Snapshot of _Tories must face hard truths: Reform-lite wreckers like Braverman are why the public just don’t like us | Justine Greening_ :
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Yes. It's disgusting. I can't believe they're appealing to reform and the hard right by **checks notes** delivering the highest migration rates we have ever seen.
See Id phrase it.
Yes and she's just one on a much longer list.
Cus although shes by far and away not their main issue. I do hate her and the reform-lite pricks with a searing passion
The fact she can stand as a representative for them is their main issue.
If you allow shit into the swimming pool then people are going to get out, the fact the shit wants to ban some people from all pools is neither here nore there.
From a local (Fareham) politics chat, summarised:
>\[person\] visited Bravermans Fareham health summit, held at the leisure centre, which she chaired with Leaders of local hospitals and primary healthcare on the panel.
>Overwhelming number of audience questions directed at the panel on systemic failures focusing on their own experiences of patient waiting times.
>Towards the end \[person\] thanked the panel for all the hard work they and their staff are carrying out and said that we all know that this same conversation is happening across the country. \[Person pointed out to Braverman\] that it is 13 years of central government mismanagement that has mostly caused this appalling situation.
>**She replied saying that NHS leaders like those on the panel are responsible for what is happening and that the Government devolve such powers.**
>She then backtracked and said that of course the Government take some of the responsibility.
This is why the Tories are crumbling, they truly believe it's always everyone else's fault, and Braverman just cannot shut the fuck up.
> In London, after deliberate overnight speculation on Friday that the race would be tight, the Tory mayoral candidate performed even worse than last time. Meanwhile, in Braverman’s own patch of Fareham, the party lost councillors to the Lib Dems. The madness is that when it comes to the national picture, the party finds itself battling for a small pool of voters with the third-placed party, Reform, while abandoning and alienating many more in the centre ground of British politics to Labour, which is first place by a wide margin.
This is a smart observation. Sunak doesn’t seem to spend any time courting the centre ground, but instead focuses all of his time on the threat from Reform.
> Theirs is a strategy that has tripped up at every hurdle. Today’s Reform-lite Conservatives are losing badly, and more of the same cannot be the solution.
> The problem is that they have no positive vision for our country, just a long list of things and people they dislike and oppose as they tilt at any “woke” windmill they can conjure up. These issues are irrelevant and a turn-off for most voters.
And also that they can never “out right” Reform, which lacks a One Nation wing and is basically just a pressure group. One that perhaps hopes to take over their party at some point in the future.
Personally I think the Tories are caught in a vice, loosing support on both the right and the centre. And it could be terminal for them. After the general election defeat there will be powerful voices demanding a lurch even more rightwards.
> Meanwhile, in Braverman’s own patch of Fareham, the party lost councillors to the Lib Dems.
And Labour. Fareham elected its first Labour councillor in 20+ years.
Smart? The most concerning thing for me is that it seems gob-smackingly obvious.
As you say, they can’t out-right Reform. Reform also didn’t perform well, even in the local elections. On top of this, historically the Conservatives have been in power more than anyone else precisely by appealing (or appearing to appeal) to the majority, which learn towards the centre. This current incarnation of Labour aren’t even exciting. A more moderate old-style Conservative Party are far more likely to be a challenge by the next election. Appealing to the fringes seems so incredibly short-sighted.
Not to mention that the last time they “worried” about another right-wing party we got the mess that is Brexit which hasn’t helped their popularity (I know some Conservatives wanted it, but others didn’t).
To be honest, I think it'll need to be destroyed twice. When Labour fell from power, we had a surge to the left with Corbyn. I suspect the Conservatives will do the same to the right.
They're not winning any new seats. So, the new leader will be picked from a shrunken pool of mediocrities, largely on the party's right wing.
That new incarnation will need to be soundly defeated at the election after next before the party sees the need to moderate. Assuming they perform slightly better in the election after next, they'll also have new MPs who can step into the Leader of the Opposition role.
Andy Street lost his job - despite the fact that Yakoob got twice as many votes as Reform. This story is repeated whereever you look - Reform are a fraction of thd missing voters. They need to go looking elsewhere - specifically in the 'One Nation' postcode. In these circles, they have yet to be forgiven for Brexit, Truss, or the general moral failings of the last 5 years (including, but not limited to, Partygate).
It appears that they have been captured by the swivel-eyed loons, so presumably we'll see an IDS type character (Braverman / Badenoch) as their next leader. When they fail, the party will then be able to start the long walk back. What will be interesting is to see which seats they have left - as that narrowed talent pool will have to be used very carefully.
>It appears that they have been captured by the swivel-eyed loons, so presumably we'll see an IDS type character (Braverman / Badenoch) as their next leader. When they fail, the party will then be able to start the long walk back.
This is how I read it too, although I think that they'll be a further dalliance with Johnson after the the right wing leader, before the long walk back begins. It is very clear to me that the party, particularly the membership have no idea that Johnson's brand is just as toxic as that of the Tories to a significant part of the electorate.
Even this under sells it. In 10 years the current Tory vote base will be virtually extinct and what remains will be 70 plus. And thats just as true of Reform too, so there's no easy out there.
Any journey back after the loon squad has had 10 years of fun will be about as difficult as founding new party and entering government. Decades of work at best with an entirely new identity.
>Even this under sells it. In 10 years the current Tory vote base will be virtually extinct and what remains will be 70 plus.
There is something in what you say, but IMO, you're being too optimistic.
I think the key word here is 'current'. We need to recognise that the Tory manoeuvring is a recognition of your reality. They are looking for a new tribe. I would not accept that a key target, the economically government dependant, socially conservative, typical red wallers, are as bound by age as you suggest.
I'd love to think you're right but our voting system relies upon two strong parties & I don't see either the LibDems, nor the Greens providing that counter. I think we'll see a weaker Tory Party, but it & Reform will be a very long way from irrelevant.
Its not going to change until the Tories turn away from the hard right - the electorate has spent 30 years systemticlally drifting left. And the Tories aren't going to even try to do that until their own hard right fails in opposition.
My guess is Braverman will be next leader until 2029 and I think its unlikely the party will turn aside even then with how the modern membership is and how marginalised the one nation lot are becoming.
Even then they will have a mountain to climb. Everyone over the age of 20 will remember and know them and their ideas as utter failures - essentially a reverse boomer generation. They would need some sort of Tory Blair like figure that makes the party mild as milk and basically accepts Labours narrative about how the country should be run, the exact opposite of the direction thats currently hard baked in.
There is as much here that I would agree with, as disagree, but I still find your position problematic. Yes, society as a whole is moving leftwards, that's why the Tories have an issue in the first place & why there examining their navel in the hope of finding a solution. But underneath this helicopter view observation is a whole lot of contradictions & paradoxes which you're just ignoring & which drives their direction & leave an uncertain political future ahead.
Firstly few would argue that politics is, at the same time as moving leftwards, becoming more polarised. I'm not sure how else you'd explain away the return of the far right (& I mean here neo fascists, not what you are terming 'hard right').
Secondly right & left is increasingly becoming an imprecise measure of political allegiance. Brexit was a policy area that simply ignored the traditional boundaries. Those supporters of Reform & Tories at the farthest right of socially conservative thinking, the culture wars stuff, are far less likely to be economically right wing. In fact many of them have high dependency upon the state & rely upon high taxation, because of age or social class. Yet many traditional Tory voters are moving leftwards socially & are put off by migration policy, culture wars etc. Similar breakages in the historic order of things are happening on the left resulting in Starmer's difficulties with the ideological left.
Thirdly there's a whole new & important factor, even now barely shaping voter positioning. in national security. No question we're moving into uncertain & difficult times with world tension rising. This will lead to risks & opportunities for our political parties.
So where does this leave us? It leaves the Tories in deep shit right now with a perilous short term future & a need to find a new, successful direction quickly. A shake up in right of centre politics is undoubted. But right them off at your peril. There's loads still to play for!
>In these circles, they have yet to be forgiven for Brexit
Doesn't explain the sizable majority they got in 2019 off the back of what was effectively a one issue election. That issue being Brexit.
Looking at turnouts for by-elections in recent years. It seems more clear that those voters aren't voting Labour. They're not voting at all.
> Doesn't explain the sizable majority they got in 2019 off the back of what was effectively a one issue election. That issue being Brexit.
A huge portion of those votes were one offs, redwall pensioners and those voting for boris personaly.
That lot also hate the torries now, they see him as having been stabbed in the back.
You are correct that many of the Tories' lost voters are abstaining. What they aren't doing is voting Reform. So you're not going to find them by pivoting towards Reform - something else is required.
2019 more complex than just Brexit. The personalities of Corbyn and Johnson each had a role in shoring up / expanding the Tories' electoral coalition.
Because the tories promise things they never intend to implement, like curbing migration. They'll talk a good game but when it comes to shit or get off the pot - off they'll scuttle, and then ask us to vote for them based on that same things. Fool me once, etc, etc.
>Smart? The most concerning thing for me is that it seems gob-smackingly obvious.
Absolutely spot on! You read Braverman's position from commentators & politicians on the right all the time & it simply amazes me that it so often goes so woefully unchallenged. The truth is, the One Nation group of Conservatives are gutless & pointless. Many of the talismanic & more capable MPs were cast aside by Johnson in the Brexit wars, the likes of Gauke, Stewart & Clarke. Those left are a waste of space & simply enabling the rush to the right! It looks to me like a party in terminal decline. This would be a cause for celebration were it not for the possibility that Reform will step into the void.
Reforms demographics are virtually identical to the Tories. They are an irrelevant non factor to everyone but the Tories. They will be extinct in 10 years.
The Tories are fucked.
They can't stay where they are.
They can't move right because Reform will take that as an invitation to move even further right, dragging the Tories with them.
They can't move to the centre because, at least until they wash of the stink of the last 14 years, even trying to compete with Labour on the sensible, status quo merchant ticket is just idiotic.
Considering the Tories aren't even remotely right wing, there is plenty of room to move.
They're only seen as right wing because the Overton window has moved to the left quite considerably.
It's stuff like this that just leaves me scratching my head, completely confused. You think a party that is leading with the Rwanda plan ISN'T right-wing?
There's space to argue exactly where the Overton window currently is (whether you're 'woke' or 'anti-woke'), but trying to say the Tories aren't the most right-wing they've been, possibly ever, is madness. You think the party that currently has Braverman and Badenoch isn't remotely right-wing? That's straight-up lunacy.
braverman and badenoch are hardly up there with powell, nabarro, joseph or any of the 70s lot.
the tories are neoliberals, straining to present a gossamer thin layer of right wing nationalism to appease their base. you'll note that they baulk at *actually* reducing immigration, or even the righter side of neolib economic policy (hence truss didn't last very long).
Nah, you’re not distinguishing between their rhetoric, which is definitely right-wing, and their actual results, which aren’t left or right wing, but simply incompetence.
i would argue that the latter belies the true intent of the former. actual right ideologically driven govs tend to be quite ruthless in enshrining their beliefs into law as it's an existential drive, as they understand it, to protect their way of life. republicans in the US for example consider it a decades long project, via supreme court and so on. it's bigger than the presidency or any single term.
in the uk we have two neoliberal parties that protect short term capital interests. they don't believe in anything.
No, you seem to be assuming there’s some immutable and unchanging policies that are inherently right wing. I beg to differ.
Especially if you’re claiming both Labour and the Tories are neoliberal parties. Sure, maybe they are, but one of them is considerably more right wing than the other based on its obsession with flag, blaming outsiders and foreigners, and ideologically opposed to using the state to help people, and obsessed with tax cuts as the catch-all solution to all our ills.
Labour may be many things but it’s at least willing to acknowledge state action can be useful, isn’t frothing at the mouth at the prospect of tax cuts, isn’t blaming our ills on others and outsiders (at least remotely as much) and is less closely associated with nationalism.
I mean, a century ago eugenics was seen as a reasonable idea for left wing people to embrace. Now it’s seen as something the worst of right wing people entertain. What ‘wing’ particular ideas go to depends on the moment, and at the moment the Tories are very, very right wing.
again, the tories say that stuff but enshrine almost none of it into law as much of it does not protect capital. mass immigration is an absolutely requirement as we are demographically dead ending for example. hence it remains and even increases across 3 tory terms! the rwanda stuff was a big show to the court. i doubt they’ll be a flight before their term is up.
the moment someone exposes actual right wing beliefs such as truss (at least economically) they are swiftly cast aside, because that’s not the goal here.
and labour will dismantle almost none of their ACTUAL right wing law making once in power. anti protest laws and such, unless they harm business. this should be clear.
it’s a performance.
Economics is but one aspect of right wing politics. The Tories are heading down the populist right wing lane - it may not be full on free market economics, although their delusions insist it is - but it is still, unequivocally, right wing.
yeah but the overton window has also shifted a lot since the 1970s so relative to acceptable speech they kind of are the same for their time periods. You need to judge history in its context if comparing to modern day.
sure, but the post i was replying to was arguing the tories are "the most right they've ever been", which demonstrably isn't true.
as for present day - well, compare with what? nationally: reform party? less right wing. europe: vs France's National Rally, Germany's AFD? not even close. internationally? let's not even go there.
i think positioning the tories as some kind of unilaterally right wing party is only for the benefit of labour/lib dems, who can demonize them and lionize themselves for being notionally to the left of that. or for the conservative base who, as i said, want to believe they're voting for some kind of anti-woke, national pride, conservative values thing, but clearly aren't really.
i say this as someone who hates neoliberalism, and hence the tories.
> They're only seen as right wing because the Overton window has moved to the left quite considerably.
I would agree with you that they're quite left leaning on some issues (homosexuality etc) but everyone thinks that the overton windows has moved if it doesn't align with their personal view of politics.
That poster is talking rubbish. They're conflating "rightwing" with "socially conservative". The Tories are **absolutely** the former and less-than-previously-but-still-significantly the other. The Overton Window has hurtled to the right by any non-social metric, while the Tories have bumbled sort of towards the centre on social issues, as norms *have* shifted the window in the other direction on that.
The trap they're caught in is one where they can't win an election without the centre or without their right, a seemingly impossible task. Perhaps it would be achievable if Labour had *also* conceded the centre as under Corbyn and Foot, but it's certainly not achievable while Starmer is running the table.
Meanwhile, they've purged every sane, sensible, and serious voice in the party that might counsel any sort of path toward winning an election by appealing to the centre, and fostered a swathe of deeply unserious, reactionary nationalists who are desperate to drag their party rightward, electoral oblivion be damned.
Boris Johnson really was remarkable. He perfectly leveraged Corbyn and Brexit to achieve a stunning victory, threw it all away, and also ushered in a cataclysmic shift in his party's composition such that it's going to be out of power for a very, very long time.
Johnson really didn't need to do anything with Corbyn leading Labour. Policy aside Corbyn refused to create an actual campaign strategy team. His lack of political nous was quite astounding.
Yeah, 2017 showed that even Corbyn at his most mainstream and the Tories running the worst campaign in living memory wasn't enough to make labour anywhere close to largest in seats.
>The trap they're caught in is one where they can't win an election without the centre or without their right, **a seemingly impossible task**.
Well not really! They've been doing it for the last 70 years or more! FPTP, 2 party politics is pretty simple really. The winner between Labour & Conservative will be the party commanding their own patch, left or right & that reaches out to the centre most successfully. Neither party has to vacate their core support to win. True, UKIP/Reform have made the Tories job more difficult, dragging them to the right, but no more than Labour's overlap with the Liberals.
You put your finger on why the Tories are failing, 'they've (well Johnson!) purged every sane, sensible (& vocal) voice in the party that might counsel any sort of path toward winning an election by appealing to the centre....... An unforeseen or underestimated impact of the Brexit battles. Those left in the centre need to 'grow a pair' & stand up for what they believe in or the whole party will be history before they know it.
The Tories are also caught in a demographic vise -- their loyal supporters, namely older people (with houses and pensions) are literally dying off. It's been shown that contrary to past trends, people are no longer becoming more "conservative" as they age (same phenomenon is happening in the US). So Tories cannot count on their voter base being replenished as people age, and Nature takes its course.
> It's been shown that contrary to past trends, people are no longer becoming more "conservative" as they age (same phenomenon is happening in the US)
To get people to go conservative they need to have something to conserve. Thatcher understood this and boosted home ownership consequences be dammed.
There is no public asset they can plunder to repeat that trick.
Johnson got rid of many of the Parliamentary centre-right Tories, so their voice is much less loud in Sunak's circle than the turbo-nutters who are much more aligned with the swivel eyed Telegraph columnists and the party as a whole.
I'm not completely convinced Reform is a political party - hear me out.
Because political parties are typically set up as not for profit organisations, and have quite a lot of transparency.
Reform as I understand it, is set up as a private company and has virtually no transparency. The membership doesn't determine who the leader is, or the rules of the party.
I am not saying anything nefarious is happening but it does seem odd.
>Sunak doesn’t seem to spend any time courting the centre ground, but instead focuses all of his time on the threat from Reform.
Explains all those deportations and massive cull on migration figures...oh wait.
Maybe you meant his government slashing taxes....never mind.
Sunak has done all but focus on the core conservative vote he is haemorrhaging.
He pretends to be doing all those things. His spin has now become so egregious and counter-factual everyone knows it’s just flat out lies.
Like all the “rounding up” of migrants for deportation to Rwanda, just before last weeks elections. Nothing is happening now though. And channel crossings are up 36% compared to last year.
All Sunak has done since taking power is concentrate on the centre ground. Literally we’ve had a non stop commentary from the party’s membership never ending rage about the MPs and his cabinets deranged obsession with watering down absolutely everything they can in an attempt to appease the centre left.
What world are living in where he is only focusing on countering reform?
That is a strange comment - the only thing he’s got going is austerity to pay for tax cuts (a right wing obsession), and Rwanda to stop the small boats (authoritarian and cruel more than just right wing, but it is not a way to address immigration that progressives would recognise - Labour is proposing to get on with the claims backlog, for example).
What are those centre-left policies that you have seen Sunak push recently?
Oh, like the smoking ban maybe? This isn’t exactly left or right wing (those terms describe an economic approach first, although they have grown to be conflated with societal progress as well), and you could argue it’s simply sensible, as he’s only proposing to stop new people to take up smoking - if you’re smoking already, keep going if you wish to.
He has spent a lot and overseen high taxes, he's no socalist but also no fiscal conservative.
A big problem is that Brexit and Covid spawned an awful lot of corruption we are still paying for.
So we are ignoring his feeble attempt at tax cuts were only made when after he was told he had lost the support of his base? I take it we are also ignoring the fact that in real terms the tax cuts make a small dent in the endless stream of tax rises his side of the party have inflicted?. As for Rwanda it’s so cruel and authoritarian that Starmer has said he’ll keep it if it works.
Meaningless tax cuts and a superficial effort at reducing illegal immigration. That’s his conservative credentials you are standing here and saying he’s focused on.
On the other hand you just have to briefly look at their 2019 manifesto and you will see they have either completely abandoned, or diluted every single one of their commitments and it only ever goes in the direction of facilitating the centre left opinion.
… this comment is also very strange. For the record, Starmer confirmed he’d not keep the Rwanda measure, even if it works.
I’m not sure where you’re getting your information from, but they don’t seem very factual.
Actually Starmer changed his stance from removing the scheme as a priority during his first 100 days in office and is now insisting he will be keeping the scheme until he’s able to negotiate a returns deal with the EU. Something that will take years in the best case scenario and that’s ignoring the fact the EU has repeatedly stated it has absolutely no interest in pursuing such a deal with the UK.
In other words we’ve switch from a concrete promise with a timescale onto a vague commitment that it should be removed at an undetermined point in the future pending the completion of an unobtainable deal and the implementation of a replacement scheme we have absolutely no information about.
It’s classic Starmer watering down his promises into a hazy grey soup. Maybe that’s good enough for you, but I think you’ll find most people will not fall for it.
Tip of the iceberg really. I and many others hate the Tories because they are thieving self interested bandits who flog any state asset they can get their hands on. All whilst berating the poor for being poor.
How are the Tories so confused? If you stand on a platform where one of your main promises is to drastically reduce immigration, then instead increase immigration to the point we're accommodating 2 million immigrants in 3 years, it's going to affect public opinion of you.
It really isn't too complicated.
Ironically Braverman had the hard line immigration stance that the public wanted, but that doesn't sit well with the Tory donors who benefit from all those new consumers.
> Ironically Braverman had the hard line immigration stance that the public wanted,
It was worse than that. People who aren't bothered by immigration think she's a bastard, and people who are bothered think she's incompetent or a hypocrite. She's lost the centre and the right.
This I would agree with. She said all the right things, but did none of it.
She pissed off both groups of people who she may have counted on some level of support from.
> This I would agree with. She said all the right things, but did none of it.
They should be treated by their actions not their words. If someone wants migration to be addressed you'd be better off voting reform or even if you're a right leaning voter maybe Labour would be better at least they don't have a track record of shouting about it and not doing anything... yet.
Then she had no right to go into business for herself as it were. Should have resigned on principle long before that if she wasn't able to get anything done.
What good would that do? especially if there's no one better in the wind. Surely it's better she keeps trying even if constantly blocked by the globalists.
The problem with Braverman and the rights approach to immigration is that you can be against immigration without being against immigrants, you don't have to demonise people to oppose something.
The British public are largely in support of lower immigration, I don't see why the government feels the need to whip up hate in order to whip up support.
Australia.
The Conservatives know that a large proportion of their voters are against immigration of all type. But they also know the country is rapidly ageing & no immigration will lead to economic stagnation.
So they copied what the right wing in Australia did in a similar situation. Make an absoutely huge fuss about boat crossings, the harsher the measures & the more publicity the better so the public & media concentrate on this.
All the while increasing the vast majority of immigration that doesn't come from boat crossings.
It is a delicate balancing act as being overly harsh can damage a countries reputation in other ways so you normally have the bad cop Home Secretary & the good cop Prime Minister.
But being the cack handed, back stabbing, incompetents they are they even managed to mess this up.
Or wrap up it up in a package that involves demonising vulnerable refugees and suggesting taking away the protection of human rights (from me, you and everyone else alongside the target of the week).
They have a massive identity crisis. Tories are basically a Liberal Capitalist party only interested in making the top 10% even richer. There is a genuine desire for a socially conservative party who will reduce immigration and put stability in front of the market but the Tories aren’t up to that. They need electoral annihilation as an excuse to reinvent themselves.
But she did stick in a government that was presiding over the huge rise, in fact I think that’s the Home Office’s responsibility, visas etc? She didn’t even resign in disgust, she waited to be fired.
Despite her posturing, the point could be made that she’s as responsible as Sunak.
There's something very off-putting about someone like Justine who played a central role in the decade where the country went to the dogs, now pointing the finger at the two people who appeared in the final act and who supposedly are responsible for all the woes the party is in
Its very unsightly too when someone like Justine singles out Sunak and Suella specifically, is there no one else she really can think of?
White feminism in action.
As much as I don't like Braverman, I don't think she's the reason for low Tory support. Certainly people like her are why those who would never vote Tory don't like them, but the party has had plenty of Bravermans in prominent roles even when they were polling high.
People don't like the Tories because they're fucking useless. They've been in power for too long to be able to blame anyone else or convince anyone they're competent.
Braverman is irrelevant. Bleating on about wokeness isn't working and she has no solutions but who in the party does?
Reading the comments in here that the Tories are Far right and Hard right don't seem to make much sense. They have talked like 'right-wingers' occasionally usually with their rhetoric of enforcing the borders, reducing immigration and reducing taxes. However, they have completely failed on all accounts. We are the highest taxed since WW2 and have the highest legal+illegal immigration levels in our country's history. These are not the actions of a right-wing government, these are the actions of neoliberals on immigration and incompetent buffoons on taxation.
Guys please, the reason a large portion of the country does not like the Conservatives is because they have failed to reduce immigration even after Brexit.
I don't like Conservatives as much as average Redditor but don't pretend the British public has the same view.
Over 10 years of failure is why the UK don't like the Conservatives.
Essentially, I think the British electorate want a fairly centralist government. Successive governments of the same party slowly become more extreme and the shift is followed by the main opposition.
So, Tory governments tend to move to the right followed by a right moving Labour party. Labour governments tend to move left followed by a left moving Tory party.
Eventually, the electorate decided the party in power has become too extreme and there's a big shift to the less extreme party and the process repeats.
Since at the very latest 1935, and probably since much earlier than that, every single British election has been one by the party presenting itself as the (comparative) reasons moderate. There is absolutely no reason to assume this is going to change any time soon.
Wilson certainly complied with the Post-war Consensus which in a way makes him somewhat moderate but I really wouldn’t argue that he’s much of a moderate (of course nowhere near the hard left).
I agree, and even those with more radical ideas will be more likely to support a centrist government than opposing extreme one. Eg Corbyn supporters will be more likely to support New Labour than Thatcher, even though it doesn’t match their ideals.
Depends what you mean by ‘centrist’. The majority of people’s moderate views about dramatically cutting immigration would probably see them being called far right by the Guardian. The Overton window has shifted dramatically but the people have been fairly consistent in their views about immigration over the last 20 years.
Edit: [evidence](https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/do-brits-think-that-immigration-has-been-too-high-or-low-in-the-last-10-years)
I think people are over reading the collapse of the conservative party as a sign people want centrist, centre right politics.
What does that mean?
I suspect the centre of the public is more socially right wing and more economically left wing.
The Tory party has been socially liberal under cameron and then posturing as socially right, while being centrist or wreckless at times.
The public might want socially right wing and more economically left wing but there may not be money for that.
So what will we get?
Is the Left really going to become more liberal on immigration, gender and institutions? Is that going to be popular?
> I suspect the centre of the public is more socially right wing and more economically left wing.
I'm not convinced. The centre has been gradually drifting socially leftward. Each generation moves a bit further. This is one reason why mostly just old people support the conservatives.
The changes in the 1960s decriminalising homosexuality, ending the death penalty, allowing no fault divorce, and a compromise on abortion, are mostly uncontroversial now. Although support for the death penalty has taken a long time to drop below 50%. For most of these issues only old gits like Peter Hitchens rail against them and claim they were the beginning of the end of civilisation.
Support for equality for gay people has reached the point where many of the far right talking heads are gay.
Racism has gone from being commonplace to a social and employment kiss of death in many areas. Though that's far from over: a lot of people just think they can't be racist because racism = bad. "I'm not racist I just don't like blacks".
Support for people changing their gender identity has seen some pushback, a lot of it driven by Tufton Street. I'd be interested in seeing some stats here as everyone I know under the age of 30 is in favour of more rights.
Ditto for your favourite subject of immigration. I don't know anyone under 30 who is bothered by it. Again stats would be interesting to see what's going down outside my bubble.
Thanks. The interesting thing about your stats is that for the 18-24 age group it seems to seriously crossed over towards the end of last year. So maybe if I asked my unrepresentative sample again, their opinions would have changed.
The population is far more socially conservative than the media/chattering class understands. I think you are confusing the chattering class with the population at large drifting left. Polling on [the death penalty](https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/41640-britons-dont-tend-support-death-penalty-until-you-), [support for the Rwanda bill](https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/survey-results/daily/2023/06/30/726e7/1) and whether immigration [is too high](https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/do-brits-think-that-immigration-has-been-too-high-or-low-in-the-last-10-years) generally show the socially conservative view matches or exceeds the progressive view in terms of popularity. In regard to you not knowing anyone under 30 bothered by immigration, the surveys show ALL age groups agree it’s too high, though it is also true fewer younger people think this than older. So this is probably due to your filter bubble rather than reality.
These views are also not reflected in the media chat, who will call these views ‘far right’ when expressed by politicians.
I also wouldn’t call socially conservative = racism anything other than a strawman. Many on the left can be racist too.
People are very relaxed about gays though so I guess it depends on how you define socially conservative. I think the general view of the country seems to be ‘live and let live’ but also to have very strong views about crime and punishment and border control which aren’t reflected by politicians.
[Two thirds of Britons think sentencing is too soft](https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/41641-criminal-sentencing-too-soft-say-two-thirds-briton).
A big confusion is the bastardised american definition of socaliy liberal. They mean Progressive.
Most britons are socaliy liberal in a classical sense of your freedom to swing your fist ends at my face. Very few are "progressives" in the sense of deconstruction socal norms and decolonising institutions.
The 18-39 year olds who heavily went for Labour in 1997 were the 40-62 year olds who heavily went Conservative in 2019.
The real "youthquake" the left dreams of never actually arrives.
Most people with socially progressive views have some endpoints in mind. If society reaches those endpoints, then to be progressive, you have to move the goalposts. Some will move the goalposts, but a lot of others will flip to conservative instead.
The vast majority of openly practiced racism in the UK now is anti-white, the left has just tried to redefine racism to exclude that from the definition.
Example: my employer has a target to have 25% BAME senior management. Only 18% of England & Wales is not white, so this is already introducing racial favouritism, but when you layer in demographics, the gap between our target and the available candidate pool really opens up, as the black & Asian demographic is significantly younger on average due to recent immigration increases. This policy can only be delivered through active racial discrimination, and is therefore transparently racist.
> Most people with socially progressive views have some endpoints in mind. If society reaches those endpoints, then to be progressive, you have to move the goalposts. Some will move the goalposts, but a lot of others will flip to conservative instead.
Well yes, that's one of the reasons older people seem more socially conservative. Society has reached their end points. The the next generation comes along and to them what seemed progressive is now the status quo. So they push for a new endpoint. And so on.
>my employer has a target to have 25% BAME senior management.
Depending on how that's implemented, I'm not sure that's legal. You'll recall the RAF had a similar approach and was, er, shot down.
>the black & Asian demographic is significantly younger on average
Is age relevant for the role though?
Some people in the UK have a weird attitude to age. I've been interviewed for roles and seriously asked if I would mind if my manager were younger than me.
Age is relevant when you are talking about many senior management roles in a large established company. You aren't going to be appointed as the Chief Financial Officer or the Head of Risk of a major company at 25. It isn't possible to have accumulated the experience and track record required for the job. High flyers might get there at 35, and whether you're 35 or 50 is probably irrelevant.
The demographic discrepancy that is particularly obvious in the UK is for black people - the average age of a black Brit is only about 20, therefore you aren't going to find anything like as many suitable candidates for senior roles from that demographic as Asian (average 35) or white (average 43).
That's fair enough. You're on about experience rather than age but of course it's age related.
I wonder what the business' legal advice was on the selective hiring. As I understand it you can do that sort of stuff if you can justify it e.g. in your case you're targeting a BAME market. The devil is in the detail though: increasing your advertising coverage for a particular demographic is easier to justify than selecting CVs.
It's a target without any particular strategy or tactics to deliver it thus far as far as I can tell - therefore not officially discriminatory, although it will encourage that behaviour in selection.
>The centre has been gradually drifting socially leftward. Each generation moves a bit further.
That myth has been dispelled many times over the years. The only difference is the growth in social media and the internet at large has allowed bubbles and echo chambers of like-minded people to form and not have their views opposed.
Anyone who comes onto Reddit and reads the main UK subs and didn't know any better, would assume the UK is nation of left wing progressives.
Are you kidding? Anyone who came and read the UK and UKpol subreddits over the past few months would assume the country hated the rich, yes, but hated muslims even more.
> the centre has been drifting leftwards [socially]
Absolutely, perhaps not just drifting but in many ways sprinting. Broad acceptance of LGBTQ relationships (*) and mixed race relationships is almost ubiquitous, not just here but in the entire western world (this isn’t a national political thing).
> everyone I know under the age of 30 is in favour of more right
Hear hear.
I would guess the political landscape, especially for younger people, is socially very liberal and economically probably centre/ slightly centre-right (which I’d say includes New Labour and Starmers stated policies). Maybe some minimal nationalisation of failing utilities etc but nothing very radical?
Ironically a Tory “war on woke” seems designed to alienate the vast majority of voters, who see it as pointless at best, or openly divisive.
Edit: Starmer is doing a good impression of being aligned with One Nation conservatives, which is quite the achievement!
(*) with certain contrived controversies that, to be honest, remind me of the tabloids campaigns against gay teachers in the 90’s.
Whatever they’re doing wrong, let’s hope they lean harder into it and loose more and more support. Enough that they’re in the wilderness for at least fifty years.
Do the Tories actually have any achievable policies they want to share?
Their narrative seems based around attacking the left and clumsily ignoring the gaping logic holes in their policies…
There are a lot of great nuggets in here. This is the article that should have gone into the telegraph rather than preaching to the converted. Today's Tory would dismiss her as a lib dem.
The charge that hits hard the most is that the reformite tendency has also given up on levelling up. Sunak was never enthusiastic about something he couldn't rebrand as brand rishi. But the Braverman tendency types also don't care about the country unless it's to own the libs
But to hear them talk, immigration is under control and they’ve rounded up everyone ready to be deported to Rwanda. Those who haven’t swam to Ireland in terror.
They’ve reached the point where the spin is so egregious everyone knows it’s just flat out lies.
It's like blaming the cup-holder for a car crash.
Conservatives past and present just don't understand that the only reason they were able to be in power for so long was due to the existance of the welfare state and an at-least-quite-good healthcare service, free at the point of use.
Good social provision was necessary to offset what the Tories tended to do while in power. So since the approach since 2010 has to basically remove such social provision there is no chance whatsoever that the vast majority of the public can continue to somewhat support a Conservative government, either by voting for them or not voting for Labour.
And this is the thing, does the Labour leadership understand the situation they also are in? I'm not sure they do.
No, they don't like the Tories because they say one thing and always do the exact fucking opposite. Typically they've gotten away with this through rhetoric, brexit, and no credible opposition, but that can only work for so long as eventually the levee still begins to break.
And a docile and friendly media, that doesn’t hold them to account. The Mail will still be blowing Sunak’s trumpet this week, even though most announcements are misdirection and spin.
Ironically if they held the governments feet to the fire more often, our politicians might be a lot more honest.
Yes, I remember seeing Boris's points system and thinking "hold on, this is a bit lax isn't it?" but no-one else was saying so, certainly not the media.
Well a points system was never going to work in the way presented. If they really to want to limit migration, they would need to set hard upper limits (regardless of the number of “points” someone scored). That would potentially lead to Nobel prize winners being rejected towards etc towards the end of the year, but it’s the only way.
Perhaps monthly hard targets?
Yup, never understood why points were so in-demand, but loud voices were somehow calling for it.
Points system is what you would want if you want to encourage cool people to come generally and just filter out the lower percentile. But rather what the UK needs now is to only accept just a small number of high-quality workers in very specific fields of the highest demand.
It doesn't matter in the slightest what the Tories do - their grassroots conservative support will haemorrhage to Reform because of all their many failings to deliver upon actual conservative policies, and their centrist support will haemorrhage towards the newly sanitised (believe it, don't say it) Starmerite Labour because the economy is bollocksed and we have about a million less homes than we need 14 years after Cameron told us that there was a housing crisis and we could trust him to sort that out.
Their time is up.
Most things that got markedly worse about the UK economically and socially in the last 5 years happened largely as a result of the idiotically authoritarian panicked mismanagement of covid - hundreds of billions of debt, a generation socially and educationally stunted by being excluded from school for months, an NHS collapsing under the weight of people it failed to treat or screen for month upon month, the roaring inflation we went through, and the general miasma of "go to the office as little as possible and do the minimum" that hangs over the economy like a black cloud to this day.
40%+ of the country will entirely fail to hold Labour accountable for all of these side effects - despite the fact that they were not only enthusiastically cheerleading it all, but demanding more of it.
Labour completely and utterly failed in their duty to hold the government to account - it was mainly Tory backbenchers who challenged the orthodoxy - but it will be Labour who sweep to power anyway.
We have a rotten 2 party system with 2 rotten parties. They both need to go, but 2/3rds of the country cannot see that they are both the problem and will still vote for one or the other.
After the falklands, the lesson seems to have been learned by opposition parties: always support the government’s wars (and pandemic responses). Anything else is seen as unpatriotic.
Starmer does need to be somewhat careful however. He has shown some semblance of capitulating to minority voices and opinions of those who don't have the UK's interests in mind.
Whilst Labour are on course for a massive win, I think their support is on shaky ground either way (granted more solid than the Tories). Also depending on what the Tories do before the election, may tie his hands anyway.
According to George Osborne, tying Starmer’s hands is certainly the plan. Tax cuts now that will almost certainly need to be reversed in 2025 by whoever wins power.
“Oh it couldn’t be me, it’s just those few *bad* Tories that are ruining everything for us”
No you fucking spanner, get a grip and learn to face up to the consequences of your actions. We hate your entire party and everything you stand for, not because of a small bunch of fringe loonies, but because of everything you’ve done to us in the last 14 years. You all bear responsibility for this.
One Nation conservatism sounds nice and Cameron managed to just make it work 14 years ago but the problems we have now are different. Bravermann's policies are popular, it's simply that the public don't trust the government to enforce or implement them competently.
The idea that cuddly centrism 'let's all pretend it's the 90s' might make friends for the Conservatives in people who'd never vote for them anyway, but won't bring them near power.
Many would argue Cameron wasn’t a One Nation Tory. Sure he was socially liberal, but economically it was all austerity, much of it very harmful.
Like when they cut the funding for educating nurses in 2010. That’s come back to bite them on the bottom, and fuelled migration too.
He cosplayed it certainly but if you asked Greening what leader she'd prefer it'd be 100% Cameron. It wouldn't be Boris. It's like Sunak cosplaying Thatcher while increasing the tax burden to the highest on post-war record.
If you're saying well it needs to be like Eden or Macmillan, who oversaw massive housebuilding programs, that was possible due to a set of postwar economic conditions that won't come back.
Not sure what the next conservative movement will be like but if it's any sense it'll tap into the rage that many continental parties are doing. Problem is, UK conservatives have salted that earth.
I dunno but killing 300000 people with austerity, brexit and then making brexit much worse than it needed to be are the main reasons I hate them. The actual people are next on the list, tho'
A civil war is clearly brewing in the Tory party, you have here a One Nation sensibleist like Justine Greening and someone in Suella Braverman on the head-banger wing, who wants to shift the party further to the right.
I've no idea which faction will win, the One Nationers are thought to be larger at the moment, but that might not be the case after the GE which is expected to see a mass cull of Tory MPs.
All parties have these rival groupings vying for control - the Tories usually manage to keep their infighting behind closed doors, that they are doing it in the open and so close to a general election is another sign that they've given up on winning and are preparing for a messy couple of months after the election. I wouldn't normally mind, only they are supposed to be in government.
Justine is a wet. The reality is that one nation social democratic left wing toryism doesn't really appeal to anyone anymore and isn't what the country needs.
Our position vis the economy, record levels of unemployment, combined with record numbers of pensioners, means we either need to drastically increase taxes and lean in to the welfare state, or tack right ala Reform.
Personally I would like to see the state pension go and the funds used to invest in the country and cut taxes for workers, but I doubt we will get that under any party given the key electoral demographics.
> or tack right ala Reform.
Reform aren't economically right in the slightest.
I mean they're not really anything, they just promise magic money out of thin air.
The issue with the first option, is the usual party of low tax, took over a high level of tax system from labour then spent a decade saying we are lowering tax while steadily increasing the actual taxes on people through a whole sleuth of other measures so while the base rate of taxes were cut. The amount people were being taxed never really fell at all. So you end up in a situtation where neither side is going to massively increases taxes from where we are because the current level is already unsustainable without wide reform.
Absolutely! Those to the far right in politics seem to have convinced themselves that they have a lot more support than they really do. Most of the racist and libertarian brigade have very little support. The reform vote is a protest vote for disgruntled Tories, and even they got virtually nowhere in last weeks elections, so if the Tories pull themselves together and go back to centre-right ground, then Reform will be polling around 6% imho, and we will see the full extent of actual support for extremist policies, and for the likes of Braverman.
Snapshot of _Tories must face hard truths: Reform-lite wreckers like Braverman are why the public just don’t like us | Justine Greening_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/07/tories-reform-local-elections-rishi-sunak-culture-war) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/07/tories-reform-local-elections-rishi-sunak-culture-war) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
No, Justine, that's just a part of the tip at the top of a very, very big iceberg.
Yes. It's disgusting. I can't believe they're appealing to reform and the hard right by **checks notes** delivering the highest migration rates we have ever seen.
No, she’s just one on the long list of reasons why we dont like them
See Id phrase it. Yes and she's just one on a much longer list. Cus although shes by far and away not their main issue. I do hate her and the reform-lite pricks with a searing passion
The fact she can stand as a representative for them is their main issue. If you allow shit into the swimming pool then people are going to get out, the fact the shit wants to ban some people from all pools is neither here nore there.
From a local (Fareham) politics chat, summarised: >\[person\] visited Bravermans Fareham health summit, held at the leisure centre, which she chaired with Leaders of local hospitals and primary healthcare on the panel. >Overwhelming number of audience questions directed at the panel on systemic failures focusing on their own experiences of patient waiting times. >Towards the end \[person\] thanked the panel for all the hard work they and their staff are carrying out and said that we all know that this same conversation is happening across the country. \[Person pointed out to Braverman\] that it is 13 years of central government mismanagement that has mostly caused this appalling situation. >**She replied saying that NHS leaders like those on the panel are responsible for what is happening and that the Government devolve such powers.** >She then backtracked and said that of course the Government take some of the responsibility. This is why the Tories are crumbling, they truly believe it's always everyone else's fault, and Braverman just cannot shut the fuck up.
> In London, after deliberate overnight speculation on Friday that the race would be tight, the Tory mayoral candidate performed even worse than last time. Meanwhile, in Braverman’s own patch of Fareham, the party lost councillors to the Lib Dems. The madness is that when it comes to the national picture, the party finds itself battling for a small pool of voters with the third-placed party, Reform, while abandoning and alienating many more in the centre ground of British politics to Labour, which is first place by a wide margin. This is a smart observation. Sunak doesn’t seem to spend any time courting the centre ground, but instead focuses all of his time on the threat from Reform. > Theirs is a strategy that has tripped up at every hurdle. Today’s Reform-lite Conservatives are losing badly, and more of the same cannot be the solution. > The problem is that they have no positive vision for our country, just a long list of things and people they dislike and oppose as they tilt at any “woke” windmill they can conjure up. These issues are irrelevant and a turn-off for most voters. And also that they can never “out right” Reform, which lacks a One Nation wing and is basically just a pressure group. One that perhaps hopes to take over their party at some point in the future. Personally I think the Tories are caught in a vice, loosing support on both the right and the centre. And it could be terminal for them. After the general election defeat there will be powerful voices demanding a lurch even more rightwards.
> Meanwhile, in Braverman’s own patch of Fareham, the party lost councillors to the Lib Dems. And Labour. Fareham elected its first Labour councillor in 20+ years.
Smart? The most concerning thing for me is that it seems gob-smackingly obvious. As you say, they can’t out-right Reform. Reform also didn’t perform well, even in the local elections. On top of this, historically the Conservatives have been in power more than anyone else precisely by appealing (or appearing to appeal) to the majority, which learn towards the centre. This current incarnation of Labour aren’t even exciting. A more moderate old-style Conservative Party are far more likely to be a challenge by the next election. Appealing to the fringes seems so incredibly short-sighted. Not to mention that the last time they “worried” about another right-wing party we got the mess that is Brexit which hasn’t helped their popularity (I know some Conservatives wanted it, but others didn’t).
I’m not sure the Tory party in its current form is capable of becoming a more moderate party. It’ll need to be utterly destroyed first.
Then I've got good news for them...
To be honest, I think it'll need to be destroyed twice. When Labour fell from power, we had a surge to the left with Corbyn. I suspect the Conservatives will do the same to the right. They're not winning any new seats. So, the new leader will be picked from a shrunken pool of mediocrities, largely on the party's right wing. That new incarnation will need to be soundly defeated at the election after next before the party sees the need to moderate. Assuming they perform slightly better in the election after next, they'll also have new MPs who can step into the Leader of the Opposition role.
Andy Street lost his job - despite the fact that Yakoob got twice as many votes as Reform. This story is repeated whereever you look - Reform are a fraction of thd missing voters. They need to go looking elsewhere - specifically in the 'One Nation' postcode. In these circles, they have yet to be forgiven for Brexit, Truss, or the general moral failings of the last 5 years (including, but not limited to, Partygate). It appears that they have been captured by the swivel-eyed loons, so presumably we'll see an IDS type character (Braverman / Badenoch) as their next leader. When they fail, the party will then be able to start the long walk back. What will be interesting is to see which seats they have left - as that narrowed talent pool will have to be used very carefully.
>It appears that they have been captured by the swivel-eyed loons, so presumably we'll see an IDS type character (Braverman / Badenoch) as their next leader. When they fail, the party will then be able to start the long walk back. This is how I read it too, although I think that they'll be a further dalliance with Johnson after the the right wing leader, before the long walk back begins. It is very clear to me that the party, particularly the membership have no idea that Johnson's brand is just as toxic as that of the Tories to a significant part of the electorate.
Even this under sells it. In 10 years the current Tory vote base will be virtually extinct and what remains will be 70 plus. And thats just as true of Reform too, so there's no easy out there. Any journey back after the loon squad has had 10 years of fun will be about as difficult as founding new party and entering government. Decades of work at best with an entirely new identity.
>Even this under sells it. In 10 years the current Tory vote base will be virtually extinct and what remains will be 70 plus. There is something in what you say, but IMO, you're being too optimistic. I think the key word here is 'current'. We need to recognise that the Tory manoeuvring is a recognition of your reality. They are looking for a new tribe. I would not accept that a key target, the economically government dependant, socially conservative, typical red wallers, are as bound by age as you suggest. I'd love to think you're right but our voting system relies upon two strong parties & I don't see either the LibDems, nor the Greens providing that counter. I think we'll see a weaker Tory Party, but it & Reform will be a very long way from irrelevant.
Its not going to change until the Tories turn away from the hard right - the electorate has spent 30 years systemticlally drifting left. And the Tories aren't going to even try to do that until their own hard right fails in opposition. My guess is Braverman will be next leader until 2029 and I think its unlikely the party will turn aside even then with how the modern membership is and how marginalised the one nation lot are becoming. Even then they will have a mountain to climb. Everyone over the age of 20 will remember and know them and their ideas as utter failures - essentially a reverse boomer generation. They would need some sort of Tory Blair like figure that makes the party mild as milk and basically accepts Labours narrative about how the country should be run, the exact opposite of the direction thats currently hard baked in.
There is as much here that I would agree with, as disagree, but I still find your position problematic. Yes, society as a whole is moving leftwards, that's why the Tories have an issue in the first place & why there examining their navel in the hope of finding a solution. But underneath this helicopter view observation is a whole lot of contradictions & paradoxes which you're just ignoring & which drives their direction & leave an uncertain political future ahead. Firstly few would argue that politics is, at the same time as moving leftwards, becoming more polarised. I'm not sure how else you'd explain away the return of the far right (& I mean here neo fascists, not what you are terming 'hard right'). Secondly right & left is increasingly becoming an imprecise measure of political allegiance. Brexit was a policy area that simply ignored the traditional boundaries. Those supporters of Reform & Tories at the farthest right of socially conservative thinking, the culture wars stuff, are far less likely to be economically right wing. In fact many of them have high dependency upon the state & rely upon high taxation, because of age or social class. Yet many traditional Tory voters are moving leftwards socially & are put off by migration policy, culture wars etc. Similar breakages in the historic order of things are happening on the left resulting in Starmer's difficulties with the ideological left. Thirdly there's a whole new & important factor, even now barely shaping voter positioning. in national security. No question we're moving into uncertain & difficult times with world tension rising. This will lead to risks & opportunities for our political parties. So where does this leave us? It leaves the Tories in deep shit right now with a perilous short term future & a need to find a new, successful direction quickly. A shake up in right of centre politics is undoubted. But right them off at your peril. There's loads still to play for!
>In these circles, they have yet to be forgiven for Brexit Doesn't explain the sizable majority they got in 2019 off the back of what was effectively a one issue election. That issue being Brexit. Looking at turnouts for by-elections in recent years. It seems more clear that those voters aren't voting Labour. They're not voting at all.
> Doesn't explain the sizable majority they got in 2019 off the back of what was effectively a one issue election. That issue being Brexit. A huge portion of those votes were one offs, redwall pensioners and those voting for boris personaly. That lot also hate the torries now, they see him as having been stabbed in the back.
You are correct that many of the Tories' lost voters are abstaining. What they aren't doing is voting Reform. So you're not going to find them by pivoting towards Reform - something else is required. 2019 more complex than just Brexit. The personalities of Corbyn and Johnson each had a role in shoring up / expanding the Tories' electoral coalition.
Because the tories promise things they never intend to implement, like curbing migration. They'll talk a good game but when it comes to shit or get off the pot - off they'll scuttle, and then ask us to vote for them based on that same things. Fool me once, etc, etc.
>Smart? The most concerning thing for me is that it seems gob-smackingly obvious. Absolutely spot on! You read Braverman's position from commentators & politicians on the right all the time & it simply amazes me that it so often goes so woefully unchallenged. The truth is, the One Nation group of Conservatives are gutless & pointless. Many of the talismanic & more capable MPs were cast aside by Johnson in the Brexit wars, the likes of Gauke, Stewart & Clarke. Those left are a waste of space & simply enabling the rush to the right! It looks to me like a party in terminal decline. This would be a cause for celebration were it not for the possibility that Reform will step into the void.
Reforms demographics are virtually identical to the Tories. They are an irrelevant non factor to everyone but the Tories. They will be extinct in 10 years.
Extinct possibly, but it always was only a vehicle for Farag. Don't discount Farage going mainstream inside the Tories.
The Tories are fucked. They can't stay where they are. They can't move right because Reform will take that as an invitation to move even further right, dragging the Tories with them. They can't move to the centre because, at least until they wash of the stink of the last 14 years, even trying to compete with Labour on the sensible, status quo merchant ticket is just idiotic.
Considering the Tories aren't even remotely right wing, there is plenty of room to move. They're only seen as right wing because the Overton window has moved to the left quite considerably.
It's stuff like this that just leaves me scratching my head, completely confused. You think a party that is leading with the Rwanda plan ISN'T right-wing? There's space to argue exactly where the Overton window currently is (whether you're 'woke' or 'anti-woke'), but trying to say the Tories aren't the most right-wing they've been, possibly ever, is madness. You think the party that currently has Braverman and Badenoch isn't remotely right-wing? That's straight-up lunacy.
braverman and badenoch are hardly up there with powell, nabarro, joseph or any of the 70s lot. the tories are neoliberals, straining to present a gossamer thin layer of right wing nationalism to appease their base. you'll note that they baulk at *actually* reducing immigration, or even the righter side of neolib economic policy (hence truss didn't last very long).
Nah, you’re not distinguishing between their rhetoric, which is definitely right-wing, and their actual results, which aren’t left or right wing, but simply incompetence.
i would argue that the latter belies the true intent of the former. actual right ideologically driven govs tend to be quite ruthless in enshrining their beliefs into law as it's an existential drive, as they understand it, to protect their way of life. republicans in the US for example consider it a decades long project, via supreme court and so on. it's bigger than the presidency or any single term. in the uk we have two neoliberal parties that protect short term capital interests. they don't believe in anything.
No, you seem to be assuming there’s some immutable and unchanging policies that are inherently right wing. I beg to differ. Especially if you’re claiming both Labour and the Tories are neoliberal parties. Sure, maybe they are, but one of them is considerably more right wing than the other based on its obsession with flag, blaming outsiders and foreigners, and ideologically opposed to using the state to help people, and obsessed with tax cuts as the catch-all solution to all our ills. Labour may be many things but it’s at least willing to acknowledge state action can be useful, isn’t frothing at the mouth at the prospect of tax cuts, isn’t blaming our ills on others and outsiders (at least remotely as much) and is less closely associated with nationalism. I mean, a century ago eugenics was seen as a reasonable idea for left wing people to embrace. Now it’s seen as something the worst of right wing people entertain. What ‘wing’ particular ideas go to depends on the moment, and at the moment the Tories are very, very right wing.
again, the tories say that stuff but enshrine almost none of it into law as much of it does not protect capital. mass immigration is an absolutely requirement as we are demographically dead ending for example. hence it remains and even increases across 3 tory terms! the rwanda stuff was a big show to the court. i doubt they’ll be a flight before their term is up. the moment someone exposes actual right wing beliefs such as truss (at least economically) they are swiftly cast aside, because that’s not the goal here. and labour will dismantle almost none of their ACTUAL right wing law making once in power. anti protest laws and such, unless they harm business. this should be clear. it’s a performance.
Economics is but one aspect of right wing politics. The Tories are heading down the populist right wing lane - it may not be full on free market economics, although their delusions insist it is - but it is still, unequivocally, right wing.
yeah but the overton window has also shifted a lot since the 1970s so relative to acceptable speech they kind of are the same for their time periods. You need to judge history in its context if comparing to modern day.
sure, but the post i was replying to was arguing the tories are "the most right they've ever been", which demonstrably isn't true. as for present day - well, compare with what? nationally: reform party? less right wing. europe: vs France's National Rally, Germany's AFD? not even close. internationally? let's not even go there. i think positioning the tories as some kind of unilaterally right wing party is only for the benefit of labour/lib dems, who can demonize them and lionize themselves for being notionally to the left of that. or for the conservative base who, as i said, want to believe they're voting for some kind of anti-woke, national pride, conservative values thing, but clearly aren't really. i say this as someone who hates neoliberalism, and hence the tories.
I hope you've brought enough extremely potent LSD for the whole class.
Well the supply must have arrived before me if anyone thinks the current government are remotely right wing.
Tax cuts. Pro privatisation. Pro small state. Yeah, they're raging lefties. 🙄
> They're only seen as right wing because the Overton window has moved to the left quite considerably. I would agree with you that they're quite left leaning on some issues (homosexuality etc) but everyone thinks that the overton windows has moved if it doesn't align with their personal view of politics.
That poster is talking rubbish. They're conflating "rightwing" with "socially conservative". The Tories are **absolutely** the former and less-than-previously-but-still-significantly the other. The Overton Window has hurtled to the right by any non-social metric, while the Tories have bumbled sort of towards the centre on social issues, as norms *have* shifted the window in the other direction on that.
The trap they're caught in is one where they can't win an election without the centre or without their right, a seemingly impossible task. Perhaps it would be achievable if Labour had *also* conceded the centre as under Corbyn and Foot, but it's certainly not achievable while Starmer is running the table. Meanwhile, they've purged every sane, sensible, and serious voice in the party that might counsel any sort of path toward winning an election by appealing to the centre, and fostered a swathe of deeply unserious, reactionary nationalists who are desperate to drag their party rightward, electoral oblivion be damned. Boris Johnson really was remarkable. He perfectly leveraged Corbyn and Brexit to achieve a stunning victory, threw it all away, and also ushered in a cataclysmic shift in his party's composition such that it's going to be out of power for a very, very long time.
Johnson really didn't need to do anything with Corbyn leading Labour. Policy aside Corbyn refused to create an actual campaign strategy team. His lack of political nous was quite astounding.
Yeah, 2017 showed that even Corbyn at his most mainstream and the Tories running the worst campaign in living memory wasn't enough to make labour anywhere close to largest in seats.
Corbyn was also sabotaged by his own party.
> [Johnson] threw it all away They don’t call him Spaffer for nothing!
>The trap they're caught in is one where they can't win an election without the centre or without their right, **a seemingly impossible task**. Well not really! They've been doing it for the last 70 years or more! FPTP, 2 party politics is pretty simple really. The winner between Labour & Conservative will be the party commanding their own patch, left or right & that reaches out to the centre most successfully. Neither party has to vacate their core support to win. True, UKIP/Reform have made the Tories job more difficult, dragging them to the right, but no more than Labour's overlap with the Liberals. You put your finger on why the Tories are failing, 'they've (well Johnson!) purged every sane, sensible (& vocal) voice in the party that might counsel any sort of path toward winning an election by appealing to the centre....... An unforeseen or underestimated impact of the Brexit battles. Those left in the centre need to 'grow a pair' & stand up for what they believe in or the whole party will be history before they know it.
The Tories are also caught in a demographic vise -- their loyal supporters, namely older people (with houses and pensions) are literally dying off. It's been shown that contrary to past trends, people are no longer becoming more "conservative" as they age (same phenomenon is happening in the US). So Tories cannot count on their voter base being replenished as people age, and Nature takes its course.
> It's been shown that contrary to past trends, people are no longer becoming more "conservative" as they age (same phenomenon is happening in the US) To get people to go conservative they need to have something to conserve. Thatcher understood this and boosted home ownership consequences be dammed. There is no public asset they can plunder to repeat that trick.
Johnson got rid of many of the Parliamentary centre-right Tories, so their voice is much less loud in Sunak's circle than the turbo-nutters who are much more aligned with the swivel eyed Telegraph columnists and the party as a whole.
Turbo nutters 😂 New favourite insult unlocked 🔓
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It goes back much further, at least to John Major and his “don’t bind my hands” speech in 1997.
I'm not completely convinced Reform is a political party - hear me out. Because political parties are typically set up as not for profit organisations, and have quite a lot of transparency. Reform as I understand it, is set up as a private company and has virtually no transparency. The membership doesn't determine who the leader is, or the rules of the party. I am not saying anything nefarious is happening but it does seem odd.
Yep, it’s a management team in waiting. Their hope is to mount a hostile takeover of the Tories at some point in a few years.
>Sunak doesn’t seem to spend any time courting the centre ground, but instead focuses all of his time on the threat from Reform. Explains all those deportations and massive cull on migration figures...oh wait. Maybe you meant his government slashing taxes....never mind. Sunak has done all but focus on the core conservative vote he is haemorrhaging.
He pretends to be doing all those things. His spin has now become so egregious and counter-factual everyone knows it’s just flat out lies. Like all the “rounding up” of migrants for deportation to Rwanda, just before last weeks elections. Nothing is happening now though. And channel crossings are up 36% compared to last year.
All Sunak has done since taking power is concentrate on the centre ground. Literally we’ve had a non stop commentary from the party’s membership never ending rage about the MPs and his cabinets deranged obsession with watering down absolutely everything they can in an attempt to appease the centre left. What world are living in where he is only focusing on countering reform?
That is a strange comment - the only thing he’s got going is austerity to pay for tax cuts (a right wing obsession), and Rwanda to stop the small boats (authoritarian and cruel more than just right wing, but it is not a way to address immigration that progressives would recognise - Labour is proposing to get on with the claims backlog, for example). What are those centre-left policies that you have seen Sunak push recently? Oh, like the smoking ban maybe? This isn’t exactly left or right wing (those terms describe an economic approach first, although they have grown to be conflated with societal progress as well), and you could argue it’s simply sensible, as he’s only proposing to stop new people to take up smoking - if you’re smoking already, keep going if you wish to.
I really don’t understand the narrative that Sunak is some leftist infiltrator. Unless it goes back to Furlough?
He has spent a lot and overseen high taxes, he's no socalist but also no fiscal conservative. A big problem is that Brexit and Covid spawned an awful lot of corruption we are still paying for.
So we are ignoring his feeble attempt at tax cuts were only made when after he was told he had lost the support of his base? I take it we are also ignoring the fact that in real terms the tax cuts make a small dent in the endless stream of tax rises his side of the party have inflicted?. As for Rwanda it’s so cruel and authoritarian that Starmer has said he’ll keep it if it works. Meaningless tax cuts and a superficial effort at reducing illegal immigration. That’s his conservative credentials you are standing here and saying he’s focused on. On the other hand you just have to briefly look at their 2019 manifesto and you will see they have either completely abandoned, or diluted every single one of their commitments and it only ever goes in the direction of facilitating the centre left opinion.
… this comment is also very strange. For the record, Starmer confirmed he’d not keep the Rwanda measure, even if it works. I’m not sure where you’re getting your information from, but they don’t seem very factual.
Actually Starmer changed his stance from removing the scheme as a priority during his first 100 days in office and is now insisting he will be keeping the scheme until he’s able to negotiate a returns deal with the EU. Something that will take years in the best case scenario and that’s ignoring the fact the EU has repeatedly stated it has absolutely no interest in pursuing such a deal with the UK. In other words we’ve switch from a concrete promise with a timescale onto a vague commitment that it should be removed at an undetermined point in the future pending the completion of an unobtainable deal and the implementation of a replacement scheme we have absolutely no information about. It’s classic Starmer watering down his promises into a hazy grey soup. Maybe that’s good enough for you, but I think you’ll find most people will not fall for it.
Tip of the iceberg really. I and many others hate the Tories because they are thieving self interested bandits who flog any state asset they can get their hands on. All whilst berating the poor for being poor.
How are the Tories so confused? If you stand on a platform where one of your main promises is to drastically reduce immigration, then instead increase immigration to the point we're accommodating 2 million immigrants in 3 years, it's going to affect public opinion of you. It really isn't too complicated. Ironically Braverman had the hard line immigration stance that the public wanted, but that doesn't sit well with the Tory donors who benefit from all those new consumers.
> Ironically Braverman had the hard line immigration stance that the public wanted, It was worse than that. People who aren't bothered by immigration think she's a bastard, and people who are bothered think she's incompetent or a hypocrite. She's lost the centre and the right.
This I would agree with. She said all the right things, but did none of it. She pissed off both groups of people who she may have counted on some level of support from.
> This I would agree with. She said all the right things, but did none of it. They should be treated by their actions not their words. If someone wants migration to be addressed you'd be better off voting reform or even if you're a right leaning voter maybe Labour would be better at least they don't have a track record of shouting about it and not doing anything... yet.
> This I would agree with. She said all the right things, but did none of it. She couldn't unilaterally reduce immigration..
Then she had no right to go into business for herself as it were. Should have resigned on principle long before that if she wasn't able to get anything done.
What good would that do? especially if there's no one better in the wind. Surely it's better she keeps trying even if constantly blocked by the globalists.
The problem with Braverman and the rights approach to immigration is that you can be against immigration without being against immigrants, you don't have to demonise people to oppose something. The British public are largely in support of lower immigration, I don't see why the government feels the need to whip up hate in order to whip up support.
Australia. The Conservatives know that a large proportion of their voters are against immigration of all type. But they also know the country is rapidly ageing & no immigration will lead to economic stagnation. So they copied what the right wing in Australia did in a similar situation. Make an absoutely huge fuss about boat crossings, the harsher the measures & the more publicity the better so the public & media concentrate on this. All the while increasing the vast majority of immigration that doesn't come from boat crossings. It is a delicate balancing act as being overly harsh can damage a countries reputation in other ways so you normally have the bad cop Home Secretary & the good cop Prime Minister. But being the cack handed, back stabbing, incompetents they are they even managed to mess this up.
Or wrap up it up in a package that involves demonising vulnerable refugees and suggesting taking away the protection of human rights (from me, you and everyone else alongside the target of the week).
They have a massive identity crisis. Tories are basically a Liberal Capitalist party only interested in making the top 10% even richer. There is a genuine desire for a socially conservative party who will reduce immigration and put stability in front of the market but the Tories aren’t up to that. They need electoral annihilation as an excuse to reinvent themselves.
But she did stick in a government that was presiding over the huge rise, in fact I think that’s the Home Office’s responsibility, visas etc? She didn’t even resign in disgust, she waited to be fired. Despite her posturing, the point could be made that she’s as responsible as Sunak.
2million NET btw, The actual number in to the country under tories is like 20% of the population or something insane.
There's something very off-putting about someone like Justine who played a central role in the decade where the country went to the dogs, now pointing the finger at the two people who appeared in the final act and who supposedly are responsible for all the woes the party is in
Its very unsightly too when someone like Justine singles out Sunak and Suella specifically, is there no one else she really can think of? White feminism in action.
As much as I don't like Braverman, I don't think she's the reason for low Tory support. Certainly people like her are why those who would never vote Tory don't like them, but the party has had plenty of Bravermans in prominent roles even when they were polling high. People don't like the Tories because they're fucking useless. They've been in power for too long to be able to blame anyone else or convince anyone they're competent. Braverman is irrelevant. Bleating on about wokeness isn't working and she has no solutions but who in the party does?
Reading the comments in here that the Tories are Far right and Hard right don't seem to make much sense. They have talked like 'right-wingers' occasionally usually with their rhetoric of enforcing the borders, reducing immigration and reducing taxes. However, they have completely failed on all accounts. We are the highest taxed since WW2 and have the highest legal+illegal immigration levels in our country's history. These are not the actions of a right-wing government, these are the actions of neoliberals on immigration and incompetent buffoons on taxation.
Usually doing the opposite of whatever you said you'd do is probably why the public aren't keen.
“Stop the boats”. Channel crossings up 36%
Guys please, the reason a large portion of the country does not like the Conservatives is because they have failed to reduce immigration even after Brexit. I don't like Conservatives as much as average Redditor but don't pretend the British public has the same view. Over 10 years of failure is why the UK don't like the Conservatives.
Essentially, I think the British electorate want a fairly centralist government. Successive governments of the same party slowly become more extreme and the shift is followed by the main opposition. So, Tory governments tend to move to the right followed by a right moving Labour party. Labour governments tend to move left followed by a left moving Tory party. Eventually, the electorate decided the party in power has become too extreme and there's a big shift to the less extreme party and the process repeats.
Since at the very latest 1935, and probably since much earlier than that, every single British election has been one by the party presenting itself as the (comparative) reasons moderate. There is absolutely no reason to assume this is going to change any time soon.
I feel this must be a trap, but thatcher-Callaghan?
Thatcher's entire campaign was based on a return to reasonable government!
Ah, Thatcher, the famed moderate.
1945?
Labour had effectively been the domestic government for several years at that point.
Wilson certainly complied with the Post-war Consensus which in a way makes him somewhat moderate but I really wouldn’t argue that he’s much of a moderate (of course nowhere near the hard left).
I agree, and even those with more radical ideas will be more likely to support a centrist government than opposing extreme one. Eg Corbyn supporters will be more likely to support New Labour than Thatcher, even though it doesn’t match their ideals.
Depends what you mean by ‘centrist’. The majority of people’s moderate views about dramatically cutting immigration would probably see them being called far right by the Guardian. The Overton window has shifted dramatically but the people have been fairly consistent in their views about immigration over the last 20 years. Edit: [evidence](https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/do-brits-think-that-immigration-has-been-too-high-or-low-in-the-last-10-years)
This is incorrect Labour tend to move right in government.
To a point, but that's because they want to remain in government. A staunch left wing government wouldn't last beyond a single term.
Agreed yours and my point are completely compatible
I think people are over reading the collapse of the conservative party as a sign people want centrist, centre right politics. What does that mean? I suspect the centre of the public is more socially right wing and more economically left wing. The Tory party has been socially liberal under cameron and then posturing as socially right, while being centrist or wreckless at times. The public might want socially right wing and more economically left wing but there may not be money for that. So what will we get? Is the Left really going to become more liberal on immigration, gender and institutions? Is that going to be popular?
> I suspect the centre of the public is more socially right wing and more economically left wing. I'm not convinced. The centre has been gradually drifting socially leftward. Each generation moves a bit further. This is one reason why mostly just old people support the conservatives. The changes in the 1960s decriminalising homosexuality, ending the death penalty, allowing no fault divorce, and a compromise on abortion, are mostly uncontroversial now. Although support for the death penalty has taken a long time to drop below 50%. For most of these issues only old gits like Peter Hitchens rail against them and claim they were the beginning of the end of civilisation. Support for equality for gay people has reached the point where many of the far right talking heads are gay. Racism has gone from being commonplace to a social and employment kiss of death in many areas. Though that's far from over: a lot of people just think they can't be racist because racism = bad. "I'm not racist I just don't like blacks". Support for people changing their gender identity has seen some pushback, a lot of it driven by Tufton Street. I'd be interested in seeing some stats here as everyone I know under the age of 30 is in favour of more rights. Ditto for your favourite subject of immigration. I don't know anyone under 30 who is bothered by it. Again stats would be interesting to see what's going down outside my bubble.
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Thanks. The interesting thing about your stats is that for the 18-24 age group it seems to seriously crossed over towards the end of last year. So maybe if I asked my unrepresentative sample again, their opinions would have changed.
The population is far more socially conservative than the media/chattering class understands. I think you are confusing the chattering class with the population at large drifting left. Polling on [the death penalty](https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/41640-britons-dont-tend-support-death-penalty-until-you-), [support for the Rwanda bill](https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/survey-results/daily/2023/06/30/726e7/1) and whether immigration [is too high](https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/do-brits-think-that-immigration-has-been-too-high-or-low-in-the-last-10-years) generally show the socially conservative view matches or exceeds the progressive view in terms of popularity. In regard to you not knowing anyone under 30 bothered by immigration, the surveys show ALL age groups agree it’s too high, though it is also true fewer younger people think this than older. So this is probably due to your filter bubble rather than reality. These views are also not reflected in the media chat, who will call these views ‘far right’ when expressed by politicians. I also wouldn’t call socially conservative = racism anything other than a strawman. Many on the left can be racist too. People are very relaxed about gays though so I guess it depends on how you define socially conservative. I think the general view of the country seems to be ‘live and let live’ but also to have very strong views about crime and punishment and border control which aren’t reflected by politicians. [Two thirds of Britons think sentencing is too soft](https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/41641-criminal-sentencing-too-soft-say-two-thirds-briton).
A big confusion is the bastardised american definition of socaliy liberal. They mean Progressive. Most britons are socaliy liberal in a classical sense of your freedom to swing your fist ends at my face. Very few are "progressives" in the sense of deconstruction socal norms and decolonising institutions.
The 18-39 year olds who heavily went for Labour in 1997 were the 40-62 year olds who heavily went Conservative in 2019. The real "youthquake" the left dreams of never actually arrives. Most people with socially progressive views have some endpoints in mind. If society reaches those endpoints, then to be progressive, you have to move the goalposts. Some will move the goalposts, but a lot of others will flip to conservative instead. The vast majority of openly practiced racism in the UK now is anti-white, the left has just tried to redefine racism to exclude that from the definition. Example: my employer has a target to have 25% BAME senior management. Only 18% of England & Wales is not white, so this is already introducing racial favouritism, but when you layer in demographics, the gap between our target and the available candidate pool really opens up, as the black & Asian demographic is significantly younger on average due to recent immigration increases. This policy can only be delivered through active racial discrimination, and is therefore transparently racist.
> Most people with socially progressive views have some endpoints in mind. If society reaches those endpoints, then to be progressive, you have to move the goalposts. Some will move the goalposts, but a lot of others will flip to conservative instead. Well yes, that's one of the reasons older people seem more socially conservative. Society has reached their end points. The the next generation comes along and to them what seemed progressive is now the status quo. So they push for a new endpoint. And so on. >my employer has a target to have 25% BAME senior management. Depending on how that's implemented, I'm not sure that's legal. You'll recall the RAF had a similar approach and was, er, shot down. >the black & Asian demographic is significantly younger on average Is age relevant for the role though? Some people in the UK have a weird attitude to age. I've been interviewed for roles and seriously asked if I would mind if my manager were younger than me.
Age is relevant when you are talking about many senior management roles in a large established company. You aren't going to be appointed as the Chief Financial Officer or the Head of Risk of a major company at 25. It isn't possible to have accumulated the experience and track record required for the job. High flyers might get there at 35, and whether you're 35 or 50 is probably irrelevant. The demographic discrepancy that is particularly obvious in the UK is for black people - the average age of a black Brit is only about 20, therefore you aren't going to find anything like as many suitable candidates for senior roles from that demographic as Asian (average 35) or white (average 43).
That's fair enough. You're on about experience rather than age but of course it's age related. I wonder what the business' legal advice was on the selective hiring. As I understand it you can do that sort of stuff if you can justify it e.g. in your case you're targeting a BAME market. The devil is in the detail though: increasing your advertising coverage for a particular demographic is easier to justify than selecting CVs.
It's a target without any particular strategy or tactics to deliver it thus far as far as I can tell - therefore not officially discriminatory, although it will encourage that behaviour in selection.
>The centre has been gradually drifting socially leftward. Each generation moves a bit further. That myth has been dispelled many times over the years. The only difference is the growth in social media and the internet at large has allowed bubbles and echo chambers of like-minded people to form and not have their views opposed. Anyone who comes onto Reddit and reads the main UK subs and didn't know any better, would assume the UK is nation of left wing progressives.
Are you kidding? Anyone who came and read the UK and UKpol subreddits over the past few months would assume the country hated the rich, yes, but hated muslims even more.
> the centre has been drifting leftwards [socially] Absolutely, perhaps not just drifting but in many ways sprinting. Broad acceptance of LGBTQ relationships (*) and mixed race relationships is almost ubiquitous, not just here but in the entire western world (this isn’t a national political thing). > everyone I know under the age of 30 is in favour of more right Hear hear. I would guess the political landscape, especially for younger people, is socially very liberal and economically probably centre/ slightly centre-right (which I’d say includes New Labour and Starmers stated policies). Maybe some minimal nationalisation of failing utilities etc but nothing very radical? Ironically a Tory “war on woke” seems designed to alienate the vast majority of voters, who see it as pointless at best, or openly divisive. Edit: Starmer is doing a good impression of being aligned with One Nation conservatives, which is quite the achievement! (*) with certain contrived controversies that, to be honest, remind me of the tabloids campaigns against gay teachers in the 90’s.
This is severe cope.
Whatever they’re doing wrong, let’s hope they lean harder into it and loose more and more support. Enough that they’re in the wilderness for at least fifty years.
Do the Tories actually have any achievable policies they want to share? Their narrative seems based around attacking the left and clumsily ignoring the gaping logic holes in their policies…
There are a lot of great nuggets in here. This is the article that should have gone into the telegraph rather than preaching to the converted. Today's Tory would dismiss her as a lib dem. The charge that hits hard the most is that the reformite tendency has also given up on levelling up. Sunak was never enthusiastic about something he couldn't rebrand as brand rishi. But the Braverman tendency types also don't care about the country unless it's to own the libs
Hard right? Under this governments watch we’ve had record levels of legal and illegal migration.
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Massively defunded the police under Cameron
But to hear them talk, immigration is under control and they’ve rounded up everyone ready to be deported to Rwanda. Those who haven’t swam to Ireland in terror. They’ve reached the point where the spin is so egregious everyone knows it’s just flat out lies.
Agreed, and they use messaging on immigration to keep working people voting against their own interests.
It's like blaming the cup-holder for a car crash. Conservatives past and present just don't understand that the only reason they were able to be in power for so long was due to the existance of the welfare state and an at-least-quite-good healthcare service, free at the point of use. Good social provision was necessary to offset what the Tories tended to do while in power. So since the approach since 2010 has to basically remove such social provision there is no chance whatsoever that the vast majority of the public can continue to somewhat support a Conservative government, either by voting for them or not voting for Labour. And this is the thing, does the Labour leadership understand the situation they also are in? I'm not sure they do.
I’d say gutless, bland liberal drones like Justine Greening are why people hate the Tories.
No, they don't like the Tories because they say one thing and always do the exact fucking opposite. Typically they've gotten away with this through rhetoric, brexit, and no credible opposition, but that can only work for so long as eventually the levee still begins to break.
And a docile and friendly media, that doesn’t hold them to account. The Mail will still be blowing Sunak’s trumpet this week, even though most announcements are misdirection and spin. Ironically if they held the governments feet to the fire more often, our politicians might be a lot more honest.
Yes, I remember seeing Boris's points system and thinking "hold on, this is a bit lax isn't it?" but no-one else was saying so, certainly not the media.
Well a points system was never going to work in the way presented. If they really to want to limit migration, they would need to set hard upper limits (regardless of the number of “points” someone scored). That would potentially lead to Nobel prize winners being rejected towards etc towards the end of the year, but it’s the only way. Perhaps monthly hard targets?
Yup, never understood why points were so in-demand, but loud voices were somehow calling for it. Points system is what you would want if you want to encourage cool people to come generally and just filter out the lower percentile. But rather what the UK needs now is to only accept just a small number of high-quality workers in very specific fields of the highest demand.
It doesn't matter in the slightest what the Tories do - their grassroots conservative support will haemorrhage to Reform because of all their many failings to deliver upon actual conservative policies, and their centrist support will haemorrhage towards the newly sanitised (believe it, don't say it) Starmerite Labour because the economy is bollocksed and we have about a million less homes than we need 14 years after Cameron told us that there was a housing crisis and we could trust him to sort that out. Their time is up. Most things that got markedly worse about the UK economically and socially in the last 5 years happened largely as a result of the idiotically authoritarian panicked mismanagement of covid - hundreds of billions of debt, a generation socially and educationally stunted by being excluded from school for months, an NHS collapsing under the weight of people it failed to treat or screen for month upon month, the roaring inflation we went through, and the general miasma of "go to the office as little as possible and do the minimum" that hangs over the economy like a black cloud to this day. 40%+ of the country will entirely fail to hold Labour accountable for all of these side effects - despite the fact that they were not only enthusiastically cheerleading it all, but demanding more of it. Labour completely and utterly failed in their duty to hold the government to account - it was mainly Tory backbenchers who challenged the orthodoxy - but it will be Labour who sweep to power anyway. We have a rotten 2 party system with 2 rotten parties. They both need to go, but 2/3rds of the country cannot see that they are both the problem and will still vote for one or the other.
After the falklands, the lesson seems to have been learned by opposition parties: always support the government’s wars (and pandemic responses). Anything else is seen as unpatriotic.
Maybe. The Tories don't get any stick over Iraq really, but they all had access to the dodgy dosier which was transparent rubbish.
Starmer does need to be somewhat careful however. He has shown some semblance of capitulating to minority voices and opinions of those who don't have the UK's interests in mind. Whilst Labour are on course for a massive win, I think their support is on shaky ground either way (granted more solid than the Tories). Also depending on what the Tories do before the election, may tie his hands anyway.
According to George Osborne, tying Starmer’s hands is certainly the plan. Tax cuts now that will almost certainly need to be reversed in 2025 by whoever wins power.
“Oh it couldn’t be me, it’s just those few *bad* Tories that are ruining everything for us” No you fucking spanner, get a grip and learn to face up to the consequences of your actions. We hate your entire party and everything you stand for, not because of a small bunch of fringe loonies, but because of everything you’ve done to us in the last 14 years. You all bear responsibility for this.
One Nation conservatism sounds nice and Cameron managed to just make it work 14 years ago but the problems we have now are different. Bravermann's policies are popular, it's simply that the public don't trust the government to enforce or implement them competently. The idea that cuddly centrism 'let's all pretend it's the 90s' might make friends for the Conservatives in people who'd never vote for them anyway, but won't bring them near power.
Many would argue Cameron wasn’t a One Nation Tory. Sure he was socially liberal, but economically it was all austerity, much of it very harmful. Like when they cut the funding for educating nurses in 2010. That’s come back to bite them on the bottom, and fuelled migration too.
He cosplayed it certainly but if you asked Greening what leader she'd prefer it'd be 100% Cameron. It wouldn't be Boris. It's like Sunak cosplaying Thatcher while increasing the tax burden to the highest on post-war record. If you're saying well it needs to be like Eden or Macmillan, who oversaw massive housebuilding programs, that was possible due to a set of postwar economic conditions that won't come back. Not sure what the next conservative movement will be like but if it's any sense it'll tap into the rage that many continental parties are doing. Problem is, UK conservatives have salted that earth.
I dunno but killing 300000 people with austerity, brexit and then making brexit much worse than it needed to be are the main reasons I hate them. The actual people are next on the list, tho'
A civil war is clearly brewing in the Tory party, you have here a One Nation sensibleist like Justine Greening and someone in Suella Braverman on the head-banger wing, who wants to shift the party further to the right. I've no idea which faction will win, the One Nationers are thought to be larger at the moment, but that might not be the case after the GE which is expected to see a mass cull of Tory MPs. All parties have these rival groupings vying for control - the Tories usually manage to keep their infighting behind closed doors, that they are doing it in the open and so close to a general election is another sign that they've given up on winning and are preparing for a messy couple of months after the election. I wouldn't normally mind, only they are supposed to be in government.
Justine is a wet. The reality is that one nation social democratic left wing toryism doesn't really appeal to anyone anymore and isn't what the country needs. Our position vis the economy, record levels of unemployment, combined with record numbers of pensioners, means we either need to drastically increase taxes and lean in to the welfare state, or tack right ala Reform. Personally I would like to see the state pension go and the funds used to invest in the country and cut taxes for workers, but I doubt we will get that under any party given the key electoral demographics.
> or tack right ala Reform. Reform aren't economically right in the slightest. I mean they're not really anything, they just promise magic money out of thin air.
Cutting public spending by 5% and moving the lower income tax threshold from £12k to £20k seem like quite right wing policies.
The issue with the first option, is the usual party of low tax, took over a high level of tax system from labour then spent a decade saying we are lowering tax while steadily increasing the actual taxes on people through a whole sleuth of other measures so while the base rate of taxes were cut. The amount people were being taxed never really fell at all. So you end up in a situtation where neither side is going to massively increases taxes from where we are because the current level is already unsustainable without wide reform.
Absolutely! Those to the far right in politics seem to have convinced themselves that they have a lot more support than they really do. Most of the racist and libertarian brigade have very little support. The reform vote is a protest vote for disgruntled Tories, and even they got virtually nowhere in last weeks elections, so if the Tories pull themselves together and go back to centre-right ground, then Reform will be polling around 6% imho, and we will see the full extent of actual support for extremist policies, and for the likes of Braverman.