UK General Discussion: Rishecession

[CumbrianLefty]

At its peak (just after the 2017 GE) Corbyn's Labour polled 46%, as with Starmer's party in this one.

If nothing else, shows what an opportunity was squandered (for multiple reasons) back then.

[CumbrianLefty]

And the response of quite a few (not totally unreasonably) is "*what* fall in inflation"?

[CumbrianLefty]

Its often forgotten how well the economy did after Black Wednesday - there were three years of pretty solid growth prior to the 1997 GE, and unemployment fell for even longer.

It made, at the most, a marginal difference.

[CumbrianLefty]

<awaiting a certain political commentator telling us this means Sunak is a "weak" leader>

[CumbrianLefty]

Apparently the asylum backlog doubling is evidence of government success. Or something.

[CumbrianLefty]

The Lib Dems are calling for Parliament to be recalled from recess, so the Mid Beds by-election can happen sooner.

Are they really that worried about Labour's surging campaign there

[CumbrianLefty]

It’s Shapps.

His fifth cabinet role in the past 12 months (Transport, Home Office, Business, Energy, Defence). All feels a bit end-stage John Major.

Or just a bit John Reid.

[CumbrianLefty]

Maybe a tentative sign that an election is still some way off?

(Wallace has wanted out for a while now, so a minor change like this was coming sooner or later)

[CumbrianLefty]

At risk of sounding nostalgic one of of those characters you rarely see these days.

Too fugging right!

[CumbrianLefty]

A piece from the BBC a decade ago has just been unearthed - "spending cuts, has anyone noticed?"

Well, they have now.

[CumbrianLefty]

He's too old FFS, is there really no rising talent that could be found to do that job?

[CumbrianLefty]

In any case, it appears the "Labour source" who incessantly tells the Times "Starmer won't be a real leader until he has sacked Miliband and Rayner" has been disappointed yet again. Such a shame

(indeed, the latter has had a promotion if anything)

[CumbrianLefty]

Expect the Tories to run with this every day until the election - if they are allowed to.

[CumbrianLefty]

Yes, but who cares about Northants in comparison?

(outside Northants, anyway)

I'm not saying they will get away with it if they do it, or even that it is a good idea - but you can see how a by now increasingly desperate party might be tempted.

[CumbrianLefty]

British stereotypes about New Zealand still reflect how the country was before Rogernomics

The view of it as a present day 1950s Britain is still remarkably persistent.

And, of course, inaccurate.

[CumbrianLefty]

Are they *really* this Panglossian?

I still see the "Sunak more popular than Starmer" canard being deployed by some diehards.

[CumbrianLefty]

A fun legacy of Mr Tony terrifying the Conservative party and Gordon imploding in 2007 is that the Conservatives believe that only Mr Blair (or someone performing a weird cosplay) cam beat them.

I've sometimes wondered whether or not a similar point was made about Mr Wilson in the mid-1990s or so (at which point no Labour leader other than Wilson had won a general election in almost half a century).  

Actually no, Wilson's reputation was very low in the 1980s and 90s. He was widely seen - throughout the political spectrum - as an unprincipled schemer who had squandered the electoral opportunities presented to him and allowed his party to be invaded by extremists. Of course his getting dementia, apart from being a personal tragedy, meant he was unable to put his own case as past PMs often are - so when he died in 1995, Blair's "tribute" was lukewarm to the point of actual embarrassment (and I also recall the late Hugo Young writing an absolute excoriation for the ages in the Guardian)

It was sometime in that decade that things began to turn, however. There had already been the first signs with sympathetic "revisionist" biographies by Ben Pimlott and Philip Ziegler, but it took seeing Labour back in power for things to really change. Blair's trauma over Iraq made his keeping us out of Vietnam look much more impressive, for instance - and some current Labour "modernisers" see him as a kindred spirit, in marked contrast to a generation ago.

[CumbrianLefty]

Blair is undoubtedly still polarising, but I do detect a definite drop off since the last GE.

[CumbrianLefty]

"Inaction Man" - that's gotta sting a bit.

[CumbrianLefty]

I see labour has lost the YIMBY twitter vote.

Which is, if anything, even smaller in the real world than the very online left Twitter vote.

[CumbrianLefty]

Persistent talk that the SNP will be taking the whip off Ewing any time now.

[CumbrianLefty]

Rishi Sunak is about to be even less popular in South Wales than he was before, I see.

Levelling up in action!

[CumbrianLefty]

Theresa May says she is “woke and proud”.

As you do.

Her reinvention is certainly intriguing, I will say that much.

[CumbrianLefty]

Theresa May says she is “woke and proud”.

As you do.

Her reinvention is certainly intriguing, I will say that much.

Hardly surprising, given her track record as the originator of the stupid and self-defeating ‘nasty party’ moniker.

Stupid, self-defeating......and correct

[CumbrianLefty]

The age of consent should be raised to 18 with some leeway for teen couples

Nah, would be completely unenforcable apart from anything else - doing it for 16 is hard enough.

We "just" need to take major age and/or power discrepancies more seriously.