For those with slightly better things to do with their life than follow it, she had mysterious 'abdominal surgery' and hasn't really been seen since, apart from one pic of her looking rough in a car. Cue wild conspiracies that she's dead or left William because he loves it up the bum.

To silence the gossip of the proles, the Palace released a mother's day photo of her and her little brats. Supposedly taken by William. Conspiracist meltdown as the image is examined in microscopic detail and finds all sorts of Photoshop errors and possible AI weirdness. Now Reuters and the Associated Press have stopped distributing the image due to 'manipulation'.

https://twitter.com/chrisshipitv/status/1766944328847364201

monkey wrote:

The Tories on 18% is the lowest poll I've seen and it probably won't happen. But a result in that ballpark is grounds for some very mild optimism. The Tories would get 50 seats maybe. Reform probably none, or a handful at best. Labour up in the 400s. The only opposition that matters at that point is the left wing of Labour. They won't have much power mind. Probably as much any other opposition.  More importantly that result would be the obliteration of Toryism. They'll be fighting against Reform. Get a trans-obsessed racist twat for a leader. More of their voters will die off. They'll still have to say how great Brexit has been. Younger voters won't forgive them in 5 years. It's going to be a proper toxic brand. Maybe a lost cause. At which point, a new moderate right-wing party (or the Lib Dems) might try and steal in, rather than leave the space open to Farage.  So, at that point, Labour can do what they want. Give it a year or two and they can spend what they need. Cook the books however they want. Unfortunately what they want seems not very good (they'll sell off bits of the NHS early doors to get some money in). But it's not going to do them any good electorally to stick to the fiction of austerity. And they won't have to. They'll be the Government and have the power to change people's minds about it. After 5 years in power, voters won't be judging Labour on how closely they stuck to Jeremy Hunt's 2024 budget.  I'm not sure I've completely convinced myself with all of that. But anything like that election result is a big win for erm something.

More likely scenario, based on what's actually going on in the world: Labour spend 10 years doing next to fuck all to improve most people's lives (and the bigger their majority, the less they try). Far-right narratives gain more traction. The Tories move further to the right and get voted back in once they find a competent leader.

The idea that one might celebrate a rise in the fascist vote is baffling to me. The higher that percentage goes, the more credibility a party like Reform gathers.

The notion that Toryism the set of policy behaviours will perish under this Labour era seems unserious.
Do I want my spiteful mismanagement hot or lukewarm, who can say.

Brooks wrote:

The notion that Toryism the set of policy behaviours will perish under this Labour era seems unserious.
Do I want my spiteful mismanagement hot or lukewarm, who can say.

Change won't come from Labour. The electorate creates the pressure to change, and with the Tories gone / divided, there's less weight pulling the other way. They go where they think the votes are.

Poll after poll tells Labour things like increased investment and nationalisation are popular. And they don’t offer them. Resolutely refusing to turn even a millimetre leftwards whilst decrying those who insist they should is their entire deal.

Reeves, Starmer, Streeting, McFadden, the rotting corpse of Blair lurking in the background … nothing good is coming from these horrible people.

Nah. The money's there if they want it.
https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2024/02/detoxifying-government-debt-part-3.html

It's not cheap mind. But it's not impossibly expensive. Dirt cheap debt was available in the early 2010s. It was almost free at one point. That's a historic missed opportunity. The Tories wouldn't be looking at polls that show them on 18% now if they'd spent some money on green industrial development then. And we wouldn't have spent the last 14 years with flatline growth.

If only Gordon Brown hadn't caused a global financial crisis.

davyK wrote:

Don't think anyone doubts the cost.  The information war needs to be won if anything close to what's needed to get services back on track is to be done; let alone considering renationalisation of anything.

They don’t even want to take part in the war (Labour I mean). They want to default into office via conforming to every rightwing media expectation and supplicating to every business and establishment demand.

These people won’t fight for you, me or anything. They’re in it for themselves.

They’re scum, just of a different variety to the Conservatives. IMO, etc.

Going to have one more stab at this thing about that poll because the replies seem to be missing the point of what I’m trying to say.

Until the rich get taxed, nothing gets fixed. Current Labour aren't doing that. Current Labour will replace the Chancellor from being a man who studied PPE at Oxford to a woman who studied PPE at Oxford and hail it as a groundbreaking triumph for equality. They’re shameless, vote-chasing, lying shits. 

They’re matching the Tories. That’s their game. The less distance between them, the less they can be attacked. What do they do when the Tories are gone? What’s the next grift? In a country that’s fucked from four and a half decades of neoliberalism. Pretend fixes don’t cut it anymore. There aren’t any right-wing economic solutions left. It’s all progressive now. The economy needs rebalancing. Do they try and fix some of the problems? Or do they still carry on copying the party that’s suffered a historic defeat, are a million miles from power, and probably locked in a racist death spiral with Farage, or even led by the cunt. Is that where the votes are?

So it’s not about Labour. It’s about the political environment any government finds itself in after a result like that. I take Jon’s point though that a big majority could well be a safety net for them and they end up doing jack. The Tories not being a threat for ten years could well increase that likelihood. It’s at least as likely as my more optimistic scenario.    

It’s not lost on me that the ‘Labour will swing left in office’ chat is dead now. I think people have seen enough of them and are like ‘nah they’re just shit aren’t they’.

And finally, after a decade and a half of those ubercunts, I want to see them suffer and will very much enjoy it.

It's probably theoretical anyway. Can't see the Tories ending up lower than the mid 20s once the tabloid scares and the usual stuff properly cranks up. A lot of the straying Tory voters will return, knowing they'll lose but want them to be an opposition to Starmer, with a 'better' leader than Sunak.

If any of us said that (not saying we actually would), we would be immediately fired and likely face prosecution for hate crimes