UK General Discussion:The Rt. Hon Alex Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Populist Hero

[Blair]

Relatively big announcement from Keir Starmer calling for a 'circuit breaker' lockdown of two weeks in England.

[Blair]

Relatively big announcement from Keir Starmer calling for a 'circuit breaker' lockdown of two weeks in England.

I don't know if Boris is hesitating because he needs a death toll first before he can make a national lockdown politically viable for the Tories , or if he's just genuinely dim enough to be sitting in his home right now & hoping it all fixes itself, but either way, this is an easy win for Starmer. The trend is there, & the people that'll be dying in 2 weeks as the UK approaches 500 deaths/day are already walking around infected now. As they were in March, the consequences of Boris' (in)actions are set in stone: he'll need to lock down when the chickens come home to roost, there'll be a human cost to not having done so sooner, & everybody will be asking why he didn't do it when advised.

I think he's just frantically hitting every switch without having to press the two bigger buttons; the first being the circuit breaker & the second being a longer lockdown.

The thing that I don't get from the Tories side is who will lose from doing this? The MPs who'd oppose Boris doing this already oppose the even weaker restrictions and where the type of idiots salivating about a return to office life.

There's of course a whole host of reasons why this has happened & where we're at this stage but it certainly feels much like it did in March & September where everyone knew there was going to be new restrictions but it was just a case of waiting.

[Blair]

It's obvious in my view that the Government will eventually just move every region of the country (bar maybe Cornwall) into the High or High Risk group; so we'll be in a national lockdown but pretending it isn't a lockdown.

[Blair]

The interesting thing is that the politician who could do worse out of this (well who should) is Sunak who is briefed as being the biggest opponent.

[Blair]

A fascinating example how the issue really does melt MPs minds. Roger Godstiff was roundly mocked & got rightly deselected when he had a similar meltdown over LGBT inclusive education.

[Blair]

What is the whole purpose of the European Union?

1. To provide a make-work programme and pension scheme for has-been and never-will-be politicians who failed/never made it at the national political level.
2. To give  an enormous (but largely false) ego-boost to ‘Europeans’ with small-man syndrome who feel threatened by the fact that the United States, China and, to a lesser extent, Russia, rule the roost in geopolitical terms.
3. To shuffle money more easily around the continent from richer to poorer countries, under the auspices of ‘convergence’ (lol).
4. To shuffle people more easily around the continent from poorer to richer countries, because having British (as was), German or Italian citizens pick fruit or clean toilets is morally wrong.
5. To enable the fulfilment of various national interests; countries with large (in the European context), inefficient agricultural sectors getting subsidies; traditionally poor countries laundering their creditworthiness via membership of the Eurozone; a comfort blanket for Germans who believe they’ll instantaneously march into the Sudetenland/Poland without some form of membership in an international body.

All the above reasons are laundered, to a greater or lesser degree, by vacuous appeals to factitious ‘European Values’ and the importance of the EU in maintaining them.

You stole that line from Yes Minister!

[Blair]

Why are people accusing the Tories of racism?

What did they do wrong?

1) How long have you got?

2) Where to even start??

(other more considered answers are available, and others here might provide them)

Not every rightwing party in the world should be accused of racism. Racism is on the left and the right. Yes, the Tories shouldn't have done what they did with the Enoch Powell speech, the Smethwick 1964 issue and the John Taylor racism in 1990, but a lot of Black Britons are Tories themselves.

There is still antisemitism on the Labor side. Old Labour took over the party since 2015.

I'm being contrarian for the sake of it but Ted Heath sacked Powell for the speech & was actually quite strong in being against it irrc.

[Blair]

Oh that's made my evening

[Blair]

Its quite interesting that the campaign appears to have really taken off today; I'm seeing it shared on facebook by relatively non political people.

[Blair]

We've now reached the stage where the Conservatives are attacking cash strapped businesses for doing charity work. Absolutely baffling & petty.

https://twitter.com/Ian_Fraser/status/1319941818025463810

How many times is Ben Bradley going to willingly humiliate himself?

The thing I find most depressing about it all is that it's an act.

He's an ex parliamentary bag carrier who went to a private school. He knows what he's doing. He isn't someone who just fell into a parliamentary seat.

His whole shtick about standing up for the forgotten people is just that; shtick.

[Blair]

That letter by 100 of their MPs the other day - claiming, with apparently total po-faced seriousness, that people are being rude to them on social media *because* Angela Rayner muttered a bad word under her breath - is certainly deliberate gaslighting on an almost industrial level.

It can't possibly work........surely?

I don't think so; the only people who take offence are people who already think Labour are the actual scum.

It's the same reason & way that the attacks on Boris Johnson over his refusal to condemn abuse of MPs didn't really move that many voters last year.

On a wider point it shows that the party as a whole are trying to be a lot more militant & outwardly aggresive; I can't even name the various party chairs under Theresa May because they were so passive but Amanda Milling has a tweet every day about 'Sir Keir' (forgetting it was her own government that knighted him) & there certainly seem to be upscaling that part of their operation- looking at the polling it's no surprise!

[Blair]

Many in the party really dislike the job Milling is doing.  Her ham-fisted attempts to land blows on Starmer are a joke and just make things worse for us (the Tories). Keir Starmer (I hate to say it) is hitting all the right buttons with his messaging and overall temperament.  We are hitting all the wrong buttons and it seems the only reason we remain ahead in the polls is Labour's still shot brand.

So much of the daily crises for the Tories are a result of terrible PR and messaging.  It's also blatantly clear that Boris is still suffering from some kind of long Covid meaning we have all the drawbacks of Boris with none of the (admittedly overhyped) benefits.

I think he has lost a huge amount of support here on the right/far-right of the party that he will really struggle to regain and that his support in the centre won't make up for.  The mood is such that I think the outcome of next year's local and devolved elections will determine the number of letters a certain MP for Altrincham has in his possession...

The problem is of course that there aren't any very credible contenders to replace him.  That being said a couple of members/supporters on the right are thinking Patel or Raab might do a good job.  Of course it's all rather academic while the pandemic is in full swing.

Interesting to hear the other side. I think Millings problem is that she (or most likely her staff) don't seem to know they need to change the copy & pasted attacked lines they get; it's fine when lobby fodder MPs share it but it just means that you don't really take any attack seriously. It's like sure the Tory Chairwomen is going to call Keir a sh**t aren't they?

I think the fact that even I seen Raab as the safe pair of hands in the Cabinet really does show a lot about the state it's in.

Theresa May's cabinet had the problem of having people who were disliked in the party & were either middle managers who'd floated into the top job (brokenshire, Clarke, Cairns), old hands doing a last round (Fox, Fallon, Hammond) or the incompetent sycophants (Grayling, Bradley etc).

It meant that the party had a cabinet that was pretty much just a holding pattern; Boris did to his credit dispatch them but he seemed to follow the advice of political twitter* and attempt to skip a generation of talent; providing that talent A.) Supported Brexit B.) Supported Boris C.) Didn't have any ideas about opposing him.

This cabinet could have survived an ordinary year but during a pandemic its been painfully out of it's depth; I mean there's a reason we're seeing Nicky Morgan on Question Time!

We know that both Grant Shapps & Gavin Williamson got jobs purely because they got Boris the numbers in his leadership bid; Shapps has actually been a lot stronger than I expected (perhaps because he is a product of the Cameron years) while Williamson has been even worse than he was at Defence.

He's responsible for the two biggest cocks up that the Government has had; he should have been sacked for the A-Levels fiasco. I don't say this in a 'oh why don't Ministers quit over minor mistake x' I mean this was a ministerial error on every level. I honestly think that books will be written over how much of a failure that was.

The funny thing I've noticed is that the golden goose of Rishi seems to be cracking; I've always actually thought his best route to power is either covid or Boris Johnson going away by April. His opinon ratings are only going to go down & he appears to have misplayed his hand a few times recently.





*please see the alternative for Labour which called for Yvette Cooper, Jess Phillips & Lord Miliband to be on Keirs frontbench- advice he rightly ignored.

[Blair]

Starmer is clearly playing the long game but if Labour can't advance from 'narrowly behind' to 'narrowly ahead' after the school meals debacle you have to wonder if the party's brand has been damaged on a more permanent basis than we thought

FWIW Labour were leading by +2 in one poll over the weekend & tied in another. With the non-election pace of decent high quality polling I think it's generally hard to find a constant ticking reaction to this stuff in public polls.

I'm also generally scared by this approach as I remember the joy when Ed M had 'won' some random debate over Energy prices, got a +3 boost in the polls and lured people like me into thinking he's won.

I'll be generally more than happy for Keir to remain between 38-42% as long as he can keep leading on Leadership & take some of the shine off the lead the Tories have on the economy.

[Blair]

Apologies for triple posting but this is actually much longer & more interesting than I thought it would be.

Basically there's an old fashioned fight between the DofE & Treasury over who is to blame for this; naturally the answer is the Prime Minister!


https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/marcus-rashford-boris-johnson-tory-revolt-johnsonism_uk_5f96d22ac5b6f077523596d3

[Blair]

Corbyn suspended from Labour over EHRC report.

Specifically for his comments in response to them.

[Blair]

Corbyn suspended from Labour over EHRC report.

FWIW this is inaccurate, the suspension is because of his reaction to it.

You are correct yes sorry.

I wonder what impact this has on the Labour NEC elections?

In all fairness I might have jumped the gun as it still appears vague despite the comments by the Labour spokesperson.

[Blair]

I'm not sure how big a problem it is (and obviously applies to some seats more than others) but there's a big failure in that a lot of people in politics think that 18-24 year olds & students are the same thing.

[Blair]

Note the fieldwork date but something no doubt that Starmers team will be pointing to...

https://twitter.com/BritainElects/status/1309930873068945408

[Blair]

But equally the YouGov poll found that even Labour voters approved of the decison?

[Blair]

In news it appears that because the decision to impose a lockdown has leaked they're going to possibly bring it forward; I assume out of the fear that people will spend the next 5 days like it's the last days of rome.

I can't see this decision doing much good politically for the Prime Minister; he was told by Labour & SAGE to do a circuit breaker to prevent this (he didn't) & he's going to have a lot of angry Tory MPs even if the Chancellor can stuff their mouth with gold.

[Blair]

Robert Syms has become one of those MPs who tweets as if he's a Tory Association Chair rather than an MP... which is actually quite interesting at times.

FWIW as much as I find the Suez example a bit overused (everything is Suez in the same way everything in Labour is a Clause IV moment) it's certainly true that on the current trends the local elections next year could be very tough; a clobbering in London, a loss of some of the 2017 high watermark councils & even an upset in the West Midlands Metro mayor could get people talking...

It's however unclear if they'll go ahead & how they'll work (I assume they should be able to work if we just use postal votes on mass+social distancing polling stations)

And even after then it's a big jump to say they'll get rid of Boris; Cameron, Blair & Brown all had awful local elections and only Brown faced a half baked coup. I think a much more likely situation is Boris quitting...

[Blair]

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/nov/10/fa-chairman-greg-clarke-resigns-after-unacceptable-comments

[Blair]

I don't know what's funnier the fact that so many of his outlandish projects & battles are now shelved (his defence review, his quest to sack every single civil servant & his project to piss off every eldery tory) or the fact that some many Tories think that Boris is now going to transform into some of different character whose on top of the details & is going to bring the country together.

[Blair]

I haven't seen it discussed but this does make it marginally easier to do a big reshuffle in the Spring; but every suffering Government has talk of a big reshuffle which often ends up as a failure.

[Blair]

Ha even more hilarous as devolution was one area he was going to focus on...