I find it difficult to see a return to Osborne -style austerity - as favoured by Hunt and Sunak - being popular in electoral terms. The markets are likely to calm down but the impact on household budgets and public services is unlikely to be helpful to the Tories after 12 years in office - particularly when combined with the effects of tighter monetary policies via higher interest rates feeding through to very substantial jumps in mortgage repayments.
All true but there is also the fact that the public has been educated to the dangers of increasing the deficit. That will make it very difficult for Starmer to promise large increases in public expenditure because the funding will have to be genuinely realistic now even during an election campaign.
In my opinion here is only one area of relatively pain free expenditure savings and boosting of living standards and that is watering down or abandoning Net Zero. I'm not sure any of the major parties are up for that (yet). Unfortunately the current Net Zero Plans look certain to fail so will have to be changed drastically but that will probably only happen when things really hit the fan in a couple of years.
I mentioned last week that my boiler was bust. Had a new one installed this week at a cost of 2.5k. More than I was expecting. Of course there was an additional 20% VAT on top. Now I'm told that new boilers are 90%+ efficient whereas old ones are 50-60%. That's a big difference in terms of gas usage.
Now of course I am biased but wouldn't it have been worth the government considering a temporary removal on VAT for the installation of new boilers? Might that actually save money if they are then spending less subsidising peoples' bills? Funny how a right of centre government ends up resorting to the most statist policies.
NB. They’re only 90+% efficient if you run the radiators at a low enough temperature so that the return flow to the boiler is cold enough to trigger the condensation process in the boiler outflow (hence, condensing boilers...).
The return flow needs to be < 54℃ for this process to work, with progressively greater gains with lower temps.
Many boiler installers just whack the flow temp up to 80℃ and leave it there so that they don’t get call-backs from their customers because “the radiators don’t feel very hot”. It’s understandable to an extent: educating customers is not always easy & people want the familiar, which in this case is to be able to walk into a cold house, whack the heating on & have the radiators start blasting out heat ASAP. (I’ve even heard of one bunch of heat pump installers doing this to the flow from their heat pump installations: Madness!)
But the consequence is that all these expensive new boiler installations are running at 70% efficiency instead of 90+%.
I can't think I would want the temperature above 54C unless it was very cold outside. Wouldn't a small public information campaign be of some benefit here?
If Labour MPs had tried to take the membership vote away during the Corbyn era then you can guarantee Labour members would have started to deselect Labour MPs too.
I'm not sure this is the zinger you think it is...
The forthcoming Labour victory is going to rob us of even the remote possibility of electoral reform - which, amongst other things, would offer a solution to the problem of the impossible cohabitation between the small state libertarian and one nation Tories. They could split without triggering mutually assured destruction at the polls.
OT. Just listened to Lisa Nandy being interviewed in depth by Nick Robinson. I have to say she's a very impressive person and politician and not at all belonging in the box I'd put her in with Rayner and Long Bailey. An object lesson in not judging someone by the number of letters they drop. On the basis of that interview I reckon she'd make a formidable leader.
Quite a few of us voted for her in 2020.
Nice that you have realised that not all northerners are thick.
The Kwarteng chancellorship was a major Cambridge University fail. The crème brûlée and Great Court Run college in particular. Re-establish the monasteries and give them their assets back?
Creme Brulee is Caius, not arriviste Trinity Burnt Cream.
My apologies. What's the difference, or is it only the nomenclature?
Doesn't the idea come from Catalonia anyway?
Despite my possible faux pas, it's true that Kwasi Kwarteng was in the in crowd at both Eton and Trinity and he ballsed up the Chancellor job as nobody has ever ballsed it up before so fast. And he doesn't have the humility and charm of Eddie the Eagle. No way would he have been promoted so high if he'd gone to the school down the road or even a second division private boarding school somewhere, or if he'd gone to, well, probably any university apart from Oxford and Cambridge.
And we can't blame the Tory party's membership in this instance.
Top post. Eton and Cambridge must be deeply embarrassed to have turned out such a tone-deaf incompetent.
He was at Cambridge with Richard Burgon, I believe, who was in the next door college?
Do people now understand why so many Cambridge politicians have been passed over before now?
Which would be a valid argument if the Oxford ones who get in weren't just as useless.
The real apex of entitled and ignorant cretinism in the education system is neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but Eton College. The first action of an incoming Labour Government should be to whistle up a squadron of RAF Typhoons armed with precision guided bombs and reduce the whole place to a pile of smouldering rubble.
Truss went to a comprehensive not Eton. The only Tory major winners in the last 40 years went to Eton
OT. Just listened to Lisa Nandy being interviewed in depth by Nick Robinson. I have to say she's a very impressive person and politician and not at all belonging in the box I'd put her in with Rayner and Long Bailey. An object lesson in not judging someone by the number of letters they drop. On the basis of that interview I reckon she'd make a formidable leader.
I agree. The Truss being Figurehead Leader in Name Only just isn't going to hold up under the pressures of the next few weeks. The Tories might be able to indulge that fantasy for a little while, but all it takes is another PMQs or media round from Liz and it will all fall apart.
Let's have some stability now until the GE. Keep things as they are. Truss doing regular car-crash interviews and pressers, Hunt being the common sense technocrat calling the shots and applying Labour policies, preventing economic meltdown through a couple of bleak years of mild recession.
Then, when the polls have narrowed a bit or time has run out, the Tories can call a GE with a Truss-led campaign leading to electoral wipe-out.
Hunt takes over as LOTO and begins the long Tory Party rebuild process. If there's anything left to rebuild.
Sounds like the least worst outlook to me. Shit, but ultimately survivable.
There is zero chance Tory members will elect Hunt as Leader of the Opposition. At present if Truss and Hunt lead the Tories to heavy defeat, the membership will likely conclude she was not rightwing enough and elect Braverman as Leader of the Opposition to PM Starmer's government.
At best Hunt can be Mandelson to Truss' Brown and steady the ship
I can seen the Tory bigwigs scrapping the membership vote sooner or later. If it means a dwindling membership gifting the Left by selecting increasingly mad and unelectable leaders then what really is the point?
Then the Tory membership will start deselecting Tory MPs until they get ones who will give them a voice.
At the end of the day the voluntary party is as much a part of the party as the parliamentary party.
If Labour MPs had tried to take the membership vote away during the Corbyn era then you can guarantee Labour members would have started to deselect Labour MPs too.
Trying to ignore what the Tory core vote wants will also only boost Farage
You are seeking the destruction of the conservative party, while many of us are fighting against the likes of yourself, the ERG, and the appalling Farage to re- establish an electable centre ground conservative party
It is only a matter of time until you and your like are marginalised, just as the Corbyn faction have been
Hunt is the first positive for the party in months as is evident in the majority of posts on here
If the Tories lose the next election they will move further right, just as Labour moved further left after its 2010 loss
I think the markets are going to move back to a truss 2022 exit over the next few hrs.
Osborne coming up on C4 and the Sundays are gonna be brutal.
And kwazi’s decided to talk.
All bad for Truss.
Agreed. Buckle in.
Next week probably crucial. If they can reach a decision on a "coronation candidate" she's as good as gone by end of October.
Only thing that might save her is waiting for Hunt's statement to be over. But I suspect any coronation candidate will either have to commit to keeping Hunt in post, or if it actually is Hunt, briefing his replacement quite early doors (or engineering it so the handover of power happens after 31 October).
The Kwarteng chancellorship was a major Cambridge University fail. The crème brûlée and Great Court Run college in particular. Re-establish the monasteries and give them their assets back?
Creme Brulee is Caius, not arriviste Trinity Burnt Cream.
My apologies. What's the difference, or is it only the nomenclature?
Doesn't the idea come from Catalonia anyway?
Despite my possible faux pas, it's true that Kwasi Kwarteng was in the in crowd at both Eton and Trinity and he ballsed up the Chancellor job as nobody has ever ballsed it up before so fast. And he doesn't have the humility and charm of Eddie the Eagle. No way would he have been promoted so high if he'd gone to the school down the road or even a second division private boarding school somewhere, or if he'd gone to, well, probably any university apart from Oxford and Cambridge.
And we can't blame the Tory party's membership in this instance.
Top post. Eton and Cambridge must be deeply embarrassed to have turned out such a tone-deaf incompetent.
He was at Cambridge with Richard Burgon, I believe, who was in the next door college?
Do people now understand why so many Cambridge politicians have been passed over before now?
Which would be a valid argument if the Oxford ones who get in weren't just as useless.
The real apex of entitled and ignorant cretinism in the education system is neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but Eton College. The first action of an incoming Labour Government should be to whistle up a squadron of RAF Typhoons armed with precision guided bombs and reduce the whole place to a pile of smouldering rubble.
Revoke its charitable status and start taxing it. That will hurt more than the Typhoons...
That's reasonable. There's no reason why the private schooling sector should benefit from charitable tax breaks. It contributes nothing of value to wider society.
That charitable status helps it provide scholarships and bursaries and it also shares facilities with the local community
OT. Just listened to Lisa Nandy being interviewed in depth by Nick Robinson. I have to say she's a very impressive person and politician and not at all belonging in the box I'd put her in with Rayner and Long Bailey. An object lesson in not judging someone by the number of letters they drop. On the basis of that interview I reckon she'd make a formidable leader.
Quite a few of us voted for her in 2020.
Nice that you have realised that not all northerners are thick.
Nandy is a complete lightweight, had she been leading Labour not Starmer I doubt Labour would now be 25% ahead in the polls
If Labour MPs had tried to take the membership vote away during the Corbyn era then you can guarantee Labour members would have started to deselect Labour MPs too.
I'm not sure this is the zinger you think it is...
The forthcoming Labour victory is going to rob us of even the remote possibility of electoral reform - which, amongst other things, would offer a solution to the problem of the impossible cohabitation between the small state libertarian and one nation Tories. They could split without triggering mutually assured destruction at the polls.
PR really would be in almost everyone’s interest, including most Tories. Perhaps only the SNP are unambiguously helped by FPTP.
The Tory party is really 3 parties now: a vote-leave, authoritarian populist party epitomised by Baker, Patel, Braverman et al; a party of twatty libertarians of the Truss and Redwood tendency; and an Osborneist party of austerity and orthodoxy not dissimilar to the German CDU which straddles Brexit/remain but lacks much of a coherent vision of Britain. Better those 3 battle it out as separate parties and we see who is able to appeal to voters.
Imagine the joy of going down the polling booth on election day and voting for a party you actually believe in, knowing there’s a possibility they might actually have some influence in the next government.
The Kwarteng chancellorship was a major Cambridge University fail. The crème brûlée and Great Court Run college in particular. Re-establish the monasteries and give them their assets back?
Creme Brulee is Caius, not arriviste Trinity Burnt Cream.
My apologies. What's the difference, or is it only the nomenclature?
Doesn't the idea come from Catalonia anyway?
Despite my possible faux pas, it's true that Kwasi Kwarteng was in the in crowd at both Eton and Trinity and he ballsed up the Chancellor job as nobody has ever ballsed it up before so fast. And he doesn't have the humility and charm of Eddie the Eagle. No way would he have been promoted so high if he'd gone to the school down the road or even a second division private boarding school somewhere, or if he'd gone to, well, probably any university apart from Oxford and Cambridge.
And we can't blame the Tory party's membership in this instance.
Top post. Eton and Cambridge must be deeply embarrassed to have turned out such a tone-deaf incompetent.
He was at Cambridge with Richard Burgon, I believe, who was in the next door college?
Do people now understand why so many Cambridge politicians have been passed over before now?
Which would be a valid argument if the Oxford ones who get in weren't just as useless.
The real apex of entitled and ignorant cretinism in the education system is neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but Eton College. The first action of an incoming Labour Government should be to whistle up a squadron of RAF Typhoons armed with precision guided bombs and reduce the whole place to a pile of smouldering rubble.
Truss went to a comprehensive not Eton. The only Tory major winners in the last 40 years went to Eton
I mentioned last week that my boiler was bust. Had a new one installed this week at a cost of 2.5k. More than I was expecting. Of course there was an additional 20% VAT on top. Now I'm told that new boilers are 90%+ efficient whereas old ones are 50-60%. That's a big difference in terms of gas usage.
Now of course I am biased but wouldn't it have been worth the government considering a temporary removal on VAT for the installation of new boilers? Might that actually save money if they are then spending less subsidising peoples' bills? Funny how a right of centre government ends up resorting to the most statist policies.
NB. They’re only 90+% efficient if you run the radiators at a low enough temperature so that the return flow to the boiler is cold enough to trigger the condensation process in the boiler outflow (hence, condensing boilers...).
The return flow needs to be < 54℃ for this process to work, with progressively greater gains with lower temps.
Many boiler installers just whack the flow temp up to 80℃ and leave it there so that they don’t get call-backs from their customers because “the radiators don’t feel very hot”. It’s understandable to an extent: educating customers is not always easy & people want the familiar, which in this case is to be able to walk into a cold house, whack the heating on & have the radiators start blasting out heat ASAP. (I’ve even heard of one bunch of heat pump installers doing this to the flow from their heat pump installations: Madness!)
But the consequence is that all these expensive new boiler installations are running at 70% efficiency instead of 90+%.
I can't think I would want the temperature above 54C unless it was very cold outside. Wouldn't a small public information campaign be of some benefit here?
Probably but, as we know, the current government are dead set against ever even suggesting that people might choose to do things that are in their own interests. It’s against their principles or something.
(You want the return flow to be < 45℃ to get 90+% efficiency IIRC.)
If Labour MPs had tried to take the membership vote away during the Corbyn era then you can guarantee Labour members would have started to deselect Labour MPs too.
I'm not sure this is the zinger you think it is...
The forthcoming Labour victory is going to rob us of even the remote possibility of electoral reform - which, amongst other things, would offer a solution to the problem of the impossible cohabitation between the small state libertarian and one nation Tories. They could split without triggering mutually assured destruction at the polls.
PR really would be in almost everyone’s interest, including most Tories. Perhaps only the SNP are unambiguously helped by FPTP.
The Tory party is really 3 parties now: a vote-leave, authoritarian populist party epitomised by Baker, Patel, Braverman et al; a party of twatty libertarians of the Truss and Redwood tendency; and an Osborneist party of austerity and orthodoxy not dissimilar to the German CDU which straddles Brexit/remain but lacks much of a coherent vision of Britain. Better those 3 battle it out as separate parties and we see who is able to appeal to voters.
Imagine the joy of going down the polling booth on election day and voting for a party you actually believe in, knowing there’s a possibility they might actually have some influence in the next government.
Baker isn't an authoritarian, he is a libertarian who voted against most of the lockdown measures.
There is also the One Nation faction, Halfon, Tugendhat, Ellwood etc
I agree. The Truss being Figurehead Leader in Name Only just isn't going to hold up under the pressures of the next few weeks. The Tories might be able to indulge that fantasy for a little while, but all it takes is another PMQs or media round from Liz and it will all fall apart.
Let's have some stability now until the GE. Keep things as they are. Truss doing regular car-crash interviews and pressers, Hunt being the common sense technocrat calling the shots and applying Labour policies, preventing economic meltdown through a couple of bleak years of mild recession.
Then, when the polls have narrowed a bit or time has run out, the Tories can call a GE with a Truss-led campaign leading to electoral wipe-out.
Hunt takes over as LOTO and begins the long Tory Party rebuild process. If there's anything left to rebuild.
Sounds like the least worst outlook to me. Shit, but ultimately survivable.
There is zero chance Tory members will elect Hunt as Leader of the Opposition. At present if Truss and Hunt lead the Tories to heavy defeat, the membership will likely conclude she was not rightwing enough and elect Braverman as Leader of the Opposition to PM Starmer's government.
At best Hunt can be Mandelson to Truss' Brown and steady the ship
I can seen the Tory bigwigs scrapping the membership vote sooner or later. If it means a dwindling membership gifting the Left by selecting increasingly mad and unelectable leaders then what really is the point?
Then the Tory membership will start deselecting Tory MPs until they get ones who will give them a voice.
At the end of the day the voluntary party is as much a part of the party as the parliamentary party.
If Labour MPs had tried to take the membership vote away during the Corbyn era then you can guarantee Labour members would have started to deselect Labour MPs too.
Trying to ignore what the Tory core vote wants will also only boost Farage
You are seeking the destruction of the conservative party, while many of us are fighting against the likes of yourself, the ERG, and the appalling Farage to re- establish an electable centre ground conservative party
It is only a matter of time until you and your like are marginalised, just as the Corbyn faction have been
Hunt is the first positive for the party in months as is evident in the majority of posts on here
If the Tories lose the next election they will move further right, just as Labour moved further left after its 2010 loss
You are clinging on by your finger nails as your ERG and Farage loyalty slips into a marginalised faction
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
But BigG definitely isn't. During the Johnson/Hunt leadership contest it was a deal breaker for his vote.
Fox hunting is a long way outside the Chncellors remit though
I am implacably opposed to fox hunting but I really do not see this as an issue at this time
Because you know absolutely nothing about it.
There is not one person across our family who supports fox hunting
I support fox hunting.
How do you think packs of wild wolves hunt Moose in the Yukon? Or any other predator for that matter? Why is that inferior to snaring or shooting?
Hunting is perfectly natural. Rest is class warfare and absurd emotional sentimentality.
Riding dressed in hunting pinks on artificially bred horses and killing the neighbourhood cats with packs of artificially bred C. familiaris is natural?
I mentioned last week that my boiler was bust. Had a new one installed this week at a cost of 2.5k. More than I was expecting. Of course there was an additional 20% VAT on top. Now I'm told that new boilers are 90%+ efficient whereas old ones are 50-60%. That's a big difference in terms of gas usage.
Now of course I am biased but wouldn't it have been worth the government considering a temporary removal on VAT for the installation of new boilers? Might that actually save money if they are then spending less subsidising peoples' bills? Funny how a right of centre government ends up resorting to the most statist policies.
NB. They’re only 90+% efficient if you run the radiators at a low enough temperature so that the return flow to the boiler is cold enough to trigger the condensation process in the boiler outflow (hence, condensing boilers...).
The return flow needs to be < 54℃ for this process to work, with progressively greater gains with lower temps.
Many boiler installers just whack the flow temp up to 80℃ and leave it there so that they don’t get call-backs from their customers because “the radiators don’t feel very hot”. It’s understandable to an extent: educating customers is not always easy & people want the familiar, which in this case is to be able to walk into a cold house, whack the heating on & have the radiators start blasting out heat ASAP. (I’ve even heard of one bunch of heat pump installers doing this to the flow from their heat pump installations: Madness!)
But the consequence is that all these expensive new boiler installations are running at 70% efficiency instead of 90+%.
I can't think I would want the temperature above 54C unless it was very cold outside. Wouldn't a small public information campaign be of some benefit here?
Probably but, as we know, the current government are dead set against ever even suggesting that people might choose to do things that are in their own interests. It’s against their principles or something.
(You want the return flow to be < 45℃ to get 90+% efficiency IIRC.)
That was an extreme piece of cargo cult Thatcherism, which I hope to see reversed next week under The Jezziah PBUH.
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
With or without dogs?
Is this a trick question?
No. Fox hunting is still legal isn't it? As long as you don't use dogs. I was against the ban. But there are deer living near us and the local oiks try hunting them with their pitbull-type dogs. And I hate that.
So I decided I shouldn't support toffs hunting foxes with dogs either.
Well, in non American English hunting means, with dogs. Using rifles is called shooting. It kills 10x the foxes hunting ever did, with the availability of military grade night sight equipment, and because foxes have never learned to lick their wounds those which are shot but not killed die very slowly and horribly of gangrene. And foxhunting unlike say pheasant shooting was never the preserve of rich toffs.
Agree about the pitbull types though.
Something that I've wondered about this, maybe you lot can help, is - is killing more foxes necessarily better? Are foxes a natural predator of something that means there needs to be an amount of foxes in circulation to bump off the other thing? Obviously eg with deer the british environment needs to be managed in some sense and the argument for foxhunting was that it was a manner of managing things that had worked for a long time. If we were killing more foxes now, but with guns or slingshots or trebuchets, would there be another problem? Apols if word salad.
The Kwarteng chancellorship was a major Cambridge University fail. The crème brûlée and Great Court Run college in particular. Re-establish the monasteries and give them their assets back?
Creme Brulee is Caius, not arriviste Trinity Burnt Cream.
My apologies. What's the difference, or is it only the nomenclature?
Doesn't the idea come from Catalonia anyway?
Despite my possible faux pas, it's true that Kwasi Kwarteng was in the in crowd at both Eton and Trinity and he ballsed up the Chancellor job as nobody has ever ballsed it up before so fast. And he doesn't have the humility and charm of Eddie the Eagle. No way would he have been promoted so high if he'd gone to the school down the road or even a second division private boarding school somewhere, or if he'd gone to, well, probably any university apart from Oxford and Cambridge.
And we can't blame the Tory party's membership in this instance.
Top post. Eton and Cambridge must be deeply embarrassed to have turned out such a tone-deaf incompetent.
He was at Cambridge with Richard Burgon, I believe, who was in the next door college?
Do people now understand why so many Cambridge politicians have been passed over before now?
Which would be a valid argument if the Oxford ones who get in weren't just as useless.
The real apex of entitled and ignorant cretinism in the education system is neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but Eton College. The first action of an incoming Labour Government should be to whistle up a squadron of RAF Typhoons armed with precision guided bombs and reduce the whole place to a pile of smouldering rubble.
Revoke its charitable status and start taxing it. That will hurt more than the Typhoons...
That's reasonable. There's no reason why the private schooling sector should benefit from charitable tax breaks. It contributes nothing of value to wider society.
That charitable status helps it provide scholarships and bursaries and it also shares facilities with the local community
W@nkers in Waitrose pouring milk on the floor for someone else to clean up
It's a form of class warfare, though listening to plummy tones of vandals defacing public art and generating cleaning work for others, I suspect total ignorance of what working people do is a factor. At some point a politician will work out draconian sentences would be popular.
The Kwarteng chancellorship was a major Cambridge University fail. The crème brûlée and Great Court Run college in particular. Re-establish the monasteries and give them their assets back?
Creme Brulee is Caius, not arriviste Trinity Burnt Cream.
My apologies. What's the difference, or is it only the nomenclature?
Doesn't the idea come from Catalonia anyway?
Despite my possible faux pas, it's true that Kwasi Kwarteng was in the in crowd at both Eton and Trinity and he ballsed up the Chancellor job as nobody has ever ballsed it up before so fast. And he doesn't have the humility and charm of Eddie the Eagle. No way would he have been promoted so high if he'd gone to the school down the road or even a second division private boarding school somewhere, or if he'd gone to, well, probably any university apart from Oxford and Cambridge.
And we can't blame the Tory party's membership in this instance.
Top post. Eton and Cambridge must be deeply embarrassed to have turned out such a tone-deaf incompetent.
He was at Cambridge with Richard Burgon, I believe, who was in the next door college?
Do people now understand why so many Cambridge politicians have been passed over before now?
Which would be a valid argument if the Oxford ones who get in weren't just as useless.
The real apex of entitled and ignorant cretinism in the education system is neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but Eton College. The first action of an incoming Labour Government should be to whistle up a squadron of RAF Typhoons armed with precision guided bombs and reduce the whole place to a pile of smouldering rubble.
Truss went to a comprehensive not Eton. The only Tory major winners in the last 40 years went to Eton
Not the best recommendation
Thatch was at Eton? Her 1983 and 1987 wins were less than 40 years ago. Major's win in '92 was comparable to Cameron's in 2015. You've only had one "major" win other than Thatch in the last 40 years.
W@nkers in Waitrose pouring milk on the floor for someone else to clean up
It's a form of class warfare, though listening to plummy tones of vandals defacing public art and generating cleaning work for others, I suspect total ignorance of what working people do is a factor. At some point a politician will work out draconian sentences would be popular.
I agree. The Truss being Figurehead Leader in Name Only just isn't going to hold up under the pressures of the next few weeks. The Tories might be able to indulge that fantasy for a little while, but all it takes is another PMQs or media round from Liz and it will all fall apart.
Let's have some stability now until the GE. Keep things as they are. Truss doing regular car-crash interviews and pressers, Hunt being the common sense technocrat calling the shots and applying Labour policies, preventing economic meltdown through a couple of bleak years of mild recession.
Then, when the polls have narrowed a bit or time has run out, the Tories can call a GE with a Truss-led campaign leading to electoral wipe-out.
Hunt takes over as LOTO and begins the long Tory Party rebuild process. If there's anything left to rebuild.
Sounds like the least worst outlook to me. Shit, but ultimately survivable.
There is zero chance Tory members will elect Hunt as Leader of the Opposition. At present if Truss and Hunt lead the Tories to heavy defeat, the membership will likely conclude she was not rightwing enough and elect Braverman as Leader of the Opposition to PM Starmer's government.
At best Hunt can be Mandelson to Truss' Brown and steady the ship
I can seen the Tory bigwigs scrapping the membership vote sooner or later. If it means a dwindling membership gifting the Left by selecting increasingly mad and unelectable leaders then what really is the point?
Then the Tory membership will start deselecting Tory MPs until they get ones who will give them a voice.
At the end of the day the voluntary party is as much a part of the party as the parliamentary party.
If Labour MPs had tried to take the membership vote away during the Corbyn era then you can guarantee Labour members would have started to deselect Labour MPs too.
Trying to ignore what the Tory core vote wants will also only boost Farage
You are seeking the destruction of the conservative party, while many of us are fighting against the likes of yourself, the ERG, and the appalling Farage to re- establish an electable centre ground conservative party
It is only a matter of time until you and your like are marginalised, just as the Corbyn faction have been
Hunt is the first positive for the party in months as is evident in the majority of posts on here
If the Tories lose the next election they will move further right, just as Labour moved further left after its 2010 loss
You are clinging on by your finger nails as your ERG and Farage loyalty slips into a marginalised faction
It is still there and more reflects the mood of the membership than Hunt and after a general election defeat it is the party membership who will elect the new leader of the Opposition
The Kwarteng chancellorship was a major Cambridge University fail. The crème brûlée and Great Court Run college in particular. Re-establish the monasteries and give them their assets back?
Creme Brulee is Caius, not arriviste Trinity Burnt Cream.
My apologies. What's the difference, or is it only the nomenclature?
Doesn't the idea come from Catalonia anyway?
Despite my possible faux pas, it's true that Kwasi Kwarteng was in the in crowd at both Eton and Trinity and he ballsed up the Chancellor job as nobody has ever ballsed it up before so fast. And he doesn't have the humility and charm of Eddie the Eagle. No way would he have been promoted so high if he'd gone to the school down the road or even a second division private boarding school somewhere, or if he'd gone to, well, probably any university apart from Oxford and Cambridge.
And we can't blame the Tory party's membership in this instance.
Top post. Eton and Cambridge must be deeply embarrassed to have turned out such a tone-deaf incompetent.
He was at Cambridge with Richard Burgon, I believe, who was in the next door college?
Do people now understand why so many Cambridge politicians have been passed over before now?
Which would be a valid argument if the Oxford ones who get in weren't just as useless.
The real apex of entitled and ignorant cretinism in the education system is neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but Eton College. The first action of an incoming Labour Government should be to whistle up a squadron of RAF Typhoons armed with precision guided bombs and reduce the whole place to a pile of smouldering rubble.
Truss went to a comprehensive not Eton. The only Tory major winners in the last 40 years went to Eton
Not the best recommendation
Thatch was at Eton? Her 1983 and 1987 wins were less than 40 years ago. Major's win in '92 was comparable to Cameron's in 2015. You've only had one "major" win other than Thatch in the last 40 years.
30 years ago then, Cameron and Johnson are the only Tory majority winners since 1992, both Etonians
I agree. The Truss being Figurehead Leader in Name Only just isn't going to hold up under the pressures of the next few weeks. The Tories might be able to indulge that fantasy for a little while, but all it takes is another PMQs or media round from Liz and it will all fall apart.
Let's have some stability now until the GE. Keep things as they are. Truss doing regular car-crash interviews and pressers, Hunt being the common sense technocrat calling the shots and applying Labour policies, preventing economic meltdown through a couple of bleak years of mild recession.
Then, when the polls have narrowed a bit or time has run out, the Tories can call a GE with a Truss-led campaign leading to electoral wipe-out.
Hunt takes over as LOTO and begins the long Tory Party rebuild process. If there's anything left to rebuild.
Sounds like the least worst outlook to me. Shit, but ultimately survivable.
There is zero chance Tory members will elect Hunt as Leader of the Opposition. At present if Truss and Hunt lead the Tories to heavy defeat, the membership will likely conclude she was not rightwing enough and elect Braverman as Leader of the Opposition to PM Starmer's government.
At best Hunt can be Mandelson to Truss' Brown and steady the ship
I can seen the Tory bigwigs scrapping the membership vote sooner or later. If it means a dwindling membership gifting the Left by selecting increasingly mad and unelectable leaders then what really is the point?
Then the Tory membership will start deselecting Tory MPs until they get ones who will give them a voice.
At the end of the day the voluntary party is as much a part of the party as the parliamentary party.
If Labour MPs had tried to take the membership vote away during the Corbyn era then you can guarantee Labour members would have started to deselect Labour MPs too.
Trying to ignore what the Tory core vote wants will also only boost Farage
You are seeking the destruction of the conservative party, while many of us are fighting against the likes of yourself, the ERG, and the appalling Farage to re- establish an electable centre ground conservative party
It is only a matter of time until you and your like are marginalised, just as the Corbyn faction have been
Hunt is the first positive for the party in months as is evident in the majority of posts on here
If the Tories lose the next election they will move further right, just as Labour moved further left after its 2010 loss
You are clinging on by your finger nails as your ERG and Farage loyalty slips into a marginalised faction
It is still there and more reflects the mood of the membership than Hunt and after a general election defeat it is the party membership who will elect the new leader of the Opposition
I don't suppose the LDs or SNP members will be too keen to elect Ms Braverman or whoever as LOTO.
The Kwarteng chancellorship was a major Cambridge University fail. The crème brûlée and Great Court Run college in particular. Re-establish the monasteries and give them their assets back?
Creme Brulee is Caius, not arriviste Trinity Burnt Cream.
My apologies. What's the difference, or is it only the nomenclature?
Doesn't the idea come from Catalonia anyway?
Despite my possible faux pas, it's true that Kwasi Kwarteng was in the in crowd at both Eton and Trinity and he ballsed up the Chancellor job as nobody has ever ballsed it up before so fast. And he doesn't have the humility and charm of Eddie the Eagle. No way would he have been promoted so high if he'd gone to the school down the road or even a second division private boarding school somewhere, or if he'd gone to, well, probably any university apart from Oxford and Cambridge.
And we can't blame the Tory party's membership in this instance.
Top post. Eton and Cambridge must be deeply embarrassed to have turned out such a tone-deaf incompetent.
He was at Cambridge with Richard Burgon, I believe, who was in the next door college?
Do people now understand why so many Cambridge politicians have been passed over before now?
Which would be a valid argument if the Oxford ones who get in weren't just as useless.
The real apex of entitled and ignorant cretinism in the education system is neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but Eton College. The first action of an incoming Labour Government should be to whistle up a squadron of RAF Typhoons armed with precision guided bombs and reduce the whole place to a pile of smouldering rubble.
Truss went to a comprehensive not Eton. The only Tory major winners in the last 40 years went to Eton
Not the best recommendation
Thatch was at Eton? Her 1983 and 1987 wins were less than 40 years ago. Major's win in '92 was comparable to Cameron's in 2015. You've only had one "major" win other than Thatch in the last 40 years.
30 years ago then, Cameron and Johnson are the only Tory majority winners since 1992, both Etonians
I agree. The Truss being Figurehead Leader in Name Only just isn't going to hold up under the pressures of the next few weeks. The Tories might be able to indulge that fantasy for a little while, but all it takes is another PMQs or media round from Liz and it will all fall apart.
Let's have some stability now until the GE. Keep things as they are. Truss doing regular car-crash interviews and pressers, Hunt being the common sense technocrat calling the shots and applying Labour policies, preventing economic meltdown through a couple of bleak years of mild recession.
Then, when the polls have narrowed a bit or time has run out, the Tories can call a GE with a Truss-led campaign leading to electoral wipe-out.
Hunt takes over as LOTO and begins the long Tory Party rebuild process. If there's anything left to rebuild.
Sounds like the least worst outlook to me. Shit, but ultimately survivable.
There is zero chance Tory members will elect Hunt as Leader of the Opposition. At present if Truss and Hunt lead the Tories to heavy defeat, the membership will likely conclude she was not rightwing enough and elect Braverman as Leader of the Opposition to PM Starmer's government.
At best Hunt can be Mandelson to Truss' Brown and steady the ship
I can seen the Tory bigwigs scrapping the membership vote sooner or later. If it means a dwindling membership gifting the Left by selecting increasingly mad and unelectable leaders then what really is the point?
Then the Tory membership will start deselecting Tory MPs until they get ones who will give them a voice.
At the end of the day the voluntary party is as much a part of the party as the parliamentary party.
If Labour MPs had tried to take the membership vote away during the Corbyn era then you can guarantee Labour members would have started to deselect Labour MPs too.
Trying to ignore what the Tory core vote wants will also only boost Farage
You are seeking the destruction of the conservative party, while many of us are fighting against the likes of yourself, the ERG, and the appalling Farage to re- establish an electable centre ground conservative party
It is only a matter of time until you and your like are marginalised, just as the Corbyn faction have been
Hunt is the first positive for the party in months as is evident in the majority of posts on here
If the Tories lose the next election they will move further right, just as Labour moved further left after its 2010 loss
You are clinging on by your finger nails as your ERG and Farage loyalty slips into a marginalised faction
It is still there and more reflects the mood of the membership than Hunt and after a general election defeat it is the party membership who will elect the new leader of the Opposition
I don't suppose the LDs or SNP members will be too keen to elect Ms Braverman or whoever as LOTO.
Nothing to do with them, somebody needs to oppose the Starmer government even if they won't
The Kwarteng chancellorship was a major Cambridge University fail. The crème brûlée and Great Court Run college in particular. Re-establish the monasteries and give them their assets back?
Creme Brulee is Caius, not arriviste Trinity Burnt Cream.
My apologies. What's the difference, or is it only the nomenclature?
Doesn't the idea come from Catalonia anyway?
Despite my possible faux pas, it's true that Kwasi Kwarteng was in the in crowd at both Eton and Trinity and he ballsed up the Chancellor job as nobody has ever ballsed it up before so fast. And he doesn't have the humility and charm of Eddie the Eagle. No way would he have been promoted so high if he'd gone to the school down the road or even a second division private boarding school somewhere, or if he'd gone to, well, probably any university apart from Oxford and Cambridge.
And we can't blame the Tory party's membership in this instance.
Top post. Eton and Cambridge must be deeply embarrassed to have turned out such a tone-deaf incompetent.
He was at Cambridge with Richard Burgon, I believe, who was in the next door college?
Do people now understand why so many Cambridge politicians have been passed over before now?
Which would be a valid argument if the Oxford ones who get in weren't just as useless.
The real apex of entitled and ignorant cretinism in the education system is neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but Eton College. The first action of an incoming Labour Government should be to whistle up a squadron of RAF Typhoons armed with precision guided bombs and reduce the whole place to a pile of smouldering rubble.
Truss went to a comprehensive not Eton. The only Tory major winners in the last 40 years went to Eton
The only three PMs to win majorities in the last thirty years went to public schools. Two Eton, one Fettes.
Prior to that, the previous four (Major, Thatcher, Wilson, Heath) were all at state schools.
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
But BigG definitely isn't. During the Johnson/Hunt leadership contest it was a deal breaker for his vote.
Fox hunting is a long way outside the Chncellors remit though
I am implacably opposed to fox hunting but I really do not see this as an issue at this time
Because you know absolutely nothing about it.
There is not one person across our family who supports fox hunting
I support fox hunting.
How do you think packs of wild wolves hunt Moose in the Yukon? Or any other predator for that matter? Why is that inferior to snaring or shooting?
Hunting is perfectly natural. Rest is class warfare and absurd emotional sentimentality.
Riding dressed in hunting pinks on artificially bred horses and killing the neighbourhood cats with packs of artificially bred C. familiaris is natural?
I have mixed feelings on it. I think the ban was basically an early example of virtue-signalling legislation. A very obvious target, based on an incorrect perception that it was conducted by posh twats, and inconsistent with animal welfare legislation elsewhere.
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
With or without dogs?
Is this a trick question?
No. Fox hunting is still legal isn't it? As long as you don't use dogs. I was against the ban. But there are deer living near us and the local oiks try hunting them with their pitbull-type dogs. And I hate that.
So I decided I shouldn't support toffs hunting foxes with dogs either.
Well, in non American English hunting means, with dogs. Using rifles is called shooting. It kills 10x the foxes hunting ever did, with the availability of military grade night sight equipment, and because foxes have never learned to lick their wounds those which are shot but not killed die very slowly and horribly of gangrene. And foxhunting unlike say pheasant shooting was never the preserve of rich toffs.
Agree about the pitbull types though.
Something that I've wondered about this, maybe you lot can help, is - is killing more foxes necessarily better? Are foxes a natural predator of something that means there needs to be an amount of foxes in circulation to bump off the other thing? Obviously eg with deer the british environment needs to be managed in some sense and the argument for foxhunting was that it was a manner of managing things that had worked for a long time. If we were killing more foxes now, but with guns or slingshots or trebuchets, would there be another problem? Apols if word salad.
Foxes keep down rabbits, and rabbits are more of a pain than you think (undermining walls and so on). They also take a LOT of lambs in the spring, which is obviously unhelpful. But the reason they are thwacked in industrial quantities is commercial pheasant shooting which is an horrific enterprise - breeding 10s of thousands of the things to be killed for sport and turned into cat food, which gets a free pass from bigG and his family because they know no more about it than they know about fox hunting, but think mammals are inherently cuddlier than birds.
So, no, exterminating foxes to enable a monoculture of pheasants isn't a policy most people would see much merit in. Balanced and natural ecosystems are best. The efect of the hunting ban has been a huge decrease in the fox population, because there is no incentive to retain the balance.
The Kwarteng chancellorship was a major Cambridge University fail. The crème brûlée and Great Court Run college in particular. Re-establish the monasteries and give them their assets back?
Creme Brulee is Caius, not arriviste Trinity Burnt Cream.
My apologies. What's the difference, or is it only the nomenclature?
Doesn't the idea come from Catalonia anyway?
Despite my possible faux pas, it's true that Kwasi Kwarteng was in the in crowd at both Eton and Trinity and he ballsed up the Chancellor job as nobody has ever ballsed it up before so fast. And he doesn't have the humility and charm of Eddie the Eagle. No way would he have been promoted so high if he'd gone to the school down the road or even a second division private boarding school somewhere, or if he'd gone to, well, probably any university apart from Oxford and Cambridge.
And we can't blame the Tory party's membership in this instance.
Top post. Eton and Cambridge must be deeply embarrassed to have turned out such a tone-deaf incompetent.
He was at Cambridge with Richard Burgon, I believe, who was in the next door college?
Do people now understand why so many Cambridge politicians have been passed over before now?
Which would be a valid argument if the Oxford ones who get in weren't just as useless.
The real apex of entitled and ignorant cretinism in the education system is neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but Eton College. The first action of an incoming Labour Government should be to whistle up a squadron of RAF Typhoons armed with precision guided bombs and reduce the whole place to a pile of smouldering rubble.
Revoke its charitable status and start taxing it. That will hurt more than the Typhoons...
That's reasonable. There's no reason why the private schooling sector should benefit from charitable tax breaks. It contributes nothing of value to wider society.
That charitable status helps it provide scholarships and bursaries and it also shares facilities with the local community
If we tax them then the whole country can share
Private school parents already pay tax for state schools despite sending their children private
The Kwarteng chancellorship was a major Cambridge University fail. The crème brûlée and Great Court Run college in particular. Re-establish the monasteries and give them their assets back?
Creme Brulee is Caius, not arriviste Trinity Burnt Cream.
My apologies. What's the difference, or is it only the nomenclature?
Doesn't the idea come from Catalonia anyway?
Despite my possible faux pas, it's true that Kwasi Kwarteng was in the in crowd at both Eton and Trinity and he ballsed up the Chancellor job as nobody has ever ballsed it up before so fast. And he doesn't have the humility and charm of Eddie the Eagle. No way would he have been promoted so high if he'd gone to the school down the road or even a second division private boarding school somewhere, or if he'd gone to, well, probably any university apart from Oxford and Cambridge.
And we can't blame the Tory party's membership in this instance.
Top post. Eton and Cambridge must be deeply embarrassed to have turned out such a tone-deaf incompetent.
He was at Cambridge with Richard Burgon, I believe, who was in the next door college?
Do people now understand why so many Cambridge politicians have been passed over before now?
Which would be a valid argument if the Oxford ones who get in weren't just as useless.
The real apex of entitled and ignorant cretinism in the education system is neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but Eton College. The first action of an incoming Labour Government should be to whistle up a squadron of RAF Typhoons armed with precision guided bombs and reduce the whole place to a pile of smouldering rubble.
Truss went to a comprehensive not Eton. The only Tory major winners in the last 40 years went to Eton
Not the best recommendation
Thatch was at Eton? Her 1983 and 1987 wins were less than 40 years ago. Major's win in '92 was comparable to Cameron's in 2015. You've only had one "major" win other than Thatch in the last 40 years.
The Kwarteng chancellorship was a major Cambridge University fail. The crème brûlée and Great Court Run college in particular. Re-establish the monasteries and give them their assets back?
Creme Brulee is Caius, not arriviste Trinity Burnt Cream.
My apologies. What's the difference, or is it only the nomenclature?
Doesn't the idea come from Catalonia anyway?
Despite my possible faux pas, it's true that Kwasi Kwarteng was in the in crowd at both Eton and Trinity and he ballsed up the Chancellor job as nobody has ever ballsed it up before so fast. And he doesn't have the humility and charm of Eddie the Eagle. No way would he have been promoted so high if he'd gone to the school down the road or even a second division private boarding school somewhere, or if he'd gone to, well, probably any university apart from Oxford and Cambridge.
And we can't blame the Tory party's membership in this instance.
Top post. Eton and Cambridge must be deeply embarrassed to have turned out such a tone-deaf incompetent.
He was at Cambridge with Richard Burgon, I believe, who was in the next door college?
Do people now understand why so many Cambridge politicians have been passed over before now?
Which would be a valid argument if the Oxford ones who get in weren't just as useless.
The real apex of entitled and ignorant cretinism in the education system is neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but Eton College. The first action of an incoming Labour Government should be to whistle up a squadron of RAF Typhoons armed with precision guided bombs and reduce the whole place to a pile of smouldering rubble.
Truss went to a comprehensive not Eton. The only Tory major winners in the last 40 years went to Eton
The only three PMs to win majorities in the last thirty years went to public schools. Two Eton, one Fettes.
Prior to that, the previous four (Major, Thatcher, Wilson, Heath) were all at state schools.
Yes, all 4 grammar school educated. Truss the first PM educated fully at a comprehensive for secondary education.
Starmer also educated at private and grammar school
I agree. The Truss being Figurehead Leader in Name Only just isn't going to hold up under the pressures of the next few weeks. The Tories might be able to indulge that fantasy for a little while, but all it takes is another PMQs or media round from Liz and it will all fall apart.
Let's have some stability now until the GE. Keep things as they are. Truss doing regular car-crash interviews and pressers, Hunt being the common sense technocrat calling the shots and applying Labour policies, preventing economic meltdown through a couple of bleak years of mild recession.
Then, when the polls have narrowed a bit or time has run out, the Tories can call a GE with a Truss-led campaign leading to electoral wipe-out.
Hunt takes over as LOTO and begins the long Tory Party rebuild process. If there's anything left to rebuild.
Sounds like the least worst outlook to me. Shit, but ultimately survivable.
There is zero chance Tory members will elect Hunt as Leader of the Opposition. At present if Truss and Hunt lead the Tories to heavy defeat, the membership will likely conclude she was not rightwing enough and elect Braverman as Leader of the Opposition to PM Starmer's government.
At best Hunt can be Mandelson to Truss' Brown and steady the ship
I can seen the Tory bigwigs scrapping the membership vote sooner or later. If it means a dwindling membership gifting the Left by selecting increasingly mad and unelectable leaders then what really is the point?
Then the Tory membership will start deselecting Tory MPs until they get ones who will give them a voice.
At the end of the day the voluntary party is as much a part of the party as the parliamentary party.
If Labour MPs had tried to take the membership vote away during the Corbyn era then you can guarantee Labour members would have started to deselect Labour MPs too.
Trying to ignore what the Tory core vote wants will also only boost Farage
You are seeking the destruction of the conservative party, while many of us are fighting against the likes of yourself, the ERG, and the appalling Farage to re- establish an electable centre ground conservative party
It is only a matter of time until you and your like are marginalised, just as the Corbyn faction have been
Hunt is the first positive for the party in months as is evident in the majority of posts on here
If the Tories lose the next election they will move further right, just as Labour moved further left after its 2010 loss
You are clinging on by your finger nails as your ERG and Farage loyalty slips into a marginalised faction
It is still there and more reflects the mood of the membership than Hunt and after a general election defeat it is the party membership who will elect the new leader of the Opposition
I agree. The Truss being Figurehead Leader in Name Only just isn't going to hold up under the pressures of the next few weeks. The Tories might be able to indulge that fantasy for a little while, but all it takes is another PMQs or media round from Liz and it will all fall apart.
Let's have some stability now until the GE. Keep things as they are. Truss doing regular car-crash interviews and pressers, Hunt being the common sense technocrat calling the shots and applying Labour policies, preventing economic meltdown through a couple of bleak years of mild recession.
Then, when the polls have narrowed a bit or time has run out, the Tories can call a GE with a Truss-led campaign leading to electoral wipe-out.
Hunt takes over as LOTO and begins the long Tory Party rebuild process. If there's anything left to rebuild.
Sounds like the least worst outlook to me. Shit, but ultimately survivable.
There is zero chance Tory members will elect Hunt as Leader of the Opposition. At present if Truss and Hunt lead the Tories to heavy defeat, the membership will likely conclude she was not rightwing enough and elect Braverman as Leader of the Opposition to PM Starmer's government.
At best Hunt can be Mandelson to Truss' Brown and steady the ship
I fear you are right in your analysis of Conservative members, but Braverman would be an absolute disaster for your party, much as Corbyn was and remains a disaster for Labour.
After Corbyn there are still left leaning voters who don't trust the Party not to jettison Starmer and replace with Burgon or Pidcock, or some other moon howler.
Should Braverman ever become Leader her spectral legacy would be, one of we Centists can't vote for a one nation feudal Tory Party because they might replace a sensible leader with Mark Francois, or Phillip Davies.
The die would be cast, as it is for Labour. To be on the safe side, perhaps we should all vote LibDem.
There is a risk that you look at what happens on the left of the labour party and assume the right of the Conservative party will do the same thing. Braverman and Badenoch are both quite smart people, they are not saddled with progressive ideology and will be scarred by having watched Truss crash and burn. There are only a handful of true idiots in the Parliamentary party, they are insignificant enough to be ignored and sidelined.
If you look at the membership of the Conservative party, I would also note that Sunak got 40%, his supporters are not likely to regret their vote given the catastrophe that has unfolded. And of Trusses voters, it is hard to believe that any of them could overlook the total, catastrophic failure that has just occurred. It isn't a case of the policies being rejected, they got to try to implement the policies and it caused untold chaos in the markets and sunk the party to its lowest poll ratings in 30 years. There is no centrist/remainer conspiracy here, we all watched the whole thing play out in real time and no one can be blamed but Liz Truss and the people that surround her. Perhaps some of the members who are in denial about the situation will tear up their membership cards but this is only a positive thing for the party, they should be goaded in to doing so.
I think that things are going in the right direction for the Conservative party, and I personally think people need to join the Conservative party to try and keep them on the right path. Once Truss is despatched to the backbenches, then the tories can still get back in to position of being the party of economic competence. They can still win the next election, because the labour party will start to get arrogant and their true nature will quickly reveal itself, as was the case in 1992. They are relying entirely on Starmer to project an image of competence and no politician is infallible.
I agree. The Truss being Figurehead Leader in Name Only just isn't going to hold up under the pressures of the next few weeks. The Tories might be able to indulge that fantasy for a little while, but all it takes is another PMQs or media round from Liz and it will all fall apart.
Let's have some stability now until the GE. Keep things as they are. Truss doing regular car-crash interviews and pressers, Hunt being the common sense technocrat calling the shots and applying Labour policies, preventing economic meltdown through a couple of bleak years of mild recession.
Then, when the polls have narrowed a bit or time has run out, the Tories can call a GE with a Truss-led campaign leading to electoral wipe-out.
Hunt takes over as LOTO and begins the long Tory Party rebuild process. If there's anything left to rebuild.
Sounds like the least worst outlook to me. Shit, but ultimately survivable.
There is zero chance Tory members will elect Hunt as Leader of the Opposition. At present if Truss and Hunt lead the Tories to heavy defeat, the membership will likely conclude she was not rightwing enough and elect Braverman as Leader of the Opposition to PM Starmer's government.
At best Hunt can be Mandelson to Truss' Brown and steady the ship
I can seen the Tory bigwigs scrapping the membership vote sooner or later. If it means a dwindling membership gifting the Left by selecting increasingly mad and unelectable leaders then what really is the point?
Then the Tory membership will start deselecting Tory MPs until they get ones who will give them a voice.
At the end of the day the voluntary party is as much a part of the party as the parliamentary party.
If Labour MPs had tried to take the membership vote away during the Corbyn era then you can guarantee Labour members would have started to deselect Labour MPs too.
Trying to ignore what the Tory core vote wants will also only boost Farage
You are seeking the destruction of the conservative party, while many of us are fighting against the likes of yourself, the ERG, and the appalling Farage to re- establish an electable centre ground conservative party
It is only a matter of time until you and your like are marginalised, just as the Corbyn faction have been
Hunt is the first positive for the party in months as is evident in the majority of posts on here
If the Tories lose the next election they will move further right, just as Labour moved further left after its 2010 loss
You are clinging on by your finger nails as your ERG and Farage loyalty slips into a marginalised faction
It is still there and more reflects the mood of the membership than Hunt and after a general election defeat it is the party membership who will elect the new leader of the Opposition
The membership of circa 172,000 are responsible for the near death of the conservative party and I doubt it will matter who the leader is out of the predicted 4 conservative mps
It should stay for now. Perhaps in a year or two we could consider a peace dividend if things go well in Ukraine. They key thing is intention.
Peace dividends never work. We were told there would be a peace dividend at the end of the Cold War but anyone with any sense knew that, even though the chances of a nuclear exchange might have been reduced, ending the East/West balance was going to make the world a more dangerous, rather than less dangerous place. It really is no surprise that the Balkans Wars started so soon after the end of the fall of the Berlin Wall - the two superpower blocs would never have allowed such a dangerous situation to develop during the Cold War.
Hmmm... There has clearly been a peace dividend since 1990. We failed to spot and prepare for the reverse since the rise of Putin and that is what we need to do (and tbf) are doing now.
No that's the whole point. We acted as if there was a peace dividend, pretending the world was a safer place that required smaller defence spending whilst in fact it was more dangerous and if anything needed us to increase defence spending just to maintain the same level of security. The peace dividend was a myth propagated by those who wanted to slash defence spending.
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
But BigG definitely isn't. During the Johnson/Hunt leadership contest it was a deal breaker for his vote.
Fox hunting is a long way outside the Chncellors remit though
I am implacably opposed to fox hunting but I really do not see this as an issue at this time
Because you know absolutely nothing about it.
There is not one person across our family who supports fox hunting
I support fox hunting.
How do you think packs of wild wolves hunt Moose in the Yukon? Or any other predator for that matter? Why is that inferior to snaring or shooting?
Hunting is perfectly natural. Rest is class warfare and absurd emotional sentimentality.
Riding dressed in hunting pinks on artificially bred horses and killing the neighbourhood cats with packs of artificially bred C. familiaris is natural?
But why should the uniforms and ceremony bother you?
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
But BigG definitely isn't. During the Johnson/Hunt leadership contest it was a deal breaker for his vote.
Fox hunting is a long way outside the Chncellors remit though
I am implacably opposed to fox hunting but I really do not see this as an issue at this time
Because you know absolutely nothing about it.
There is not one person across our family who supports fox hunting
I support fox hunting.
How do you think packs of wild wolves hunt Moose in the Yukon? Or any other predator for that matter? Why is that inferior to snaring or shooting?
Hunting is perfectly natural. Rest is class warfare and absurd emotional sentimentality.
Riding dressed in hunting pinks on artificially bred horses and killing the neighbourhood cats with packs of artificially bred C. familiaris is natural?
But why should the uniforms and ceremony bother you?
Just checking your claim that "hunting is perfectly natural".
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
But BigG definitely isn't. During the Johnson/Hunt leadership contest it was a deal breaker for his vote.
Fox hunting is a long way outside the Chncellors remit though
I am implacably opposed to fox hunting but I really do not see this as an issue at this time
Because you know absolutely nothing about it.
There is not one person across our family who supports fox hunting
I support fox hunting.
How do you think packs of wild wolves hunt Moose in the Yukon? Or any other predator for that matter? Why is that inferior to snaring or shooting?
Hunting is perfectly natural. Rest is class warfare and absurd emotional sentimentality.
Riding dressed in hunting pinks on artificially bred horses and killing the neighbourhood cats with packs of artificially bred C. familiaris is natural?
Very weak. Yes, compared to shooting them with Czech rifles fitted with Russian night vision scopes.
The Kwarteng chancellorship was a major Cambridge University fail. The crème brûlée and Great Court Run college in particular. Re-establish the monasteries and give them their assets back?
Creme Brulee is Caius, not arriviste Trinity Burnt Cream.
My apologies. What's the difference, or is it only the nomenclature?
Doesn't the idea come from Catalonia anyway?
Despite my possible faux pas, it's true that Kwasi Kwarteng was in the in crowd at both Eton and Trinity and he ballsed up the Chancellor job as nobody has ever ballsed it up before so fast. And he doesn't have the humility and charm of Eddie the Eagle. No way would he have been promoted so high if he'd gone to the school down the road or even a second division private boarding school somewhere, or if he'd gone to, well, probably any university apart from Oxford and Cambridge.
And we can't blame the Tory party's membership in this instance.
Top post. Eton and Cambridge must be deeply embarrassed to have turned out such a tone-deaf incompetent.
He was at Cambridge with Richard Burgon, I believe, who was in the next door college?
Do people now understand why so many Cambridge politicians have been passed over before now?
Which would be a valid argument if the Oxford ones who get in weren't just as useless.
The real apex of entitled and ignorant cretinism in the education system is neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but Eton College. The first action of an incoming Labour Government should be to whistle up a squadron of RAF Typhoons armed with precision guided bombs and reduce the whole place to a pile of smouldering rubble.
Revoke its charitable status and start taxing it. That will hurt more than the Typhoons...
That's reasonable. There's no reason why the private schooling sector should benefit from charitable tax breaks. It contributes nothing of value to wider society.
That charitable status helps it provide scholarships and bursaries and it also shares facilities with the local community
I used to play squash on the courts at Eton School when I worked in the area. We had to pay to hire them, mind.
Strangely, our school did not have its own squash courts.
I agree. The Truss being Figurehead Leader in Name Only just isn't going to hold up under the pressures of the next few weeks. The Tories might be able to indulge that fantasy for a little while, but all it takes is another PMQs or media round from Liz and it will all fall apart.
Let's have some stability now until the GE. Keep things as they are. Truss doing regular car-crash interviews and pressers, Hunt being the common sense technocrat calling the shots and applying Labour policies, preventing economic meltdown through a couple of bleak years of mild recession.
Then, when the polls have narrowed a bit or time has run out, the Tories can call a GE with a Truss-led campaign leading to electoral wipe-out.
Hunt takes over as LOTO and begins the long Tory Party rebuild process. If there's anything left to rebuild.
Sounds like the least worst outlook to me. Shit, but ultimately survivable.
There is zero chance Tory members will elect Hunt as Leader of the Opposition. At present if Truss and Hunt lead the Tories to heavy defeat, the membership will likely conclude she was not rightwing enough and elect Braverman as Leader of the Opposition to PM Starmer's government.
At best Hunt can be Mandelson to Truss' Brown and steady the ship
I fear you are right in your analysis of Conservative members, but Braverman would be an absolute disaster for your party, much as Corbyn was and remains a disaster for Labour.
After Corbyn there are still left leaning voters who don't trust the Party not to jettison Starmer and replace with Burgon or Pidcock, or some other moon howler.
Should Braverman ever become Leader her spectral legacy would be, one of we Centists can't vote for a one nation feudal Tory Party because they might replace a sensible leader with Mark Francois, or Phillip Davies.
The die would be cast, as it is for Labour. To be on the safe side, perhaps we should all vote LibDem.
There is a risk that you look at what happens on the left of the labour party and assume the right of the Conservative party will do the same thing. Braverman and Badenoch are both quite smart people, they are not saddled with progressive ideology and will be scarred by having watched Truss crash and burn. There are only a handful of true idiots in the Parliamentary party, they are insignificant enough to be ignored and sidelined.
If you look at the membership of the Conservative party, I would also note that Sunak got 40%, his supporters are not likely to regret their vote given the catastrophe that has unfolded. And of Trusses voters, it is hard to believe that any of them could overlook the total, catastrophic failure that has just occurred. It isn't a case of the policies being rejected, they got to try to implement the policies and it caused untold chaos in the markets and sunk the party to its lowest poll ratings in 30 years. There is no centrist/remainer conspiracy here, we all watched the whole thing play out in real time and no one can be blamed but Liz Truss and the people that surround her. Perhaps some of the members who are in denial about the situation will tear up their membership cards but this is only a positive thing for the party, they should be goaded in to doing so.
I think that things are going in the right direction for the Conservative party, and I personally think people need to join the Conservative party to try and keep them on the right path. Once Truss is despatched to the backbenches, then the tories can still get back in to position of being the party of economic competence. They can still win the next election, because the labour party will start to get arrogant and their true nature will quickly reveal itself, as was the case in 1992. They are relying entirely on Starmer to project an image of competence and no politician is infallible.
The right of the party would rather lose to Starmer and rebuild in opposition under a rightwing leader now than win with Hunt or Sunak. Not that that is likely anyway
The Kwarteng chancellorship was a major Cambridge University fail. The crème brûlée and Great Court Run college in particular. Re-establish the monasteries and give them their assets back?
Creme Brulee is Caius, not arriviste Trinity Burnt Cream.
My apologies. What's the difference, or is it only the nomenclature?
Doesn't the idea come from Catalonia anyway?
Despite my possible faux pas, it's true that Kwasi Kwarteng was in the in crowd at both Eton and Trinity and he ballsed up the Chancellor job as nobody has ever ballsed it up before so fast. And he doesn't have the humility and charm of Eddie the Eagle. No way would he have been promoted so high if he'd gone to the school down the road or even a second division private boarding school somewhere, or if he'd gone to, well, probably any university apart from Oxford and Cambridge.
And we can't blame the Tory party's membership in this instance.
Top post. Eton and Cambridge must be deeply embarrassed to have turned out such a tone-deaf incompetent.
He was at Cambridge with Richard Burgon, I believe, who was in the next door college?
Do people now understand why so many Cambridge politicians have been passed over before now?
Which would be a valid argument if the Oxford ones who get in weren't just as useless.
The real apex of entitled and ignorant cretinism in the education system is neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but Eton College. The first action of an incoming Labour Government should be to whistle up a squadron of RAF Typhoons armed with precision guided bombs and reduce the whole place to a pile of smouldering rubble.
Revoke its charitable status and start taxing it. That will hurt more than the Typhoons...
That's reasonable. There's no reason why the private schooling sector should benefit from charitable tax breaks. It contributes nothing of value to wider society.
That charitable status helps it provide scholarships and bursaries and it also shares facilities with the local community
If we tax them then the whole country can share
Private school parents already pay tax for state schools despite sending their children private
So? Bentley drivers' taxes pay for buses. Doesn't follow that Bentleys should be exempt from road tax.
Bursaries are crumbs chucked at a handful of lucky proles to justify the subsidising of luxury schools for the offspring of plutocrats at public expense.
The Kwarteng chancellorship was a major Cambridge University fail. The crème brûlée and Great Court Run college in particular. Re-establish the monasteries and give them their assets back?
Creme Brulee is Caius, not arriviste Trinity Burnt Cream.
My apologies. What's the difference, or is it only the nomenclature?
Doesn't the idea come from Catalonia anyway?
Despite my possible faux pas, it's true that Kwasi Kwarteng was in the in crowd at both Eton and Trinity and he ballsed up the Chancellor job as nobody has ever ballsed it up before so fast. And he doesn't have the humility and charm of Eddie the Eagle. No way would he have been promoted so high if he'd gone to the school down the road or even a second division private boarding school somewhere, or if he'd gone to, well, probably any university apart from Oxford and Cambridge.
And we can't blame the Tory party's membership in this instance.
Top post. Eton and Cambridge must be deeply embarrassed to have turned out such a tone-deaf incompetent.
He was at Cambridge with Richard Burgon, I believe, who was in the next door college?
Do people now understand why so many Cambridge politicians have been passed over before now?
Which would be a valid argument if the Oxford ones who get in weren't just as useless.
The real apex of entitled and ignorant cretinism in the education system is neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but Eton College. The first action of an incoming Labour Government should be to whistle up a squadron of RAF Typhoons armed with precision guided bombs and reduce the whole place to a pile of smouldering rubble.
Truss went to a comprehensive not Eton. The only Tory major winners in the last 40 years went to Eton
The only three PMs to win majorities in the last thirty years went to public schools. Two Eton, one Fettes.
Prior to that, the previous four (Major, Thatcher, Wilson, Heath) were all at state schools.
Yes, all 4 grammar school educated. Truss the first PM educated fully at a comprehensive for secondary education.
Starmer also educated at private and grammar school
I agree. The Truss being Figurehead Leader in Name Only just isn't going to hold up under the pressures of the next few weeks. The Tories might be able to indulge that fantasy for a little while, but all it takes is another PMQs or media round from Liz and it will all fall apart.
Let's have some stability now until the GE. Keep things as they are. Truss doing regular car-crash interviews and pressers, Hunt being the common sense technocrat calling the shots and applying Labour policies, preventing economic meltdown through a couple of bleak years of mild recession.
Then, when the polls have narrowed a bit or time has run out, the Tories can call a GE with a Truss-led campaign leading to electoral wipe-out.
Hunt takes over as LOTO and begins the long Tory Party rebuild process. If there's anything left to rebuild.
Sounds like the least worst outlook to me. Shit, but ultimately survivable.
There is zero chance Tory members will elect Hunt as Leader of the Opposition. At present if Truss and Hunt lead the Tories to heavy defeat, the membership will likely conclude she was not rightwing enough and elect Braverman as Leader of the Opposition to PM Starmer's government.
At best Hunt can be Mandelson to Truss' Brown and steady the ship
I can seen the Tory bigwigs scrapping the membership vote sooner or later. If it means a dwindling membership gifting the Left by selecting increasingly mad and unelectable leaders then what really is the point?
Then the Tory membership will start deselecting Tory MPs until they get ones who will give them a voice.
At the end of the day the voluntary party is as much a part of the party as the parliamentary party.
If Labour MPs had tried to take the membership vote away during the Corbyn era then you can guarantee Labour members would have started to deselect Labour MPs too.
Trying to ignore what the Tory core vote wants will also only boost Farage
You are seeking the destruction of the conservative party, while many of us are fighting against the likes of yourself, the ERG, and the appalling Farage to re- establish an electable centre ground conservative party
It is only a matter of time until you and your like are marginalised, just as the Corbyn faction have been
Hunt is the first positive for the party in months as is evident in the majority of posts on here
If the Tories lose the next election they will move further right, just as Labour moved further left after its 2010 loss
You are clinging on by your finger nails as your ERG and Farage loyalty slips into a marginalised faction
It is still there and more reflects the mood of the membership than Hunt and after a general election defeat it is the party membership who will elect the new leader of the Opposition
I don't suppose the LDs or SNP members will be too keen to elect Ms Braverman or whoever as LOTO.
Nothing to do with them, somebody needs to oppose the Starmer government even if they won't
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
But BigG definitely isn't. During the Johnson/Hunt leadership contest it was a deal breaker for his vote.
Fox hunting is a long way outside the Chncellors remit though
I am implacably opposed to fox hunting but I really do not see this as an issue at this time
Because you know absolutely nothing about it.
There is not one person across our family who supports fox hunting
I support fox hunting.
How do you think packs of wild wolves hunt Moose in the Yukon? Or any other predator for that matter? Why is that inferior to snaring or shooting?
Hunting is perfectly natural. Rest is class warfare and absurd emotional sentimentality.
Riding dressed in hunting pinks on artificially bred horses and killing the neighbourhood cats with packs of artificially bred C. familiaris is natural?
But why should the uniforms and ceremony bother you?
Just checking your claim that "hunting is perfectly natural".
So, hang on, we have to strip naked before we can claim that our actions are, relatively speaking, natural? (And natural is only ever relatively speaking, you think foxes haven't evolved in lockstep with human farming practices?)
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
But BigG definitely isn't. During the Johnson/Hunt leadership contest it was a deal breaker for his vote.
Fox hunting is a long way outside the Chncellors remit though
I am implacably opposed to fox hunting but I really do not see this as an issue at this time
Because you know absolutely nothing about it.
There is not one person across our family who supports fox hunting
I support fox hunting.
How do you think packs of wild wolves hunt Moose in the Yukon? Or any other predator for that matter? Why is that inferior to snaring or shooting?
Hunting is perfectly natural. Rest is class warfare and absurd emotional sentimentality.
Riding dressed in hunting pinks on artificially bred horses and killing the neighbourhood cats with packs of artificially bred C. familiaris is natural?
Very weak. Yes, compared to shooting them with Czech rifles fitted with Russian night vision scopes.
i'm assuming as they're Russian they usually shoot far more ammunition than they need, destroy everything around the fox and then let it wander away unhurt while the marksman is declaring a great victory?
The Kwarteng chancellorship was a major Cambridge University fail. The crème brûlée and Great Court Run college in particular. Re-establish the monasteries and give them their assets back?
Creme Brulee is Caius, not arriviste Trinity Burnt Cream.
My apologies. What's the difference, or is it only the nomenclature?
Doesn't the idea come from Catalonia anyway?
Despite my possible faux pas, it's true that Kwasi Kwarteng was in the in crowd at both Eton and Trinity and he ballsed up the Chancellor job as nobody has ever ballsed it up before so fast. And he doesn't have the humility and charm of Eddie the Eagle. No way would he have been promoted so high if he'd gone to the school down the road or even a second division private boarding school somewhere, or if he'd gone to, well, probably any university apart from Oxford and Cambridge.
And we can't blame the Tory party's membership in this instance.
Top post. Eton and Cambridge must be deeply embarrassed to have turned out such a tone-deaf incompetent.
He was at Cambridge with Richard Burgon, I believe, who was in the next door college?
Do people now understand why so many Cambridge politicians have been passed over before now?
Which would be a valid argument if the Oxford ones who get in weren't just as useless.
The real apex of entitled and ignorant cretinism in the education system is neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but Eton College. The first action of an incoming Labour Government should be to whistle up a squadron of RAF Typhoons armed with precision guided bombs and reduce the whole place to a pile of smouldering rubble.
Truss went to a comprehensive not Eton. The only Tory major winners in the last 40 years went to Eton
The only three PMs to win majorities in the last thirty years went to public schools. Two Eton, one Fettes.
Prior to that, the previous four (Major, Thatcher, Wilson, Heath) were all at state schools.
Yes, all 4 grammar school educated. Truss the first PM educated fully at a comprehensive for secondary education.
Starmer also educated at private and grammar school
Truss is hardly the great advert for comprehensive education. Be a while before the next, you'd think. Which is annoying. Going to be giving the posho wankers a clear run at it for decades....
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
With or without dogs?
Is this a trick question?
No. Fox hunting is still legal isn't it? As long as you don't use dogs. I was against the ban. But there are deer living near us and the local oiks try hunting them with their pitbull-type dogs. And I hate that.
So I decided I shouldn't support toffs hunting foxes with dogs either.
Well, in non American English hunting means, with dogs. Using rifles is called shooting. It kills 10x the foxes hunting ever did, with the availability of military grade night sight equipment, and because foxes have never learned to lick their wounds those which are shot but not killed die very slowly and horribly of gangrene. And foxhunting unlike say pheasant shooting was never the preserve of rich toffs.
Agree about the pitbull types though.
Something that I've wondered about this, maybe you lot can help, is - is killing more foxes necessarily better? Are foxes a natural predator of something that means there needs to be an amount of foxes in circulation to bump off the other thing? Obviously eg with deer the british environment needs to be managed in some sense and the argument for foxhunting was that it was a manner of managing things that had worked for a long time. If we were killing more foxes now, but with guns or slingshots or trebuchets, would there be another problem? Apols if word salad.
Foxes keep down rabbits, and rabbits are more of a pain than you think (undermining walls and so on). They also take a LOT of lambs in the spring, which is obviously unhelpful. But the reason they are thwacked in industrial quantities is commercial pheasant shooting which is an horrific enterprise - breeding 10s of thousands of the things to be killed for sport and turned into cat food, which gets a free pass from bigG and his family because they know no more about it than they know about fox hunting, but think mammals are inherently cuddlier than birds.
So, no, exterminating foxes to enable a monoculture of pheasants isn't a policy most people would see much merit in. Balanced and natural ecosystems are best. The efect of the hunting ban has been a huge decrease in the fox population, because there is no incentive to retain the balance.
Would you ban grouse and pheasant shooting too then?
The Kwarteng chancellorship was a major Cambridge University fail. The crème brûlée and Great Court Run college in particular. Re-establish the monasteries and give them their assets back?
Creme Brulee is Caius, not arriviste Trinity Burnt Cream.
My apologies. What's the difference, or is it only the nomenclature?
Doesn't the idea come from Catalonia anyway?
Despite my possible faux pas, it's true that Kwasi Kwarteng was in the in crowd at both Eton and Trinity and he ballsed up the Chancellor job as nobody has ever ballsed it up before so fast. And he doesn't have the humility and charm of Eddie the Eagle. No way would he have been promoted so high if he'd gone to the school down the road or even a second division private boarding school somewhere, or if he'd gone to, well, probably any university apart from Oxford and Cambridge.
And we can't blame the Tory party's membership in this instance.
Top post. Eton and Cambridge must be deeply embarrassed to have turned out such a tone-deaf incompetent.
He was at Cambridge with Richard Burgon, I believe, who was in the next door college?
Do people now understand why so many Cambridge politicians have been passed over before now?
Which would be a valid argument if the Oxford ones who get in weren't just as useless.
The real apex of entitled and ignorant cretinism in the education system is neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but Eton College. The first action of an incoming Labour Government should be to whistle up a squadron of RAF Typhoons armed with precision guided bombs and reduce the whole place to a pile of smouldering rubble.
Revoke its charitable status and start taxing it. That will hurt more than the Typhoons...
That's reasonable. There's no reason why the private schooling sector should benefit from charitable tax breaks. It contributes nothing of value to wider society.
That charitable status helps it provide scholarships and bursaries and it also shares facilities with the local community
If we tax them then the whole country can share
Private school parents already pay tax for state schools despite sending their children private
So? Bentley drivers' taxes pay for buses. Doesn't follow that Bentleys should be exempt from road tax.
Bursaries are crumbs chucked at a handful of lucky proles to justify the subsidising of luxury schools for the offspring of plutocrats at public expense.
They don't, without that charitable status most bursaries and scholarships would end as would sharing pools, theatres etc with the local community. Private schools would become even more exclusive to the rich
Hunt has calmed the markets, if he quits then it will be carnage, so Truss cannot afford to lose him, he will do whatever he wants.
What happens if Monday comes and the markets aren’t calmed?
The way this usually happens is there can be two weeks of calm - people say the markets have been calmed, but then it all erupts again.
Obviously you all know my theory - £400bn of Rishi splaffing (and wasting a lot) to get us through covid has maxxed out the credit - now they want to (unnecessarily, needlessly) try to get another £200bn more borrowing - the markets won’t calm till that plan is dead.
Or the £200bn becomes more like £20bn. Everything now turns on the future price of gas.
I don’t want to be really rude David, but you keep posting that “If gas falls sufficiently, the cost of the energy cap freeze drops” means don’t think you really understand it. That thinking is utter bollox.
1. We haven’t had an OBR how much Tories total promise is likely to cost. The Tories have promised to buck the UK energy market for two and a half years regardless what global energy price does. Some think tanks have had a go at pricing this and come to a quarter of a trillion pound. To be found by tax rises, borrowing or cuts or mixture thereof. Quarter of a trillion on that one policy alone. 2. Variable one. Energy prices can go down, yes, but also up, it’s a very fluid situation in supply and demand over this coming period - but at which point do energy companies need to commit to buying it in advance, so commit to passing on THAT price to both customers AND onto a government commitment to bucking the market? 3. Variable two. If global prices do come down, to what degree is the saving on the quarter of a trillion eaten into or obliterated by the more expensive borrowing costs? Out of these two variable’s, borrowing costs for this policy look certain to remain high now, the greater doubt is if energy prices will come down and stay down isn’t it?
You really think that whole £200bn comes down to £20bn? 🥹 We all know what’s really behind “but the bill freeze looks like turning out much cheaper because gas prices are coming down” argument we get spun from Tory’s on TV and on PB - they privately hate this lumbering Labour policy Tory party has adopted, they hate the ENORMOUS amount of borrowing maxing out UKs credit limit, and the regressive unConservative way the money is spewed out in indiscriminate handouts.
But. They are only fooling themselves spinning that comfort blanket, because, yes, there are variables, but the variables are very much against them.
Don’t be one of them.
There is no defence to this insane policy, Truss has been hiding behind all week.
I would agree we don't know what this policy is going to cost and I would agree that there are significant risks on the upside but there is also some reason for hope on the low side.
The government have committed to the average house bill being no more than £2500 a year. At the moment the price of gas futures are 263p/therm. It has been over 700p and has averaged around 400p of late. The cost of the UK subsidy is directly relational to that price against the price that fixes the £2500 pa average. I have been unable to work out exactly what that is because there are quite a number of other variables. Energy companies are bumping up their fixed charges as well. My best guess is that £2500 per household is going be equivalent to something like 200p/therm, roughly twice what it was last winter.
But I am not wrong is saying that there is a chance that the cost of the scheme will prove to be much lower than the worst estimates. It could also be higher of course. If it stays somewhere near our current price or goes even lower then the cost of the scheme will be less. If it goes back up again we are in trouble, no doubt about it.
Edit, and btw the OBR will have no better idea than the rest of us, it is simply unknowable.
You telling us It’s unknowable wasn’t the impression I got when you reduced it from £200bn to £20bn to spark my reply. 🙂
We know enough overall price can’t come down that much. Because the bit you seem to be avoiding is commodity price drop is to some extent offset by borrowing cost increase - goes back to the unknowable being very guessable in that the borrowing cost won’t be based on “maybe the commodity price drops and stays at x price”, who lends money on that basis?
You accept the part of the equation, political and economic, it is not necessary to provide help in this way, there other options such as sliding scale to target help where needed, not wasted where not needed, and virtually pays for itself?
I believe most UK government borrowing is fixed rate. So the increase only kicks in as new debt is issued.
Interesting the current (March) forecast it from debt interest this year to be c £83bn but to *fall* to £47bn next year… a cut in public spending baked in
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
But BigG definitely isn't. During the Johnson/Hunt leadership contest it was a deal breaker for his vote.
Fox hunting is a long way outside the Chncellors remit though
I am implacably opposed to fox hunting but I really do not see this as an issue at this time
Because you know absolutely nothing about it.
There is not one person across our family who supports fox hunting
I support fox hunting.
How do you think packs of wild wolves hunt Moose in the Yukon? Or any other predator for that matter? Why is that inferior to snaring or shooting?
Hunting is perfectly natural. Rest is class warfare and absurd emotional sentimentality.
Riding dressed in hunting pinks on artificially bred horses and killing the neighbourhood cats with packs of artificially bred C. familiaris is natural?
But why should the uniforms and ceremony bother you?
Just checking your claim that "hunting is perfectly natural".
So, hang on, we have to strip naked before we can claim that our actions are, relatively speaking, natural?
That's given me a mental image of a hunt in action I could well have done without!
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
But BigG definitely isn't. During the Johnson/Hunt leadership contest it was a deal breaker for his vote.
Fox hunting is a long way outside the Chncellors remit though
I am implacably opposed to fox hunting but I really do not see this as an issue at this time
Because you know absolutely nothing about it.
There is not one person across our family who supports fox hunting
I support fox hunting.
How do you think packs of wild wolves hunt Moose in the Yukon? Or any other predator for that matter? Why is that inferior to snaring or shooting?
Hunting is perfectly natural. Rest is class warfare and absurd emotional sentimentality.
Riding dressed in hunting pinks on artificially bred horses and killing the neighbourhood cats with packs of artificially bred C. familiaris is natural?
Very weak. Yes, compared to shooting them with Czech rifles fitted with Russian night vision scopes.
i'm assuming as they're Russian they usually shoot far more ammunition than they need, destroy everything around the fox and then let it wander away unhurt while the marksman is declaring a great victory?
No, they do work. I assume because the officer class nicks all the good stuff and ebays it in the west.
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
With or without dogs?
Is this a trick question?
No. Fox hunting is still legal isn't it? As long as you don't use dogs. I was against the ban. But there are deer living near us and the local oiks try hunting them with their pitbull-type dogs. And I hate that.
So I decided I shouldn't support toffs hunting foxes with dogs either.
Well, in non American English hunting means, with dogs. Using rifles is called shooting. It kills 10x the foxes hunting ever did, with the availability of military grade night sight equipment, and because foxes have never learned to lick their wounds those which are shot but not killed die very slowly and horribly of gangrene. And foxhunting unlike say pheasant shooting was never the preserve of rich toffs.
Agree about the pitbull types though.
Something that I've wondered about this, maybe you lot can help, is - is killing more foxes necessarily better? Are foxes a natural predator of something that means there needs to be an amount of foxes in circulation to bump off the other thing? Obviously eg with deer the british environment needs to be managed in some sense and the argument for foxhunting was that it was a manner of managing things that had worked for a long time. If we were killing more foxes now, but with guns or slingshots or trebuchets, would there be another problem? Apols if word salad.
Foxes keep down rabbits, and rabbits are more of a pain than you think (undermining walls and so on). They also take a LOT of lambs in the spring, which is obviously unhelpful. But the reason they are thwacked in industrial quantities is commercial pheasant shooting which is an horrific enterprise - breeding 10s of thousands of the things to be killed for sport and turned into cat food, which gets a free pass from bigG and his family because they know no more about it than they know about fox hunting, but think mammals are inherently cuddlier than birds.
So, no, exterminating foxes to enable a monoculture of pheasants isn't a policy most people would see much merit in. Balanced and natural ecosystems are best. The efect of the hunting ban has been a huge decrease in the fox population, because there is no incentive to retain the balance.
Would you ban grouse and pheasant shooting too then?
At least the grouse and pheasent get eaten. I would have more sympathy if the Unspeakable actually ate the foxes...
I agree. The Truss being Figurehead Leader in Name Only just isn't going to hold up under the pressures of the next few weeks. The Tories might be able to indulge that fantasy for a little while, but all it takes is another PMQs or media round from Liz and it will all fall apart.
Let's have some stability now until the GE. Keep things as they are. Truss doing regular car-crash interviews and pressers, Hunt being the common sense technocrat calling the shots and applying Labour policies, preventing economic meltdown through a couple of bleak years of mild recession.
Then, when the polls have narrowed a bit or time has run out, the Tories can call a GE with a Truss-led campaign leading to electoral wipe-out.
Hunt takes over as LOTO and begins the long Tory Party rebuild process. If there's anything left to rebuild.
Sounds like the least worst outlook to me. Shit, but ultimately survivable.
There is zero chance Tory members will elect Hunt as Leader of the Opposition. At present if Truss and Hunt lead the Tories to heavy defeat, the membership will likely conclude she was not rightwing enough and elect Braverman as Leader of the Opposition to PM Starmer's government.
At best Hunt can be Mandelson to Truss' Brown and steady the ship
I fear you are right in your analysis of Conservative members, but Braverman would be an absolute disaster for your party, much as Corbyn was and remains a disaster for Labour.
After Corbyn there are still left leaning voters who don't trust the Party not to jettison Starmer and replace with Burgon or Pidcock, or some other moon howler.
Should Braverman ever become Leader her spectral legacy would be, one of we Centists can't vote for a one nation feudal Tory Party because they might replace a sensible leader with Mark Francois, or Phillip Davies.
The die would be cast, as it is for Labour. To be on the safe side, perhaps we should all vote LibDem.
There is a risk that you look at what happens on the left of the labour party and assume the right of the Conservative party will do the same thing. Braverman and Badenoch are both quite smart people, they are not saddled with progressive ideology and will be scarred by having watched Truss crash and burn. There are only a handful of true idiots in the Parliamentary party, they are insignificant enough to be ignored and sidelined.
If you look at the membership of the Conservative party, I would also note that Sunak got 40%, his supporters are not likely to regret their vote given the catastrophe that has unfolded. And of Trusses voters, it is hard to believe that any of them could overlook the total, catastrophic failure that has just occurred. It isn't a case of the policies being rejected, they got to try to implement the policies and it caused untold chaos in the markets and sunk the party to its lowest poll ratings in 30 years. There is no centrist/remainer conspiracy here, we all watched the whole thing play out in real time and no one can be blamed but Liz Truss and the people that surround her. Perhaps some of the members who are in denial about the situation will tear up their membership cards but this is only a positive thing for the party, they should be goaded in to doing so.
I think that things are going in the right direction for the Conservative party, and I personally think people need to join the Conservative party to try and keep them on the right path. Once Truss is despatched to the backbenches, then the tories can still get back in to position of being the party of economic competence. They can still win the next election, because the labour party will start to get arrogant and their true nature will quickly reveal itself, as was the case in 1992. They are relying entirely on Starmer to project an image of competence and no politician is infallible.
The right of the party would rather lose to Starmer and rebuild in opposition under a rightwing leader now than win with Hunt or Sunak. Not that that is likely anyway
OK, but have they got the numbers in the parliamentary party or in the membership to make any difference? And are they not completely undermined by what has just happened to Truss? They've just had a go at government and failed miserably. Surely they cannot be in denial about this?
I am genuinely interested in your view of this @HYUFD , as you are closer to the action than me.
The Kwarteng chancellorship was a major Cambridge University fail. The crème brûlée and Great Court Run college in particular. Re-establish the monasteries and give them their assets back?
Creme Brulee is Caius, not arriviste Trinity Burnt Cream.
My apologies. What's the difference, or is it only the nomenclature?
Doesn't the idea come from Catalonia anyway?
Despite my possible faux pas, it's true that Kwasi Kwarteng was in the in crowd at both Eton and Trinity and he ballsed up the Chancellor job as nobody has ever ballsed it up before so fast. And he doesn't have the humility and charm of Eddie the Eagle. No way would he have been promoted so high if he'd gone to the school down the road or even a second division private boarding school somewhere, or if he'd gone to, well, probably any university apart from Oxford and Cambridge.
And we can't blame the Tory party's membership in this instance.
Top post. Eton and Cambridge must be deeply embarrassed to have turned out such a tone-deaf incompetent.
He was at Cambridge with Richard Burgon, I believe, who was in the next door college?
Do people now understand why so many Cambridge politicians have been passed over before now?
Which would be a valid argument if the Oxford ones who get in weren't just as useless.
The real apex of entitled and ignorant cretinism in the education system is neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but Eton College. The first action of an incoming Labour Government should be to whistle up a squadron of RAF Typhoons armed with precision guided bombs and reduce the whole place to a pile of smouldering rubble.
Truss went to a comprehensive not Eton. The only Tory major winners in the last 40 years went to Eton
Not the best recommendation
Thatch was at Eton? Her 1983 and 1987 wins were less than 40 years ago. Major's win in '92 was comparable to Cameron's in 2015. You've only had one "major" win other than Thatch in the last 40 years.
30 years ago then, Cameron and Johnson are the only Tory majority winners since 1992, both Etonians
Moving goalposts alert!
The only Tory PMs to win majorities with names ending in -ON in the last 40 years both went to Et-ON. Its obvious isn't it?
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
But BigG definitely isn't. During the Johnson/Hunt leadership contest it was a deal breaker for his vote.
Fox hunting is a long way outside the Chncellors remit though
I am implacably opposed to fox hunting but I really do not see this as an issue at this time
Because you know absolutely nothing about it.
There is not one person across our family who supports fox hunting
I support fox hunting.
How do you think packs of wild wolves hunt Moose in the Yukon? Or any other predator for that matter? Why is that inferior to snaring or shooting?
Hunting is perfectly natural. Rest is class warfare and absurd emotional sentimentality.
Riding dressed in hunting pinks on artificially bred horses and killing the neighbourhood cats with packs of artificially bred C. familiaris is natural?
But why should the uniforms and ceremony bother you?
Just checking your claim that "hunting is perfectly natural".
As an aside on rabbits, when I was a kid I lived in a very specific middle of nowhere where nothing ever happens, and my father gave my sister tortoiseshell rabbits that were kept in a hutch. My sister was a hippy from birth, and she released them all into the wild, and in the end there was massive amounts of tortoiseshell rabbits living wild.
I agree. The Truss being Figurehead Leader in Name Only just isn't going to hold up under the pressures of the next few weeks. The Tories might be able to indulge that fantasy for a little while, but all it takes is another PMQs or media round from Liz and it will all fall apart.
Let's have some stability now until the GE. Keep things as they are. Truss doing regular car-crash interviews and pressers, Hunt being the common sense technocrat calling the shots and applying Labour policies, preventing economic meltdown through a couple of bleak years of mild recession.
Then, when the polls have narrowed a bit or time has run out, the Tories can call a GE with a Truss-led campaign leading to electoral wipe-out.
Hunt takes over as LOTO and begins the long Tory Party rebuild process. If there's anything left to rebuild.
Sounds like the least worst outlook to me. Shit, but ultimately survivable.
There is zero chance Tory members will elect Hunt as Leader of the Opposition. At present if Truss and Hunt lead the Tories to heavy defeat, the membership will likely conclude she was not rightwing enough and elect Braverman as Leader of the Opposition to PM Starmer's government.
At best Hunt can be Mandelson to Truss' Brown and steady the ship
I fear you are right in your analysis of Conservative members, but Braverman would be an absolute disaster for your party, much as Corbyn was and remains a disaster for Labour.
After Corbyn there are still left leaning voters who don't trust the Party not to jettison Starmer and replace with Burgon or Pidcock, or some other moon howler.
Should Braverman ever become Leader her spectral legacy would be, one of we Centists can't vote for a one nation feudal Tory Party because they might replace a sensible leader with Mark Francois, or Phillip Davies.
The die would be cast, as it is for Labour. To be on the safe side, perhaps we should all vote LibDem.
There is a risk that you look at what happens on the left of the labour party and assume the right of the Conservative party will do the same thing. Braverman and Badenoch are both quite smart people, they are not saddled with progressive ideology and will be scarred by having watched Truss crash and burn. There are only a handful of true idiots in the Parliamentary party, they are insignificant enough to be ignored and sidelined.
If you look at the membership of the Conservative party, I would also note that Sunak got 40%, his supporters are not likely to regret their vote given the catastrophe that has unfolded. And of Trusses voters, it is hard to believe that any of them could overlook the total, catastrophic failure that has just occurred. It isn't a case of the policies being rejected, they got to try to implement the policies and it caused untold chaos in the markets and sunk the party to its lowest poll ratings in 30 years. There is no centrist/remainer conspiracy here, we all watched the whole thing play out in real time and no one can be blamed but Liz Truss and the people that surround her. Perhaps some of the members who are in denial about the situation will tear up their membership cards but this is only a positive thing for the party, they should be goaded in to doing so.
I think that things are going in the right direction for the Conservative party, and I personally think people need to join the Conservative party to try and keep them on the right path. Once Truss is despatched to the backbenches, then the tories can still get back in to position of being the party of economic competence. They can still win the next election, because the labour party will start to get arrogant and their true nature will quickly reveal itself, as was the case in 1992. They are relying entirely on Starmer to project an image of competence and no politician is infallible.
The right of the party would rather lose to Starmer and rebuild in opposition under a rightwing leader now than win with Hunt or Sunak. Not that that is likely anyway
In every post you demonstrate your Corbyn like ideology and frankly it is time conservatives called out those in the ERG and Farage group as a very present danger to the extinction of the party
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
With or without dogs?
Is this a trick question?
No. Fox hunting is still legal isn't it? As long as you don't use dogs. I was against the ban. But there are deer living near us and the local oiks try hunting them with their pitbull-type dogs. And I hate that.
So I decided I shouldn't support toffs hunting foxes with dogs either.
Well, in non American English hunting means, with dogs. Using rifles is called shooting. It kills 10x the foxes hunting ever did, with the availability of military grade night sight equipment, and because foxes have never learned to lick their wounds those which are shot but not killed die very slowly and horribly of gangrene. And foxhunting unlike say pheasant shooting was never the preserve of rich toffs.
Agree about the pitbull types though.
Something that I've wondered about this, maybe you lot can help, is - is killing more foxes necessarily better? Are foxes a natural predator of something that means there needs to be an amount of foxes in circulation to bump off the other thing? Obviously eg with deer the british environment needs to be managed in some sense and the argument for foxhunting was that it was a manner of managing things that had worked for a long time. If we were killing more foxes now, but with guns or slingshots or trebuchets, would there be another problem? Apols if word salad.
Foxes keep down rabbits, and rabbits are more of a pain than you think (undermining walls and so on). They also take a LOT of lambs in the spring, which is obviously unhelpful. But the reason they are thwacked in industrial quantities is commercial pheasant shooting which is an horrific enterprise - breeding 10s of thousands of the things to be killed for sport and turned into cat food, which gets a free pass from bigG and his family because they know no more about it than they know about fox hunting, but think mammals are inherently cuddlier than birds.
So, no, exterminating foxes to enable a monoculture of pheasants isn't a policy most people would see much merit in. Balanced and natural ecosystems are best. The efect of the hunting ban has been a huge decrease in the fox population, because there is no incentive to retain the balance.
Would you ban grouse and pheasant shooting too then?
At least the grouse and pheasent get eaten. I would have more sympathy if the Unspeakable actually ate the foxes...
I hate to break it to you but we shoot and snare hundreds of thousands of animals a year in the name of conservation and habitat/ecological protection.
The Kwarteng chancellorship was a major Cambridge University fail. The crème brûlée and Great Court Run college in particular. Re-establish the monasteries and give them their assets back?
Creme Brulee is Caius, not arriviste Trinity Burnt Cream.
My apologies. What's the difference, or is it only the nomenclature?
Doesn't the idea come from Catalonia anyway?
Despite my possible faux pas, it's true that Kwasi Kwarteng was in the in crowd at both Eton and Trinity and he ballsed up the Chancellor job as nobody has ever ballsed it up before so fast. And he doesn't have the humility and charm of Eddie the Eagle. No way would he have been promoted so high if he'd gone to the school down the road or even a second division private boarding school somewhere, or if he'd gone to, well, probably any university apart from Oxford and Cambridge.
And we can't blame the Tory party's membership in this instance.
Top post. Eton and Cambridge must be deeply embarrassed to have turned out such a tone-deaf incompetent.
He was at Cambridge with Richard Burgon, I believe, who was in the next door college?
Do people now understand why so many Cambridge politicians have been passed over before now?
Which would be a valid argument if the Oxford ones who get in weren't just as useless.
The real apex of entitled and ignorant cretinism in the education system is neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but Eton College. The first action of an incoming Labour Government should be to whistle up a squadron of RAF Typhoons armed with precision guided bombs and reduce the whole place to a pile of smouldering rubble.
Revoke its charitable status and start taxing it. That will hurt more than the Typhoons...
That's reasonable. There's no reason why the private schooling sector should benefit from charitable tax breaks. It contributes nothing of value to wider society.
That charitable status helps it provide scholarships and bursaries and it also shares facilities with the local community
If we tax them then the whole country can share
Private school parents already pay tax for state schools despite sending their children private
So? Bentley drivers' taxes pay for buses. Doesn't follow that Bentleys should be exempt from road tax.
Bursaries are crumbs chucked at a handful of lucky proles to justify the subsidising of luxury schools for the offspring of plutocrats at public expense.
The proles aren't that lucky. The treatment they got at the place where I was, would scar anyone for life.
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
But BigG definitely isn't. During the Johnson/Hunt leadership contest it was a deal breaker for his vote.
Fox hunting is a long way outside the Chncellors remit though
I am implacably opposed to fox hunting but I really do not see this as an issue at this time
Because you know absolutely nothing about it.
There is not one person across our family who supports fox hunting
I support fox hunting.
How do you think packs of wild wolves hunt Moose in the Yukon? Or any other predator for that matter? Why is that inferior to snaring or shooting?
Hunting is perfectly natural. Rest is class warfare and absurd emotional sentimentality.
Riding dressed in hunting pinks on artificially bred horses and killing the neighbourhood cats with packs of artificially bred C. familiaris is natural?
But why should the uniforms and ceremony bother you?
Just checking your claim that "hunting is perfectly natural".
So, hang on, we have to strip naked before we can claim that our actions are, relatively speaking, natural? (And natural is only ever relatively speaking, you think foxes haven't evolved in lockstep with human farming practices?)
Yes, the only way to do it properly is on foot with flint microlith spears and dressed in fur jockstraps. I am specifrically referring to CR's contention that it was all "perfectly natural", unless 'perfect' has some other meaning I'm not aware of.
Of course the modern environment is substantially artificial and of course foxes respond in innate and learned behaviours and physiology as a result. IIRC there are a number of actual/potential cases of human predation etc. affecting vertebrate evolution though I forget the details - fish breeding age in the North Sea and so on.
This would give the best top team and mean continuity after Hunt's statement.
And Con election prospects would immediately be completely transformed.
Would they though, Mike?
You and I and the sentient beings that populate this site would mostly agree that they ought to because we can see those three are strong politicians with the ability to run the country sensibly. But then you look at ConHome, and see the comments there. You then realise that leaders of sense and experience are simply not going to be acceptable to the batshit crazy bunch that elected Truss, and of course Boris before her.
I can actually see Conservative poll ratings falling further as the crazies foam at the mouth with outrage at the appointment of somebody like Hunt.
Really, the Party is in one hell of a mess and I don't see a solution. And if you think it is just me, read young Hyufd's posts. He tells it pretty straight and says there is no way the membership will accept the kind of leadership you are so sensibly proposing.
I agree. The Truss being Figurehead Leader in Name Only just isn't going to hold up under the pressures of the next few weeks. The Tories might be able to indulge that fantasy for a little while, but all it takes is another PMQs or media round from Liz and it will all fall apart.
Let's have some stability now until the GE. Keep things as they are. Truss doing regular car-crash interviews and pressers, Hunt being the common sense technocrat calling the shots and applying Labour policies, preventing economic meltdown through a couple of bleak years of mild recession.
Then, when the polls have narrowed a bit or time has run out, the Tories can call a GE with a Truss-led campaign leading to electoral wipe-out.
Hunt takes over as LOTO and begins the long Tory Party rebuild process. If there's anything left to rebuild.
Sounds like the least worst outlook to me. Shit, but ultimately survivable.
There is zero chance Tory members will elect Hunt as Leader of the Opposition. At present if Truss and Hunt lead the Tories to heavy defeat, the membership will likely conclude she was not rightwing enough and elect Braverman as Leader of the Opposition to PM Starmer's government.
At best Hunt can be Mandelson to Truss' Brown and steady the ship
I fear you are right in your analysis of Conservative members, but Braverman would be an absolute disaster for your party, much as Corbyn was and remains a disaster for Labour.
After Corbyn there are still left leaning voters who don't trust the Party not to jettison Starmer and replace with Burgon or Pidcock, or some other moon howler.
Should Braverman ever become Leader her spectral legacy would be, one of we Centists can't vote for a one nation feudal Tory Party because they might replace a sensible leader with Mark Francois, or Phillip Davies.
The die would be cast, as it is for Labour. To be on the safe side, perhaps we should all vote LibDem.
There is a risk that you look at what happens on the left of the labour party and assume the right of the Conservative party will do the same thing. Braverman and Badenoch are both quite smart people, they are not saddled with progressive ideology and will be scarred by having watched Truss crash and burn. There are only a handful of true idiots in the Parliamentary party, they are insignificant enough to be ignored and sidelined.
If you look at the membership of the Conservative party, I would also note that Sunak got 40%, his supporters are not likely to regret their vote given the catastrophe that has unfolded. And of Trusses voters, it is hard to believe that any of them could overlook the total, catastrophic failure that has just occurred. It isn't a case of the policies being rejected, they got to try to implement the policies and it caused untold chaos in the markets and sunk the party to its lowest poll ratings in 30 years. There is no centrist/remainer conspiracy here, we all watched the whole thing play out in real time and no one can be blamed but Liz Truss and the people that surround her. Perhaps some of the members who are in denial about the situation will tear up their membership cards but this is only a positive thing for the party, they should be goaded in to doing so.
I think that things are going in the right direction for the Conservative party, and I personally think people need to join the Conservative party to try and keep them on the right path. Once Truss is despatched to the backbenches, then the tories can still get back in to position of being the party of economic competence. They can still win the next election, because the labour party will start to get arrogant and their true nature will quickly reveal itself, as was the case in 1992. They are relying entirely on Starmer to project an image of competence and no politician is infallible.
The right of the party would rather lose to Starmer and rebuild in opposition under a rightwing leader now than win with Hunt or Sunak. Not that that is likely anyway
OK, but have they got the numbers in the parliamentary party or in the membership to make any difference? And are they not completely undermined by what has just happened to Truss? They've just had a go at government and failed miserably. Surely they cannot be in denial about this?
I am genuinely interested in your view of this @HYUFD , as you are closer to the action than me.
The membership largely agrees with them and they have the numbers to get a candidate to the membership again
Hunt has calmed the markets, if he quits then it will be carnage, so Truss cannot afford to lose him, he will do whatever he wants.
What happens if Monday comes and the markets aren’t calmed?
The way this usually happens is there can be two weeks of calm - people say the markets have been calmed, but then it all erupts again.
Obviously you all know my theory - £400bn of Rishi splaffing (and wasting a lot) to get us through covid has maxxed out the credit - now they want to (unnecessarily, needlessly) try to get another £200bn more borrowing - the markets won’t calm till that plan is dead.
Or the £200bn becomes more like £20bn. Everything now turns on the future price of gas.
I don’t want to be really rude David, but you keep posting that “If gas falls sufficiently, the cost of the energy cap freeze drops” means don’t think you really understand it. That thinking is utter bollox.
1. We haven’t had an OBR how much Tories total promise is likely to cost. The Tories have promised to buck the UK energy market for two and a half years regardless what global energy price does. Some think tanks have had a go at pricing this and come to a quarter of a trillion pound. To be found by tax rises, borrowing or cuts or mixture thereof. Quarter of a trillion on that one policy alone. 2. Variable one. Energy prices can go down, yes, but also up, it’s a very fluid situation in supply and demand over this coming period - but at which point do energy companies need to commit to buying it in advance, so commit to passing on THAT price to both customers AND onto a government commitment to bucking the market? 3. Variable two. If global prices do come down, to what degree is the saving on the quarter of a trillion eaten into or obliterated by the more expensive borrowing costs? Out of these two variable’s, borrowing costs for this policy look certain to remain high now, the greater doubt is if energy prices will come down and stay down isn’t it?
You really think that whole £200bn comes down to £20bn? 🥹 We all know what’s really behind “but the bill freeze looks like turning out much cheaper because gas prices are coming down” argument we get spun from Tory’s on TV and on PB - they privately hate this lumbering Labour policy Tory party has adopted, they hate the ENORMOUS amount of borrowing maxing out UKs credit limit, and the regressive unConservative way the money is spewed out in indiscriminate handouts.
But. They are only fooling themselves spinning that comfort blanket, because, yes, there are variables, but the variables are very much against them.
Don’t be one of them.
There is no defence to this insane policy, Truss has been hiding behind all week.
I would agree we don't know what this policy is going to cost and I would agree that there are significant risks on the upside but there is also some reason for hope on the low side.
The government have committed to the average house bill being no more than £2500 a year. At the moment the price of gas futures are 263p/therm. It has been over 700p and has averaged around 400p of late. The cost of the UK subsidy is directly relational to that price against the price that fixes the £2500 pa average. I have been unable to work out exactly what that is because there are quite a number of other variables. Energy companies are bumping up their fixed charges as well. My best guess is that £2500 per household is going be equivalent to something like 200p/therm, roughly twice what it was last winter.
But I am not wrong is saying that there is a chance that the cost of the scheme will prove to be much lower than the worst estimates. It could also be higher of course. If it stays somewhere near our current price or goes even lower then the cost of the scheme will be less. If it goes back up again we are in trouble, no doubt about it.
Edit, and btw the OBR will have no better idea than the rest of us, it is simply unknowable.
You telling us It’s unknowable wasn’t the impression I got when you reduced it from £200bn to £20bn to spark my reply. 🙂
We know enough overall price can’t come down that much. Because the bit you seem to be avoiding is commodity price drop is to some extent offset by borrowing cost increase - goes back to the unknowable being very guessable in that the borrowing cost won’t be based on “maybe the commodity price drops and stays at x price”, who lends money on that basis?
You accept the part of the equation, political and economic, it is not necessary to provide help in this way, there other options such as sliding scale to target help where needed, not wasted where not needed, and virtually pays for itself?
I believe most UK government borrowing is fixed rate. So the increase only kicks in as new debt is issued.
Interesting the current (March) forecast it from debt interest this year to be c £83bn but to *fall* to £47bn next year… a cut in public spending baked in
If you listened to what the mini budget said - the Energy Price Freeze (a quarter of a trillion pounds) will be paid for by new borrowing, no new taxes no new cuts.
If you listed to what Liz Truss said Wednesday, public spending overall total will not show any cuts under her, simply because the quarter of a trillion Energy Price Freeze is being added to the public spending total.
What I am arguing in this thread, we don’t have to fund a quarter of a trillion pound scheme when other realistic options are available better targeted and virtually paying for themselves, I’m also arguing against those saying commodity price coming down proves the end bill will definitely be cheaper, because even with cuts even with more tax, this scheme will always need a huge amount of new borrowing at the new higher borrowing rates.
Correct me where wrong.
But I am now adding a third facet to my argument - anyone who claims Kwarteng and Truss mini budget crashed the markets I am calling an idiot peddling a myth. And I can prove it. That spiking gilt market graph they use over and over in media, expand it to see the previous 12 months and see the trajectory is up up up long before Truss got anywhere near number 10 - my argument is the budget exacerbated an already underlying problem.
Anyone want to own the claim if the mini budget is reversed, annulled, reset, the trajectory on the borrowings chart graph would be down when it hasn’t been all year?
I’m arguing anyone who peddles Labour Party lies that Kwarteng and Truss mini budget crashed the markets I am calling an idiot peddling a myth, and sure I can win this argument.
I’ve been drinking all afternoon, don’t anyone want to take me on?
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
But BigG definitely isn't. During the Johnson/Hunt leadership contest it was a deal breaker for his vote.
Fox hunting is a long way outside the Chncellors remit though
I am implacably opposed to fox hunting but I really do not see this as an issue at this time
Because you know absolutely nothing about it.
There is not one person across our family who supports fox hunting
I support fox hunting.
How do you think packs of wild wolves hunt Moose in the Yukon? Or any other predator for that matter? Why is that inferior to snaring or shooting?
Hunting is perfectly natural. Rest is class warfare and absurd emotional sentimentality.
Riding dressed in hunting pinks on artificially bred horses and killing the neighbourhood cats with packs of artificially bred C. familiaris is natural?
But why should the uniforms and ceremony bother you?
Just checking your claim that "hunting is perfectly natural".
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
With or without dogs?
Is this a trick question?
No. Fox hunting is still legal isn't it? As long as you don't use dogs. I was against the ban. But there are deer living near us and the local oiks try hunting them with their pitbull-type dogs. And I hate that.
So I decided I shouldn't support toffs hunting foxes with dogs either.
Well, in non American English hunting means, with dogs. Using rifles is called shooting. It kills 10x the foxes hunting ever did, with the availability of military grade night sight equipment, and because foxes have never learned to lick their wounds those which are shot but not killed die very slowly and horribly of gangrene. And foxhunting unlike say pheasant shooting was never the preserve of rich toffs.
Agree about the pitbull types though.
Something that I've wondered about this, maybe you lot can help, is - is killing more foxes necessarily better? Are foxes a natural predator of something that means there needs to be an amount of foxes in circulation to bump off the other thing? Obviously eg with deer the british environment needs to be managed in some sense and the argument for foxhunting was that it was a manner of managing things that had worked for a long time. If we were killing more foxes now, but with guns or slingshots or trebuchets, would there be another problem? Apols if word salad.
Foxes keep down rabbits, and rabbits are more of a pain than you think (undermining walls and so on). They also take a LOT of lambs in the spring, which is obviously unhelpful. But the reason they are thwacked in industrial quantities is commercial pheasant shooting which is an horrific enterprise - breeding 10s of thousands of the things to be killed for sport and turned into cat food, which gets a free pass from bigG and his family because they know no more about it than they know about fox hunting, but think mammals are inherently cuddlier than birds.
So, no, exterminating foxes to enable a monoculture of pheasants isn't a policy most people would see much merit in. Balanced and natural ecosystems are best. The efect of the hunting ban has been a huge decrease in the fox population, because there is no incentive to retain the balance.
Would you ban grouse and pheasant shooting too then?
At least the grouse and pheasent get eaten. I would have more sympathy if the Unspeakable actually ate the foxes...
The pheasent (sic) bloody don't, except out of tins by cats. An absolutely cracking example of ignorant bigotry, well done.
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
With or without dogs?
Is this a trick question?
No. Fox hunting is still legal isn't it? As long as you don't use dogs. I was against the ban. But there are deer living near us and the local oiks try hunting them with their pitbull-type dogs. And I hate that.
So I decided I shouldn't support toffs hunting foxes with dogs either.
Well, in non American English hunting means, with dogs. Using rifles is called shooting. It kills 10x the foxes hunting ever did, with the availability of military grade night sight equipment, and because foxes have never learned to lick their wounds those which are shot but not killed die very slowly and horribly of gangrene. And foxhunting unlike say pheasant shooting was never the preserve of rich toffs.
Agree about the pitbull types though.
Something that I've wondered about this, maybe you lot can help, is - is killing more foxes necessarily better? Are foxes a natural predator of something that means there needs to be an amount of foxes in circulation to bump off the other thing? Obviously eg with deer the british environment needs to be managed in some sense and the argument for foxhunting was that it was a manner of managing things that had worked for a long time. If we were killing more foxes now, but with guns or slingshots or trebuchets, would there be another problem? Apols if word salad.
Foxes keep down rabbits, and rabbits are more of a pain than you think (undermining walls and so on). They also take a LOT of lambs in the spring, which is obviously unhelpful. But the reason they are thwacked in industrial quantities is commercial pheasant shooting which is an horrific enterprise - breeding 10s of thousands of the things to be killed for sport and turned into cat food, which gets a free pass from bigG and his family because they know no more about it than they know about fox hunting, but think mammals are inherently cuddlier than birds.
So, no, exterminating foxes to enable a monoculture of pheasants isn't a policy most people would see much merit in. Balanced and natural ecosystems are best. The efect of the hunting ban has been a huge decrease in the fox population, because there is no incentive to retain the balance.
Would you ban grouse and pheasant shooting too then?
At least the grouse and pheasent get eaten. I would have more sympathy if the Unspeakable actually ate the foxes...
Some pheasant on the cooker at maison Carnyx atm ...
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
With or without dogs?
Is this a trick question?
No. Fox hunting is still legal isn't it? As long as you don't use dogs. I was against the ban. But there are deer living near us and the local oiks try hunting them with their pitbull-type dogs. And I hate that.
So I decided I shouldn't support toffs hunting foxes with dogs either.
Well, in non American English hunting means, with dogs. Using rifles is called shooting. It kills 10x the foxes hunting ever did, with the availability of military grade night sight equipment, and because foxes have never learned to lick their wounds those which are shot but not killed die very slowly and horribly of gangrene. And foxhunting unlike say pheasant shooting was never the preserve of rich toffs.
Agree about the pitbull types though.
Something that I've wondered about this, maybe you lot can help, is - is killing more foxes necessarily better? Are foxes a natural predator of something that means there needs to be an amount of foxes in circulation to bump off the other thing? Obviously eg with deer the british environment needs to be managed in some sense and the argument for foxhunting was that it was a manner of managing things that had worked for a long time. If we were killing more foxes now, but with guns or slingshots or trebuchets, would there be another problem? Apols if word salad.
Foxes keep down rabbits, and rabbits are more of a pain than you think (undermining walls and so on). They also take a LOT of lambs in the spring, which is obviously unhelpful. But the reason they are thwacked in industrial quantities is commercial pheasant shooting which is an horrific enterprise - breeding 10s of thousands of the things to be killed for sport and turned into cat food, which gets a free pass from bigG and his family because they know no more about it than they know about fox hunting, but think mammals are inherently cuddlier than birds.
So, no, exterminating foxes to enable a monoculture of pheasants isn't a policy most people would see much merit in. Balanced and natural ecosystems are best. The efect of the hunting ban has been a huge decrease in the fox population, because there is no incentive to retain the balance.
Would you ban grouse and pheasant shooting too then?
Oh please don't. We usually get at least 3 or 4 brace of pheasant and partridge each Sunday during the shooting season, left for us by a couple of the shooters who do walking up. Eat absolutely loads of the stuff, roasted, casseroles, pies. Great stuff.
It has been notable this year with bird flu how badly affected the game season has been.
Hunt has calmed the markets, if he quits then it will be carnage, so Truss cannot afford to lose him, he will do whatever he wants.
What happens if Monday comes and the markets aren’t calmed?
The way this usually happens is there can be two weeks of calm - people say the markets have been calmed, but then it all erupts again.
Obviously you all know my theory - £400bn of Rishi splaffing (and wasting a lot) to get us through covid has maxxed out the credit - now they want to (unnecessarily, needlessly) try to get another £200bn more borrowing - the markets won’t calm till that plan is dead.
Or the £200bn becomes more like £20bn. Everything now turns on the future price of gas.
I don’t want to be really rude David, but you keep posting that “If gas falls sufficiently, the cost of the energy cap freeze drops” means don’t think you really understand it. That thinking is utter bollox.
1. We haven’t had an OBR how much Tories total promise is likely to cost. The Tories have promised to buck the UK energy market for two and a half years regardless what global energy price does. Some think tanks have had a go at pricing this and come to a quarter of a trillion pound. To be found by tax rises, borrowing or cuts or mixture thereof. Quarter of a trillion on that one policy alone. 2. Variable one. Energy prices can go down, yes, but also up, it’s a very fluid situation in supply and demand over this coming period - but at which point do energy companies need to commit to buying it in advance, so commit to passing on THAT price to both customers AND onto a government commitment to bucking the market? 3. Variable two. If global prices do come down, to what degree is the saving on the quarter of a trillion eaten into or obliterated by the more expensive borrowing costs? Out of these two variable’s, borrowing costs for this policy look certain to remain high now, the greater doubt is if energy prices will come down and stay down isn’t it?
You really think that whole £200bn comes down to £20bn? 🥹 We all know what’s really behind “but the bill freeze looks like turning out much cheaper because gas prices are coming down” argument we get spun from Tory’s on TV and on PB - they privately hate this lumbering Labour policy Tory party has adopted, they hate the ENORMOUS amount of borrowing maxing out UKs credit limit, and the regressive unConservative way the money is spewed out in indiscriminate handouts.
But. They are only fooling themselves spinning that comfort blanket, because, yes, there are variables, but the variables are very much against them.
Don’t be one of them.
There is no defence to this insane policy, Truss has been hiding behind all week.
I would agree we don't know what this policy is going to cost and I would agree that there are significant risks on the upside but there is also some reason for hope on the low side.
The government have committed to the average house bill being no more than £2500 a year. At the moment the price of gas futures are 263p/therm. It has been over 700p and has averaged around 400p of late. The cost of the UK subsidy is directly relational to that price against the price that fixes the £2500 pa average. I have been unable to work out exactly what that is because there are quite a number of other variables. Energy companies are bumping up their fixed charges as well. My best guess is that £2500 per household is going be equivalent to something like 200p/therm, roughly twice what it was last winter.
But I am not wrong is saying that there is a chance that the cost of the scheme will prove to be much lower than the worst estimates. It could also be higher of course. If it stays somewhere near our current price or goes even lower then the cost of the scheme will be less. If it goes back up again we are in trouble, no doubt about it.
Edit, and btw the OBR will have no better idea than the rest of us, it is simply unknowable.
You telling us It’s unknowable wasn’t the impression I got when you reduced it from £200bn to £20bn to spark my reply. 🙂
We know enough overall price can’t come down that much. Because the bit you seem to be avoiding is commodity price drop is to some extent offset by borrowing cost increase - goes back to the unknowable being very guessable in that the borrowing cost won’t be based on “maybe the commodity price drops and stays at x price”, who lends money on that basis?
You accept the part of the equation, political and economic, it is not necessary to provide help in this way, there other options such as sliding scale to target help where needed, not wasted where not needed, and virtually pays for itself?
I believe most UK government borrowing is fixed rate. So the increase only kicks in as new debt is issued.
Interesting the current (March) forecast it from debt interest this year to be c £83bn but to *fall* to £47bn next year… a cut in public spending baked in
If you listened to what the mini budget said - the Energy Price Freeze (a quarter of a trillion pounds) will be paid for by new borrowing, no new taxes no new cuts.
If you listed to what Liz Truss said Wednesday, public spending overall total will not show any cuts under her, simply because the quarter of a trillion Energy Price Freeze is being added to the public spending total.
What I am arguing in this thread, we don’t have to fund a quarter of a trillion pound scheme when other realistic options are available better targeted and virtually paying for themselves, I’m also arguing against those saying commodity price coming down proves the end bill will definitely be cheaper, because even with cuts even with more tax, this scheme will always need a huge amount of new borrowing at the new higher borrowing rates.
Correct me where wrong.
But I am now adding a third facet to my argument - anyone who claims Kwarteng and Truss mini budget crashed the markets I am calling an idiot peddling a myth. And I can prove it. That spiking gilt market graph they use over and over in media, expand it to see the previous 12 months and see the trajectory is up up up long before Truss got anywhere near number 10 - my argument is the budget exacerbated an already underlying problem.
Anyone want to own the claim if the mini budget is reversed, annulled, reset, the trajectory on the borrowings chart graph would be down when it hasn’t been all year?
I’m arguing anyone who peddles Labour Party lies that Kwarteng and Truss mini budget crashed the markets I am calling an idiot peddling a myth, and sure I can win this argument.
I’ve been drinking all afternoon, don’t anyone want to take Meon?
I'd be more interested in occupying Old Alresford. Nice place as I recall.
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
But BigG definitely isn't. During the Johnson/Hunt leadership contest it was a deal breaker for his vote.
Fox hunting is a long way outside the Chncellors remit though
I am implacably opposed to fox hunting but I really do not see this as an issue at this time
Because you know absolutely nothing about it.
There is not one person across our family who supports fox hunting
I support fox hunting.
How do you think packs of wild wolves hunt Moose in the Yukon? Or any other predator for that matter? Why is that inferior to snaring or shooting?
Hunting is perfectly natural. Rest is class warfare and absurd emotional sentimentality.
Riding dressed in hunting pinks on artificially bred horses and killing the neighbourhood cats with packs of artificially bred C. familiaris is natural?
But why should the uniforms and ceremony bother you?
Just checking your claim that "hunting is perfectly natural".
So, hang on, we have to strip naked before we can claim that our actions are, relatively speaking, natural? (And natural is only ever relatively speaking, you think foxes haven't evolved in lockstep with human farming practices?)
Yes, the only way to do it properly is on foot with flint microlith spears and dressed in fur jockstraps. I am specifrically referring to CR's contention that it was all "perfectly natural", unless 'perfect' has some other meaning I'm not aware of.
Of course the modern environment is substantially artificial and of course foxes respond in innate and learned behaviours and physiology as a result. IIRC there are a number of actual/potential cases of human predation etc. affecting vertebrate evolution though I forget the details - fish breeding age in the North Sea and so on.
I've seen it suggested urban foxes are developing the sorts of signs of neoteny that are seen in domestication.
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
With or without dogs?
Is this a trick question?
No. Fox hunting is still legal isn't it? As long as you don't use dogs. I was against the ban. But there are deer living near us and the local oiks try hunting them with their pitbull-type dogs. And I hate that.
So I decided I shouldn't support toffs hunting foxes with dogs either.
Well, in non American English hunting means, with dogs. Using rifles is called shooting. It kills 10x the foxes hunting ever did, with the availability of military grade night sight equipment, and because foxes have never learned to lick their wounds those which are shot but not killed die very slowly and horribly of gangrene. And foxhunting unlike say pheasant shooting was never the preserve of rich toffs.
Agree about the pitbull types though.
Something that I've wondered about this, maybe you lot can help, is - is killing more foxes necessarily better? Are foxes a natural predator of something that means there needs to be an amount of foxes in circulation to bump off the other thing? Obviously eg with deer the british environment needs to be managed in some sense and the argument for foxhunting was that it was a manner of managing things that had worked for a long time. If we were killing more foxes now, but with guns or slingshots or trebuchets, would there be another problem? Apols if word salad.
Foxes keep down rabbits, and rabbits are more of a pain than you think (undermining walls and so on). They also take a LOT of lambs in the spring, which is obviously unhelpful. But the reason they are thwacked in industrial quantities is commercial pheasant shooting which is an horrific enterprise - breeding 10s of thousands of the things to be killed for sport and turned into cat food, which gets a free pass from bigG and his family because they know no more about it than they know about fox hunting, but think mammals are inherently cuddlier than birds.
So, no, exterminating foxes to enable a monoculture of pheasants isn't a policy most people would see much merit in. Balanced and natural ecosystems are best. The efect of the hunting ban has been a huge decrease in the fox population, because there is no incentive to retain the balance.
Would you ban grouse and pheasant shooting too then?
Oh please don't. We usually get at least 3 or 4 brace of pheasant and partridge each Sunday during the shooting season, left for us by a couple of the shooters who do walking up. Eat absolutely loads of the stuff, roasted, casseroles, pies. Great stuff.
It has been notable this year with bird flu how badly affected the game season has been.
For the first time in a long time I believe we have a grown up in what is now the most powerful political position in the country
I wish Hunt all the best not just for the conservative party but for the country
Truss is over, it is just the question of when but it won't be long
But he is in favour of fox hunting don't forget.
Good. So am I.
But BigG definitely isn't. During the Johnson/Hunt leadership contest it was a deal breaker for his vote.
Fox hunting is a long way outside the Chncellors remit though
I am implacably opposed to fox hunting but I really do not see this as an issue at this time
Because you know absolutely nothing about it.
There is not one person across our family who supports fox hunting
I support fox hunting.
How do you think packs of wild wolves hunt Moose in the Yukon? Or any other predator for that matter? Why is that inferior to snaring or shooting?
Hunting is perfectly natural. Rest is class warfare and absurd emotional sentimentality.
Riding dressed in hunting pinks on artificially bred horses and killing the neighbourhood cats with packs of artificially bred C. familiaris is natural?
But why should the uniforms and ceremony bother you?
Just checking your claim that "hunting is perfectly natural".
So, hang on, we have to strip naked before we can claim that our actions are, relatively speaking, natural? (And natural is only ever relatively speaking, you think foxes haven't evolved in lockstep with human farming practices?)
Yes, the only way to do it properly is on foot with flint microlith spears and dressed in fur jockstraps. I am specifrically referring to CR's contention that it was all "perfectly natural", unless 'perfect' has some other meaning I'm not aware of.
Of course the modern environment is substantially artificial and of course foxes respond in innate and learned behaviours and physiology as a result. IIRC there are a number of actual/potential cases of human predation etc. affecting vertebrate evolution though I forget the details - fish breeding age in the North Sea and so on.
I've seen it suggested urban foxes are developing the sorts of signs of neoteny that are seen in domestication.
Comments
In my opinion here is only one area of relatively pain free expenditure savings and boosting of living standards and that is watering down or abandoning Net Zero. I'm not sure any of the major parties are up for that (yet). Unfortunately the current Net Zero Plans look certain to fail so will have to be changed drastically but that will probably only happen when things really hit the fan in a couple of years.
Osborne coming up on C4 and the Sundays are gonna be brutal.
And kwazi’s decided to talk.
All bad for Truss.
For the record, I'm not convinced you're the latter. Most of the time, anyway.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/09/ex-vaccine-head-kate-bingham-accuses-matt-hancock-behaviour-in-meeting
Nice that you have realised that not all northerners are thick.
I dedicate the idea to Paloma Faith.
Next week probably crucial. If they can reach a decision on a "coronation candidate" she's as good as gone by end of October.
Only thing that might save her is waiting for Hunt's statement to be over. But I suspect any coronation candidate will either have to commit to keeping Hunt in post, or if it actually is Hunt, briefing his replacement quite early doors (or engineering it so the handover of power happens after 31 October).
The Tory party is really 3 parties now: a vote-leave, authoritarian populist party epitomised by Baker, Patel, Braverman et al; a party of twatty libertarians of the Truss and Redwood tendency; and an Osborneist party of austerity
and orthodoxy not dissimilar to the German CDU which straddles Brexit/remain but lacks much of a coherent vision of Britain. Better those 3 battle it out as separate parties and we see who is able to appeal to voters.
Imagine the joy of going down the polling booth on election day and voting for a party you actually believe in, knowing there’s a possibility they might actually have some influence in the next government.
How do you think packs of wild wolves hunt Moose in the Yukon? Or any other predator for that matter? Why is that inferior to snaring or shooting?
Hunting is perfectly natural. Rest is class warfare and absurd emotional sentimentality.
(You want the return flow to be < 45℃ to get 90+% efficiency IIRC.)
There is also the One Nation faction, Halfon, Tugendhat, Ellwood etc
It's a form of class warfare, though listening to plummy tones of vandals defacing public art and generating cleaning work for others, I suspect total ignorance of what working people do is a factor. At some point a politician will work out draconian sentences would be popular.
https://twitter.com/iainmartin1/status/1581329808180776961
Isn’t it all a bit futile, when billions of East Asians, South Asians, Africans and South Americans give out antibiotics like candy?
Would us continuing to be strict about antibiotics really make much difference to the level of resistance?
FS (& Deputy PM) Penny
CoE Hunt
This would give the best top team and mean continuity after Hunt's statement.
And Con election prospects would immediately be completely transformed.
Prior to that, the previous four (Major, Thatcher, Wilson, Heath) were all at state schools.
Still agree with the ban though.
So, no, exterminating foxes to enable a monoculture of pheasants isn't a policy most people would see much merit in. Balanced and natural ecosystems are best. The efect of the hunting ban has been a huge decrease in the fox population, because there is no incentive to retain the balance.
Starmer also educated at private and grammar school
If you look at the membership of the Conservative party, I would also note that Sunak got 40%, his supporters are not likely to regret their vote given the catastrophe that has unfolded. And of Trusses voters, it is hard to believe that any of them could overlook the total, catastrophic failure that has just occurred. It isn't a case of the policies being rejected, they got to try to implement the policies and it caused untold chaos in the markets and sunk the party to its lowest poll ratings in 30 years. There is no centrist/remainer conspiracy here, we all watched the whole thing play out in real time and no one can be blamed but Liz Truss and the people that surround her. Perhaps some of the members who are in denial about the situation will tear up their membership cards but this is only a positive thing for the party, they should be goaded in to doing so.
I think that things are going in the right direction for the Conservative party, and I personally think people need to join the Conservative party to try and keep them on the right path. Once Truss is despatched to the backbenches, then the tories can still get back in to position of being the party of economic competence. They can still win the next election, because the labour party will start to get arrogant and their true nature will quickly reveal itself, as was the case in 1992. They are relying entirely on Starmer to project an image of competence and no politician is infallible.
Strangely, our school did not have its own squash courts.
Bursaries are crumbs chucked at a handful of lucky proles to justify the subsidising of luxury schools for the offspring of plutocrats at public expense.
Theresa May was at a grammar that became a comp.
Oh, for a film title designer artist who could match the sex appeal and genius of Maurice Binder today.
I am genuinely interested in your view of this @HYUFD , as you are closer to the action than me.
Still hold?
Of course the modern environment is substantially artificial and of course foxes respond in innate and learned behaviours and physiology as a result. IIRC there are a number of actual/potential cases of human predation etc. affecting vertebrate evolution though I forget the details - fish breeding age in the North Sea and so on.
You and I and the sentient beings that populate this site would mostly agree that they ought to because we can see those three are strong politicians with the ability to run the country sensibly. But then you look at ConHome, and see the comments there. You then realise that leaders of sense and experience are simply not going to be acceptable to the batshit crazy bunch that elected Truss, and of course Boris before her.
I can actually see Conservative poll ratings falling further as the crazies foam at the mouth with outrage at the appointment of somebody like Hunt.
Really, the Party is in one hell of a mess and I don't see a solution. And if you think it is just me, read young Hyufd's posts. He tells it pretty straight and says there is no way the membership will accept the kind of leadership you are so sensibly proposing.
Your party is in deep, deep shit. Reopening the hunting debate is not likely to help.
I’ve been drinking all afternoon, don’t anyone want to take me on?
It has been notable this year with bird flu how badly affected the game season has been.
Far better than chicken.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y20CLumT2Sg