These are hard and so my rates will have to increase significantly. But still a much much better bet than Levido and whichever Cummings-look alike cretins have been advising you up till now.
Leadership
1. See the basic principles from my earlier post on previous thread. People with a loose understanding of integrity should not even be in contention. That rules out Braverman and Jenrick - also on the grounds of competence.
2. Take your time. No-one wants to hear from you right now and they certainly don't want to hear retreads they've just blown a gigantic raspberry at. See also point 1.
3. Your new leader needs to be a new face or, at least, one capable of creating a new face for themselves and the party. Tetchy arrogance is not a good look. So think next generation or the bridge to it. If there is no-one ready yet look for another Michael Howard and accept this will be a long game.
4. Whatever you do stop looking for the next Cameron or Thatcher. You're meant to remember your granny not turn into her.
5. They will need one thing above all: courage. First, courage to speak some truths to the membership. Preserving and building on the best of the past does not mean living in it. If they don't like that message, the party will die. Be blunt and don't pander. Second: they will need the courage to tear up party shibboleths, be ruthless with the drama queens and be largely irrelevant for a while. That lack of attention gives some space to rebuild.
Opposition
This will be hard. You don't set the agenda. You will be blamed for everything. Find an answer to the obvious blame statements. One good one is: You're in power now so expect to be put under scrutiny for what you are doing now. Develop a thick skin.
You do have a lot of experience of government so you should know where the traps are. Plus you have quite a few ex-MPs who can give you useful intelligence. Use them.
Work on the competence and delivery angle: this is where governments come unstuck. So patiently ask questions, get into the detail, know your briefs and keep on asking questions and probing and pointing out errors etc.,. Think Jason Beer KC. Remember it's not whether they're doing things as you would like them to do. It's whether the government achieves what they have promised. That's what you attack and probe and target. That - if you do it well - is what will undermine voters' faith in a government and start the process of them looking at alternatives.
New faces please and ones who communicate as humans.
Ditch the entitlement: no group of voters belong to you, not Reform, not Blue Wall, no-one.
Do not copy the USA.
Remember: you are planning for the 2030's and beyond.
You’re forgetting the change curve. I think the Tories will find this all exceptionally difficult, at least for a while.
I was elected to my former council in 1994, and at that election an unbroken series of Conservative majorities since the council had been created came to an end, with the council going balanced and a minority Labour administration taking office for the first time.
All but a handful of the Conservative councillors were used to making decisions and having the council carry them out, and being in opposition came as a massive shock. At the first budget setting meeting, we had sorted out the budget with the Labour Group in advance, and the Tories simply couldn’t cope with the reality that all their amendments were simply going to be voted down. They reacted by raising points of order and recorded votes and making lengthy speeches, such that we carried on through the night and the budget was not actually set until 4am the following morning.
How many of the current bunch of Tory MPs are new to parliament, and won’t have to go through the denial stage?
Here they are, the let's-hope-some-of-them-are-magnificent 26:
Alison Griffiths Bognor Regis and Littlehampton Ashley Fox Bridgwater Charlie Dewhirst Bridlington and The Wolds Peter Fortune Bromley and Biggin Hill Bradley Thomas Bromsgrove Lewis Cocking Broxbourne Patrick Spencer Central Suffolk and North Ipswich Aphra Brandreth Chester South and Eddisbury John Cooper Dumfries and Galloway David Reed Exmouth and Exeter East Greg Stafford Farnham and Bordon Andrew Snowden Fylde Harriet Cross Gordon and Buchan Ben Obese-Jecty Huntingdon Joe Robertson Isle of Wight East Shivani Raja Leicester East Blake Stephenson Mid Bedfordshire Peter Bedford Mid Leicestershire Rebecca Paul Reigate Neil Shastri-Hurst Solihull West and Shirley Sarah Bool South Northamptonshire Rebecca Smith South West Devon Lincoln Jopp Spelthorne Katie Lam Weald of Kent Nick Timothy West Suffolk Jack Rankin Windsor
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
I didn’t say that.
It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be
Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.
There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?
The problem is that there *is* overlap between some of the parties in the centre, and you want that to be a hard-and-fast boundary. But without going to the NF or BNP, there is no boundary on the right. You want to truncate the broad church in the centre, but let any nutcase in on the far right.
But IMV the key word for Conservatives is the small-c word 'conservative'. Not no change, but careful and well-planned change, cautiously made. Progress by evolution rather than revolution.
The Conservative Party have forgotten that over the last decade.
But that notion is one of parties occupying a silly sort of space on left/right spectrum. A band that contracts, expands, and is pushed up and down like a pipe cleaner with the vagaries of politics.
What I'm arguing for is belief in a set of values and principles by which all political actions are measured. Is a law adding to the powers of the state against individual? Is a law or treaty in the national interest or against it? Is a law adding unduly to the tax burden? Will a law fundamentally undermine the security of the nation or its ability to defend itself? Is a law in the interests of families? Is a political action conducive to a strong, cohesive society? Is a law conducive to parliamentary sovereignty?
It isn't really about right and left, though those terms can be useful shorthand. A lot of the PCP, through design by CCHQ for reasons which I can't discern, doesn't pay more than lip service to those values, and sometimes not even that.
The issue is that the way those topics viewed can very much be in the eyes of he beholder, e.g. what is the national interest, especially if you take short- and long-term into account? They can also be contradictory. Is a slightly increased tax burden justified if that tax money is spent in the national interest? This treaty may slightly reduce national sovereignty, but also be in the national interest.
I think they're less ambiguous than you indicate. But they do come in and out of fashion.
There are fashionable weasel words that would justify the closing of Britain's virgin steel making capacity, dealing a knockout blow to our ability to manufacture armaments without importing the steel, based on amorphous envisaged future benefits of 'setting a good example' on CO2 emissions, but no true adherent to Tory principles could ever support such a scheme. Another Tory principle is that families and individuals spend their money better than the state. If adherence to these principles was widespread within the PCP, neither the party nor the country would be in the mess they are in.
Before wittering about immigration or whatever, the Tories need to think hard about the 4 things they have lacked or deliberately abandoned in recent years.
1. An understanding of Burkean principles - the idea that conservatism is about preserving the best of what we have built but also about building on that for the next generations - to leave the country in a better state than they found it. So it is not enough to focus only on one elderly generation but to remember those that are and those to come and to make life and opportunities better for them. (Why in God's name did a Conservative government kill off Sure Start? - to give just one example.)
2. Chesterton's Fence: you don't just randomly and angrily attack and destroy institutions and conventions just because they stand in your way. You are meant to be grown ups not tantruming toddlers. The attacks on the rule of law, on any standards of integrity and political decency, on independent institutions etc was pathetic, dangerous and, well, unconservative. See point 1.
3. Competence: obvious but forgotten. Just try to do your tasks well. Good administration, thinking about the consequences, thinking ahead, getting advice, planning, sorting out mistakes, learning from them, small practical improvements instead of snake oil promises backed by nothing more than bullshit etc. You forgot that. You will have to relearn this and try to demonstrate it where you can - in how you run your party and whatever councils you control. It will take time and you won't be listened to for a long time. But unless you do start doing this now, forget the rest.
4. Character: the single most important factor. The moral character, the integrity, the honesty of those who lead your party and those in it and how they behave says more about you than any manifesto. You chose some dreadful leaders in a Faustian pact which has well and truly bitten you on the arse. You abandoned all standards of political decency. You allowed corruption and shadiness and spivs in public office to fester. You gave the impression that duty and public service were jokes. The one abiding image for your years in power was parties in Downing Street while a widowed queen sat alone at her husband's funeral. That image stood for many who did their job while you treated their old-fashioned virtues with contempt. Really, how dare you call yourself conservative and behave like that.
Get these right. Then you can start worrying about policies. The current government will eventually make mistakes in all these areas. (I mean, Jacqui Smith, really?) But they won't listen to you until you've admitted you fucked things up and have changed.
Available for consultation at £1,3750 per hour + VAT or its euro equivalent. An absolute bargain.
Everyone Conservative MP should have to read it and every Conservative wannabe leader should have to give their thoughts on it.
I'm afraid I can't agree, because unlike @DeclanF's first set of points on the matter, which came over as high-minded and was universal enough for conservatives of all colours (including me, who 'liked' the post) to get behind, this set of requirements is narrowly political, and frankly reads as yet another PB post dolorously opining that the Tories must 'avoid a swing to the right', despite (and probably because of) the centrist position being utterly destroyed in a test with real voters. Time and again, those on the right have urged the building of the same coalition that Boris made into a landslide victory. The post-electoral arithmetic clearly shows this to be the case. Starmer's victory is based on an utterly shallow pool of voters, and it's incredibly self-serving of his supporters to urge the Tories to pull their punches against Labour, leave the right of British politics unrepresented, and attack Reform instead.
Absolutely not. No sensible tactician would urge the Tories to go back to chasing after some white van man in Redcar. It’s the sensible folk of Surrey and Sussex and Hampshire and Wiltshire and Somerset and Devon and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire and … that you should be worrying about. By and large, they don’t want a government of ideological obsessives, and right now, that’s you, not them.
Shush! As someone who's just worked his socks off to help make Oxfordshire Tory MP-free for the first time since before the American Revolution, if the Tories want to move further and further away from the centre ground, let them.
Sarwar claims @UKLabour wants UK’s governments to “actually work together in the national interest; cooperation instead of conflict; respect without suspicion” #GE2024
The Tories will elect a new chairman of the 1922 committee this week. It's likely to be either Geoffrey Clifton-Brown or Bob Blackman. They'll have the unenviable task of being holder-of-the-letters for any future race
The other part of it is reconstituting the 1922 Committee which in opposition is far more important for the Conservative Parliamentary Party. The new committee may well reveal the power balance within the Parliamentary group and provide some insight as to who might emerge from the "sea of electoral hazard" to a members' ballot.
The Tories will elect a new chairman of the 1922 committee this week. It's likely to be either Geoffrey Clifton-Brown or Bob Blackman. They'll have the unenviable task of being holder-of-the-letters for any future race
The other part of it is reconstituting the 1922 Committee which in opposition is far more important for the Conservative Parliamentary Party. The new committee may well reveal the power balance within the Parliamentary group and provide some insight as to who might emerge from the "sea of electoral hazard" to a members' ballot.
The first big fight is going to be the length of the contest. Some of them want to take their time, some of them want a new leader by conference.
The long game is the right answer, so expect Cruella to get a standing ovation in September...
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
The idea of a broad church is that everyone puts their ideas in, and then the leader decides, and everyone goes along with it. That's what should happen. Ideally no-one will be fully happy, but everyone gets something.
A 'broad church' isn't the right wingers getting everything they want. And sadly, the right-wingers seem to want everything their own way. There can be no compromise - as we saw over Brexit. And they were not exactly loyal, were they? They weren't loyal to Major, to Cameron, to May...
'Loyalty' isn't stabbing your leader in the back.
Tell that to Rishi Sunak.
I was appalled that he went to the King for a dissolution and told the cabinet afterwards.
As a lifelong Liberal and Liberal Democrat supporter and one time Party member, it's incredible to think we now have 72 MPs. I remember the thrill of 46 MPs in 1997 and thinking of that as a breakthrough but to imagine after the dark days of 2015, we now have 2 LD MPs for every 3 Conservatives - almost unbelievable.
I've often said on here the party I joined and worked for died in the fires of the coalition but, phoenix-like, that party has risen from the ashes of 2015 and has targeted ruthlessly to achieve such a result. Ed Davey is a product of ALDC and the campaigning techniques of that organisation (as was Farron) and it's perhaps no surprise the party has gone back to the future. Yes, a lot of it was the classic "high tide floating all boats" but that doesn't mean each and every gain wasn't the result of hard work.
I strongly suspect there is a significant correlation between local Government success, especially from 2022 onwards, and victory last Thursday and it's to other areas of local strength which were outside the scope of targeting this time the party needs to look for further progress. 2025 has to be about gains at County level and using those to develop organisation in new areas.
Given how some Conservatives enjoyed dancing on the LD graves in 2015, you'll forgive a wry smile as I look at the Conservatives "assessing their losses". The humiliation of 2015 has been avenged. Such is politics, a rough trade as someone once said.
But 71 Lib Dem seats in 2024 matter a lot less than a dozen did in 2015, because Labour's majority is so huge and they will obviously be mostly gone when the public want Labour out, whenever that is. Most of the public would be hard pressed to name a single LibDem policy I think. That's the way with protest votes, whether they are Reform, LibDem or Monster Raving Loony.
LibDems do a great job as "not the Tories!" Can they do the same as "not bloody Labour!"? Jury is very much out on that one.
As currently configured the LDs can only do well if Labour do well. There is no party that rises as the Tories rise - they have no friends. But though they don't say so, the great majority of seats in England has become ones in which, of the three traditional parties, it is either Lab v Con or LD v Con. (Obviously at the moment Reform and other interlopers slightly muddy the waters, but it holds good generally). In this election, while LD seats are a bit better at tactical voting than Labour ones, the effect was obvious and, like quantum particles, entangled.
The LDs are desperate to not look like Tories. Less desperate about Labour.
The Tories will elect a new chairman of the 1922 committee this week. It's likely to be either Geoffrey Clifton-Brown or Bob Blackman. They'll have the unenviable task of being holder-of-the-letters for any future race
The other part of it is reconstituting the 1922 Committee which in opposition is far more important for the Conservative Parliamentary Party. The new committee may well reveal the power balance within the Parliamentary group and provide some insight as to who might emerge from the "sea of electoral hazard" to a members' ballot.
Isn't the Committee for backbenchers? Given the number of Shadow posts to be filled, might there be a shortage of candidates?
So who do we think that favours? Is this right wingers who would not normally vote coming out in numbers or moderates determined to stop the National Rally? Could be both, of course.
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
The idea of a broad church is that everyone puts their ideas in, and then the leader decides, and everyone goes along with it. That's what should happen. Ideally no-one will be fully happy, but everyone gets something.
A 'broad church' isn't the right wingers getting everything they want. And sadly, the right-wingers seem to want everything their own way. There can be no compromise - as we saw over Brexit. And they were not exactly loyal, were they? They weren't loyal to Major, to Cameron, to May...
'Loyalty' isn't stabbing your leader in the back.
Tell that to Rishi Sunak.
I was appalled that he went to the King for a dissolution and told the cabinet afterwards.
That really isn't cricket.
His entire tenure seems little more than an extended confidence trick.
The conservatives need *someone* who looks competent and can actually manage complex policy / actually deliver.
Who can do that in the tories? They’ll all revert to culture wars
They have a fundamental first task of deciding what their core principles are, and articulating how they are both different from and better than Lab, LD and Reform. The last of those is intellectually easy, but they will struggle because of the Tories' deficit of intelligence. The first two are intellectually hard and they are about to find them getting harder.
So who do we think that favours? Is this right wingers who would not normally vote coming out in numbers or moderates determined to stop the National Rally? Could be both, of course.
Hard to say (meaning I have no idea). But even if NR do not get to the level that was projected from the first round as a result of people pulling out they'll still be a much increased force.
So who do we think that favours? Is this right wingers who would not normally vote coming out in numbers or moderates determined to stop the National Rally? Could be both, of course.
Also for @Cleitophon, note that shops are boarding themselves up in anticipation of riots.
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
The idea of a broad church is that everyone puts their ideas in, and then the leader decides, and everyone goes along with it. That's what should happen. Ideally no-one will be fully happy, but everyone gets something.
A 'broad church' isn't the right wingers getting everything they want. And sadly, the right-wingers seem to want everything their own way. There can be no compromise - as we saw over Brexit. And they were not exactly loyal, were they? They weren't loyal to Major, to Cameron, to May...
'Loyalty' isn't stabbing your leader in the back.
Tell that to Rishi Sunak.
I was appalled that he went to the King for a dissolution and told the cabinet afterwards.
That really isn't cricket.
His entire tenure seems little more than an extended confidence trick.
So who do we think that favours? Is this right wingers who would not normally vote coming out in numbers or moderates determined to stop the National Rally? Could be both, of course.
Isn't the mantra "vote for the crook, not the fascist?". Perhaps there are no crooks to vote for
The conservatives need *someone* who looks competent and can actually manage complex policy / actually deliver.
Who can do that in the tories? They’ll all revert to culture wars
First parliamentary term: bloodletting and fighting with reform Second parliamentary term: stability and reason and finding new talent of millenials. Third parliamentary term: the new talent has a chance at connecting with millenial voters.
The next tories to form government aren't even in politics yet
So who do we think that favours? Is this right wingers who would not normally vote coming out in numbers or moderates determined to stop the National Rally? Could be both, of course.
It's pretty similar to the figures last week. Occam's Razor suggests the same folk.
So who do we think that favours? Is this right wingers who would not normally vote coming out in numbers or moderates determined to stop the National Rally? Could be both, of course.
Isn't the mantra "vote for the crook, not the fascist?". Perhaps there are no crooks to vote for
Correction. In France they vote against not for. I should have said "perhaps there are no fascists to vote against". Vraiment
The conservatives need *someone* who looks competent and can actually manage complex policy / actually deliver.
Who can do that in the tories? They’ll all revert to culture wars
They have a fundamental first task of deciding what their core principles are, and articulating how they are both different from and better than Lab, LD and Reform. The last of those is intellectually easy, but they will struggle because of the Tories' deficit of intelligence. The first two are intellectually hard and they are about to find them getting harder.
Personally I think that the centrist wet Tory MPs would be better fitted to and happier in the Lib Dems.
The only reason that most of them were ever in the Tories not the Liberal/Libdem Parties is because the Tory Party provided a vehicle to achieve office and the Liberals didn't.
There is a worthy place for Liberalism, but the decline of the Liberal party in the 1920s led to both of the other two parties being infested with ambitious Liberals with the result that by 2010 the electorate was presented with three variants of Liberslism and is now revolting.
The place for Liberalism is within the Liberal (Democrat) Party.
The conservatives need *someone* who looks competent and can actually manage complex policy / actually deliver.
Who can do that in the tories? They’ll all revert to culture wars
First parliamentary term: bloodletting and fighting with reform Second parliamentary term: stability and reason and finding new talent of millenials. Third parliamentary term: the new talent has a chance at connecting with millenial voters.
The next tories to form government aren't even in politics yet
The oldest millennials will be in their late fifties by then.
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
I didn’t say that.
It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be
Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.
There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?
The problem is that there *is* overlap between some of the parties in the centre, and you want that to be a hard-and-fast boundary. But without going to the NF or BNP, there is no boundary on the right. You want to truncate the broad church in the centre, but let any nutcase in on the far right.
But IMV the key word for Conservatives is the small-c word 'conservative'. Not no change, but careful and well-planned change, cautiously made. Progress by evolution rather than revolution.
The Conservative Party have forgotten that over the last decade.
But that notion is one of parties occupying a silly sort of space on left/right spectrum. A band that contracts, expands, and is pushed up and down like a pipe cleaner with the vagaries of politics.
What I'm arguing for is belief in a set of values and principles by which all political actions are measured. Is a law adding to the powers of the state against individual? Is a law or treaty in the national interest or against it? Is a law adding unduly to the tax burden? Will a law fundamentally undermine the security of the nation or its ability to defend itself? Is a law in the interests of families? Is a political action conducive to a strong, cohesive society? Is a law conducive to parliamentary sovereignty?
It isn't really about right and left, though those terms can be useful shorthand. A lot of the PCP, through design by CCHQ for reasons which I can't discern, doesn't pay more than lip service to those values, and sometimes not even that.
The issue is that the way those topics viewed can very much be in the eyes of he beholder, e.g. what is the national interest, especially if you take short- and long-term into account? They can also be contradictory. Is a slightly increased tax burden justified if that tax money is spent in the national interest? This treaty may slightly reduce national sovereignty, but also be in the national interest.
I think they're less ambiguous than you indicate. But they do come in and out of fashion.
There are fashionable weasel words that would justify the closing of Britain's virgin steel making capacity, dealing a knockout blow to our ability to manufacture armaments without importing the steel, based on amorphous envisaged future benefits of 'setting a good example' on CO2 emissions, but no true adherent to Tory principles could ever support such a scheme. Another Tory principle is that families and individuals spend their money better than the state. If adherence to these principles was widespread within the PCP, neither the party nor the country would be in the mess they are in.
I think Thatcher would have been thoroughly on board with reducing CO2 emissions. I think she was the first major world leader to take it seriously, along with CFCs and acid rain.
Her own words:
"For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.
Recently three changes in atmospheric chemistry have become familiar subjects of concern. The first is the increase in the greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons—which has led some [end p4] to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability. We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century. This was brought home to me at the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver last year when the President of the Maldive Islands reminded us that the highest part of the Maldives is only six feet above sea level. The population is 177,000. It is noteworthy that the five warmest years in a century of records have all been in the 1980s—though we may not have seen much evidence in Britain!
The second matter under discussion is the discovery by the British Antarctic Survey of a large hole in the ozone layer which protects life from ultra-violet radiation. We don't know the full implications of the ozone hole nor how it may interact with the greenhouse effect. Nevertheless it was common sense to support a worldwide agreement in Montreal last year to halve world consumption of chlorofluorocarbons by the end of the century. As the sole measure to limit ozone depletion, this may be insufficient but it is a start in reducing the pace of change while we continue the detailed study of the problem on which our (the British) Stratospheric Ozone Review Group is about to report.
The third matter is acid deposition which has affected soils, lakes and trees downwind from industrial centres. Extensive action is being taken to cut down emission of sulphur and nitrogen oxides from power stations at great but necessary expense."
The conservatives need *someone* who looks competent and can actually manage complex policy / actually deliver.
Who can do that in the tories? They’ll all revert to culture wars
They have a fundamental first task of deciding what their core principles are, and articulating how they are both different from and better than Lab, LD and Reform. The last of those is intellectually easy, but they will struggle because of the Tories' deficit of intelligence. The first two are intellectually hard and they are about to find them getting harder.
The Tories need, urgently, a Peel, a Burke, a David Hume, an Adam Smith, a Disraeli, a Thatcher and a Hayek. At this minute they have Braverman, Patel, Cleverley, Charles Moore, the Spectator, the Daily Mail and Tugendhat. They hang by a pretty slender thread
Firstly, Sunak left the D-Day commemorations early, a catastrophic political misjudgment which made his personal ratings plummet. He left just after the King, something his aides did not want to brief during the campaign because it would have dragged the monarchy into it.
The King who is currently undergoing treatment for cancer and is presumably knackered?
I’d cut him some slack. Sunak not so much.
Yup, that King.
Leaking about it is such shitty behaviour.
The King's early departure was covered on the day itself, with his ongoing treatment given as the reason. He'd been advised not to travel at all, if I recall correctly. The PoW was there to deputise for him at the international event, and had been on hand throughout the British events in case he needed to step in.
It's a really bad look for Sunak's aides to be "well, acutally"-ing about this...
Believe you mean "Sunak's funkies" seeing as how they were incapable of providing him any actual "aid"?
Quite the reverse . . . or obverse if you prefer . . .
The conservatives need *someone* who looks competent and can actually manage complex policy / actually deliver.
Who can do that in the tories? They’ll all revert to culture wars
The Tories need, urgently, a Peel, a Burke, a David Hume, an Adam Smith, a Disraeli, a Thatcher and a Hayek. At this minute they have Braverman, Patel, Cleverley, Charles Moore, the Spectator, the Daily Mail and Tugendhat
The conservatives need *someone* who looks competent and can actually manage complex policy / actually deliver.
Who can do that in the tories? They’ll all revert to culture wars
First parliamentary term: bloodletting and fighting with reform Second parliamentary term: stability and reason and finding new talent of millenials. Third parliamentary term: the new talent has a chance at connecting with millenial voters.
The next tories to form government aren't even in politics yet
The oldest millennials will be in their late fifties by then.
The conservatives need *someone* who looks competent and can actually manage complex policy / actually deliver.
Who can do that in the tories? They’ll all revert to culture wars
The Tories need, urgently, a Peel, a Burke, a David Hume, an Adam Smith, a Disraeli, a Thatcher and a Hayek. At this minute they have Braverman, Patel, Cleverley, Charles Moore, the Spectator, the Daily Mail and Tugendhat
🤣🤣🤣🤣 is that all ..not a big ask at all then
Indeed. But it is a realistic ask that those who aspire to run the country at out behest should be able to articulate the core principles which they work to and the practicalities of how it is done. We ask that of car mechanics.
The huge gaps in the market place at this moment are: an explanation of current Tory principle and practice. (I don't think it can be done). Secondly, an articulation of what a centre right liberal small state, low tax, personal responsibility polity would look like.
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
I didn’t say that.
It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be
Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.
There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?
The problem is that there *is* overlap between some of the parties in the centre, and you want that to be a hard-and-fast boundary. But without going to the NF or BNP, there is no boundary on the right. You want to truncate the broad church in the centre, but let any nutcase in on the far right.
But IMV the key word for Conservatives is the small-c word 'conservative'. Not no change, but careful and well-planned change, cautiously made. Progress by evolution rather than revolution.
The Conservative Party have forgotten that over the last decade.
But that notion is one of parties occupying a silly sort of space on left/right spectrum. A band that contracts, expands, and is pushed up and down like a pipe cleaner with the vagaries of politics.
What I'm arguing for is belief in a set of values and principles by which all political actions are measured. Is a law adding to the powers of the state against individual? Is a law or treaty in the national interest or against it? Is a law adding unduly to the tax burden? Will a law fundamentally undermine the security of the nation or its ability to defend itself? Is a law in the interests of families? Is a political action conducive to a strong, cohesive society? Is a law conducive to parliamentary sovereignty?
It isn't really about right and left, though those terms can be useful shorthand. A lot of the PCP, through design by CCHQ for reasons which I can't discern, doesn't pay more than lip service to those values, and sometimes not even that.
The issue is that the way those topics viewed can very much be in the eyes of he beholder, e.g. what is the national interest, especially if you take short- and long-term into account? They can also be contradictory. Is a slightly increased tax burden justified if that tax money is spent in the national interest? This treaty may slightly reduce national sovereignty, but also be in the national interest.
I think they're less ambiguous than you indicate. But they do come in and out of fashion.
There are fashionable weasel words that would justify the closing of Britain's virgin steel making capacity, dealing a knockout blow to our ability to manufacture armaments without importing the steel, based on amorphous envisaged future benefits of 'setting a good example' on CO2 emissions, but no true adherent to Tory principles could ever support such a scheme. Another Tory principle is that families and individuals spend their money better than the state. If adherence to these principles was widespread within the PCP, neither the party nor the country would be in the mess they are in.
I think Thatcher would have been thoroughly on board with reducing CO2 emissions. I think she was the first major world leader to take it seriously, along with CFCs and acid rain.
Her own words:
"For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.
Recently three changes in atmospheric chemistry have become familiar subjects of concern. The first is the increase in the greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons—which has led some [end p4] to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability. We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century. This was brought home to me at the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver last year when the President of the Maldive Islands reminded us that the highest part of the Maldives is only six feet above sea level. The population is 177,000. It is noteworthy that the five warmest years in a century of records have all been in the 1980s—though we may not have seen much evidence in Britain!
The second matter under discussion is the discovery by the British Antarctic Survey of a large hole in the ozone layer which protects life from ultra-violet radiation. We don't know the full implications of the ozone hole nor how it may interact with the greenhouse effect. Nevertheless it was common sense to support a worldwide agreement in Montreal last year to halve world consumption of chlorofluorocarbons by the end of the century. As the sole measure to limit ozone depletion, this may be insufficient but it is a start in reducing the pace of change while we continue the detailed study of the problem on which our (the British) Stratospheric Ozone Review Group is about to report.
The third matter is acid deposition which has affected soils, lakes and trees downwind from industrial centres. Extensive action is being taken to cut down emission of sulphur and nitrogen oxides from power stations at great but necessary expense."
The conservatives need *someone* who looks competent and can actually manage complex policy / actually deliver.
Who can do that in the tories? They’ll all revert to culture wars
The Tories need, urgently, a Peel, a Burke, a David Hume, an Adam Smith, a Disraeli, a Thatcher and a Hayek. At this minute they have Braverman, Patel, Cleverley, Charles Moore, the Spectator, the Daily Mail and Tugendhat
🤣🤣🤣🤣 is that all ..not a big ask at all then
Indeed. But it is a realistic ask that those who aspire to run the country at out behest should be able to articulate the core principles which they work to and the practicalities of how it is done. We ask that of car mechanics.
The huge gaps in the market place at this moment are: an explanation of current Tory principle and practice. (I don't think it can be done). Secondly, an articulation of what a centre right liberal small state, low tax, personal responsibility polity would look like.
The conservatives need *someone* who looks competent and can actually manage complex policy / actually deliver.
Who can do that in the tories? They’ll all revert to culture wars
First parliamentary term: bloodletting and fighting with reform Second parliamentary term: stability and reason and finding new talent of millenials. Third parliamentary term: the new talent has a chance at connecting with millenial voters.
The next tories to form government aren't even in politics yet
The oldest millennials will be in their late fifties by then.
Err yes, Gen Z will basically be the working parents by that point.
The conservatives need *someone* who looks competent and can actually manage complex policy / actually deliver.
Who can do that in the tories? They’ll all revert to culture wars
They have a fundamental first task of deciding what their core principles are, and articulating how they are both different from and better than Lab, LD and Reform. The last of those is intellectually easy, but they will struggle because of the Tories' deficit of intelligence. The first two are intellectually hard and they are about to find them getting harder.
Personally I think that the centrist wet Tory MPs would be better fitted to and happier in the Lib Dems.
The only reason that most of them were ever in the Tories not the Liberal/Libdem Parties is because the Tory Party provided a vehicle to achieve office and the Liberals didn't.
There is a worthy place for Liberalism, but the decline of the Liberal party in the 1920s led to both of the other two parties being infested with ambitious Liberals with the result that by 2010 the electorate was presented with three variants of Liberslism and is now revolting.
The place for Liberalism is within the Liberal (Democrat) Party.
This is partly the cause of and is caused by the narrowing of the Overton window - which is now so narrow it is almost closed. Ie, in a word, government as cause of all problems and responsible for all solutions.
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
I didn’t say that.
It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be
Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.
There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?
The problem is that there *is* overlap between some of the parties in the centre, and you want that to be a hard-and-fast boundary. But without going to the NF or BNP, there is no boundary on the right. You want to truncate the broad church in the centre, but let any nutcase in on the far right.
But IMV the key word for Conservatives is the small-c word 'conservative'. Not no change, but careful and well-planned change, cautiously made. Progress by evolution rather than revolution.
The Conservative Party have forgotten that over the last decade.
But that notion is one of parties occupying a silly sort of space on left/right spectrum. A band that contracts, expands, and is pushed up and down like a pipe cleaner with the vagaries of politics.
What I'm arguing for is belief in a set of values and principles by which all political actions are measured. Is a law adding to the powers of the state against individual? Is a law or treaty in the national interest or against it? Is a law adding unduly to the tax burden? Will a law fundamentally undermine the security of the nation or its ability to defend itself? Is a law in the interests of families? Is a political action conducive to a strong, cohesive society? Is a law conducive to parliamentary sovereignty?
It isn't really about right and left, though those terms can be useful shorthand. A lot of the PCP, through design by CCHQ for reasons which I can't discern, doesn't pay more than lip service to those values, and sometimes not even that.
The issue is that the way those topics viewed can very much be in the eyes of he beholder, e.g. what is the national interest, especially if you take short- and long-term into account? They can also be contradictory. Is a slightly increased tax burden justified if that tax money is spent in the national interest? This treaty may slightly reduce national sovereignty, but also be in the national interest.
I think they're less ambiguous than you indicate. But they do come in and out of fashion.
There are fashionable weasel words that would justify the closing of Britain's virgin steel making capacity, dealing a knockout blow to our ability to manufacture armaments without importing the steel, based on amorphous envisaged future benefits of 'setting a good example' on CO2 emissions, but no true adherent to Tory principles could ever support such a scheme. Another Tory principle is that families and individuals spend their money better than the state. If adherence to these principles was widespread within the PCP, neither the party nor the country would be in the mess they are in.
I think Thatcher would have been thoroughly on board with reducing CO2 emissions. I think she was the first major world leader to take it seriously, along with CFCs and acid rain.
Her own words:
"For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.
Recently three changes in atmospheric chemistry have become familiar subjects of concern. The first is the increase in the greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons—which has led some [end p4] to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability. We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century. This was brought home to me at the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver last year when the President of the Maldive Islands reminded us that the highest part of the Maldives is only six feet above sea level. The population is 177,000. It is noteworthy that the five warmest years in a century of records have all been in the 1980s—though we may not have seen much evidence in Britain!
The second matter under discussion is the discovery by the British Antarctic Survey of a large hole in the ozone layer which protects life from ultra-violet radiation. We don't know the full implications of the ozone hole nor how it may interact with the greenhouse effect. Nevertheless it was common sense to support a worldwide agreement in Montreal last year to halve world consumption of chlorofluorocarbons by the end of the century. As the sole measure to limit ozone depletion, this may be insufficient but it is a start in reducing the pace of change while we continue the detailed study of the problem on which our (the British) Stratospheric Ozone Review Group is about to report.
The third matter is acid deposition which has affected soils, lakes and trees downwind from industrial centres. Extensive action is being taken to cut down emission of sulphur and nitrogen oxides from power stations at great but necessary expense."
According to you, Thatcher would not be a Conservative...
There is no other way to make commercial steel without coking coal (a heck of a lot of CO2). Anyone who says otherwise also has a Fusion reactor to sell you.
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
I didn’t say that.
It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be
Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.
There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?
The problem is that there *is* overlap between some of the parties in the centre, and you want that to be a hard-and-fast boundary. But without going to the NF or BNP, there is no boundary on the right. You want to truncate the broad church in the centre, but let any nutcase in on the far right.
But IMV the key word for Conservatives is the small-c word 'conservative'. Not no change, but careful and well-planned change, cautiously made. Progress by evolution rather than revolution.
The Conservative Party have forgotten that over the last decade.
But that notion is one of parties occupying a silly sort of space on left/right spectrum. A band that contracts, expands, and is pushed up and down like a pipe cleaner with the vagaries of politics.
What I'm arguing for is belief in a set of values and principles by which all political actions are measured. Is a law adding to the powers of the state against individual? Is a law or treaty in the national interest or against it? Is a law adding unduly to the tax burden? Will a law fundamentally undermine the security of the nation or its ability to defend itself? Is a law in the interests of families? Is a political action conducive to a strong, cohesive society? Is a law conducive to parliamentary sovereignty?
It isn't really about right and left, though those terms can be useful shorthand. A lot of the PCP, through design by CCHQ for reasons which I can't discern, doesn't pay more than lip service to those values, and sometimes not even that.
The issue is that the way those topics viewed can very much be in the eyes of he beholder, e.g. what is the national interest, especially if you take short- and long-term into account? They can also be contradictory. Is a slightly increased tax burden justified if that tax money is spent in the national interest? This treaty may slightly reduce national sovereignty, but also be in the national interest.
I think they're less ambiguous than you indicate. But they do come in and out of fashion.
There are fashionable weasel words that would justify the closing of Britain's virgin steel making capacity, dealing a knockout blow to our ability to manufacture armaments without importing the steel, based on amorphous envisaged future benefits of 'setting a good example' on CO2 emissions, but no true adherent to Tory principles could ever support such a scheme. Another Tory principle is that families and individuals spend their money better than the state. If adherence to these principles was widespread within the PCP, neither the party nor the country would be in the mess they are in.
I think Thatcher would have been thoroughly on board with reducing CO2 emissions. I think she was the first major world leader to take it seriously, along with CFCs and acid rain.
Her own words:
"For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.
Recently three changes in atmospheric chemistry have become familiar subjects of concern. The first is the increase in the greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons—which has led some [end p4] to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability. We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century. This was brought home to me at the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver last year when the President of the Maldive Islands reminded us that the highest part of the Maldives is only six feet above sea level. The population is 177,000. It is noteworthy that the five warmest years in a century of records have all been in the 1980s—though we may not have seen much evidence in Britain!
The second matter under discussion is the discovery by the British Antarctic Survey of a large hole in the ozone layer which protects life from ultra-violet radiation. We don't know the full implications of the ozone hole nor how it may interact with the greenhouse effect. Nevertheless it was common sense to support a worldwide agreement in Montreal last year to halve world consumption of chlorofluorocarbons by the end of the century. As the sole measure to limit ozone depletion, this may be insufficient but it is a start in reducing the pace of change while we continue the detailed study of the problem on which our (the British) Stratospheric Ozone Review Group is about to report.
The third matter is acid deposition which has affected soils, lakes and trees downwind from industrial centres. Extensive action is being taken to cut down emission of sulphur and nitrogen oxides from power stations at great but necessary expense."
According to you, Thatcher would not be a Conservative...
She would have been on board for funding research to develop commercially viable renewables solutions in the long term which people would freeely choose in a free market and a large nuclear programme to get us through the next fifty years if it was.
Not subsidising low energy dense Beta renewables solutions and doubling the cost of electricity in the process, driving industry to places like China where the biggest coal fired power generation project in world history continues and coercing people to buy inferior and expensive immature technology electric vehicles with huge subsidies and banning internal combustion engines.
The Tories will elect a new chairman of the 1922 committee this week. It's likely to be either Geoffrey Clifton-Brown or Bob Blackman. They'll have the unenviable task of being holder-of-the-letters for any future race
The other part of it is reconstituting the 1922 Committee which in opposition is far more important for the Conservative Parliamentary Party. The new committee may well reveal the power balance within the Parliamentary group and provide some insight as to who might emerge from the "sea of electoral hazard" to a members' ballot.
Isn't the Committee for backbenchers? Given the number of Shadow posts to be filled, might there be a shortage of candidates?
I believe in Opposition ALL Conservative MPs are members of the 1922 - in Government, it's the backbenchers only.
The Tories will elect a new chairman of the 1922 committee this week. It's likely to be either Geoffrey Clifton-Brown or Bob Blackman. They'll have the unenviable task of being holder-of-the-letters for any future race
The other part of it is reconstituting the 1922 Committee which in opposition is far more important for the Conservative Parliamentary Party. The new committee may well reveal the power balance within the Parliamentary group and provide some insight as to who might emerge from the "sea of electoral hazard" to a members' ballot.
Isn't the Committee for backbenchers? Given the number of Shadow posts to be filled, might there be a shortage of candidates?
I believe in Opposition ALL Conservative MPs are members of the 1922 - in Government, it's the backbenchers only.
Before wittering about immigration or whatever, the Tories need to think hard about the 4 things they have lacked or deliberately abandoned in recent years.
1. An understanding of Burkean principles - the idea that conservatism is about preserving the best of what we have built but also about building on that for the next generations - to leave the country in a better state than they found it. So it is not enough to focus only on one elderly generation but to remember those that are and those to come and to make life and opportunities better for them. (Why in God's name did a Conservative government kill off Sure Start? - to give just one example.)
2. Chesterton's Fence: you don't just randomly and angrily attack and destroy institutions and conventions just because they stand in your way. You are meant to be grown ups not tantruming toddlers. The attacks on the rule of law, on any standards of integrity and political decency, on independent institutions etc was pathetic, dangerous and, well, unconservative. See point 1.
3. Competence: obvious but forgotten. Just try to do your tasks well. Good administration, thinking about the consequences, thinking ahead, getting advice, planning, sorting out mistakes, learning from them, small practical improvements instead of snake oil promises backed by nothing more than bullshit etc. You forgot that. You will have to relearn this and try to demonstrate it where you can - in how you run your party and whatever councils you control. It will take time and you won't be listened to for a long time. But unless you do start doing this now, forget the rest.
4. Character: the single most important factor. The moral character, the integrity, the honesty of those who lead your party and those in it and how they behave says more about you than any manifesto. You chose some dreadful leaders in a Faustian pact which has well and truly bitten you on the arse. You abandoned all standards of political decency. You allowed corruption and shadiness and spivs in public office to fester. You gave the impression that duty and public service were jokes. The one abiding image for your years in power was parties in Downing Street while a widowed queen sat alone at her husband's funeral. That image stood for many who did their job while you treated their old-fashioned virtues with contempt. Really, how dare you call yourself conservative and behave like that.
Get these right. Then you can start worrying about policies. The current government will eventually make mistakes in all these areas. (I mean, Jacqui Smith, really?) But they won't listen to you until you've admitted you fucked things up and have changed.
Available for consultation at £1,3750 per hour + VAT or its euro equivalent. An absolute bargain.
Everyone Conservative MP should have to read it and every Conservative wannabe leader should have to give their thoughts on it.
I'm afraid I can't agree, because unlike @DeclanF's first set of points on the matter, which came over as high-minded and was universal enough for conservatives of all colours (including me, who 'liked' the post) to get behind, this set of requirements is narrowly political, and frankly reads as yet another PB post dolorously opining that the Tories must 'avoid a swing to the right', despite (and probably because of) the centrist position being utterly destroyed in a test with real voters. Time and again, those on the right have urged the building of the same coalition that Boris made into a landslide victory. The post-electoral arithmetic clearly shows this to be the case. Starmer's victory is based on an utterly shallow pool of voters, and it's incredibly self-serving of his supporters to urge the Tories to pull their punches against Labour, leave the right of British politics unrepresented, and attack Reform instead.
Absolutely not. No sensible tactician would urge the Tories to go back to chasing after some white van man in Redcar. It’s the sensible folk of Surrey and Sussex and Hampshire and Wiltshire and Somerset and Devon and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire and … that you should be worrying about. By and large, they don’t want a government of ideological obsessives, and right now, that’s you, not them.
Shush! As someone who's just worked his socks off to help make Oxfordshire Tory MP-free for the first time since before the American Revolution, if the Tories want to move further and further away from the centre ground, let them.
That is fine as long as some party grows as a counter to Labour. If the LDs take the opportunity to consolidate and grow, I am fine with that. I am even fine with the Conservatives doing it as long as they offload the swivel-eyed loons and other crazies.
It does mean that the LDs will have to accept that policies have consequences and live up to that instead of acting like idealist activists.
As PMs not Chancellors, Gordon Brown was a leading figure in recovering from the GFC. Rishi, nothing springs to mind. I expect both men will do better when the histories are written.
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
I didn’t say that.
It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be
Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.
There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?
The problem is that there *is* overlap between some of the parties in the centre, and you want that to be a hard-and-fast boundary. But without going to the NF or BNP, there is no boundary on the right. You want to truncate the broad church in the centre, but let any nutcase in on the far right.
But IMV the key word for Conservatives is the small-c word 'conservative'. Not no change, but careful and well-planned change, cautiously made. Progress by evolution rather than revolution.
The Conservative Party have forgotten that over the last decade.
But that notion is one of parties occupying a silly sort of space on left/right spectrum. A band that contracts, expands, and is pushed up and down like a pipe cleaner with the vagaries of politics.
What I'm arguing for is belief in a set of values and principles by which all political actions are measured. Is a law adding to the powers of the state against individual? Is a law or treaty in the national interest or against it? Is a law adding unduly to the tax burden? Will a law fundamentally undermine the security of the nation or its ability to defend itself? Is a law in the interests of families? Is a political action conducive to a strong, cohesive society? Is a law conducive to parliamentary sovereignty?
It isn't really about right and left, though those terms can be useful shorthand. A lot of the PCP, through design by CCHQ for reasons which I can't discern, doesn't pay more than lip service to those values, and sometimes not even that.
The issue is that the way those topics viewed can very much be in the eyes of he beholder, e.g. what is the national interest, especially if you take short- and long-term into account? They can also be contradictory. Is a slightly increased tax burden justified if that tax money is spent in the national interest? This treaty may slightly reduce national sovereignty, but also be in the national interest.
I think they're less ambiguous than you indicate. But they do come in and out of fashion.
There are fashionable weasel words that would justify the closing of Britain's virgin steel making capacity, dealing a knockout blow to our ability to manufacture armaments without importing the steel, based on amorphous envisaged future benefits of 'setting a good example' on CO2 emissions, but no true adherent to Tory principles could ever support such a scheme. Another Tory principle is that families and individuals spend their money better than the state. If adherence to these principles was widespread within the PCP, neither the party nor the country would be in the mess they are in.
I think Thatcher would have been thoroughly on board with reducing CO2 emissions. I think she was the first major world leader to take it seriously, along with CFCs and acid rain.
Her own words:
"For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.
Recently three changes in atmospheric chemistry have become familiar subjects of concern. The first is the increase in the greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons—which has led some [end p4] to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability. We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century. This was brought home to me at the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver last year when the President of the Maldive Islands reminded us that the highest part of the Maldives is only six feet above sea level. The population is 177,000. It is noteworthy that the five warmest years in a century of records have all been in the 1980s—though we may not have seen much evidence in Britain!
The second matter under discussion is the discovery by the British Antarctic Survey of a large hole in the ozone layer which protects life from ultra-violet radiation. We don't know the full implications of the ozone hole nor how it may interact with the greenhouse effect. Nevertheless it was common sense to support a worldwide agreement in Montreal last year to halve world consumption of chlorofluorocarbons by the end of the century. As the sole measure to limit ozone depletion, this may be insufficient but it is a start in reducing the pace of change while we continue the detailed study of the problem on which our (the British) Stratospheric Ozone Review Group is about to report.
The third matter is acid deposition which has affected soils, lakes and trees downwind from industrial centres. Extensive action is being taken to cut down emission of sulphur and nitrogen oxides from power stations at great but necessary expense."
According to you, Thatcher would not be a Conservative...
She would have been on board for funding research to develop commercially viable renewables solutions in the long term which people would freeely choose in a free market and a large nuclear programme to get us through the next fifty years if it was.
Not subsidising low energy dense Beta renewables solutions and doubling the cost of electricity in the process, driving industry to places like China where the biggest coal fired power generation project in world history continues and coercing people to buy inferior and expensive immature technology electric vehicles with huge subsidies and banning internal combustion engines.
I'd strongly argue that her work on CFCs and the Montreal agreement shows that your view is wrong. AIUI the replacement chemicals were not, and are not, as good (which is why some Chinese companies started using them again a few years ago, noted by an increase in ozone depletion).
Also see the Dash for Gas, which she set in motion for her successors.
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
I didn’t say that.
It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be
Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.
There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?
Yet I’d wager that your approved candidates list is still stuffed with Reform Party supporters?
Looks like we no longer need to be up from Survation who have fallen from most accurate pollster at the last 3 general elections back to middle of the pack. Instead Verian, Norstat and BMG take the crown this time.
Also shocked Matt Goodwin's pollster came last and to top that the result ended up closer to 1997 than Canada 1993 for the Tories and Farage is not LOTO as Mystic Matt had hoped. If Le Pen doesn't win a landslide this evening how will the poor man cope?
Well done Sir John Curtice for another broadly accurate exit poll
A comfortable hold for Neil Hudson in Epping Forest but a huge swing to Reform in Brentwood & Ongar.
In your view, should the Party go for a "quick" leadership election (I don't really see the point) or basically use the Conference as an extended hustings?
I presume the reconstituted 1922 will make the decision - any thoughts on who might replace Sir Graham Brady as Chairman?
On Neil Hudson, a vet, generally good bloke, and formerly my MP in Penrith and Border, he has a bit of good fortune. He got bounced from the Penrith seat this time, with boundary changes, in favour of Workington's Jenkinson (sub optimal compared with the decent Hudson), so had to go carpet bagging. Got Epping and won. Penrith along with the whole of Cumbria told the Tories where to go - clean sweep. Neil Hudson had a once in a lifetime's luck.
"the decent neil" Someone who did everything he could to annoy his local association, who refused to move down, who barely voted in favour of the government and ended up with a plumb seat. He didnt get bounced out of Penrith, he just lost to someone who was a better candidate.
There was no penrith campaigning the entire time he was the MP.
As a lifelong Liberal and Liberal Democrat supporter and one time Party member, it's incredible to think we now have 72 MPs. I remember the thrill of 46 MPs in 1997 and thinking of that as a breakthrough but to imagine after the dark days of 2015, we now have 2 LD MPs for every 3 Conservatives - almost unbelievable.
I've often said on here the party I joined and worked for died in the fires of the coalition but, phoenix-like, that party has risen from the ashes of 2015 and has targeted ruthlessly to achieve such a result. Ed Davey is a product of ALDC and the campaigning techniques of that organisation (as was Farron) and it's perhaps no surprise the party has gone back to the future. Yes, a lot of it was the classic "high tide floating all boats" but that doesn't mean each and every gain wasn't the result of hard work.
I strongly suspect there is a significant correlation between local Government success, especially from 2022 onwards, and victory last Thursday and it's to other areas of local strength which were outside the scope of targeting this time the party needs to look for further progress. 2025 has to be about gains at County level and using those to develop organisation in new areas.
Given how some Conservatives enjoyed dancing on the LD graves in 2015, you'll forgive a wry smile as I look at the Conservatives "assessing their losses". The humiliation of 2015 has been avenged. Such is politics, a rough trade as someone once said.
But 71 Lib Dem seats in 2024 matter a lot less than a dozen did in 2015, because Labour's majority is so huge and they will obviously be mostly gone when the public want Labour out, whenever that is. Most of the public would be hard pressed to name a single LibDem policy I think. That's the way with protest votes, whether they are Reform, LibDem or Monster Raving Loony.
LibDems do a great job as "not the Tories!" Can they do the same as "not bloody Labour!"? Jury is very much out on that one.
As currently configured the LDs can only do well if Labour do well. There is no party that rises as the Tories rise - they have no friends. But though they don't say so, the great majority of seats in England has become ones in which, of the three traditional parties, it is either Lab v Con or LD v Con. (Obviously at the moment Reform and other interlopers slightly muddy the waters, but it holds good generally). In this election, while LD seats are a bit better at tactical voting than Labour ones, the effect was obvious and, like quantum particles, entangled.
The LDs are desperate to not look like Tories. Less desperate about Labour.
The Lib Dems are increasingly economically quite pro business, especially small business, which is why they appeal to strivers in the former Tory seats. Equally the the majority of their members don´t give a stuff about much of the culture wars battles, since mostly they take a live and let live view of things, The Tories "Woke wars, Fuck business and sod the consequences" is spectacularly unappealing to the ABs, in Wessex and the Home Counties who seem to have defected en bloc. The fact is that Braverman, Patel et al are pretty naff. They belittle "experts" and sing their own strident and discordant songs, which may appeal to Reform voters, but for every vote they get back from RefUK they will lose three to the Lib Dems.
As for Labour, getting two thirds of the seats on one third of the vote is a terrible warning. The average Lib Dem majority is surprisingly solid, not so for Labour and even less so for the Tories. Come the 2029 GE, things could easily swing into Hung Parliament territory, only this time it could even be the Lib Dems who dictate the terms of the next Parliament.
The i paper is reporting that there is talk of Sunak going soon and a temporary leader in place as caretaker if the contest is going to stretch into autumn.
BF rules on leadership seem to rule out paying out on temporary or caretaker leaders.
Matt Goodwin was unknown to me until yesterday's any questions. I can't say I'm surprised he came last. He had none of the objectivity you normally expect from a pollster. In fact he sounded like a cheerleader for Farage and not a particularly endearing one
As a lifelong Liberal and Liberal Democrat supporter and one time Party member, it's incredible to think we now have 72 MPs. I remember the thrill of 46 MPs in 1997 and thinking of that as a breakthrough but to imagine after the dark days of 2015, we now have 2 LD MPs for every 3 Conservatives - almost unbelievable.
I've often said on here the party I joined and worked for died in the fires of the coalition but, phoenix-like, that party has risen from the ashes of 2015 and has targeted ruthlessly to achieve such a result. Ed Davey is a product of ALDC and the campaigning techniques of that organisation (as was Farron) and it's perhaps no surprise the party has gone back to the future. Yes, a lot of it was the classic "high tide floating all boats" but that doesn't mean each and every gain wasn't the result of hard work.
I strongly suspect there is a significant correlation between local Government success, especially from 2022 onwards, and victory last Thursday and it's to other areas of local strength which were outside the scope of targeting this time the party needs to look for further progress. 2025 has to be about gains at County level and using those to develop organisation in new areas.
Given how some Conservatives enjoyed dancing on the LD graves in 2015, you'll forgive a wry smile as I look at the Conservatives "assessing their losses". The humiliation of 2015 has been avenged. Such is politics, a rough trade as someone once said.
As to what's going to happen, given how all the immediate post election predictions of December 2019 turned out, perhaps we should just wait and see. How Starmer handles his first "crisis" will be informative. I'd also note it's not the big things which cause problems but the little things becoming big things because they are not sorted.
Certainly in a seat like - to pick somewhere at random - Newton Abbot - it clearly helped that when presented with conflicting evidence from the national MRPs, which many folk mistakenly thought were local polls, the local council there was already LibDem controlled.
Having a local government base brings profile, money, credibility, experience, and a pre-existing organisation. It’s a lesson I think the Greens are beginning to learn, and I expect the next round of local elections will see Green gains in some of the seats Labour has won where the Greens have leapfrogged the LibDems.
Whether Reform is really interested in putting in the hard yards to build such a base, which takes commitment and perseverance and a lot of hard work, remains to be seen.
@algarkirk I like Jesse Norman's books, he has written on the relevance of Burke and Smith for conservatism. Nick Timothy has interesting works on the future of conservatism in book and pamphlet form. Then, noting a name highlighted yesterday, not an MP but Philip Blonde writes interesting stuff too.
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
I didn’t say that.
It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be
Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.
There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?
Yet I’d wager that your approved candidates list is still stuffed with Reform Party supporters?
Since I don't approve the candidates list, I take it you're asking me about my personal fantasy approved candidates list? And no, I wouldn't suggest that the Tory Party raids the Reform candidates list (I don't know what you mean by supporters - how would they even have a list of supporters), I would suggest that they: a) Find someone with a genuine desire to become a conservative MP, not a Lib Dem (or Reform) one b) Find someone with an existing link to the constituency - in-fact why not put the selection process back into the hands of local parties, because nobody in their right mind would argue that it has been 'professionalised' by taking it under central control.
You're a Lib Dem (or Labour supporter, I can't recall which) - would you appreciate some right wing Tory being waved through the selection process by Labour Central Office in preference to local Lib Dems/Labour people?
As a lifelong Liberal and Liberal Democrat supporter and one time Party member, it's incredible to think we now have 72 MPs. I remember the thrill of 46 MPs in 1997 and thinking of that as a breakthrough but to imagine after the dark days of 2015, we now have 2 LD MPs for every 3 Conservatives - almost unbelievable.
I've often said on here the party I joined and worked for died in the fires of the coalition but, phoenix-like, that party has risen from the ashes of 2015 and has targeted ruthlessly to achieve such a result. Ed Davey is a product of ALDC and the campaigning techniques of that organisation (as was Farron) and it's perhaps no surprise the party has gone back to the future. Yes, a lot of it was the classic "high tide floating all boats" but that doesn't mean each and every gain wasn't the result of hard work.
I strongly suspect there is a significant correlation between local Government success, especially from 2022 onwards, and victory last Thursday and it's to other areas of local strength which were outside the scope of targeting this time the party needs to look for further progress. 2025 has to be about gains at County level and using those to develop organisation in new areas.
Given how some Conservatives enjoyed dancing on the LD graves in 2015, you'll forgive a wry smile as I look at the Conservatives "assessing their losses". The humiliation of 2015 has been avenged. Such is politics, a rough trade as someone once said.
But 71 Lib Dem seats in 2024 matter a lot less than a dozen did in 2015, because Labour's majority is so huge and they will obviously be mostly gone when the public want Labour out, whenever that is. Most of the public would be hard pressed to name a single LibDem policy I think. That's the way with protest votes, whether they are Reform, LibDem or Monster Raving Loony.
LibDems do a great job as "not the Tories!" Can they do the same as "not bloody Labour!"? Jury is very much out on that one.
As I said earlier, our sterling efforts in coalition with you lot, trying to inject some backbone and common sense into your party’s flaky ideological politics, cost us most of our Labour-facing base. I sense it will take a long time to rebuild; meanwhile our focus will be on digging in across the south, hoping that you lot will pick Suella and go onwards and, well, onwards….
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
I didn’t say that.
It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be
Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.
There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?
The problem is that there *is* overlap between some of the parties in the centre, and you want that to be a hard-and-fast boundary. But without going to the NF or BNP, there is no boundary on the right. You want to truncate the broad church in the centre, but let any nutcase in on the far right.
But IMV the key word for Conservatives is the small-c word 'conservative'. Not no change, but careful and well-planned change, cautiously made. Progress by evolution rather than revolution.
The Conservative Party have forgotten that over the last decade.
But that notion is one of parties occupying a silly sort of space on left/right spectrum. A band that contracts, expands, and is pushed up and down like a pipe cleaner with the vagaries of politics.
What I'm arguing for is belief in a set of values and principles by which all political actions are measured. Is a law adding to the powers of the state against individual? Is a law or treaty in the national interest or against it? Is a law adding unduly to the tax burden? Will a law fundamentally undermine the security of the nation or its ability to defend itself? Is a law in the interests of families? Is a political action conducive to a strong, cohesive society? Is a law conducive to parliamentary sovereignty?
It isn't really about right and left, though those terms can be useful shorthand. A lot of the PCP, through design by CCHQ for reasons which I can't discern, doesn't pay more than lip service to those values, and sometimes not even that.
The issue is that the way those topics viewed can very much be in the eyes of he beholder, e.g. what is the national interest, especially if you take short- and long-term into account? They can also be contradictory. Is a slightly increased tax burden justified if that tax money is spent in the national interest? This treaty may slightly reduce national sovereignty, but also be in the national interest.
I think they're less ambiguous than you indicate. But they do come in and out of fashion.
There are fashionable weasel words that would justify the closing of Britain's virgin steel making capacity, dealing a knockout blow to our ability to manufacture armaments without importing the steel, based on amorphous envisaged future benefits of 'setting a good example' on CO2 emissions, but no true adherent to Tory principles could ever support such a scheme. Another Tory principle is that families and individuals spend their money better than the state. If adherence to these principles was widespread within the PCP, neither the party nor the country would be in the mess they are in.
I think Thatcher would have been thoroughly on board with reducing CO2 emissions. I think she was the first major world leader to take it seriously, along with CFCs and acid rain.
Her own words:
"For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.
Recently three changes in atmospheric chemistry have become familiar subjects of concern. The first is the increase in the greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons—which has led some [end p4] to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability. We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century. This was brought home to me at the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver last year when the President of the Maldive Islands reminded us that the highest part of the Maldives is only six feet above sea level. The population is 177,000. It is noteworthy that the five warmest years in a century of records have all been in the 1980s—though we may not have seen much evidence in Britain!
The second matter under discussion is the discovery by the British Antarctic Survey of a large hole in the ozone layer which protects life from ultra-violet radiation. We don't know the full implications of the ozone hole nor how it may interact with the greenhouse effect. Nevertheless it was common sense to support a worldwide agreement in Montreal last year to halve world consumption of chlorofluorocarbons by the end of the century. As the sole measure to limit ozone depletion, this may be insufficient but it is a start in reducing the pace of change while we continue the detailed study of the problem on which our (the British) Stratospheric Ozone Review Group is about to report.
The third matter is acid deposition which has affected soils, lakes and trees downwind from industrial centres. Extensive action is being taken to cut down emission of sulphur and nitrogen oxides from power stations at great but necessary expense."
According to you, Thatcher would not be a Conservative...
There is no other way to make commercial steel without coking coal (a heck of a lot of CO2). Anyone who says otherwise also has a Fusion reactor to sell you.
I'm unsure what point you're trying to make? Few people say we need *no* coal; otherwise heritage railways would be in serious trouble. But getting rid of coal-fired power stations from the 1990s onwards made a massive dent in our carbon emissions.
As a lifelong Liberal and Liberal Democrat supporter and one time Party member, it's incredible to think we now have 72 MPs. I remember the thrill of 46 MPs in 1997 and thinking of that as a breakthrough but to imagine after the dark days of 2015, we now have 2 LD MPs for every 3 Conservatives - almost unbelievable.
I've often said on here the party I joined and worked for died in the fires of the coalition but, phoenix-like, that party has risen from the ashes of 2015 and has targeted ruthlessly to achieve such a result. Ed Davey is a product of ALDC and the campaigning techniques of that organisation (as was Farron) and it's perhaps no surprise the party has gone back to the future. Yes, a lot of it was the classic "high tide floating all boats" but that doesn't mean each and every gain wasn't the result of hard work.
I strongly suspect there is a significant correlation between local Government success, especially from 2022 onwards, and victory last Thursday and it's to other areas of local strength which were outside the scope of targeting this time the party needs to look for further progress. 2025 has to be about gains at County level and using those to develop organisation in new areas.
Given how some Conservatives enjoyed dancing on the LD graves in 2015, you'll forgive a wry smile as I look at the Conservatives "assessing their losses". The humiliation of 2015 has been avenged. Such is politics, a rough trade as someone once said.
But 71 Lib Dem seats in 2024 matter a lot less than a dozen did in 2015, because Labour's majority is so huge and they will obviously be mostly gone when the public want Labour out, whenever that is. Most of the public would be hard pressed to name a single LibDem policy I think. That's the way with protest votes, whether they are Reform, LibDem or Monster Raving Loony.
The i paper is reporting that there is talk of Sunak going soon and a temporary leader in place as caretaker if the contest is going to stretch into autumn.
BF rules on leadership seem to rule out paying out on temporary or caretaker leaders.
I am really unconvinced Sunak will hang around much longer. I must admit an eyebrow was raised when it was announced he’d stay in post.
Indeed I can’t think it’ll be very long until we get a Richmond by election (and, perhaps, a chance for one of the defeated Tories like Mordaunt to stage a quick return).
As a lifelong Liberal and Liberal Democrat supporter and one time Party member, it's incredible to think we now have 72 MPs. I remember the thrill of 46 MPs in 1997 and thinking of that as a breakthrough but to imagine after the dark days of 2015, we now have 2 LD MPs for every 3 Conservatives - almost unbelievable.
I've often said on here the party I joined and worked for died in the fires of the coalition but, phoenix-like, that party has risen from the ashes of 2015 and has targeted ruthlessly to achieve such a result. Ed Davey is a product of ALDC and the campaigning techniques of that organisation (as was Farron) and it's perhaps no surprise the party has gone back to the future. Yes, a lot of it was the classic "high tide floating all boats" but that doesn't mean each and every gain wasn't the result of hard work.
I strongly suspect there is a significant correlation between local Government success, especially from 2022 onwards, and victory last Thursday and it's to other areas of local strength which were outside the scope of targeting this time the party needs to look for further progress. 2025 has to be about gains at County level and using those to develop organisation in new areas.
Given how some Conservatives enjoyed dancing on the LD graves in 2015, you'll forgive a wry smile as I look at the Conservatives "assessing their losses". The humiliation of 2015 has been avenged. Such is politics, a rough trade as someone once said.
But 71 Lib Dem seats in 2024 matter a lot less than a dozen did in 2015, because Labour's majority is so huge and they will obviously be mostly gone when the public want Labour out, whenever that is. Most of the public would be hard pressed to name a single LibDem policy I think. That's the way with protest votes, whether they are Reform, LibDem or Monster Raving Loony.
LibDems do a great job as "not the Tories!" Can they do the same as "not bloody Labour!"? Jury is very much out on that one.
As currently configured the LDs can only do well if Labour do well. There is no party that rises as the Tories rise - they have no friends. But though they don't say so, the great majority of seats in England has become ones in which, of the three traditional parties, it is either Lab v Con or LD v Con. (Obviously at the moment Reform and other interlopers slightly muddy the waters, but it holds good generally). In this election, while LD seats are a bit better at tactical voting than Labour ones, the effect was obvious and, like quantum particles, entangled.
The LDs are desperate to not look like Tories. Less desperate about Labour.
The Lib Dems are increasingly economically quite pro business, especially small business, which is why they appeal to strivers in the former Tory seats. Equally the the majority of their members don´t give a stuff about much of the culture wars battles, since mostly they take a live and let live view of things, The Tories "Woke wars, Fuck business and sod the consequences" is spectacularly unappealing to the ABs, in Wessex and the Home Counties who seem to have defected en bloc. The fact is that Braverman, Patel et al are pretty naff. They belittle "experts" and sing their own strident and discordant songs, which may appeal to Reform voters, but for every vote they get back from RefUK they will lose three to the Lib Dems.
As for Labour, getting two thirds of the seats on one third of the vote is a terrible warning. The average Lib Dem majority is surprisingly solid, not so for Labour and even less so for the Tories. Come the 2029 GE, things could easily swing into Hung Parliament territory, only this time it could even be the Lib Dems who dictate the terms of the next Parliament.
There is all to play for,
On the contrary, I'd say the extent of the willingness to vote tactically against the Tories made Labour and the Lib Dems more like a single party with support in the mid-40s, which achieved a majority of more than 300.
In the header, instead of "total absolute error" shouldn't Jennings have given the average absolute error, averaged over the number of polls done by each of the pollsters? Or did they all do the same number of polls (I doubt it)?
In the header, instead of "total absolute error" shouldn't Jennings have given the average absolute error, averaged over the number of polls done by each of the pollsters? Or did they all do the same number of polls (I doubt it)?
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
I didn’t say that.
It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be
Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.
There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?
The problem is that there *is* overlap between some of the parties in the centre, and you want that to be a hard-and-fast boundary. But without going to the NF or BNP, there is no boundary on the right. You want to truncate the broad church in the centre, but let any nutcase in on the far right.
But IMV the key word for Conservatives is the small-c word 'conservative'. Not no change, but careful and well-planned change, cautiously made. Progress by evolution rather than revolution.
The Conservative Party have forgotten that over the last decade.
But that notion is one of parties occupying a silly sort of space on left/right spectrum. A band that contracts, expands, and is pushed up and down like a pipe cleaner with the vagaries of politics.
What I'm arguing for is belief in a set of values and principles by which all political actions are measured. Is a law adding to the powers of the state against individual? Is a law or treaty in the national interest or against it? Is a law adding unduly to the tax burden? Will a law fundamentally undermine the security of the nation or its ability to defend itself? Is a law in the interests of families? Is a political action conducive to a strong, cohesive society? Is a law conducive to parliamentary sovereignty?
It isn't really about right and left, though those terms can be useful shorthand. A lot of the PCP, through design by CCHQ for reasons which I can't discern, doesn't pay more than lip service to those values, and sometimes not even that.
The issue is that the way those topics viewed can very much be in the eyes of he beholder, e.g. what is the national interest, especially if you take short- and long-term into account? They can also be contradictory. Is a slightly increased tax burden justified if that tax money is spent in the national interest? This treaty may slightly reduce national sovereignty, but also be in the national interest.
I think they're less ambiguous than you indicate. But they do come in and out of fashion.
There are fashionable weasel words that would justify the closing of Britain's virgin steel making capacity, dealing a knockout blow to our ability to manufacture armaments without importing the steel, based on amorphous envisaged future benefits of 'setting a good example' on CO2 emissions, but no true adherent to Tory principles could ever support such a scheme. Another Tory principle is that families and individuals spend their money better than the state. If adherence to these principles was widespread within the PCP, neither the party nor the country would be in the mess they are in.
I think Thatcher would have been thoroughly on board with reducing CO2 emissions. I think she was the first major world leader to take it seriously, along with CFCs and acid rain.
Her own words:
"For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.
Recently three changes in atmospheric chemistry have become familiar subjects of concern. The first is the increase in the greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons—which has led some [end p4] to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability. We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century. This was brought home to me at the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver last year when the President of the Maldive Islands reminded us that the highest part of the Maldives is only six feet above sea level. The population is 177,000. It is noteworthy that the five warmest years in a century of records have all been in the 1980s—though we may not have seen much evidence in Britain!
The second matter under discussion is the discovery by the British Antarctic Survey of a large hole in the ozone layer which protects life from ultra-violet radiation. We don't know the full implications of the ozone hole nor how it may interact with the greenhouse effect. Nevertheless it was common sense to support a worldwide agreement in Montreal last year to halve world consumption of chlorofluorocarbons by the end of the century. As the sole measure to limit ozone depletion, this may be insufficient but it is a start in reducing the pace of change while we continue the detailed study of the problem on which our (the British) Stratospheric Ozone Review Group is about to report.
The third matter is acid deposition which has affected soils, lakes and trees downwind from industrial centres. Extensive action is being taken to cut down emission of sulphur and nitrogen oxides from power stations at great but necessary expense."
According to you, Thatcher would not be a Conservative...
What a flimsy straw man. Thatcher was rightly extremely concerned about the evidence of global warming, but it is leaping a vast logical chasm to suggest that she would therefore have consented to give up virgin steel-making capacity in Britain, especially given the fact that it has not reduced the quantity of blast furnaces in the world - huge extra capacity has simply been built in India, where environmental standards are lower, so net CO2 may well go up. So the move surrenders a key component of national security, for zero environmental gain.
Do I take it from your attempt to co-opt a dead Margaret Thatcher into agreeing with the closure of Britain's last blast furnace, and therefore our ability to sustain independent armaments production during a war scenario, that you are in favour of this move?
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
I didn’t say that.
It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be
Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.
There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?
The problem is that there *is* overlap between some of the parties in the centre, and you want that to be a hard-and-fast boundary. But without going to the NF or BNP, there is no boundary on the right. You want to truncate the broad church in the centre, but let any nutcase in on the far right.
But IMV the key word for Conservatives is the small-c word 'conservative'. Not no change, but careful and well-planned change, cautiously made. Progress by evolution rather than revolution.
The Conservative Party have forgotten that over the last decade.
But that notion is one of parties occupying a silly sort of space on left/right spectrum. A band that contracts, expands, and is pushed up and down like a pipe cleaner with the vagaries of politics.
What I'm arguing for is belief in a set of values and principles by which all political actions are measured. Is a law adding to the powers of the state against individual? Is a law or treaty in the national interest or against it? Is a law adding unduly to the tax burden? Will a law fundamentally undermine the security of the nation or its ability to defend itself? Is a law in the interests of families? Is a political action conducive to a strong, cohesive society? Is a law conducive to parliamentary sovereignty?
It isn't really about right and left, though those terms can be useful shorthand. A lot of the PCP, through design by CCHQ for reasons which I can't discern, doesn't pay more than lip service to those values, and sometimes not even that.
The issue is that the way those topics viewed can very much be in the eyes of he beholder, e.g. what is the national interest, especially if you take short- and long-term into account? They can also be contradictory. Is a slightly increased tax burden justified if that tax money is spent in the national interest? This treaty may slightly reduce national sovereignty, but also be in the national interest.
I think they're less ambiguous than you indicate. But they do come in and out of fashion.
There are fashionable weasel words that would justify the closing of Britain's virgin steel making capacity, dealing a knockout blow to our ability to manufacture armaments without importing the steel, based on amorphous envisaged future benefits of 'setting a good example' on CO2 emissions, but no true adherent to Tory principles could ever support such a scheme. Another Tory principle is that families and individuals spend their money better than the state. If adherence to these principles was widespread within the PCP, neither the party nor the country would be in the mess they are in.
I think Thatcher would have been thoroughly on board with reducing CO2 emissions. I think she was the first major world leader to take it seriously, along with CFCs and acid rain.
Her own words:
"For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.
Recently three changes in atmospheric chemistry have become familiar subjects of concern. The first is the increase in the greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons—which has led some [end p4] to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability. We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century. This was brought home to me at the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver last year when the President of the Maldive Islands reminded us that the highest part of the Maldives is only six feet above sea level. The population is 177,000. It is noteworthy that the five warmest years in a century of records have all been in the 1980s—though we may not have seen much evidence in Britain!
The second matter under discussion is the discovery by the British Antarctic Survey of a large hole in the ozone layer which protects life from ultra-violet radiation. We don't know the full implications of the ozone hole nor how it may interact with the greenhouse effect. Nevertheless it was common sense to support a worldwide agreement in Montreal last year to halve world consumption of chlorofluorocarbons by the end of the century. As the sole measure to limit ozone depletion, this may be insufficient but it is a start in reducing the pace of change while we continue the detailed study of the problem on which our (the British) Stratospheric Ozone Review Group is about to report.
The third matter is acid deposition which has affected soils, lakes and trees downwind from industrial centres. Extensive action is being taken to cut down emission of sulphur and nitrogen oxides from power stations at great but necessary expense."
According to you, Thatcher would not be a Conservative...
There is no other way to make commercial steel without coking coal (a heck of a lot of CO2). Anyone who says otherwise also has a Fusion reactor to sell you.
I'm unsure what point you're trying to make? Few people say we need *no* coal; otherwise heritage railways would be in serious trouble. But getting rid of coal-fired power stations from the 1990s onwards made a massive dent in our carbon emissions.
We are talking about commercial steel and the closing down of a plant that makes virgin steel to replace it with one the recycles scrap steel. The virgin steel market is not decreasing in any way, but it just wont be getting made here.
@HackneyAbbott Giants of the English football team. Meanwhile Reform is complaining about immigration
All born and bred in England.
It is probably an unwise reaction to the Twitter slating the Black players got for missing penalties last time. Better now would be to follow Mrs Thatcher: just rejoice at that news.
Before wittering about immigration or whatever, the Tories need to think hard about the 4 things they have lacked or deliberately abandoned in recent years.
1. An understanding of Burkean principles - the idea that conservatism is about preserving the best of what we have built but also about building on that for the next generations - to leave the country in a better state than they found it. So it is not enough to focus only on one elderly generation but to remember those that are and those to come and to make life and opportunities better for them. (Why in God's name did a Conservative government kill off Sure Start? - to give just one example.)
2. Chesterton's Fence: you don't just randomly and angrily attack and destroy institutions and conventions just because they stand in your way. You are meant to be grown ups not tantruming toddlers. The attacks on the rule of law, on any standards of integrity and political decency, on independent institutions etc was pathetic, dangerous and, well, unconservative. See point 1.
3. Competence: obvious but forgotten. Just try to do your tasks well. Good administration, thinking about the consequences, thinking ahead, getting advice, planning, sorting out mistakes, learning from them, small practical improvements instead of snake oil promises backed by nothing more than bullshit etc. You forgot that. You will have to relearn this and try to demonstrate it where you can - in how you run your party and whatever councils you control. It will take time and you won't be listened to for a long time. But unless you do start doing this now, forget the rest.
4. Character: the single most important factor. The moral character, the integrity, the honesty of those who lead your party and those in it and how they behave says more about you than any manifesto. You chose some dreadful leaders in a Faustian pact which has well and truly bitten you on the arse. You abandoned all standards of political decency. You allowed corruption and shadiness and spivs in public office to fester. You gave the impression that duty and public service were jokes. The one abiding image for your years in power was parties in Downing Street while a widowed queen sat alone at her husband's funeral. That image stood for many who did their job while you treated their old-fashioned virtues with contempt. Really, how dare you call yourself conservative and behave like that.
Get these right. Then you can start worrying about policies. The current government will eventually make mistakes in all these areas. (I mean, Jacqui Smith, really?) But they won't listen to you until you've admitted you fucked things up and have changed.
Available for consultation at £1,3750 per hour + VAT or its euro equivalent. An absolute bargain.
Everyone Conservative MP should have to read it and every Conservative wannabe leader should have to give their thoughts on it.
I'm afraid I can't agree, because unlike @DeclanF's first set of points on the matter, which came over as high-minded and was universal enough for conservatives of all colours (including me, who 'liked' the post) to get behind, this set of requirements is narrowly political, and frankly reads as yet another PB post dolorously opining that the Tories must 'avoid a swing to the right', despite (and probably because of) the centrist position being utterly destroyed in a test with real voters. Time and again, those on the right have urged the building of the same coalition that Boris made into a landslide victory. The post-electoral arithmetic clearly shows this to be the case. Starmer's victory is based on an utterly shallow pool of voters, and it's incredibly self-serving of his supporters to urge the Tories to pull their punches against Labour, leave the right of British politics unrepresented, and attack Reform instead.
Absolutely not. No sensible tactician would urge the Tories to go back to chasing after some white van man in Redcar. It’s the sensible folk of Surrey and Sussex and Hampshire and Wiltshire and Somerset and Devon and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire and … that you should be worrying about. By and large, they don’t want a government of ideological obsessives, and right now, that’s you, not them.
It's customary for parties to swing to their radical fringe after a crushing defeat, before sobering up and realising that perpetual failure lives there.
I don't think that the Tories can resist going down the Reform rabbit hole.
Will Reform want the Tory Party in their rabbit hole?
This is where we miss Boris.
He could have sold the Conservative Party to Nigel Farage-Reform Ltd (bankrolled by who knows who?) and made enough commission to decorate a street full of Downing Street flats courtesy of Lulu Lytle.
The Tories will elect a new chairman of the 1922 committee this week. It's likely to be either Geoffrey Clifton-Brown or Bob Blackman. They'll have the unenviable task of being holder-of-the-letters for any future race
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
I didn’t say that.
It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be
Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.
There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?
The problem is that there *is* overlap between some of the parties in the centre, and you want that to be a hard-and-fast boundary. But without going to the NF or BNP, there is no boundary on the right. You want to truncate the broad church in the centre, but let any nutcase in on the far right.
But IMV the key word for Conservatives is the small-c word 'conservative'. Not no change, but careful and well-planned change, cautiously made. Progress by evolution rather than revolution.
The Conservative Party have forgotten that over the last decade.
But that notion is one of parties occupying a silly sort of space on left/right spectrum. A band that contracts, expands, and is pushed up and down like a pipe cleaner with the vagaries of politics.
What I'm arguing for is belief in a set of values and principles by which all political actions are measured. Is a law adding to the powers of the state against individual? Is a law or treaty in the national interest or against it? Is a law adding unduly to the tax burden? Will a law fundamentally undermine the security of the nation or its ability to defend itself? Is a law in the interests of families? Is a political action conducive to a strong, cohesive society? Is a law conducive to parliamentary sovereignty?
It isn't really about right and left, though those terms can be useful shorthand. A lot of the PCP, through design by CCHQ for reasons which I can't discern, doesn't pay more than lip service to those values, and sometimes not even that.
The issue is that the way those topics viewed can very much be in the eyes of he beholder, e.g. what is the national interest, especially if you take short- and long-term into account? They can also be contradictory. Is a slightly increased tax burden justified if that tax money is spent in the national interest? This treaty may slightly reduce national sovereignty, but also be in the national interest.
I think they're less ambiguous than you indicate. But they do come in and out of fashion.
There are fashionable weasel words that would justify the closing of Britain's virgin steel making capacity, dealing a knockout blow to our ability to manufacture armaments without importing the steel, based on amorphous envisaged future benefits of 'setting a good example' on CO2 emissions, but no true adherent to Tory principles could ever support such a scheme. Another Tory principle is that families and individuals spend their money better than the state. If adherence to these principles was widespread within the PCP, neither the party nor the country would be in the mess they are in.
I think Thatcher would have been thoroughly on board with reducing CO2 emissions. I think she was the first major world leader to take it seriously, along with CFCs and acid rain.
Her own words:
"For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.
Recently three changes in atmospheric chemistry have become familiar subjects of concern. The first is the increase in the greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons—which has led some [end p4] to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability. We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century. This was brought home to me at the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver last year when the President of the Maldive Islands reminded us that the highest part of the Maldives is only six feet above sea level. The population is 177,000. It is noteworthy that the five warmest years in a century of records have all been in the 1980s—though we may not have seen much evidence in Britain!
The second matter under discussion is the discovery by the British Antarctic Survey of a large hole in the ozone layer which protects life from ultra-violet radiation. We don't know the full implications of the ozone hole nor how it may interact with the greenhouse effect. Nevertheless it was common sense to support a worldwide agreement in Montreal last year to halve world consumption of chlorofluorocarbons by the end of the century. As the sole measure to limit ozone depletion, this may be insufficient but it is a start in reducing the pace of change while we continue the detailed study of the problem on which our (the British) Stratospheric Ozone Review Group is about to report.
The third matter is acid deposition which has affected soils, lakes and trees downwind from industrial centres. Extensive action is being taken to cut down emission of sulphur and nitrogen oxides from power stations at great but necessary expense."
According to you, Thatcher would not be a Conservative...
She would have been on board for funding research to develop commercially viable renewables solutions in the long term which people would freeely choose in a free market and a large nuclear programme to get us through the next fifty years if it was.
Not subsidising low energy dense Beta renewables solutions and doubling the cost of electricity in the process, driving industry to places like China where the biggest coal fired power generation project in world history continues and coercing people to buy inferior and expensive immature technology electric vehicles with huge subsidies and banning internal combustion engines.
I'd strongly argue that her work on CFCs and the Montreal agreement shows that your view is wrong. AIUI the replacement chemicals were not, and are not, as good (which is why some Chinese companies started using them again a few years ago, noted by an increase in ozone depletion).
Also see the Dash for Gas, which she set in motion for her successors.
The dash for gas was about destroying the NUM and trade union movement as a mob directing threat to democracy along with much else she did.
In the process it closed down indigenous coal mines for being "loss making" and put us in hoc to gas imports from Vladimir and sundry Sheiks as we discovered a couple of years back.
Even in Dundee — the fabled “Yes City” — Chris Law clung on to the new Dundee Central constituency by only 675 votes. The SNP’s catastrophic result was “much worse than I thought in my darkest days,” one veteran said. “There is just shock among the entire party,” another insider said. The nationalists no longer hold any seats south of Stirling.
As a lifelong Liberal and Liberal Democrat supporter and one time Party member, it's incredible to think we now have 72 MPs. I remember the thrill of 46 MPs in 1997 and thinking of that as a breakthrough but to imagine after the dark days of 2015, we now have 2 LD MPs for every 3 Conservatives - almost unbelievable.
I've often said on here the party I joined and worked for died in the fires of the coalition but, phoenix-like, that party has risen from the ashes of 2015 and has targeted ruthlessly to achieve such a result. Ed Davey is a product of ALDC and the campaigning techniques of that organisation (as was Farron) and it's perhaps no surprise the party has gone back to the future. Yes, a lot of it was the classic "high tide floating all boats" but that doesn't mean each and every gain wasn't the result of hard work.
I strongly suspect there is a significant correlation between local Government success, especially from 2022 onwards, and victory last Thursday and it's to other areas of local strength which were outside the scope of targeting this time the party needs to look for further progress. 2025 has to be about gains at County level and using those to develop organisation in new areas.
Given how some Conservatives enjoyed dancing on the LD graves in 2015, you'll forgive a wry smile as I look at the Conservatives "assessing their losses". The humiliation of 2015 has been avenged. Such is politics, a rough trade as someone once said.
But 71 Lib Dem seats in 2024 matter a lot less than a dozen did in 2015, because Labour's majority is so huge and they will obviously be mostly gone when the public want Labour out, whenever that is. Most of the public would be hard pressed to name a single LibDem policy I think. That's the way with protest votes, whether they are Reform, LibDem or Monster Raving Loony.
LibDems do a great job as "not the Tories!" Can they do the same as "not bloody Labour!"? Jury is very much out on that one.
I don't think they can.
Reform on the other hand could eviscerate Labour but would that benefit the Conservatives? Probably not by much.
As a lifelong Liberal and Liberal Democrat supporter and one time Party member, it's incredible to think we now have 72 MPs. I remember the thrill of 46 MPs in 1997 and thinking of that as a breakthrough but to imagine after the dark days of 2015, we now have 2 LD MPs for every 3 Conservatives - almost unbelievable.
I've often said on here the party I joined and worked for died in the fires of the coalition but, phoenix-like, that party has risen from the ashes of 2015 and has targeted ruthlessly to achieve such a result. Ed Davey is a product of ALDC and the campaigning techniques of that organisation (as was Farron) and it's perhaps no surprise the party has gone back to the future. Yes, a lot of it was the classic "high tide floating all boats" but that doesn't mean each and every gain wasn't the result of hard work.
I strongly suspect there is a significant correlation between local Government success, especially from 2022 onwards, and victory last Thursday and it's to other areas of local strength which were outside the scope of targeting this time the party needs to look for further progress. 2025 has to be about gains at County level and using those to develop organisation in new areas.
Given how some Conservatives enjoyed dancing on the LD graves in 2015, you'll forgive a wry smile as I look at the Conservatives "assessing their losses". The humiliation of 2015 has been avenged. Such is politics, a rough trade as someone once said.
But 71 Lib Dem seats in 2024 matter a lot less than a dozen did in 2015, because Labour's majority is so huge and they will obviously be mostly gone when the public want Labour out, whenever that is. Most of the public would be hard pressed to name a single LibDem policy I think. That's the way with protest votes, whether they are Reform, LibDem or Monster Raving Loony.
72. It's 72.
73 teamed up with the APNI
Will the Alliance sit with the LibDems? I seem to remember that during the coalition years they didn't.
Even in Dundee — the fabled “Yes City” — Chris Law clung on to the new Dundee Central constituency by only 675 votes. The SNP’s catastrophic result was “much worse than I thought in my darkest days,” one veteran said. “There is just shock among the entire party,” another insider said. The nationalists no longer hold any seats south of Stirling.
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
I didn’t say that.
It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be
Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.
There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?
The problem is that there *is* overlap between some of the parties in the centre, and you want that to be a hard-and-fast boundary. But without going to the NF or BNP, there is no boundary on the right. You want to truncate the broad church in the centre, but let any nutcase in on the far right.
But IMV the key word for Conservatives is the small-c word 'conservative'. Not no change, but careful and well-planned change, cautiously made. Progress by evolution rather than revolution.
The Conservative Party have forgotten that over the last decade.
But that notion is one of parties occupying a silly sort of space on left/right spectrum. A band that contracts, expands, and is pushed up and down like a pipe cleaner with the vagaries of politics.
What I'm arguing for is belief in a set of values and principles by which all political actions are measured. Is a law adding to the powers of the state against individual? Is a law or treaty in the national interest or against it? Is a law adding unduly to the tax burden? Will a law fundamentally undermine the security of the nation or its ability to defend itself? Is a law in the interests of families? Is a political action conducive to a strong, cohesive society? Is a law conducive to parliamentary sovereignty?
It isn't really about right and left, though those terms can be useful shorthand. A lot of the PCP, through design by CCHQ for reasons which I can't discern, doesn't pay more than lip service to those values, and sometimes not even that.
The issue is that the way those topics viewed can very much be in the eyes of he beholder, e.g. what is the national interest, especially if you take short- and long-term into account? They can also be contradictory. Is a slightly increased tax burden justified if that tax money is spent in the national interest? This treaty may slightly reduce national sovereignty, but also be in the national interest.
I think they're less ambiguous than you indicate. But they do come in and out of fashion.
There are fashionable weasel words that would justify the closing of Britain's virgin steel making capacity, dealing a knockout blow to our ability to manufacture armaments without importing the steel, based on amorphous envisaged future benefits of 'setting a good example' on CO2 emissions, but no true adherent to Tory principles could ever support such a scheme. Another Tory principle is that families and individuals spend their money better than the state. If adherence to these principles was widespread within the PCP, neither the party nor the country would be in the mess they are in.
I think Thatcher would have been thoroughly on board with reducing CO2 emissions. I think she was the first major world leader to take it seriously, along with CFCs and acid rain.
Her own words:
"For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.
Recently three changes in atmospheric chemistry have become familiar subjects of concern. The first is the increase in the greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons—which has led some [end p4] to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability. We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century. This was brought home to me at the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver last year when the President of the Maldive Islands reminded us that the highest part of the Maldives is only six feet above sea level. The population is 177,000. It is noteworthy that the five warmest years in a century of records have all been in the 1980s—though we may not have seen much evidence in Britain!
The second matter under discussion is the discovery by the British Antarctic Survey of a large hole in the ozone layer which protects life from ultra-violet radiation. We don't know the full implications of the ozone hole nor how it may interact with the greenhouse effect. Nevertheless it was common sense to support a worldwide agreement in Montreal last year to halve world consumption of chlorofluorocarbons by the end of the century. As the sole measure to limit ozone depletion, this may be insufficient but it is a start in reducing the pace of change while we continue the detailed study of the problem on which our (the British) Stratospheric Ozone Review Group is about to report.
The third matter is acid deposition which has affected soils, lakes and trees downwind from industrial centres. Extensive action is being taken to cut down emission of sulphur and nitrogen oxides from power stations at great but necessary expense."
According to you, Thatcher would not be a Conservative...
There is no other way to make commercial steel without coking coal (a heck of a lot of CO2). Anyone who says otherwise also has a Fusion reactor to sell you.
I'm unsure what point you're trying to make? Few people say we need *no* coal; otherwise heritage railways would be in serious trouble. But getting rid of coal-fired power stations from the 1990s onwards made a massive dent in our carbon emissions.
We are talking about commercial steel and the closing down of a plant that makes virgin steel to replace it with one the recycles scrap steel. The virgin steel market is not decreasing in any way, but it just wont be getting made here.
We also do not mine iron ore any more (there are lots of traces of that industry, only recently gone, in the Northamptonshire area). So that needs importing as well for the true independence you desire. Fortunately we have oodles of limestone.
I'm ambivalent about the steel plant's closure. Ideally we'd keep it, bit I have little idea of the economics of it. If we did, we may be better off nationalising it as a national resource - not that British Steel did a stellar job...
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
I didn’t say that.
It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be
Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.
There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?
The problem is that there *is* overlap between some of the parties in the centre, and you want that to be a hard-and-fast boundary. But without going to the NF or BNP, there is no boundary on the right. You want to truncate the broad church in the centre, but let any nutcase in on the far right.
But IMV the key word for Conservatives is the small-c word 'conservative'. Not no change, but careful and well-planned change, cautiously made. Progress by evolution rather than revolution.
The Conservative Party have forgotten that over the last decade.
But that notion is one of parties occupying a silly sort of space on left/right spectrum. A band that contracts, expands, and is pushed up and down like a pipe cleaner with the vagaries of politics.
What I'm arguing for is belief in a set of values and principles by which all political actions are measured. Is a law adding to the powers of the state against individual? Is a law or treaty in the national interest or against it? Is a law adding unduly to the tax burden? Will a law fundamentally undermine the security of the nation or its ability to defend itself? Is a law in the interests of families? Is a political action conducive to a strong, cohesive society? Is a law conducive to parliamentary sovereignty?
It isn't really about right and left, though those terms can be useful shorthand. A lot of the PCP, through design by CCHQ for reasons which I can't discern, doesn't pay more than lip service to those values, and sometimes not even that.
The issue is that the way those topics viewed can very much be in the eyes of he beholder, e.g. what is the national interest, especially if you take short- and long-term into account? They can also be contradictory. Is a slightly increased tax burden justified if that tax money is spent in the national interest? This treaty may slightly reduce national sovereignty, but also be in the national interest.
I think they're less ambiguous than you indicate. But they do come in and out of fashion.
There are fashionable weasel words that would justify the closing of Britain's virgin steel making capacity, dealing a knockout blow to our ability to manufacture armaments without importing the steel, based on amorphous envisaged future benefits of 'setting a good example' on CO2 emissions, but no true adherent to Tory principles could ever support such a scheme. Another Tory principle is that families and individuals spend their money better than the state. If adherence to these principles was widespread within the PCP, neither the party nor the country would be in the mess they are in.
I think Thatcher would have been thoroughly on board with reducing CO2 emissions. I think she was the first major world leader to take it seriously, along with CFCs and acid rain.
Her own words:
"For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.
Recently three changes in atmospheric chemistry have become familiar subjects of concern. The first is the increase in the greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons—which has led some [end p4] to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability. We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century. This was brought home to me at the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver last year when the President of the Maldive Islands reminded us that the highest part of the Maldives is only six feet above sea level. The population is 177,000. It is noteworthy that the five warmest years in a century of records have all been in the 1980s—though we may not have seen much evidence in Britain!
The second matter under discussion is the discovery by the British Antarctic Survey of a large hole in the ozone layer which protects life from ultra-violet radiation. We don't know the full implications of the ozone hole nor how it may interact with the greenhouse effect. Nevertheless it was common sense to support a worldwide agreement in Montreal last year to halve world consumption of chlorofluorocarbons by the end of the century. As the sole measure to limit ozone depletion, this may be insufficient but it is a start in reducing the pace of change while we continue the detailed study of the problem on which our (the British) Stratospheric Ozone Review Group is about to report.
The third matter is acid deposition which has affected soils, lakes and trees downwind from industrial centres. Extensive action is being taken to cut down emission of sulphur and nitrogen oxides from power stations at great but necessary expense."
Looks like the increased turnout is increased for BOTH sides en France
It’s obvious where this leads. A chaotic anti RN coalition for 3 years which endlessly bickers and does nothing and then Le Pen comes in and says: make me le President. End the chaos. And they do?
As a lifelong Liberal and Liberal Democrat supporter and one time Party member, it's incredible to think we now have 72 MPs. I remember the thrill of 46 MPs in 1997 and thinking of that as a breakthrough but to imagine after the dark days of 2015, we now have 2 LD MPs for every 3 Conservatives - almost unbelievable.
I've often said on here the party I joined and worked for died in the fires of the coalition but, phoenix-like, that party has risen from the ashes of 2015 and has targeted ruthlessly to achieve such a result. Ed Davey is a product of ALDC and the campaigning techniques of that organisation (as was Farron) and it's perhaps no surprise the party has gone back to the future. Yes, a lot of it was the classic "high tide floating all boats" but that doesn't mean each and every gain wasn't the result of hard work.
I strongly suspect there is a significant correlation between local Government success, especially from 2022 onwards, and victory last Thursday and it's to other areas of local strength which were outside the scope of targeting this time the party needs to look for further progress. 2025 has to be about gains at County level and using those to develop organisation in new areas.
Given how some Conservatives enjoyed dancing on the LD graves in 2015, you'll forgive a wry smile as I look at the Conservatives "assessing their losses". The humiliation of 2015 has been avenged. Such is politics, a rough trade as someone once said.
But 71 Lib Dem seats in 2024 matter a lot less than a dozen did in 2015, because Labour's majority is so huge and they will obviously be mostly gone when the public want Labour out, whenever that is. Most of the public would be hard pressed to name a single LibDem policy I think. That's the way with protest votes, whether they are Reform, LibDem or Monster Raving Loony.
LibDems do a great job as "not the Tories!" Can they do the same as "not bloody Labour!"? Jury is very much out on that one.
As currently configured the LDs can only do well if Labour do well. There is no party that rises as the Tories rise - they have no friends. But though they don't say so, the great majority of seats in England has become ones in which, of the three traditional parties, it is either Lab v Con or LD v Con. (Obviously at the moment Reform and other interlopers slightly muddy the waters, but it holds good generally). In this election, while LD seats are a bit better at tactical voting than Labour ones, the effect was obvious and, like quantum particles, entangled.
The LDs are desperate to not look like Tories. Less desperate about Labour.
The Lib Dems are increasingly economically quite pro business, especially small business, which is why they appeal to strivers in the former Tory seats. Equally the the majority of their members don´t give a stuff about much of the culture wars battles, since mostly they take a live and let live view of things, The Tories "Woke wars, Fuck business and sod the consequences" is spectacularly unappealing to the ABs, in Wessex and the Home Counties who seem to have defected en bloc. The fact is that Braverman, Patel et al are pretty naff. They belittle "experts" and sing their own strident and discordant songs, which may appeal to Reform voters, but for every vote they get back from RefUK they will lose three to the Lib Dems.
As for Labour, getting two thirds of the seats on one third of the vote is a terrible warning. The average Lib Dem majority is surprisingly solid, not so for Labour and even less so for the Tories. Come the 2029 GE, things could easily swing into Hung Parliament territory, only this time it could even be the Lib Dems who dictate the terms of the next Parliament.
There is all to play for,
On the contrary, I'd say the extent of the willingness to vote tactically against the Tories made Labour and the Lib Dems more like a single party with support in the mid-40s, which achieved a majority of more than 300.
Yes, and I think you can go a bit further, Chris. Toss in a few Greens, bit of Plaid, maybe even some Scotsnats who aren't too particular outside the referendum issue. it all adds up to something approaching a majority of voters at least consenting happily to the eleceted Government.
The Opposition by contrast falls well short, even of you do assume Con and RefUk are joined at the hip.
⚫️ #RN: circa 200 seggi 🔴 #NFP: circa 170 🟡 #ENS: circa 140 🔵 #LR: circa 60
That would be toward the upper end of expectations the BBC was showing previously based on polling - lower than initial estimates before all the withdrawals, but high.
Comments
There are fashionable weasel words that would justify the closing of Britain's virgin steel making capacity, dealing a knockout blow to our ability to manufacture armaments without importing the steel, based on amorphous envisaged future benefits of 'setting a good example' on CO2 emissions, but no true adherent to Tory principles could ever support such a scheme. Another Tory principle is that families and individuals spend their money better than the state. If adherence to these principles was widespread within the PCP, neither the party nor the country would be in the mess they are in.
As someone who's just worked his socks off to help make Oxfordshire Tory MP-free for the first time since before the American Revolution, if the Tories want to move further and further away from the centre ground, let them.
Keir Starmer @10DowningStreet & @AnasSarwar enjoy rapturous applause at Edinburgh @ScottishLabour rally, before Starmer meets @JohnSwinney at Bute House
Sarwar claims @UKLabour wants UK’s governments to “actually work together in the national interest; cooperation instead of conflict; respect without suspicion” #GE2024
https://x.com/severincarrell/status/1809980379874377784
The answer is just one.
Scotland has 3 league clubs.
The long game is the right answer, so expect Cruella to get a standing ovation in September...
That really isn't cricket.
The LDs are desperate to not look like Tories. Less desperate about Labour.
Given the number of Shadow posts to be filled, might there be a shortage of candidates?
Who can do that in the tories? They’ll all revert to culture wars
London Frenchmen with British Citizenship will get to vote three times this week.
Second parliamentary term: stability and reason and finding new talent of millenials.
Third parliamentary term: the new talent has a chance at connecting with millenial voters.
The next tories to form government aren't even in politics yet
Occam's Razor suggests the same folk.
The only reason that most of them were ever in the Tories not the Liberal/Libdem Parties is because the Tory Party provided a vehicle to achieve office and the Liberals didn't.
There is a worthy place for Liberalism, but the decline of the Liberal party in the 1920s led to both of the other two parties being infested with ambitious Liberals with the result that by 2010 the electorate was presented with three variants of Liberslism and is now revolting.
The place for Liberalism is within the Liberal (Democrat) Party.
Her own words:
"For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.
Recently three changes in atmospheric chemistry have become familiar subjects of concern. The first is the increase in the greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons—which has led some [end p4] to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability. We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century. This was brought home to me at the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver last year when the President of the Maldive Islands reminded us that the highest part of the Maldives is only six feet above sea level. The population is 177,000. It is noteworthy that the five warmest years in a century of records have all been in the 1980s—though we may not have seen much evidence in Britain!
The second matter under discussion is the discovery by the British Antarctic Survey of a large hole in the ozone layer which protects life from ultra-violet radiation. We don't know the full implications of the ozone hole nor how it may interact with the greenhouse effect. Nevertheless it was common sense to support a worldwide agreement in Montreal last year to halve world consumption of chlorofluorocarbons by the end of the century. As the sole measure to limit ozone depletion, this may be insufficient but it is a start in reducing the pace of change while we continue the detailed study of the problem on which our (the British) Stratospheric Ozone Review Group is about to report.
The third matter is acid deposition which has affected soils, lakes and trees downwind from industrial centres. Extensive action is being taken to cut down emission of sulphur and nitrogen oxides from power stations at great but necessary expense."
https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107346
According to you, Thatcher would not be a Conservative...
The Tories need, urgently, a Peel, a Burke, a David Hume, an Adam Smith, a Disraeli, a Thatcher and a Hayek. At this minute they have Braverman, Patel, Cleverley, Charles Moore, the Spectator, the Daily Mail and Tugendhat. They hang by a pretty slender thread
Quite the reverse . . . or obverse if you prefer . . .
"They [Reform] were also second in Dagenham & Rainham, as well as Barking."
Well yes, they were certinly barking, Sunil.
The huge gaps in the market place at this moment are: an explanation of current Tory principle and practice. (I don't think it can be done). Secondly, an articulation of what a centre right liberal small state, low tax, personal responsibility polity would look like.
Not subsidising low energy dense Beta renewables solutions and doubling the cost of electricity in the process, driving industry to places like China where the biggest coal fired power generation project in world history continues and coercing people to buy inferior and expensive immature technology electric vehicles with huge subsidies and banning internal combustion engines.
Another new reality to get my head around.
It does mean that the LDs will have to accept that policies have consequences and live up to that instead of acting like idealist activists.
Also see the Dash for Gas, which she set in motion for her successors.
There was no penrith campaigning the entire time he was the MP.
As for Labour, getting two thirds of the seats on one third of the vote is a terrible warning. The average Lib Dem majority is surprisingly solid, not so for Labour and even less so for the Tories. Come the 2029 GE, things could easily swing into Hung Parliament territory, only this time it could even be the Lib Dems who dictate the terms of the next Parliament.
There is all to play for,
BF rules on leadership seem to rule out paying out on temporary or caretaker leaders.
Certainly in a seat like - to pick somewhere at random - Newton Abbot - it clearly helped that when presented with conflicting evidence from the national MRPs, which many folk mistakenly thought were local polls, the local council there was already LibDem controlled.
Having a local government base brings profile, money, credibility, experience, and a pre-existing organisation. It’s a lesson I think the Greens are beginning to learn, and I expect the next round of local elections will see Green gains in some of the seats Labour has won where the Greens have leapfrogged the LibDems.
Whether Reform is really interested in putting in the hard yards to build such a base, which takes commitment and perseverance and a lot of hard work, remains to be seen.
a) Find someone with a genuine desire to become a conservative MP, not a Lib Dem (or Reform) one
b) Find someone with an existing link to the constituency - in-fact why not put the selection process back into the hands of local parties, because nobody in their right mind would argue that it has been 'professionalised' by taking it under central control.
You're a Lib Dem (or Labour supporter, I can't recall which) - would you appreciate some right wing Tory being waved through the selection process by Labour Central Office in preference to local Lib Dems/Labour people?
Gotta say it does look quite fash-adjacent. This place could - understandably - vote Nazi in despair any moment
https://x.com/HackneyAbbott/status/1809905930949030162
@HackneyAbbott
Giants of the English football team. Meanwhile Reform is complaining about immigration
All born and bred in England.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/449503/co2-emissions-united-kingdom-uk/
Indeed I can’t think it’ll be very long until we get a Richmond by election (and, perhaps, a chance for one of the defeated Tories like Mordaunt to stage a quick return).
(Is there an any way similar website to PB in France? A mere echo though it must be of course.)
Do I take it from your attempt to co-opt a dead Margaret Thatcher into agreeing with the closure of Britain's last blast furnace, and therefore our ability to sustain independent armaments production during a war scenario, that you are in favour of this move?
These competitions take a lot of work, so I am grateful for you running it.
No riots….. YET
He could have sold the Conservative Party to Nigel Farage-Reform Ltd (bankrolled by who knows who?) and made enough commission to decorate a street full of Downing Street flats courtesy of Lulu Lytle.
RN first but no overall majority
🇫🇷 #Francia — Exit Poll La Libre Belgique:
⚫️ #RN: circa 200 seggi
🔴 #NFP: circa 170
🟡 #ENS: circa 140
🔵 #LR: circa 60
Anyway, I'm chuffed with 5th place - a couple of lucky guesses. Thanks!
In the process it closed down indigenous coal mines for being "loss making" and put us in hoc to gas imports from Vladimir and sundry Sheiks as we discovered a couple of years back.
Reform on the other hand could eviscerate Labour but would that benefit the Conservatives? Probably not by much.
I'm ambivalent about the steel plant's closure. Ideally we'd keep it, bit I have little idea of the economics of it. If we did, we may be better off nationalising it as a national resource - not that British Steel did a stellar job...
Oh, that we had politicians of her calibre again today.
It’s obvious where this leads. A chaotic anti RN coalition for 3 years which endlessly bickers and does nothing and then Le Pen comes in and says: make me le President. End the chaos. And they do?
The Opposition by contrast falls well short, even of you do assume Con and RefUk are joined at the hip.