UK General Discussion: Rishecession

[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.)

[CumbrianLefty]

Though coming through that brush with mortality maybe only convinced him even more of his glorious destiny, rather than having the humbling effect it would surely have done with most of us.

[Torrain]

Labour lead in a Scottish Westminster poll for the first time since June 2014:
https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1719753277808443795

[Torrain]

Just for fun - seat projection, based on those numbers, from the same account:

LAB: 35 (+34)
SNP: 11 (-37)
CON: 7 (+1)
LDM: 4 (+2)

Not quite as eye-catching as the seat projection you'd get from today's Scottish numbers from Redfield and Wilton - but given the balls-up R&W seem to be making with their Scottish samples, I think YouGov's a safer bet...

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

I think the Caithness seat should be relatively safe for Jamie Stone - the LDs activists will heavily defend it unless they get very greedy and try and win Inverness.

[JimJamUK]

I think the Caithness seat should be relatively safe for Jamie Stone - the LDs activists will heavily defend it unless they get very greedy and try and win Inverness.

They did very well there in the 2022 council elections, while Labour actually came a (distant) 2nd in East Dunbartonshire. As usual, local context will matter a lot more for the Lib Dems than UNS, and given how soft the ‘not Tory’ (and to some extent ‘not SNP’) vote is you’d have to imagine a hold in Caithness next election.

[Torrain]

Caithness always goes back and forth between the SNP and Lib Dems in these models, because it was *so* marginal in 2019, and the new boundaries tilt it slightly more towards the SNP. Any % decline in the Lib Dem vote share tends to push it into the SNP column.

But, given Stone's incumbency, a nationwide decline in the SNP vote, and a decent Conservative voteshare to squeeze, it shouldn't be too hard for him to hold on.

**

On Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire - I think it'll get quietly left alone this cycle. While Ed Davey speaks fondly of it as a reach target, and it holds a lot of sentimental value (there are still *strong* feelings about the Charles Kennedy - Ian Blackford race in 2015), it's just out of reach.

Including Inverness in the new boundaries seems to produce an SNP-Lab seat, rather than a SNP-LD seat. By Electoral Calculus' reckoning, Lib Dems came fourth place, if you extrapolate the new boundaries to 2019 - with the SNP on a 7k majority over Labour.

Very confusing state of play right now - probably best to just let 2024 play out, and regroup once it's clearer what the new seat looks like.

[Blair]

I regret to inform you that America brain has gotten so bad for our home secretary that she is considering some sort of comically draconian action around banning tents for rough sleepers because we might end up “like LA.’’

She then went on to describe sleeping rough as a lifestyle choice.

I usually avoid these sort of righteous posts about U.K. politics but it is a mark of shame that the Conservative party see her as someone fit to hold ministerial office. The party deserves to lose and I look forward to her glorious reign as leader of the opposition which will no doubt be as successful as IBS.

[Blair]

As someone who has worked in and around this issue we know why people sleep rough; because the public realm is a mess. It costs around £900 a month to rent in London, the cost of food is insane, local councils have no money, our welfare system makes you wait 5 weeks before giving you your first paltry payment and we offer no support to those leaving prison, the armed forces, hospital or other various parts of our state.

New Labour and yes the Conservatives in 2020 effectively ended rough sleeping- we all know how to do it and we all know it would save money, cut crime and so forth if we actually did.

They have been in power for 13 years that they keep finding someone new to blame.

[CumbrianLefty]

Maybe the most striking thing about last night's briefing is that the Tories genuinely seem to think the policy in question will be popular. Jonn Elledge seems to be more spot on by the day with his thesis that the right wing media/think tank bubble is now basically killing the Conservative Party.

[TheTide]

This must be the worst psephological account on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/PollingReportUK

Maybe I should ignore it but it comes up too often on my feed. Basically applies uniform swing to every constituency (on previous boundaries), implies that various MPs who are standing down will stand again and knows that most of the people it reaches aren't as up on psephology as those on this site (for example) are. It also deviously shares its name with a fairly respectable (and now defunct?) psephology website.

[Zinneke]

Blair I get where your coming from re: Braverman and you’re definitely an authority on London homelessness

I’d like to open the debate though and ask you if you think this issue is unique to the United Kingdom or an EU wide, if not Western wide problem

Because you could also argue New York, Brussels, Barcelona, Berlin are all facing similar issues of homelessness and vagrants. I went to a better run city the other day, in the Netherlands, but that country still has a huge housing issue.

We know some of the root causes : Covid lockdowns destroyed the livelihoods of thousands of long term illegal residents who found themselves without a job, as well as a mental health epidemic.
In the mean time big cities are expected to take on the bulk of asylum seekers and economic migrants. The numbers the UK receives are the equivalent of a 500k city per year, same for most of the Blue Banana. That requires wartime-like state capacity to deal with. And yet London, an already cramped densely populated city, or Brussels, or Berin are all expected to absorb the migrants, because the periphery are too xenophobic (despite all the happy sappy Ken Loach films about Syrians in Durham) and the migrants themselves only want to stay in the capital city because our immigration systems revolve around a centralized outdated bureaucracy and in the case of the UK the economy for a recent arrival is simply better in one location only.


But to say its a British centric problem is naive. Its a systemic problem Western governments have which is lacking any sort of state capacity to deal with what should be considered almost a war time issue, just like Covid. Yet the brahmin left-liberals on this site were mocking the likes of Paul Mason for saying we should build nuclear power plants like spitfires and other such rhetoric : for them the comfort already exists in their cottages.


So yeah Braverman is a total sociopath but I do think the ideology of Sir Anthony Blair and all the other Washington Consensus sycophants are the reason why Western states are in the state their in and authoritarianism is on the rise, even in big cities.

Braverman et al is really just a symptom of slow Western decay.

[Torrain]

This must be the worst psephological account on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/PollingReportUK

Maybe I should ignore it but it comes up too often on my feed. Basically applies uniform swing to every constituency (on previous boundaries), implies that various MPs who are standing down will stand again and knows that most of the people it reaches aren't as up on psephology as those on this site (for example) are. It also deviously shares its name with a fairly respectable (and now defunct?) psephology website.

Preach. It’s a total grift. They’ll often time their results for media events surrounding a controversial MP, and then drop a graph showing them losing.

My For You page on Twitter is basically just a Westminster Bubble List post-Elon, and I’ve lost count of the times it’s pushed Alistair Campbell gleefully retweeting/quote-tweeting the PollingReportUK graph showing Rees-Mogg losing his seat.

I’m convinced they post that projection at least once a month for the engagement, and the likes of Campbell and Vorderman fall for it every time.

[CumbrianLefty]

This must be the worst psephological account on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/PollingReportUK

Maybe I should ignore it but it comes up too often on my feed. Basically applies uniform swing to every constituency (on previous boundaries), implies that various MPs who are standing down will stand again and knows that most of the people it reaches aren't as up on psephology as those on this site (for example) are. It also deviously shares its name with a fairly respectable (and now defunct?) psephology website.

IIRC the previous owner of UK Polling Report, Anthony Wells, did give his blessing to the "takeover" - but that was before it became clear just how shoddy the "new" incarnation would be.

[Zinneke]

Galloway is touting a bid for London Mayor, of course.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Interesting (though not terribly surprising) findings here - worth going through the whole thread:

https://twitter.com/sundersays/status/1721107432175173961

I.e. amongst the broad public, the present flare up of ~The Conflict~ is not a massively polarizing issue with nuanced opinions being very common.

[Blair]

Blair I get where your coming from re: Braverman and you’re definitely an authority on London homelessness

I’d like to open the debate though and ask you if you think this issue is unique to the United Kingdom or an EU wide, if not Western wide problem

Because you could also argue New York, Brussels, Barcelona, Berlin are all facing similar issues of homelessness and vagrants. I went to a better run city the other day, in the Netherlands, but that country still has a huge housing issue.

We know some of the root causes Covid lockdowns destroyed the livelihoods of thousands of long term illegal residents who found themselves without a job, as well as a mental health epidemic.
In the mean time big cities are expected to take on the bulk of asylum seekers and economic migrants. The numbers the UK receives are the equivalent of a 500k city per year, same for most of the Blue Banana. That requires wartime-like state capacity to deal with. And yet London, an already cramped densely populated city, or Brussels, or Berin are all expected to absorb the migrants, because the periphery are too xenophobic (despite all the happy sappy Ken Loach films about Syrians in Durham) and the migrants themselves only want to stay in the capital city because our immigration systems revolve around a centralized outdated bureaucracy and in the case of the UK the economy for a recent arrival is simply better in one location only.


But to say its a British centric problem is naive. Its a systemic problem Western governments have which is lacking any sort of state capacity to deal with what should be considered almost a war time issue, just like Covid. Yet the brahmin left-liberals on this site were mocking the likes of Paul Mason for saying we should build nuclear power plants like spitfires and other such rhetoric : for them the comfort already exists in their cottages.


So yeah Braverman is a total sociopath but I do think the ideology of Sir Anthony Blair and all the other Washington Consensus sycophants are the reason why Western states are in the state their in and authoritarianism is on the rise, even in big cities.

Braverman et al is really just a symptom of slow Western decay.

This is interesting; it's made complex as I imagine that the UK being outside of FoM might have changed the make up.

The problem the UK has had with asylum seekers has been that our Government has basically taken the approach of sending them to different corners of the country and then taking months and months to do anything about their asylum claim; the migrants themselves have been moved around a fair bit so I'm not sure how much of it has become a London problem but it's natural that once they get status granted some will then.

But even the Governments own stats show that a majority of those sleeping rough are people who are British.

It is very much a problem around UK state capacity- we have twice in my lifetime essentially ended rough sleeping- the New Labour Government threw loads of money at it and got the different parts of the Government to work together over a number of years, and during the first covid lockdown local councils were given funding to house people sleeping rough; it worked to the degree that the only people sleeping rough where those who did not want to engage with state support.

[CumbrianLefty]

Braverman's homeless "plan" is now apparently dropped from the King's Speech.

[JimJamUK]

Braverman's homeless "plan" is now apparently dropped from the King's Speech.

If she wanted a dividing line on homelessness, she’d have been better off going after ‘fake beggars’. Going as far as wanting to take away the tents of (overwhelmingly genuine) homeless people during a cost of living crisis just looked callous.

[CumbrianLefty]

A giveaway for many was the reference to San Francisco in her original spiel supporting this - backs up the idea this was another product of terminally online right wing think tank brain.

[Torrain]

Braverman's homeless "plan" is now apparently dropped from the King's Speech.

It seem to have struck a bit of a nerve with backbenchers. Per Politico, whips have received more complaints about that set of comments than any prior Braverman utterance.

Didn't expect to see the likes of Natalie Elphicke , and Nickie Aiken (Party Vice-Chair), criticise her pretty clearly, citing their own experience working on the issue.

Even amongst the Cabinet, Coutinho and Chalk seemed to walk as far away as they could within collective responsibility.

[Blair]

I see Sue Ellen has done a bizarre article about Islamists (a word that we never really use in mainstream politics- I wondered if it was a phrase that is used in the sub continents politics maybe?)

She’s also managed to make a weird point comparing the protests to scenes in Ulster which has errrr baffled everyone.

If Sunak had sense he would sack her.

[Хahar 🤔]

Her approach seems to be a combination of American talking points and a French attitude to the appropriate use of state power.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Got to admit that Braverman accidentally comparing pro-Palestinian demonstrators and Islamists to the Orange Order is incredibly funny.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Her approach seems to be a combination of American talking points and a French attitude to the appropriate use of state power.

Yeah, she seems to think that as Home Secretary she can just direct the police to do whatever she wants them to, and that's just not how it works here.