UK General Discussion: Rishecession

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Does anyone want to have a vote on ostracizing that irritating troll from this thread?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The big issue with Braverman is she is one those politicians who believes that every day where she isn't in the news to be a personal failure - everything she does is calculated as "i hope I'm the front page of the mail and telegraph tomorrow"

Well... it's a big issue with her, anyway. Very impressively she manages to have 'big issues' plural.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Out of Liz Truss, always something new. Latest is that her personal phone was hacked when she was Foreign Secretary, that it was probably by the Russians, that her phone contained a lot of sensitive information, that this was known about by the Summer of this year, that the story was suppressed on her request with the agreement of Boris Johnson and the Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case. This seems bad.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

imagine dooming over numbers that still give Labour a landslide majority of 112 lol

Given the voters who have moved, it would likely be a bigger number than that. 16pts would also be the largest PV margin since 1931.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The classic British reference is 'a vote of confidence from the board' or '[insert name here] has the full confidence of the chairman/owner', which are things often reported in public shortly before a football manager is sacked.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The complete horrified surprise at quite how effective leaflet-bombing different lines to different parts of the district being contested would be would be quite special, I think.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Messina also worked on Theresa May's campaign in 2017...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Good whipping is applied sociopathy, not applied evil. Williamson, quite obviously, has never been able to tell the difference.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Some sad news: Sir David Butler, Britain's leading postwar psephologist and famous for being the numbers and analysis man on the BBC's election coverage for many decades, has died. He was 98.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This week, they came out in favour of opencast coal-mining in closed Durham mines.

Who do they think that would appeal to? Opencast pits are very unpopular in the former coalfields as a rule, especially in Durham where there's been a small but clear electoral penalty for politicians who are in favour.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

But why?

Rishi Sunak is... aha... not particularly well-placed to appeal to a particular section of the electorate that both May and Johnson made a huge effort to win over. It isn't a large section, but it has been a useful one to them. Though some of it would also just be the base grumbling, and that's less likely to end up as 'real', I'd have thought. Anyway, it's only some very new and fairly sketchy polling outfits that have shown them in the high single digits, so it's hard to know for sure how real any of it is.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Never one to miss an opportunity to stress what is clearly a favourite policy...

https://twitter.com/bphillipsonMP/status/1593696960304881666

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Basically if you want even moderate reform then you need to start by pledging very radical changes otherwise it all gets lost.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This particular affair has also further undermined the credibility of the House of Lords in its current form as Johnson in his resignation honours list has brazenly breached the usual conventions.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's exactly what you would expect, but I'm surprised at how poorly he has handled the issue: there's no way it won't go down badly with the bulk of the electorate, but if he had framed it along the old 'right to choose' grounds and suggested that patients going private takes the strain off the public system (the truth or otherwise wouldn't be the issue) then that at least has some appeal to a small minority, but instead we've just had awkward non-denial denials. There's little he can do to avoid people viewing him as Rich-y Sunak, but the Shifty Sunak issue was another matter.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The by-election, of course, was caused by the resignation of Ian Gibson under a massive expenses-related cloud. He insisted that he had done nothing wrong (in reality he was lucky to avoid prosecution) and resigned to spite his party as he had been barred from seeking re-election at the next GE.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Never any chance that it would have ruled differently: the constitutional position is very clear and the Court is (and rightly so) 'conservative' by default in its readings and interpretations of the law.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Wait... BoJo and Truss are trying to outflank Rishi on environmentalism? After the thing that finally brought down Truss was forcing her MPs to vote in favor of fracking???

Just. Wild. You can't make this sh*t up.

By this point the Conservative Party is beyond satire. There's nothing you could suggest as a parodic joke that would be any more absurd than what they might end up doing themselves anyway.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Have they hired Max Bialystok as their director of strategy or something?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Not going to happen, surely. But still.....

The pundits who have tried to claim Labour's result in Chester wasn't very good actually, are very out of touch with the current mood I think.

'It is perfectly fine and healthy when a government party loses a by-election by forty points in a demographically average constituency that was triggered by the opposition MP resigning due to being exposed as a sex pest' is certainly... an argument. We must all admit that it is an argument.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I see that we've reached the 'It's a feint!' stage...

https://twitter.com/PickardJE/status/1599372377938624513

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Scotland is generally accepted as a distinct nation within the UK, though - and this has pretty much always been the case since 1707 (even at the height of "modern" unionism in the 1950s)

Yes, so that while we could conventionally never describe Scottish people as some sort of minority group even in the loosest possible sense, this is not because Scottish people were/are seen as identical to English people: it's more that once you cross the border, the majority group becomes Scottish; much as when the Monarch does they become a Presbyterian rather than an Anglican. As bizarre as this might sound to people who aren't British, it's one reason why the debate over Scotland's constitutional status has never anything like as nasty as the one in Quebec, even at its worst: there has never been this sense of Scottish people as a besieged ethnic minority.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Its the mythology that Thatcher was always "resolute" and never ever compromised that is killing the Tories - Truss deployed this fairy story constantly during her fated 50 days as well.

Whereas the real Mrs Thatcher - up until her somewhat addled final years in office at least - never picked a fight she wasn't sure she'd win and would always settle as quickly as possible otherwise. That was the whole trick!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Listen to people having conversations about politics and/or The News, it's very like the 1990s all over again: people are furious at the state of the public services and have worked out that the government is to blame.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The Prime Minister Vanishes. LOL. We're going to miss Grant Shapps when he's gone. Sure, he's a dreadful, lousy minister as a rule, but the man is an inherently funny content machine!