UK General Discussion: Rishecession

[EastAnglianLefty]

People believed in Modernity then. Enough people, anyway.

Strangely there seems to be a lot of the schools in Essex and the North East for some reason.

Because government (cowardly poltroons etc) have refused to release the list, we only know from what has been reported independently. So on the one hand it may just be that, for whatever reason, heads in those areas have been unusually keen to contact the media (esp. the BBC) to confirm that they're on it, but it could also relate to particular patterns of contractors.

One of the schools that was already closed down by RAAC issues before the summer (Mistley Norman Church of England) is in Essex. Not sure if there are analogues in the north east. If one were looking for gaps, it might also be worth looking at patterns of MATs. If one school in a MAT is found to have RAAC, that would tend to suggest that they've also felt the need to check the others in the chain.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Birmingham is broke: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-66715441

[EastAnglianLefty]

Yes, but who cares about Northants in comparison?

(outside Northants, anyway)

Based on local election results since the fiasco, they don’t even care in it.

Though those were in 2021 and the pandemic was somewhat more prominent in voters' mind than something that happened four years earlier.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The Westminster aide spying for China has been unmasked in the Times. It’s Chris Cash, the Director of the China Research Group.

The CRG is a working group set up by Security Minister Tom Tugendhat and spearheaded by Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Alicia Kearns. It’s supposed to provide policy insights to “tackle the rise of China”.

He’s also Kearns’ parliamentary researcher.

Which all seems… unfortunate.

I assume he's not a relative of Bill?

[EastAnglianLefty]

A number of animal charities have come out against this - arguing that breed-based bans are ineffective.

Which is not necessarily an unreasonable argument, but the problem is that there aren't really any effective alternatives that wouldn't take a level of resourcing the state doesn't have and isn't willing to provide.

[EastAnglianLefty]

There are going to be more splits than that. You will have a Trussite lane; an immigration hardliner lane; an assorted culture wars lane; and a moderate lane (relative to the rest of the party, not to the country.) It will be possible for candidates to occupy more than one of those lanes, but I can't see it being a two-way contest. A lot of Tories (even those accepting they're currently on course to lose badly) believe that they can return to power after one election and that means that lots of candidates will want to be the ones to ride the expected wave.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The major potential candidates are Braverman, Badenoch, Cleverly and Mordaunt. The first three are running in extremely safe seats with majorities just below 25,000, so would only be lost if the Tories are struggling to be the Official Opposition. Mordaunt has a pretty healthy majority, but represents a seat that has swung quite heavily in the past. A lot of Westminster commentators (and clearly she herself) believe she has a personal vote; I don't think there's clear evidence of that from prior election results but it may be the case.

There are probably going to be a fair few other candidates who will throw their hats into the ring, and it's entirely possible that some of those outsiders planning leadership campaigns when the short campaign starts won't have a seat by the time it ends. With a couple of exceptions, however, the members of the Cabinet mostly represent very safe seats rather than traditional marginals or semi-marginals.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Why are people who (purport to) believe that we can ban sales of petrol and diesel cars by 2030 considered to be ‘moderates’.

I think because car manufacturers agree that the target is plausible and they're phasing out production of petrol and diesel cars by then?

[EastAnglianLefty]

It's not necessarily a bad idea in the abstract, but there are a lot of expensive and disruptive changes you would have to make to begin implementing it, and that's if the education sector was in a good place at the moment. At a time when they're getting nowhere near meeting recruitment targets and about 1% of schools have roofs at risk of collapse, it's a non-starter.

[EastAnglianLefty]

To follow up on that - there’s a number of pundits (from the Times lot, to Emily Maitlis) who have noticed that Labour need to reclaim more seats to win a majority of one, than the number Blair won from the Tories in 1997.

So that becomes the framing on a quiet news day, when they want a horse-race story - irrespective of polling, by-elections and local election results, etc. As Devout Centrist noted, it’s  an easy excuse for some hung Parliament chatter - and the go-to intro for a piece about the Lib Dems or SNP at Westminster (I think it’s now illegal to write an editorial about Ed Davey that doesn’t include the word *kingmaker*).

It’s either that, or “there’s no great enthusiasm for Keir Starmer, so Labour’s lead is soft”.

It would be interesting to know what the private views of those in the Tory hierarchy are regarding what the election result might be. Michael Heseltine, then Deputy PM, was said to have predicted a Tory majority of 40 just prior to the 1997 election.

I'm sure I remember Hezza sayng a bit later he privately knew it was baloney, and was perfectly aware that the Tories were headed for a big defeat.

But how else to motivate at least some of the troops? You have to suspend disbelief a bit in elections where it is pretty obvious that you are going to lose.

There were a few people - more in their media supporters than the party, admittedly - who really did think the Tories might pull it off again, however. They claimed stuff like Labour's poll lead being "soft" and Blair actually being widely disliked by the voters (sound familiar, any of this?)

The Mail's headline on election day 1997 was "The Great Don't Know Factor". One of the problems with considering yourself to be the natural governing party is it's very hard to accept that you aren't going to be.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Little bit of East Kilbride news - Linda Fabiani (List MSP 1999-2011, constituency MSP for East Kilbride 2011-2021) has endorsed Grant Costello in his selection fight against sitting MP Lisa Cameron. Challengers have also made the ballot against sitting MPs in Argyll & Bute, and Stirling & Strathallan.

Allison Thewliss (whose Glasgow Central seat is abolished by boundary changes) is challenging for the now-vacant Glasgow North selection (Patrick Grady isn't running again), and *also* running against sitting MP David Linden in Glasgow East - which is an odd one.

Thewliss was/is close to Sturgeon & Yousaf (she was her pick for Westminster leader, and briefly proposed as a successor in her Holyrood seat if the former FM resigned to take up a job at the UN). Linden is a key ally of Stephen Flynn (running his leadership campaign last year, and tapped to run the SNP's Rutherglen campaign). Both are senior frontbenchers (Thewliss has the Home Office brief, and shadowed the Chancellor under Blackford, while Linden holds the Social Justice/DWP brief.

Given Glasgow North is open, it seems an odd choice to antagonise a high-profile colleague, and try for their seat. Linden was Thewliss' parliamentary researcher before being elected in his own right, so the whole thing looks a little awkward.

It's also odd because I would have thought that Glasgow North is a better prospect for the SNP than Glasgow East. Local elections in both seats last year were reasonably close between Labour and the SNP, but with a large Green vote in North and decent Tory performances in parts of East. You would think in a general election the former would tend to be squeezed to the benefit of the SNP and the latter to the benefit of Labour.

It's not a huge difference and on current Scottish polling both seats would be lost, but I certainly can't see why East is so much the better seat that it's worth antagonising a close colleague.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The New Statesman, on the other hand, has prepared by hiring more Tories.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I don't think even Braverman could lose Fareham & Waterlooville.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Yes, but there's no convention that new plans that weren't in the manifesto require a new election.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I'm a little sceptical of those figures, but if they're accurate then the main thing it suggests is that a lot of readers go nowhere near the opinion pages.

[EastAnglianLefty]

If it’s an attempt to save her career, you’d have to imagine she’ll be looking for a new seat, though are there any plausible Tory prospects in Scotland which don’t have candidates in place?

Can’t see them parachuting her over to Aberdeenshire - there are only 3-4 seats under the nee boundaries that are winnable, and those all seem to have candidate (even Douglas Ross has a successor picked). Would have to be one of the Ayrshire seats. But those are going to be tough enough as it is. 2026 is shaping up to be a rough election for the Scottish Tories too - there’s not going to be spare list seats at Holyrood to go around.

I think the defection is a nice excuse for her not to follow through on her by-election threat (which she’s now officially walked back), before she goes back to the NHS, which she’s talked about for a while.

The defection is absolutely hilarious and despite 'oh this helps with anti SNP attack lines' etc, she's spiked herself more than the SNP by joining the Tories. Which makes me suspect Labour didn't want her...

I can't see why we'd have wanted her - there's no evidence she has a particularly large personal vote, we'd be favoured to take the seat anyway and to the extent she's outside the SNP mainstream, it's in terms of the sorts of social conservatism that don't play especially well with Labour members or voters.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Also today is the vote on suspending Peter Bone, which if passed will lead to a recall petition being opened for him.

[EastAnglianLefty]

And it should be remembered that 'student debt' in the UK is not debt in the traditional sense, it's far more equivalent to a graduate tax.

It is 9% of all income above 26k pounds until either it is paid off or 30 years have passed right ?

Depends when you attended university. It's 40 years for more recent grads, and there's a distinct difference in terms of interest rates. For those of us who graduated before 2011, it's an annoyance but a bearable one; for more recent grads it's far more punitive.

[EastAnglianLefty]

‘older people accepting their fate’ and ‘nature’s way of dealing with old people’ is hilariously blasé for a leader that so efficiently exploited age polarisation.

Also hilariously blasé from somebody who became seriously ill with Covid despite not being in an at-risk group (formally, at least.)

[EastAnglianLefty]

https://twitter.com/Conservatives/status/1724067848555737262
Holden engineered much of the noise around "beergate" last year, for better or worse. Given it let Starmer get on a soap-box and talk about his own integrity amidst the worst of partygate, I'd be inclined to lean towards the latter.

Odd that, given the rest of the cabinet leans *very* blue wall, they'd put party strategy in the hands of a red-waller. Every other appointment screams "shore up the home counties", while Holden is very 2019.

Holden won't be in a Red Wall seat as soon as he can find a safe berth for next time - though as things stand, his seat-hunting has been only marginally more successful than Seb Payne's.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I wonder if Bravermann, Truss, Mogg all bolted the Tories(along with MP's like them) to Reform, would Farage be able to pull a UK Version of Manning 1993 .

Reform are almost certainly overestimated in the polls at the moment (notably they do much better with men, whereas women are more likely to say Don't Know, implying that some of it is just male unwillingness to admit uncertainty) but they also have pretty much no media profile. If they replaced Tice with Farage or with a big-name Conservative defector, they'd be much more of a threat, though probably less likely to win seats than Canadian Reform was.

Braverman would be the ideal defector for them, but I think she's dramatically over-estimating her chances of ever becoming Tory leader and hence won't consider it until her value has dropped considerably.

[EastAnglianLefty]

https://twitter.com/TorstenBell/status/1725810524561043670

£250,000 is not an average price home in London. You're getting a one-bedroom flat for that at best.

Yes, but the London housing market is sui generis. Even with our out of control housing market, there are relatively few towns in England where you can't buy a respectable family home for £250k and many more towns where it will buy you a big house in a nice neighbourhood.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Something interesting I've noticed was after an announcement by the Deputy Mayor for Housing Tom Copley about buying up existing private rent housing to become council housing was the scale of the backlash from the Y***BY crowd who seem to be organising more in politics; it really surprised me both in terms of the hostility and the tone of it.

It did make me realise I am actually a socialist (I think council housing is a good thing & authorities should use the means they have to get it) but showed something interesting about the YIMBY trend- I wondered how much of them are people who basically want to a party that is the UK version of the FDP.

Some of the loudest YIMBY voices online are IEA types, whose enthusiasm for house-building is certainly genuine but nevertheless want to use the issue as a bait and switch. I'm not sure they're reflective of the wider movement, but they would definitely like to imply they are.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Some people have suggested the Autumn statement implies a plan for a May election. Their arguments for this aren't necessarily good, but they also rely upon the idea that the Autumn statement will shift the polls. If it doesn't, we're probably still in for the long-haul.