The British Politics Thread - The Bear and Badger

Brooks

I don't really like tankies either to be fair.

hunk

I rest my case.

Diluted Dante

monkey wrote:

A new poll has Tories back up to 46% and Labour on 34, which would give them a 100 seat majority so back to the doom-mongering I suppose.

Back to polling, whilst no one has matched that 5% YouGov poll, most have the Tory lead narrowing.

Obverver/Opinium has it down from 13 points to 10, with approval ratings for the leaders closing dramatically too, from a 56 point gap to a 22 point gap, suggesting that the Supreme Leader is not as Strong and Stable in the public's eyes as she would have us believe she is.

YouGov have the gap at 7 points, and the Sunday Telegraph/ORB have the Tory lead at just 6 points. Comres show a bigger lead, at 12 points, but this has dropped from 18 last week.

ICM for the S*n have the Tory lead back at 14 points, the only poll to show the gap not closing.

An outright Labour win remains unlikely, but the Tories losing seats, or even their majority is a distinct possibility.

monkey

Yeah there's some cause for optimism, just not much. They seem to have lost a lot of women voters, May's approval ratings have fallen, Labour have regained the lead as best party for the NHS, the overall gap has definitely narrowed and seems to be getting narrower. Old, white bastards and most over 65s haven't budged an inch though, and they're not likely to. A hung parliament or a Tory majority so slender that it amounts to the same is all that can be hoped for imo.

acemuzzy

I just got a Tory doom-mongering ad on YouTube. Insidious, particularly all being undercover and utterly unregulated.

monkey

I can't really get past the idea that Labour should be trouncing the Tories though. After the couple of years they've had, no plan for the future, Brexit etc.

acemuzzy

Strong and Stable, Monkey. That's the key.

GooberTheHat

Is one of the problems that the Conservative Party have millions to spend on campaigning versus relatively little for Labour.

If anything it's amazing how well labour are doing. And how poorly the Tories are.

GooberTheHat

I don't think I've seen one official thing from the Tories telling me why I should vote for them. Only that everyone else is really really bad.

acemuzzy

Yup it's all utterly depressing. Unlikely a Tory government will change the rules, of course. The thinnest veneer of democracy.

Diluted Dante

GooberTheHat wrote:

Is one of the problems that the Conservative Party have millions to spend on campaigning versus relatively little for Labour. If anything it's amazing how well labour are doing. And how poorly the Tories are.

Yeah, Tories are expected to spend the limit (£19 million I think), and Labour are expected to only have around £7 million to spend, after several party donors have pulled out.

I'm more than happy for them to waste money advertising to me though.

If Labour hadn't decided to engage in a civil war since the last election, perhaps they would be ahead. But you can't change what's happened, all you can do it change what's to come.

acemuzzy

If they had been more competent May wouldn't have called the GE, of course...

Yossarian

As the old saying goes: oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. Despite the fact that the cracks in the Tory project are starting to show, they've managed to avoid anything that would really put paid to them (recession, major NHS crisis) and the issues that do come up aren't severe enough for them and their media cheerleaders to be unable to deflect.

I'm not surprised that Labour aren't ahead, and I don't see that there is anything that the party could have done to have changed this fact.

monkey

It's just conjecture so I dunno. If led by someone other than Corbyn, it could be worse. May would have called an election on Brexit, if Labour had had any balls when that vote went through. How that would have gone down is anyone's guess. Tories would argue that they were frustrating the process, inciting as much public anger as possible (although they'd have still had their own MPs rebelling on the issue to deal with as well). Labour would have asked why the Tories were unwilling to prioritise jobs and single-market access (which despite how they voted, even Leavers still want the same single market access and don't want to be poorer because of Brexit). Who would have won that debate is anyone's guess.

Any of the other leadership contenders wouldn't have produced a manifesto as popular as the Labour one but then they wouldn't be an IRA sympathiser etc etc. Dan Jarvis could have produced a progressive popular manifesto, led a united party, been immune to Tory attempts to smear him as weak or soft, had a clue what to do about Brexit but then still lose the election because of a bacon sandwich.

It shouldn't be like this though. Both party leaderships completely united on an insane idea for different reasons so they barely discuss it and, when they do, it's not spoken of in anything other than the vaguest terms possible. If one party has an crackpot idea to ruin the country, the opposition shouldn't be egging them on.

monkey

Labour winning might actually end up being the worst possible thing that could happen. Brexit will be a humiliating fiasco regardless of who is running it. Having Labour in gives every Tory chancer and newspaper the chance to blame them for making a mess of the process rather than it being a rotten idea that can't possibly succeed. The economy will tank, jobs will be lost, companies will go and Labour will still be spending loads of money all over the place from a diminishing pot of tax receipts. If the Tories are in, there's nowhere to pass the buck. It could end them.

Yossarian

There's more chance of Labour either settling for a Noreweigan model or stepping back from Brexit altogether in the face of a bad deal. With the Tories in charge, there's every chance that they'll Thelma and Louise us all off the cliff edge.

monkey

Corbyn doesn't want to cancel it because Tony Benn told him once in 1982 when they were on a march how he doesn't like the EU, so now its doctrine. A Norway arrangement seems more likely but that's only limiting the damage, and then Labour will get the blame when things turn bad. "If Theresa May had been leading negotiations, this mess wouldn't have happened" and so on.

You don't want to be anywhere near that garbage fire when the fingers of blame start getting pointed.

acemuzzy

Even with a Tory majority they'll blame Labour for holding them back or some bollocks

monkey

They will but that won't wash, and it'll be seen as excuse-making.

Diluted Dante

Like calling this election was?

monkey

If May gets a majority, and goes through with Brexit, there is nowhere they can convincingly point the finger. A Tory idea, implemented by a Tory government that is only in place because it called an election specifically on the issue of how competent it was, and then fucked up by a Tory negotiating team has no one else to blame. The tabloids might be able to convince people that dusk is dawn, but they can't tell people night is day. There are limits.

monkey

The EU will get a press and Tory savaging of course. This might lead people to, despite everything, believe we're better off out of it rather than being in an organisation of 'bullies' or whatever. That defence has got some pretty big holes in it. But they'd be in no position to blame an opposition that has already voted itself out of the negotiating process.

Diluted Dante

I'm not so sure on that. I mean we're still in the position of it being a generally held belief that Labour were the cause of a worldwide recession, because an MP left a vaguely amusing post it note for his successor.

n0face

Brexit is going to go on for so long everybody will get a chance to take a share of the blame.

monkey

Diluted Dante wrote:

I'm not so sure on that. I mean we're still in the position of it being a generally held belief that Labour were the cause of a worldwide recession, because an MP left a vaguely amusing post it note for his successor.

Labour were in power. Labour overspend. Labour left a note saying all the monies have gone. These are simple things that all feed into each other and Labour didn't bother defending themselves against it properly. It would take a far more convoluted and implausible chain of reasoning to place the blame for Brexit at Labour's door.

monkey

n0face wrote:

Brexit is going to go on for so long everybody will get a chance to take a share of the blame.

Yeah it's not like one day things will be fine and then suddenly Brexit happens and the country collapses. But the Tories won't be coming back for another election for 5 years. They will oversee the whole thing.

acemuzzy

Or maybe it'll be a roaring success and we'll all be very grateful towards our Tory overlords

monkey

acemuzzy

Has Cameron just spanked his load?

Diluted Dante

monkey wrote:

Diluted Dante wrote:

I'm not so sure on that. I mean we're still in the position of it being a generally held belief that Labour were the cause of a worldwide recession, because an MP left a vaguely amusing post it note for his successor.

Labour were in power. Labour overspend. Labour left a note saying all the monies have gone. These are simple things that all feed into each other and Labour didn't bother defending themselves against it properly. It would take a far more convoluted and implausible chain of reasoning to place the blame for Brexit at Labour's door.

Except that they didn't, the Tories and the papers just said they did.

I'm not saying that it's as simple as that, but I don't see it as a dead cert that this would all be placed squarely at the Tories door. Especially if May can't deliver the mandate she said she needs.

Howdy, Stranger!

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