by climbing the greasy pole in the unions, no real experience of real business and likely to be as big a dud as Prescott was. Labour always need a union rep as deputy to keep the wolves happy.
It isn't the politicians that deliver, it is the Civil Servants. I think that Rayner will work well with the Civil Service.
The civil servants in between watching Netflix, PMSL.
Centrists here of both Tory and Libdem persuasion are still having more vapours about Farage winning five seats compared with Labours 400 odd I see.
I guess when you have had a monopoly of the right wing in parliament since the 1661 general election, a rival party of the right breaking through the first past the post wall and winning five seats as well as knocking you into third place in a lot of seats you held until this week is going to seem a bit existensial.
They do not like it.
Labour + Green + SDLP + WPB + Plaid + SNP (33.7% + 6.7% + 0.7% + 0.7% + 0.3% + 2.5) = 44.6%
I know the LDs/Alliance really really really want to count all their 12.6% of voters to the Left-wing block, but they're not. If I was being really generous I'd give them 60% of them and 40% to the Right-wing block. That'd still get you to only 51.1% v 44.2%, and that's on a reduced turnout where many Tories stayed at home.
Point is the country is still split into two-voter blocks. And there's not an awful lot between them, save the mathematics of FPTP, which computed into the landslide.
A lot can change quickly.
The important numbers are 121 and 411. The Conservatives need to get to 300 seats or so to form the next government even if they can get into a coalition with Reform. Meanwhile Labour have an issuance policy of a coalition with the Lib Dems if their seat count is drastically cut.
Starmer's GOATs are a welcome move of looking 'serious'.
Tories need to welcome back Gauke and co asap rather than head off to the fringes with Braverman.
Sadly I don't think they will.
Starmer's GOATS appointments smack too much of gimmicks, and will doubtless annoy or disappoint backbenchers who regard themselves, rightly or wrongly, as at least as talented and more deserving than Blairite retreads and the Covid bloke. It stores up trouble for the future, although to be cynical, Starmer will be ready to take his bus pass by the next election.
Is there anyone particularly upset by the election? A lot of upsides across the political spectrum: Labour won a landslide Tories still breathing Best LibDem result in a century RefUK on the board Greens won 4 seats SNP routed
Any downsides?
yes, the second of your points...
It would have been joyous to see ELE. But that would almost certainly have elevated Farage and his mob - surely a worse outcome than what we have.
Also, just enough of the nutters survived in the Tory Party to ensure that the crazy circus carries on even longer. We have seen parties suffer a catastrophic drop in support and spend some time rebuilding before being competitive again. That is the Tories most likely scenario. Can't rule out another oscillation in 2029 that sees them sweep back - in today's politics everything is possible.
But the other scenario is to copy the Liberals a century ago. A crushing defeat followed by division, infighting and absolute self-destructive idiocy. Leading to another hammering into an even smaller total in the elections that follow. 121 may prove to be an impossible target in the next election...
If we had had proportional representation then Farage would have got 100 MPs, most of them having no political experience and paper candidates who would have been a disaster and probably imploded the party within 18 months.
FPTP keeps a party out until it reaches a critical mass and has now ensured that Farage only has his most able leiutenants in Parliament, with five years to professionalise the party.
PR enthusiasts should be careful what they wish for.
I support PR for two simple reasons: 1) In a democracy you should get what you vote for. Every vote should count equally. As a matter of principle it is an aberation that Reform won so many votes and so few seats 2) The best way to defeat any extreme is to expose it to scrutiny. Reform won 4.1m votes - 14.3%. If it has won 93 seats instead of 5 it would not have been a force at the next election. So many of those additional MPs would have been catastrophic for Reform. So many crazy people with appalling ideas and disgusting opinions. With them in the Commons we would have examined Faragism, been repelled by it and seen it off. Instead it continues to fester away in society.
But in PR we get governments that nobody votes for. That is the trade-off. Let’s say you like party policy X and Y, so you vote for that party. You then have to hope that party forms part of a coalition and doesn’t ditch X and Y in favour of A and B.
Instead we just got a government that 66% of people didn't vote for.
Centrists here of both Tory and Libdem persuasion are still having more vapours about Farage winning five seats compared with Labours 400 odd I see.
I guess when you have had a monopoly of the right wing in parliament since the 1661 general election, a rival party of the right breaking through the first past the post wall and winning five seats as well as knocking you into third place in a lot of seats you held until this week is going to seem a bit existensial.
They do not like it.
Labour + Green + SDLP + WPB + Plaid + SNP (33.7% + 6.7% + 0.7% + 0.7% + 0.3% + 2.5) = 44.6%
I know the LDs/Alliance really really really want to count all their 12.6% of voters to the Left-wing block, but they're not. If I was being really generous I'd give them 60% of them and 40% to the Right-wing block. That'd still get you to only 51.1% v 44.2%, and that's on a reduced turnout where many Tories stayed at home.
Point is the country is still split into two-voter blocks. And there's not an awful lot between them, save the mathematics of FPTP, which computed into the landslide.
A lot can change quickly.
Reform aren't a right-wing bloc party, sorry. They compete against Tories and promise magic money tree for the NHS.
It's because Casino is thinking of the culture war, not economics (although resists the logic therein of putting the LibDems firmly on the left, because it would upset his sums). Economically, Reform voters and some of the MPs will be firmly left - the irony is that they're led by free-market libertarians like Farage and Tice.
Are Farage and Tice really free-market libertarians? I think I might fit that description but I'm a long way from them.
The answer with immigration is to reclassify temporary visitors as VISITORS rather than immigrants. These temporary immigrants include students and their families - and young people on 2 year work visas currently from Australia but why not from the EU.
How many of those temporary "students" actually go home, rather than use their time here to either slip into the black economy or extend their courses until they get a work visa and can claim residence?
Maybe a lot, but I think it’s really important to be clear about the different types of immigrant, legal and illegal.
We need a revised vocabulary of immigration.
Tag the illegals/no visa so you know where they are and can be easily deported. Hunt them down if the tags are removed. They have been pussyfooting about since the 90's and teh result is just thousands more economic migrants / ne'er do wells flooding into the country. It cannot go on there are not enough 5 star hotels to put them all up. Should havemassive sheds full of immigration staff processing them in a couple of days, then ship out the illegals etc immediately.
These sheds must be enormous if you need to tag the inmates to find them in there
You wit gets no better, a loud groan from the audience.
My great fear really is that Rayner isn’t capable of policy delivery, perhaps similar to the way Prescott essentially blocked up the plumbing of his critical portfolios in the New Labour years.
I respect Rayner immensely as a politician, but there’s just no background of delivery I’m aware of.
Exactly , got there like Prescott by climbing the greasy pole in the unions, no real experience of real business and likely to be as big a dud as Prescott was. Labour always need a union rep as deputy to keep the wolves happy.
It isn't the politicians that deliver, it is the Civil Servants. I think that Rayner will work well with the Civil Service.
They are there to implement what the ministers want to do. You can't expect them to do it for them. Unless the government just wants to continue with Tory policy.
Is there anyone particularly upset by the election? A lot of upsides across the political spectrum: Labour won a landslide Tories still breathing Best LibDem result in a century RefUK on the board Greens won 4 seats SNP routed
Any downsides?
yes, the second of your points...
It would have been joyous to see ELE. But that would almost certainly have elevated Farage and his mob - surely a worse outcome than what we have.
Also, just enough of the nutters survived in the Tory Party to ensure that the crazy circus carries on even longer. We have seen parties suffer a catastrophic drop in support and spend some time rebuilding before being competitive again. That is the Tories most likely scenario. Can't rule out another oscillation in 2029 that sees them sweep back - in today's politics everything is possible.
But the other scenario is to copy the Liberals a century ago. A crushing defeat followed by division, infighting and absolute self-destructive idiocy. Leading to another hammering into an even smaller total in the elections that follow. 121 may prove to be an impossible target in the next election...
If we had had proportional representation then Farage would have got 100 MPs, most of them having no political experience and paper candidates who would have been a disaster and probably imploded the party within 18 months.
FPTP keeps a party out until it reaches a critical mass and has now ensured that Farage only has his most able leiutenants in Parliament, with five years to professionalise the party.
PR enthusiasts should be careful what they wish for.
I support PR for two simple reasons: 1) In a democracy you should get what you vote for. Every vote should count equally. As a matter of principle it is an aberation that Reform won so many votes and so few seats 2) The best way to defeat any extreme is to expose it to scrutiny. Reform won 4.1m votes - 14.3%. If it has won 93 seats instead of 5 it would not have been a force at the next election. So many of those additional MPs would have been catastrophic for Reform. So many crazy people with appalling ideas and disgusting opinions. With them in the Commons we would have examined Faragism, been repelled by it and seen it off. Instead it continues to fester away in society.
But in PR we get governments that nobody votes for. That is the trade-off. Let’s say you like party policy X and Y, so you vote for that party. You then have to hope that party forms part of a coalition and doesn’t ditch X and Y in favour of A and B.
Instead we just got a government that 66% of people didn't vote for.
Er, 66% of actual voting voters. About 80% of the total slate, counting DNV (and the claim that DV means that they can be ignored is unfair this time round, esp. in Scotland and NI, because some were disfranchised in the rush).
As to events locally, Sir Stephen Timms was safely returned in East Ham but lost a third of his vote share. There are some obvious parallels with 2005 though this is slightly worse than that for Timms.
Tahir Mirza of the Newham Independents got 18% and came in second (the Respect candidate in 2005 got 21%). The other big winner was the Greens who came third quadrupling their vote share despite doing nothing in the constituency and I'm sure they will be second next time and will be starting to challenge at Council level. The Conservative was fourth with 10% - their worst result since the constituency was re-created in 1997.
Reform, the Liberal Democrats and both Independents all lost their deposits and turnout slumped from 66% to 48%. Having enjoyed majorities of over 30,000, Timms now has less than 13,000 in hand.
A similar result in West Ham & Beckton with James Asser getting home by 9,250 with his vote share falling from 70% to 45%. Sophia Naqvi for the Newham Independents got 20% but I know the Newham Independents put a lot more effort into this seat than East Ham and I think they may just have hit the glass ceiling of pro-Palestine support. The Greens were again third going from 2.5% to 11% and now look the principal opposition to Labour in the future. The Conservative got 10% in fourth but Reform did better polling 8% in fifth - the constituency has a larger WWC element down around Silvertown and the Docks than East Ham.
In Stratford & Bow, the Greens put in the work and finished second as Labour fell from 70% to 44%. The Conservative vote halved and their candidate finished fourth behind the Workers' Party. The Greens went from 4% to 17%.
Looking to the 2026 locals, I suspect the Greens will be targeting Labour votes across the borough - whether the Newham Independents will be as strong a force by then I've no clue. Only Timms got above 50% so it could well be we'll see a midterm collapse in Labour support at Council level from which the Greens look set to be the main beneficiaries.
I mentioned the collapse of urban liberalism earlier; in a fair few areas, the Greens are picking up the mantle, Conservatism having been rejected after Thatcher and Liberalism after its coalition.
Starmer's GOATs are a welcome move of looking 'serious'.
Tories need to welcome back Gauke and co asap rather than head off to the fringes with Braverman.
Sadly I don't think they will.
Starmer's GOATS appointments smack too much of gimmicks, and will doubtless annoy or disappoint backbenchers who regard themselves, rightly or wrongly, as at least as talented and more deserving than Blairite retreads and the Covid bloke. It stores up trouble for the future, although to be cynical, Starmer will be ready to take his bus pass by the next election.
Isn't he 61 and resident in London? He's therefore eligible for one already.
Centrists here of both Tory and Libdem persuasion are still having more vapours about Farage winning five seats compared with Labours 400 odd I see.
I guess when you have had a monopoly of the right wing in parliament since the 1661 general election, a rival party of the right breaking through the first past the post wall and winning five seats as well as knocking you into third place in a lot of seats you held until this week is going to seem a bit existensial.
They do not like it.
Labour + Green + SDLP + WPB + Plaid + SNP (33.7% + 6.7% + 0.7% + 0.7% + 0.3% + 2.5) = 44.6%
I know the LDs/Alliance really really really want to count all their 12.6% of voters to the Left-wing block, but they're not. If I was being really generous I'd give them 60% of them and 40% to the Right-wing block. That'd still get you to only 51.1% v 44.2%, and that's on a reduced turnout where many Tories stayed at home.
Point is the country is still split into two-voter blocks. And there's not an awful lot between them, save the mathematics of FPTP, which computed into the landslide.
A lot can change quickly.
The important numbers are 121 and 411. The Conservatives need to get to 300 seats or so to form the next government even if they can get into a coalition with Reform. Meanwhile Labour have an issuance policy of a coalition with the Lib Dems if their seat count is drastically cut.
That conventional thinking is quite wrong, as shown last week. Winning an extra 200 seats is not 200 times as difficult as winning one. We are not liberating Europe from the Nazis one village at a time. Seats are fought in parallel, not in series.
And talk of a Labour LibDem coalition forgets 2010 to 2015. Why should the LibDems want to repeat the circumstances of their demise? Why should Labour be interested in the Tories' little helpers?
Centrists here of both Tory and Libdem persuasion are still having more vapours about Farage winning five seats compared with Labours 400 odd I see.
I guess when you have had a monopoly of the right wing in parliament since the 1661 general election, a rival party of the right breaking through the first past the post wall and winning five seats as well as knocking you into third place in a lot of seats you held until this week is going to seem a bit existensial.
They do not like it.
Labour + Green + SDLP + WPB + Plaid + SNP (33.7% + 6.7% + 0.7% + 0.7% + 0.3% + 2.5) = 44.6%
I know the LDs/Alliance really really really want to count all their 12.6% of voters to the Left-wing block, but they're not. If I was being really generous I'd give them 60% of them and 40% to the Right-wing block. That'd still get you to only 51.1% v 44.2%, and that's on a reduced turnout where many Tories stayed at home.
Point is the country is still split into two-voter blocks. And there's not an awful lot between them, save the mathematics of FPTP, which computed into the landslide.
A lot can change quickly.
Reform aren't a right-wing bloc party, sorry. They compete against Tories and promise magic money tree for the NHS.
I'm amazed at how often I'm seeing the Con+Reform vote as the same thing. Both left and right are suggesting that Reform saved Labour.
Yet, we already know that most Reform voters wouldn't have voted Tory. Farage admitted he couldn't "deliver" them before the election, and polling for the last two years has consistently showed that most weren't keen on the Tories.
In fact, if this polling from the day after the election is correct, given the extremely efficient Lab/LD/Green tactical voting, then no Reform may have been a bad thing for the Tories.
Robert Jenrick is the first leadership contender to break cover. He says the last government “insulted the public” by failing to deal with immigration. He sets out his stall here:
A position somewhat undermined by his having been a minister with responsibility for (checks notes) immigration.
And also another step into irrelevance.
They created a wedge issue - then found themselves on the wrong side of the wedge. It goes back to Cameron and his foolish "under 100,000" pledge - another reaction to Farage like his Brexit referendum. The issue is not "immigration" but "population" - and the houses and services the population needs. Anyone proposing to "cut immigration" should start off by telling us who they are going to stop coming. NHS staff? Students?
We had 67,000 asylum claims last year, so on Cameron's pledge we would have to have very little net migration to stay under 100,000 per year. Almost certainly that would be lower than the numbers we would want merely to staff essential services.
Now unless we want to turn away all refugees through the schemes we have for places like Hong Kong and Ukraine, and all people arriving and making asylum claims with completely legitimate reasons, then we are going to almost certainly have migration north of 100,000 per year indefinitely. Maybe somewhere in the 200,000 - 300,000 region assuming we still want other types of migrants for high-skill jobs, academic studies, etc.
So once we arrive at a necessary and unavoidable level of migration we basically need to ask one question. Where is everyone going to live and how much stuff do we need to build for them? That's the thing that we need to work on to make immigration work. Keep building at a much faster rate and we will at least make immigration sustainable and less of a resource problem.
Something that keeps on getting left out of the immigration debate is that there is no hard wall between economic migration and asylum migration.
Many of the economic migrants I have worked with have backstories that could amount to an asylum claim. My wife might well have been able to make an asylum claim, for example.
It is much easier to get into work via the economic migration route. Asylum claiming is a last resort.
Ok, but that's just a description of how it works, not a defence of it.
You obviously didn't read the bit about how votes in constituencies that are not mine shouldn't change my MP
With STV, votes in other constituencies wouldn't change your MPs. It's just that your MPs would better reflect local preferences.
There would also be competition between candidates of the same party. You wouldn't be stuck with whoever your local party chooses as their sole candidate.
Starmer's GOATs are a welcome move of looking 'serious'.
Tories need to welcome back Gauke and co asap rather than head off to the fringes with Braverman.
Sadly I don't think they will.
Starmer's GOATS appointments smack too much of gimmicks, and will doubtless annoy or disappoint backbenchers who regard themselves, rightly or wrongly, as at least as talented and more deserving than Blairite retreads and the Covid bloke. It stores up trouble for the future, although to be cynical, Starmer will be ready to take his bus pass by the next election.
Can anyone think of a GOAT who succeeded in achieving anything much, and/or stuck around?
In a sense, they're a hostage to fortune, because they're seen as semi-independent and if they get fed up and stomp off, you get a bad publicity hit.
I don’t quite know how to make this point, but it’s a serious one. Liz Truss generally comes across to me as a bit childish, lacking the kind of seriousness or gravitas you would normally expect. It seems to be a disease that has infected some on the right. They seem to want to shock and provoke rather than effect change. It’s a subtle thing, but they’re a long way from the kind of intellectual heft that sat behind the Thatcherite revolution.
Not just Truss. The British right loved Beano Boris, and grumily tolerated May and Sunak, who at least tried to be responsible national leaders. Or see the Spectator; yes it sells by the truckload but that's in part because it's given up on being a serious journal of right wing thinking and is now almost entirely there to make people think "OMG what are they going to say now?" Which is an excellent sales strategy, but a terrible way to run a country.
Let us hope that Boring Old PM Starmer can Make Britain Boring Again.
May I join in the chorus.
Reform Uk is the Party of childish politics, of wishful thinking. Farage is an essentially unserious politician, in it for the laughs.
True to an extent but Farage did bring Brexit and should not be underestimated
A careful reading of their manifesto shows us that underestimating him his impossible. It was the worst policy platform of any party and would see the economy curl up and die. Surprised fewer people talked about it, but therein lies the truth. Farage is a wrecking ball, not a builder. You vote for him if you prefer a pile of rubble over what we have now.
I have no doubt you are correct, but the rise of Reform and the right in Europe is not something easily dismissed
I have no regrets voting for Labour and think Starmer will do a decent job. I am impressed with the emphasis on honesty and integrity, after the Boris era. But I think the assumption that everything is now 'back to normal' is quite severely mistaken.
I do think that the greatest threat to democracy is not the Reform party but the dismissal and ostracisation of the Reform party. They should be able to represent their voters on things like 'woke' , 'immigration', 'net zero' , 'low traffic zones' without being slandered or defamed because amongst all the misinformation on every point there is something of value which Labour should take in to account. The 'woke' stuff has gone way too far. Illegal immigration is a massive problem and the asylum system is a failure. Net Zero imposes costs on working people which are too casually shrugged off. If the governing party can take this in to account then it defuses the threat from the reform party. If it goes full on culture war against the 'far right' as many of its MP's/members/supporters would like then it just perpetuates the polarisation and appeal of the Reform party.
You can't converse with conspiracy theorists without making yourself look like one too. Perfectly sensible Tories like Mark Harper made that mistake, undermining his own government's policies. It also leads to people like IDS siding with criminals.
Woke has had next to zero impact on most people's lives. Legal immigration is a material issue, not illegal immigration. Net Zero is the only path to growth for the UK, not protecting 20th century technologies and special interests. Cheap, secure British Energy for the British Economy.
If the Tories engage in the kind of paranoid culture battles you suggest, they'll just lose even more votes to Reform (the real deal) or the Lib Dems (the sensible alternative).
Does 'woke' impact peoples lives? Perhaps not a lot so far. But the desecration of our universities will certainly do so in the long term.
Affects my blood pressure having to listen to the tossers.
Woke is responsible for the pressure on the NHS. Millions of Daily Mail readers pushed to the edge of a heart attack by rainbow lanyards and vegan sausage rolls.
I will not mention "venison" as it upsets one of our esteemed posters.
@MichaelDnes1 It’s a truth universally acknowledged that road pricing is political suicide.
But what if it wasn’t? And what if I knew people who’d almost proved it?
Come with me, and try to avoid losing a trillion dollars as we go.🧵
Interesting thread. TLDR is - bring in road pricing on vehicles registered from a point in the future onwards and people won't complain. But, now is the time to act. Soon it will be too late not impose road pricing on existing vehicles and that will be unpopular.
I have to say, I'm not sure it would be accepted just like that, but it would certainly have a better chance than getting to 2028 and going "oh, what are we going to do?"
Thinking that road pricing on future vehicles isn’t political suicide is interesting.
That seems to assume that existing car owners can’t conceive of needing a new(er) car sometime in the near future.
If nothing else, it would crash the car market in interesting ways.
As to events locally, Sir Stephen Timms was safely returned in East Ham but lost a third of his vote share. There are some obvious parallels with 2005 though this is slightly worse than that for Timms.
Tahir Mirza of the Newham Independents got 18% and came in second (the Respect candidate in 2005 got 21%). The other big winner was the Greens who came third quadrupling their vote share despite doing nothing in the constituency and I'm sure they will be second next time and will be starting to challenge at Council level. The Conservative was fourth with 10% - their worst result since the constituency was re-created in 1997.
Reform, the Liberal Democrats and both Independents all lost their deposits and turnout slumped from 66% to 48%. Having enjoyed majorities of over 30,000, Timms now has less than 13,000 in hand.
A similar result in West Ham & Beckton with James Asser getting home by 9,250 with his vote share falling from 70% to 45%. Sophia Naqvi for the Newham Independents got 20% but I know the Newham Independents put a lot more effort into this seat than East Ham and I think they may just have hit the glass ceiling of pro-Palestine support. The Greens were again third going from 2.5% to 11% and now look the principal opposition to Labour in the future. The Conservative got 10% in fourth but Reform did better polling 8% in fifth - the constituency has a larger WWC element down around Silvertown and the Docks than East Ham.
In Stratford & Bow, the Greens put in the work and finished second as Labour fell from 70% to 44%. The Conservative vote halved and their candidate finished fourth behind the Workers' Party. The Greens went from 4% to 17%.
Looking to the 2026 locals, I suspect the Greens will be targeting Labour votes across the borough - whether the Newham Independents will be as strong a force by then I've no clue. Only Timms got above 50% so it could well be we'll see a midterm collapse in Labour support at Council level from which the Greens look set to be the main beneficiaries.
My cursory analysis shows that the Green vote rose significantly in safe Labour seats, which is one reason why the overall Labour share was lower than expectations.
However, the same analysis shows that the Green vote did not rise much, if at all, in the marginal seats won by Labour or the Lib Dems. Take Lewes, for example. Quite a lot of Greens around there, but the Green vote was only 3.5%, up by only 0.6% from 2019.
I don’t quite know how to make this point, but it’s a serious one. Liz Truss generally comes across to me as a bit childish, lacking the kind of seriousness or gravitas you would normally expect. It seems to be a disease that has infected some on the right. They seem to want to shock and provoke rather than effect change. It’s a subtle thing, but they’re a long way from the kind of intellectual heft that sat behind the Thatcherite revolution.
Not just Truss. The British right loved Beano Boris, and grumily tolerated May and Sunak, who at least tried to be responsible national leaders. Or see the Spectator; yes it sells by the truckload but that's in part because it's given up on being a serious journal of right wing thinking and is now almost entirely there to make people think "OMG what are they going to say now?" Which is an excellent sales strategy, but a terrible way to run a country.
Let us hope that Boring Old PM Starmer can Make Britain Boring Again.
May I join in the chorus.
Reform Uk is the Party of childish politics, of wishful thinking. Farage is an essentially unserious politician, in it for the laughs.
True to an extent but Farage did bring Brexit and should not be underestimated
A careful reading of their manifesto shows us that underestimating him his impossible. It was the worst policy platform of any party and would see the economy curl up and die. Surprised fewer people talked about it, but therein lies the truth. Farage is a wrecking ball, not a builder. You vote for him if you prefer a pile of rubble over what we have now.
I have no doubt you are correct, but the rise of Reform and the right in Europe is not something easily dismissed
I have no regrets voting for Labour and think Starmer will do a decent job. I am impressed with the emphasis on honesty and integrity, after the Boris era. But I think the assumption that everything is now 'back to normal' is quite severely mistaken.
I do think that the greatest threat to democracy is not the Reform party but the dismissal and ostracisation of the Reform party. They should be able to represent their voters on things like 'woke' , 'immigration', 'net zero' , 'low traffic zones' without being slandered or defamed because amongst all the misinformation on every point there is something of value which Labour should take in to account. The 'woke' stuff has gone way too far. Illegal immigration is a massive problem and the asylum system is a failure. Net Zero imposes costs on working people which are too casually shrugged off. If the governing party can take this in to account then it defuses the threat from the reform party. If it goes full on culture war against the 'far right' as many of its MP's/members/supporters would like then it just perpetuates the polarisation and appeal of the Reform party.
You can't converse with conspiracy theorists without making yourself look like one too. Perfectly sensible Tories like Mark Harper made that mistake, undermining his own government's policies. It also leads to people like IDS siding with criminals.
Woke has had next to zero impact on most people's lives. Legal immigration is a material issue, not illegal immigration. Net Zero is the only path to growth for the UK, not protecting 20th century technologies and special interests. Cheap, secure British Energy for the British Economy.
If the Tories engage in the kind of paranoid culture battles you suggest, they'll just lose even more votes to Reform (the real deal) or the Lib Dems (the sensible alternative).
Does 'woke' impact peoples lives? Perhaps not a lot so far. But the desecration of our universities will certainly do so in the long term.
Affects my blood pressure having to listen to the tossers.
Woke is responsible for the pressure on the NHS. Millions of Daily Mail readers pushed to the edge of a heart attack by rainbow lanyards and vegan sausage rolls.
I will not mention "venison" as it upsets one of our esteemed posters.
Centrists here of both Tory and Libdem persuasion are still having more vapours about Farage winning five seats compared with Labours 400 odd I see.
I guess when you have had a monopoly of the right wing in parliament since the 1661 general election, a rival party of the right breaking through the first past the post wall and winning five seats as well as knocking you into third place in a lot of seats you held until this week is going to seem a bit existensial.
They do not like it.
Labour + Green + SDLP + WPB + Plaid + SNP (33.7% + 6.7% + 0.7% + 0.7% + 0.3% + 2.5) = 44.6%
I know the LDs/Alliance really really really want to count all their 12.6% of voters to the Left-wing block, but they're not. If I was being really generous I'd give them 60% of them and 40% to the Right-wing block. That'd still get you to only 51.1% v 44.2%, and that's on a reduced turnout where many Tories stayed at home.
Point is the country is still split into two-voter blocks. And there's not an awful lot between them, save the mathematics of FPTP, which computed into the landslide.
A lot can change quickly.
Reform aren't a right-wing bloc party, sorry. They compete against Tories and promise magic money tree for the NHS.
It's because Casino is thinking of the culture war, not economics (although resists the logic therein of putting the LibDems firmly on the left, because it would upset his sums). Economically, Reform voters and some of the MPs will be firmly left - the irony is that they're led by free-market libertarians like Farage and Tice.
Are Farage and Tice really free-market libertarians? I think I might fit that description but I'm a long way from them.
Free market, yes. Authoritarian on social issues.
I guess its hard to really put a sensible tag on economic policies that are so far from being sensible. They're like a more extreme version of Truss - and I disliked her not so much for the individual policies as the fact that she had no idea as to how the overall picture might work.
Centrists here of both Tory and Libdem persuasion are still having more vapours about Farage winning five seats compared with Labours 400 odd I see.
I guess when you have had a monopoly of the right wing in parliament since the 1661 general election, a rival party of the right breaking through the first past the post wall and winning five seats as well as knocking you into third place in a lot of seats you held until this week is going to seem a bit existensial.
They do not like it.
Labour + Green + SDLP + WPB + Plaid + SNP (33.7% + 6.7% + 0.7% + 0.7% + 0.3% + 2.5) = 44.6%
I know the LDs/Alliance really really really want to count all their 12.6% of voters to the Left-wing block, but they're not. If I was being really generous I'd give them 60% of them and 40% to the Right-wing block. That'd still get you to only 51.1% v 44.2%, and that's on a reduced turnout where many Tories stayed at home.
Point is the country is still split into two-voter blocks. And there's not an awful lot between them, save the mathematics of FPTP, which computed into the landslide.
A lot can change quickly.
Reform aren't a right-wing bloc party, sorry. They compete against Tories and promise magic money tree for the NHS.
In some ways they are the anti-establishment mirror of the SNP.
Both parties argue that their constituents’ needs cannot be met within the current Westminster setup. SNP from the left(ish), Reform from the right.
One says independence is the solution, the other says - what? The Nietschian superman I suppose.
So you can’t group either into blocs with others because they are constitutionally set apart.
Plaid, not so much. More like SDLP, for now.
You can group them in in terms of whom they would support in government. So right now in mid 2024, the LDs would support a Labour-led government but almost certainly not a Conservative one. Reform would probably be the opposite way around. SNP would probably find it slightly tricky to support Labour but would never, ever support the Tories.
Casino is missing the point to a certain extent when he tries to split the Lib Dems down a 60-40 line and use that to keep them out of the left bloc. The Lib Dems would, in a hung parliament, have elevated Starmer with zero hesitation. He's right in that this reality can change but there's no sign of that any time soon.
Except they’ll be opposing them on quite a lot of stuff in this parliament, and they were part of a coalition with the Tories a decade back.
All Casino is effectively saying is that FPTP is the way it should be. That’s a circular argument, not one of principle.
Yes, the LDs coalitioned with the Tories in 2010. It's that experience that means they are fairly unlikely to repeat it any time soon! Of course the LDs will be opposing Labour at some points in this parliament, and if Labour start to do really badly in the eyes of LDs then you WILL see that drift away. Casino is right in implying the mutability of such support. But that future is undecided. Right now, the LD position on Labour v Tory is extremely clear, and will remain so until such a time that Labour or the Tories change. The likelier outcome, in my view, is that the LDs will still be on the Labour side of the fence come the next election.
LibDems won't like the way Labour goes about things, with civil liberties and centralism likely to be the dividing lines (noting that Labour has endorsed decentralisation in opposition, but time will tell), but it's hard to see what Labour might do that the LibDems would absolutely hate, like so much of the old government's policy?
@MichaelDnes1 It’s a truth universally acknowledged that road pricing is political suicide.
But what if it wasn’t? And what if I knew people who’d almost proved it?
Come with me, and try to avoid losing a trillion dollars as we go.🧵
Interesting thread. TLDR is - bring in road pricing on vehicles registered from a point in the future onwards and people won't complain. But, now is the time to act. Soon it will be too late not impose road pricing on existing vehicles and that will be unpopular.
I have to say, I'm not sure it would be accepted just like that, but it would certainly have a better chance than getting to 2028 and going "oh, what are we going to do?"
Centrists here of both Tory and Libdem persuasion are still having more vapours about Farage winning five seats compared with Labours 400 odd I see.
I guess when you have had a monopoly of the right wing in parliament since the 1661 general election, a rival party of the right breaking through the first past the post wall and winning five seats as well as knocking you into third place in a lot of seats you held until this week is going to seem a bit existensial.
They do not like it.
Labour + Green + SDLP + WPB + Plaid + SNP (33.7% + 6.7% + 0.7% + 0.7% + 0.3% + 2.5) = 44.6%
I know the LDs/Alliance really really really want to count all their 12.6% of voters to the Left-wing block, but they're not. If I was being really generous I'd give them 60% of them and 40% to the Right-wing block. That'd still get you to only 51.1% v 44.2%, and that's on a reduced turnout where many Tories stayed at home.
Point is the country is still split into two-voter blocks. And there's not an awful lot between them, save the mathematics of FPTP, which computed into the landslide.
A lot can change quickly.
The important numbers are 121 and 411. The Conservatives need to get to 300 seats or so to form the next government even if they can get into a coalition with Reform. Meanwhile Labour have an issuance policy of a coalition with the Lib Dems if their seat count is drastically cut.
That conventional thinking is quite wrong, as shown last week. Winning an extra 200 seats is not 200 times as difficult as winning one. We are not liberating Europe from the Nazis one village at a time. Seats are fought in parallel, not in series.
And talk of a Labour LibDem coalition forgets 2010 to 2015. Why should the LibDems want to repeat the circumstances of their demise? Why should Labour be interested in the Tories' little helpers?
All the history suggests that the LibDems prosper when Labour does. They kind of need each other. But its friends with benefits, not partnership, territory.
Centrists here of both Tory and Libdem persuasion are still having more vapours about Farage winning five seats compared with Labours 400 odd I see.
I guess when you have had a monopoly of the right wing in parliament since the 1661 general election, a rival party of the right breaking through the first past the post wall and winning five seats as well as knocking you into third place in a lot of seats you held until this week is going to seem a bit existensial.
They do not like it.
Labour + Green + SDLP + WPB + Plaid + SNP (33.7% + 6.7% + 0.7% + 0.7% + 0.3% + 2.5) = 44.6%
I know the LDs/Alliance really really really want to count all their 12.6% of voters to the Left-wing block, but they're not. If I was being really generous I'd give them 60% of them and 40% to the Right-wing block. That'd still get you to only 51.1% v 44.2%, and that's on a reduced turnout where many Tories stayed at home.
Point is the country is still split into two-voter blocks. And there's not an awful lot between them, save the mathematics of FPTP, which computed into the landslide.
A lot can change quickly.
Reform aren't a right-wing bloc party, sorry. They compete against Tories and promise magic money tree for the NHS.
It's because Casino is thinking of the culture war, not economics (although resists the logic therein of putting the LibDems firmly on the left, because it would upset his sums). Economically, Reform voters and some of the MPs will be firmly left - the irony is that they're led by free-market libertarians like Farage and Tice.
Are Farage and Tice really free-market libertarians? I think I might fit that description but I'm a long way from them.
Free market, yes. Authoritarian on social issues.
I expect Farage and Tice are only 'free market' when it comes to increasing profits and cutting taxes (on themselves).
As we have seen many of the loudest supporters of 'free markets' are happy to nationalise the losses when things go badly.
Starmer's GOATs are a welcome move of looking 'serious'.
Tories need to welcome back Gauke and co asap rather than head off to the fringes with Braverman.
Sadly I don't think they will.
Starmer's GOATS appointments smack too much of gimmicks, and will doubtless annoy or disappoint backbenchers who regard themselves, rightly or wrongly, as at least as talented and more deserving than Blairite retreads and the Covid bloke. It stores up trouble for the future, although to be cynical, Starmer will be ready to take his bus pass by the next election.
Most Labour backbenchers are currently just glad - and rather surprised - to even be backbenchers.
Comments
It is very revealing that the green party get a free pass. They just actually seem to get humoured, like they are idealistic children, only now they run Council's and have MP's. The disparity with how the reform party are treated is massive and unfortunately revealing of a deep cultural bias.
On the other hand the SNP sit in a different box altogether. You can’t lump them in with Labour when they are their chief rivals.
Back from an election week spent on the Isle of Man. Now, I'm sure @Leon has been from Point of Aire to the Calf of Man but it was my first visit.
It's a curious place - all the trappings of modernity are there and yet Douglas feels like it's still in the 1970s - the bookies open fromn 10am to 6.30pm only. Friday was Tynwald Day, a public holiday, and the majority of shops and Government buildings closed.
"Quaint" wouldn't be the correct word but it's the nearest I can get to. I'm sure @Sunil_Prasannan has covered these but the steam railway to Port Erin, the Manx Electric Railway to Ramsey and the Snaefell Mountain Railway are delightful if not easy on the behind (wooden benches). The buses are German, comfortable and dare one say it, equally teutonic in their punctuality.
And yet, Douglas is quiet at night - the old fashioned hotels and b&bs along the Promenade cater for their guests with carvery restaurants and lounges and the (mostly) older clientele seem to prefer to stay put rather than venture out. They get cruise ships - Celebrity Silhouette called in with its 2000 passengers and the town got noticeably busier. There are some very good places to eat though the prices aren't far off London which again might explain why the hotels do so well.
I'll leave the tourist reports to others.
One of the others I know of is a public sector worker who graduated not long ago.
Your sneering attitude to millions of voters crystallises the reason why Reform came third in this election, votes wise, half a million ahead of the lib dems.
Also, just enough of the nutters survived in the Tory Party to ensure that the crazy circus carries on even longer. We have seen parties suffer a catastrophic drop in support and spend some time rebuilding before being competitive again. That is the Tories most likely scenario. Can't rule out another oscillation in 2029 that sees them sweep back - in today's politics everything is possible.
But the other scenario is to copy the Liberals a century ago. A crushing defeat followed by division, infighting and absolute self-destructive idiocy. Leading to another hammering into an even smaller total in the elections that follow. 121 may prove to be an impossible target in the next election...
This is where Labour need to act first. Don’t allow a vacuum to develop. They can help to shift the Overton window if they have a good first month or two. And when I say shift the window, I don’t mean necessarily leftward but rather away from gesture politics and towards competence-based politics.
FPTP keeps a party out until it reaches a critical mass and has now ensured that Farage only has his most able leiutenants in Parliament, with five years to professionalise the party.
PR enthusiasts should be careful what they wish for.
The evidence of this election is that it’s a lot more complicated than that.
There’s not a lot, other than the artificial constraints of FPTP, which makes for only two tribes,
International Cricket and very some interesting / innovative community development back in the 1970s / 1980s.
I fully expect Farage to tack leftwards on that in the next Parliament to shut that attack line down.
Fuck Business.
You may consider that to be a throw away line from Boris, but it neatly summarised the policy agenda of Tory government over the last decade.
If the Tories can step away from knee-jerk populism aimed at voters who don't understand economics, and go back to a sound economic base which will be a popular sell to those voters, it can recover. And would *deserve* to recover. So much of why this country is so broken is because we have had a government who implemented a fuck business agenda.
Borrow. Invest. Gain a return on the investment. Grow. Employ. Tax revenues increase. People have cash to spend. Feel good is tangible and our communities aren't shuttered and crumbling.
Whither capitalism?
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2024/06/08/london-falling-the-capital-and-the-election/
I put a few London bets on a month ago as follows:
Harrow East – CON 9/4
Ruislip, Northwood & Pinner – CON 4/5
Bromley & Biggin Hill – CON 11/8
Croydon East – CON 10/1
Croydon South – CON 2/1
Sutton & Cheam – LD 11/10
Romford – CON 6/4
I make that six out of seven - Croydon East always a bit of a long shot. Total return to a 1 point stake - 15.1 points so essentially backing a 14/1 winner but I'll take that all day every day.
The outcome of this election may have been foretold, but that makes it no less momentous. This is a dazzling achievement by Sir Keir, the more so for being such a vindication of a strategy that very few people outside a tight circle of friends and allies ever completely trusted.
It is true that Sir Keir has had a large number of assists from the Tories, but he wouldn’t have won this scale of majority without the drive to turn his party into an electable alternative to Conservative rule. This makes it a highly personal triumph. This victory magnifies his authority over Labour and the government will not have much to fear from opposition parties anytime soon.
This regime change is being greeted with enthusiasm in Whitehall, not so much for reasons of ideological sympathy, but because it is more professionally satisfying for civil servants to work for a stable government with a sense of direction allied to the power to get stuff done.
The euphoria is tempered by trepidation. Sue Gray, Sir Keir’s chief of staff, has a “shit list” of emergencies that could erupt during the infancy of this government, ranging from universities and more councils going bankrupt to a full-blown crisis in prisons. Government debt relative to output is at its largest in 60 years. Taxes as a proportion of GDP are heading towards the highest level since 1948. At the same time, critical public services are either on their knees or on the floor.
This was a revenge election in which voters expressed visceral loathing for the Tories much more evidently than they did any love for Labour. Sir Keir is at Number 10 on the back of a vote share that fell short of 34%. There’s never been a lower score for a majority-winning party since 1832. So while the victory looks commanding, the mandate feels brittle. Sir Keir sits atop a skyscraper majority, but its foundations are built on clay. The answer to that is not easy, but it is obvious. Sir Keir will have to set about earning this majority by using it to deliver.
He has astonished all those in his own party and beyond it who were once so sceptical that he was the man to take Labour back into power. Now he must confound the many doubters already noisily questioning whether his government will be equal to the towering challenges that have become Labour’s responsibility.
Now unless we want to turn away all refugees through the schemes we have for places like Hong Kong and Ukraine, and all people arriving and making asylum claims with completely legitimate reasons, then we are going to almost certainly have migration north of 100,000 per year indefinitely. Maybe somewhere in the 200,000 - 300,000 region assuming we still want other types of migrants for high-skill jobs, academic studies, etc.
So once we arrive at a necessary and unavoidable level of migration we basically need to ask one question. Where is everyone going to live and how much stuff do we need to build for them? That's the thing that we need to work on to make immigration work. Keep building at a much faster rate and we will at least make immigration sustainable and less of a resource problem.
Tories need to welcome back Gauke and co asap rather than head off to the fringes with Braverman.
Sadly I don't think they will.
Should havemassive sheds full of immigration staff processing them in a couple of days, then ship out the illegals etc immediately.
Both parties argue that their constituents’ needs cannot be met within the current Westminster setup. SNP from the left(ish) and independence perspective, Reform from the right.
One says independence is the solution, the other says - what? The Nietschian superman I suppose.
So you can’t group either into blocs with others because they are constitutionally set apart. But you can group many Reform voters into a potential pool with the Tories.
Plaid, not so much. More like SDLP, for now.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/10/observer-view-michelle-donolan-false-allegations
His policy if moving to a French type system is excellent in principle.
However in practice I fear it would degenerate into a US style system in short order as Britain seems institutionally incapable of avoiding extremes (as anyone who has been to a private equity owned chain vet (now most of them) will testify.
Hence most will opt for a communist health service until such time as it irretrievably implodes.
Personally I expect little change but a continuing drift to employer funded private health insurance and pressure building for fees for such to be tax deductable as they are in the rest of the world.
1) In a democracy you should get what you vote for. Every vote should count equally. As a matter of principle it is an aberation that Reform won so many votes and so few seats
2) The best way to defeat any extreme is to expose it to scrutiny. Reform won 4.1m votes - 14.3%. If it has won 93 seats instead of 5 it would not have been a force at the next election. So many of those additional MPs would have been catastrophic for Reform. So many crazy people with appalling ideas and disgusting opinions. With them in the Commons we would have examined Faragism, been repelled by it and seen it off. Instead it continues to fester away in society.
That's not to say their policies were sensible. But I liked the honesty.
Its a good job you can take a good photo otherwise your remaining skills would leave you in a bit of a pickle.
I think the Tories have options. I don't know which they will choose. At one end they could try the full Matthew Goodwin patriotic/social democratic realignment or alternatively revert to a sort of George Osborne win back those wealthier seats. Or something in the middle. It isn't that obvious. Not least because we don't really know what Starmer is likely to be and where he will likely make himself vulnerable. There will also be events, dear boy, events......
Blair it appears has been writing in the Sunday Times that if you want to deal with Reform, get control of migration. Pretty obvious but I'm amazed at the number of people who think right wing populism is just some irrational spasm that's come out of nowhere. It's a result of countries losing control of their borders and struggling to maintain internal unity as a result of multiculturalism.
The 4 million people who voted for these fascists are largely uneducated, lazy, xenophobic, bigoted and not willing to take any personal responsibility. Instead Farage has used these people (by telling these folk it’s the immigrants that are the issue; nothing to do with how lazy and thick they are) to further his political aims.
My government will restore politics as a force for good.
Let's get started.
https://x.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1809876856419561483
Taking my subject of the morning, the Green Party, as an obvious example, how many Green voters are actually left-leaning? You just have to look at the four seats they actually won - two urban cores, two very rural - to appreciate that the party is both viewed as authentic (the commonality between its voters in both locations will doubtless be a strong interest in the environment, and the voters will believe the Greens care about this,) and yet, at the same time, can present two faces.
The Trotskyite trans activist-green voters of Bristol and the Love Your Weekend with Alan Titchmarsh-green voters of North Herefordshire would doubtless disagree on rather a lot if they were forced to pit their interests against one another, but the Greens are a small insurgent party in no danger of coming to power, so the potential for conflict simply doesn't arise. It doesn't matter if you're fiscally dry or a tax and spend socialist, all that's really important is caring about the world not being consumed by fire and that all the little birds, bees and cute fluffy animals should live. Most people can agree on this.
Tahir Mirza of the Newham Independents got 18% and came in second (the Respect candidate in 2005 got 21%). The other big winner was the Greens who came third quadrupling their vote share despite doing nothing in the constituency and I'm sure they will be second next time and will be starting to challenge at Council level. The Conservative was fourth with 10% - their worst result since the constituency was re-created in 1997.
Reform, the Liberal Democrats and both Independents all lost their deposits and turnout slumped from 66% to 48%. Having enjoyed majorities of over 30,000, Timms now has less than 13,000 in hand.
A similar result in West Ham & Beckton with James Asser getting home by 9,250 with his vote share falling from 70% to 45%. Sophia Naqvi for the Newham Independents got 20% but I know the Newham Independents put a lot more effort into this seat than East Ham and I think they may just have hit the glass ceiling of pro-Palestine support. The Greens were again third going from 2.5% to 11% and now look the principal opposition to Labour in the future. The Conservative got 10% in fourth but Reform did better polling 8% in fifth - the constituency has a larger WWC element down around Silvertown and the Docks than East Ham.
In Stratford & Bow, the Greens put in the work and finished second as Labour fell from 70% to 44%. The Conservative vote halved and their candidate finished fourth behind the Workers' Party. The Greens went from 4% to 17%.
Looking to the 2026 locals, I suspect the Greens will be targeting Labour votes across the borough - whether the Newham Independents will be as strong a force by then I've no clue. Only Timms got above 50% so it could well be we'll see a midterm collapse in Labour support at Council level from which the Greens look set to be the main beneficiaries.
Business comes in a multitude of types.
The business I work for invests and trains and produces and exports.
The businesses which are sucking the life out of Morrisons, Asda and some of the utilities are very different.
I'm not sure that the Conservatives understand the difference or if they do would not prefer the second type.
Michelle Mone, after all, is also in business.
…in the scattering of tiny golden stone hamlets that make up St Vincent des Pres, 71250.
i do think the post election 'not that bad' talk from some Tories is misjudged.
1 A record low number of seats.
2 Big names very contaminated
3 Apparent refusal on some parts to recognise the last few years were a clown show
4 Libdems now free to target a whole load more blue wall seats
5 Membership propensity to elect a flag waving dud
6 Lost young people and govt have the wherewithal for the sort of planning reform that Cummings knew the Tories needed but failed to do
7 Starmer looks like a capable administrator to me (time will tell)
8 Misogyny a very bad look- Rayner, comments on the dress sense of new cabinet and Sunaks wife. People notice.
9 Outflanked on the right with The Four Roubles now in parliament. Suspect the ECHR wont be much of an issue as if you do not create mad policy you tend not to bash up against it.
10 Immigration likely to be addressed by wide-scale European coordinated response over the next few years. Not by war with France etc.
11 Covid procurement issues may come to light.
I think Iain Martins analysis about this being a significant leftward shift is bang on - but i do not see much evidence of that having been taken onboard. Early days I suppose.
All Casino is effectively saying is that FPTP is the way it should be.
That’s a circular argument, not one of principle.
@MichaelDnes1
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that road pricing is political suicide.
But what if it wasn’t? And what if I knew people who’d almost proved it?
Come with me, and try to avoid losing a trillion dollars as we go.🧵
Interesting thread. TLDR is - bring in road pricing on vehicles registered from a point in the future onwards and people won't complain. But, now is the time to act. Soon it will be too late not impose road pricing on existing vehicles and that will be unpopular.
I have to say, I'm not sure it would be accepted just like that, but it would certainly have a better chance than getting to 2028 and going "oh, what are we going to do?"
He's therefore eligible for one already.
And talk of a Labour LibDem coalition forgets 2010 to 2015. Why should the LibDems want to repeat the circumstances of their demise? Why should Labour be interested in the Tories' little helpers?
Yet, we already know that most Reform voters wouldn't have voted Tory. Farage admitted he couldn't "deliver" them before the election, and polling for the last two years has consistently showed that most weren't keen on the Tories.
In fact, if this polling from the day after the election is correct, given the extremely efficient Lab/LD/Green tactical voting, then no Reform may have been a bad thing for the Tories.
https://x.com/LukeTryl/status/1809270711619395945
Many of the economic migrants I have worked with have backstories that could amount to an asylum claim. My wife might well have been able to make an asylum claim, for example.
It is much easier to get into work via the economic migration route. Asylum claiming is a last resort.
There would also be competition between candidates of the same party. You wouldn't be stuck with whoever your local party chooses as their sole candidate.
In a sense, they're a hostage to fortune, because they're seen as semi-independent and if they get fed up and stomp off, you get a bad publicity hit.
That seems to assume that existing car owners can’t conceive of needing a new(er) car sometime in the near future.
If nothing else, it would crash the car market in interesting ways.
However, the same analysis shows that the Green vote did not rise much, if at all, in the marginal seats won by Labour or the Lib Dems. Take Lewes, for example. Quite a lot of Greens around there, but the Green vote was only 3.5%, up by only 0.6% from 2019.
https://x.com/MichaelDnes1/status/1809853448097010154
PhD and 3 post-docs and only has 6 papers. No wonder he is unemployed with such poor academic output.
As we have seen many of the loudest supporters of 'free markets' are happy to nationalise the losses when things go badly.