UK General Discussion: Rishecession

[JimJamUK]

The key difference, unfortunately, is that unlike his version of Labour they can still count on sizeable totally uncritical support from client media - and the rest may still be too timid in challenging them.

I was watching the Sky News coverage earlier. It was pretty unrelentingly negative, to the point where the ‘Labour will respond” segment was no less negative or different in substance. The client media may lap it up, but the non-partisan bits don’t seem to be.

[JimJamUK]

What would worry me if I was a Tory is that they have no one good on the airwaves to promote this?

They’re trying to reform the British state with a bunch of D list cabinet ministers and G list junior ministers.

Case in point, the government minister on Question Time last night said he was neutral on fracking, not exactly the response you need when everyone else is slagging off the governments policies.

[JimJamUK]

The Telegraph is such a frustrating paper - competent at investigative journalism, and basically c**p at most other stuff.

It's a shame: it used to be a paper with a firm and very right-wing editorial line but with high quality journalism across the board (including very good sports coverage) so perfectly readable even if you strongly disagreed with its politics, but, well, long ago and far away now. It's an extreme example, but the general pattern holds across our newspapers.

The Mail is genuinely mad these days (was it ever not?), see todays front page on the government induced sterling crisis:

https://twitter.com/bbcnews/status/1574517854560362496?s=21&t=btG9hchqAlFpHj...

[JimJamUK]

Errr…

https://twitter.com/edconwaysky/status/1575128310740389889?s=21&t=7-GH7t0gSX...

[JimJamUK]

Recent local and by-elections have indicated that anti-Tory tactical voting has increased hugely since 2019, so I certainly think things could start to spiral out of control pretty quickly for the Tories. In particular, I’m not sure I buy the Lib Dem vote being as low as it is in current polls, and I definitely don’t buy the Green vote being so high. Especially if there’s as much chaos with mortgages as seems very possible as a result of the current mess, I think the affluent Southeast could look a lot more orange…

The Lib Dem vote is low since Labour are on the up (leading to them gaining 25-30% of 2019 Lib Dem voters) while the ‘liberal’ Conservative vote was already an endangered species in 2019 so there isn’t much left to jump ship (and the sort of socially liberal people who voted Conservative in 2019 tend to be very economically right wing/middle class, so Trussonomics isn’t necessarily that alienating). The traditional ‘pissed off Conservative’ vote that has in the past gone their way is more likely to go Labour’s or don’t knows way these days (partisanship has broken down, the Lib Dem profiled themselves in a bad way in 2019 and have been invisible since etc).

[JimJamUK]

Truss's cabinet is full of the overambitious grifter clowns too, so they'd probably begin to jump ship at some point within the next few weeks if this continues.

Many of these people wouldn’t get in another leader’s cabinet so not much point jumping ship (though that was said about Boris’ cabinet as well…).

[JimJamUK]

Clarke represents a notoriously volatile constituency on Teesside.

Which he won off Labor in 2017. Now that's less dangerous than a Corbyn 17/Johnson 19 seat, but clearly he'd be in deep sh**t if an election was held today and would be very vulnerable barring a miracle turnaround for the Tories.

The majority is 24%, which given the disproportionate swing amongst Leave voters/people who’ve voted Labour previously, would mean it would likely fall to Labour in the event of a Labour majority (which is a little short of a 10% lead).

[JimJamUK]

Opinium have 23% of 2019 Conservative voters switching to Labour! (which under their de facto projection methodology is only a 19% Labour lead)

[JimJamUK]

For our Labour people, was Lee Anderson always this right wing when in Labour or has he got the zeal of a convert?

www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/tory-mp-says-economy-only-28136853

[JimJamUK]

Curious- why do people think that the poll collapse has been so large?

The single defining advantage of the Conservatives over Labour post-2008 has been the economy. Labour’s advantage disappeared under Brown, collapsed further under Miliband, and didn’t recover under Corbyn. Whatever else the median voter thinks about the Conservatives, they have up til now thought that they were more competent on the economy than Labour and it’s very hard to vote for a party you think will do worse on the economy. The budget has destroyed that hard earned reputation. The mini meltdown in the financial markets was obviously the biggest factor, but the idea that the government is going to take a big risk borrowing shed loads of money to cut taxes for high earners while ordinary people worry about their bills was just awful optics. Many people accepted, if not outright supported, an austere approach to government finances that was presented as necessary for economic stability, but the Truss budget was neither and instead just pure electoral poison.

[JimJamUK]

We might even see another Christian Wakeford at this rate.

The unprecedented number of Conservative MPs attacking the budget does raise the prospect of this happening (the UK has one of the strongest party whips in a Western democracy, you don’t publicly state you might vote against your own budget without very serious misgivings).   

[JimJamUK]

As an aside, I don't think there's ever been a Conference of a major British political party quite like this. Even the really bad Labour Conferences - even 2019, even more in the 1970s and 80s than I'd care to mention; yes, even the one where Trade Union General Secretaries accused each other of being JACKELS from the podium, live on on national television - were not this bad. This is a shitshow for All Time.

Suella Braverman is like if one of the Labour activists currently relegated to The World Transformed somehow made their way on to the main conference stage.

One of the main points of a conference is to showcase your party, do the Tories really think that any of their current behaviour is making people want to vote for them?

[JimJamUK]

Even people who backed Truss are starting to publicly slag her off (of course caveated by the fact Nadine Dorries is a loose cannon and attacked Cameron/Osborne from the left as well).

https://twitter.com/danbloom1/status/1577786846553276416?s=61&t=dvF_43oSqV_r...

[JimJamUK]

Did not expect to end up discussing anime and giving manga recs when I started campaigning for Labour.

Pokémon or I’m sticking you on ignore.

[JimJamUK]

Isn't it strange that the swing away from the Tories is 100% to Labour? You'd think there'd be some significant share of disaffected Tories choosing Lib Dem or Reform first, but they're totally flat.

It would be consistent with people wanting the government out and everything else being secondary to that. In practice behaviour in individual constituencies would probably differ, but in most of the country if your priority is not having a Tory MP, voting Labour is the best way to do something about that.

And always worth remembering that many people don’t understand the intricacies of their own constituency so automatically default to Labour when wanting the Conservatives out, and even people who do (and will) know better don’t think about LD tactical voting right now when answering a poll.

[JimJamUK]

Charles III coronation is schedule for the 6th May 2023 on Westminster Abbey.

Will Liz Truss still be PM by then?

The local elections are 2 days earlier so the coronation may soften the blow (both distracting people beforehand and forcing people to move on quickly in the aftermath).

[JimJamUK]

Genuinely shocked it wasn’t the C-word given previous ‘accidental’ utterances.

https://twitter.com/jimwaterson/status/1581187861776257024?s=61&t=IP5Jovym4m...

[JimJamUK]

Anyone have an update on the Truss vs Lettuce?

It’s starting to age, but it’s been given some Lucozade which should give it a new boost of energy.

[JimJamUK]

6% of the public approve of the governments handing of the economy. Interestingly, we still haven’t reached American style ‘this person is absolutely rubbish, therefore I say they’re rubbish on everything without thinking’, with defence and terrorism still in positive territory and even unemployment isn’t too bad despite being an economic question.

https://twitter.com/yougov/status/1582372958130958336?s=61&t=FDFZ9kQXVSulR61...

[JimJamUK]

There's been an incident at a migrant site in Dover:
https://twitter.com/BBCBreaking/status/1586714002360598530

I don’t mean to sound pedantic, but the site is not in Dover, it’s 20 miles away in Thanet (not that you can expect news organisations to get details like this correct).

[JimJamUK]

There's been an incident at a migrant site in Dover:
https://twitter.com/BBCBreaking/status/1586714002360598530

I don’t mean to sound pedantic, but the site is not in Dover, it’s 20 miles away in Thanet (not that you can expect news organisations to get details like this correct).

Apologies - the event was originally reported as happening in Manston, then edited to read Dover, so that’s the change I made to the original post. From what I can see, it happened close to The Viaduct - which I thought was in the port of Dover?

It’s manifestly not my corner of the country, so happy to defer on that though…

I was attacking the BBC not you, and actually it seems you’re right anyways (the articles mentions he was angry about Manston migrant centre but the attack was in Dover itself) 😅

[JimJamUK]

It does seem a bit random that they’ve suddenly surged. Yes, Sunak polls quite poorly with a lot of more cultural conservative voters, but Truss was just hideously unpopular with everyone and it didn’t result in Reform closing in on double digits in any polls. And it’s not like Reform have suddenly gotten loads of media that led to a polling bounce. My best guess is that they’ve benefitted to some extent from the increasing focus on immigration, which like 2010-2016 sees the Conservatives bang on about it but not actually do much to solve the problems.

[JimJamUK]

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.

There does seem to be some people on the right who don’t realise why coal mining was popular in coal mining communities in the first place. It was popular because it employed a large share of the community and provided an economic basis for its existence. Open cast coal mining employs a dozen commuters from Newcastle while visibly destroying the local environment. Why would there be enthusiastic support for that?

[JimJamUK]

Today’s papers seem to be broadly in consensus about the Hunt budget:

As often happens, the immediate reaction wasn’t that bad, but the later reaction may well sink the budget and cause further harm to the Tories in the process.

[JimJamUK]

We will wait and see from other pollsters, but worth noting it was Osmosis who had the ‘shock’ 9% for Reform so immediately falling back down to 5% suggests a one off dodgy sample (the other pollster was PeoplePolling whose results I don’t trust are entirely agenda free).