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UK General Election - 12th December 2019 | Con 365, Lab 203, LD 11, SNP 48, Other 23 - Tory Majority of 80
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Stay classy Boris
It’s staggering that the Tories are seemingly running a campaign talking about things being broken and hoping everyone ignores the fact that they’ve been in charge for 9 years and it’s them that pissing broke everything.
And worse still, it’s going to work.
And worse still, it’s going to work.
Well you've sure proved them wrong. Anyway 4+ years of DWP disability tests, dropping bombs on little brown kids in Yemen and this
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Cheers mate. Really fighting the good cause.
Why do you say sorry? It’s perfectly acceptable to not like Corbyn’s policies. Further more that doesn’t make you a Tory bastard, yellow Tory bastard, or any of the other banalities that pervade this threat
It wasn’t an apology T00lsh3d, but some of these guys put so much effort into their bullish arguments and accusations, generalisations and sweeping statements regarding anyone who doesn’t ride on the Labour train it’s almost admirable.
I agree with the gist. My question to you, is what other choice do we have? (Those who are deeply uncomfortable with Corbyn as Labour leader, but diametrically opposed to the Tories) - It's the devil or the deep blue sea.
Pretty much Owlo, and that is working both ways for people too.
If I was a die hard blue Tory that couldn’t stand either Boris or Corbyn and was capable of absolute pragmatism I really do think I’d back Corbyn in this election because I honestly don’t believe he would last more than a couple year or two in the job with the absolute torrent of abuse he will receive from the media, I also think he would struggle to whip the residual Blarites. You’d hope that it would give the Tories a year or two to reflect and decouple themselves from the far right and move the political spectrum in the UK back towards the centre and some sense of normality.
Genuine question to current labour supporters who aren’t fans of Corbyn. Who would you like as leader?
Speaking for @esmufc07, Owen Jones.
I wouldn't call myself a Labour supporter anymore but that could change with Starmer as leader.
I'm not sure. Corbyn is both far too authoritarian for my tastes, and far too left wing. I would generally like the SNP philosophy is they were unionists as opposed to nationalists.
Indeed. As I said above, I feel he could get a referendum over the line and do some minor stuff, but none of his radical jibber jabber is actually going to happen. The PLP is far more hostile to it than the base.
As a traditional Labour supporter driven away by the party's shift to the right in the 90s and by the introduction of policies (tuition fees as an example) that I fundamentally oppose Corbyn is, in many ways, closer to that which I might vote for again. That is not to say that I think he has the qualities of political nous and compromise needed to succeed, nor do I agree with all of his policies or actions but, if I were in England, I suspect I'd vote Labour at this election (although I may remain Green as I will be voting over the border).
I think Corbyn alongside a more "New Labour" style leadership partner might work and temper/augment his weaknesses.
To be fair, I pointed out yesterday that actually this entire forum tends to stay pretty clear of the name calling shite. It tends to be the people anti Corbyn who use those school ground terms and also tend to float around the "Red Tory" stuff. Just flick back a couple of pages and you'll see what I mean if you can be bothered.
I don't really mind who people vote for as long as it isn't Tory. Mind you, I still understand and respect people from wealth voting for them, naturally I disagree but I understand them wanting to protect their own assets. Fair enough. What I don't get are people from working class or middle class backgrounds voting Tory. It baffles me.
Starmer is the only realistic name that could plausibly get both sides of the party onside... However the problem with questions like this, is that the people who most often propose them, act like the populist youthquake Corbyn engendered, is a dismissive anomaly, that reasonable Gen X centrist liberals merely need to weather or see out, rather than acknowledge or win round.
As such, the idea that Labour just needs a new leader to somehow become instantly electable, is flawed from the get go... as it presumes the political default, and the only voters that really matter, are the kind of nostalgic middle class media types who don't understand why a whole generation of voting age adults don't appreciate the New Labour centrism of Blair and Campbell as some ideological Valhalla... and that the generational political shift towards the left, is not only uninteresting, but something to be tangibly defeated, rather than encouraged or encompassed, or even understood.
Corbyn is a far from ideal Labour leader. But the people who elected him (twice!) aren't just going to fall obediently in line if he's replaced by Jess Phillips, just as the kind of people who think Jess Phillips would be a popular leader, because she came across quite well in a Sunday Times editorial they read once, where she was sitting backwards on a chair like Michelle Pfieffer in that one movie, aren't going to (and have consistently refused to) reciprocally fall behind Corbyn...
I personally hope Starmer gets a chance to lead the party at some point. But I'm under no illusion that if he did, he'd end up facing anything less than the same consistent co-ordinated character assassination afforded Corbyn. And that the first to turn against him, will likely be the same who insist their only issue is the leadership.
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I always look at policies.
The membership chooses the leader.
Look at policies.
The membership chooses the leader.
Look at policies.
I’ll set my stall out right here.
I don’t have a problem with Corbyn, in fact as a direct comparison with Johnson, i definitely don’t have a problem with him because Johnson’s an odious prick. The problem I have with him is his economic policies. They are too radical, too much of an assault on business.
Strangely, I think if he’d watered them down a bit and not gone for broke in this manifesto, I think he’d have a much better chance.
What pisses me off big time is the anti-semitism allegations. They were so easily avoidable by him taking a rational stance on the matter, but because he hasn’t and the press are out for him, it’s all we ever hear about! I’m not dismissing it as an issue btw, I’d just rather the leaders said “right, zero tolerance on discrimination”, and we could fight the elections on issues like, “is the 300bn equity-grab going to drive foreign investment away” vs “do the tories have the moral and fiscal right to claim they are the right people to overhaul the public services”. Instead it’s......”but he said letterboxes”, “but he’s an ira sympathiser”
That's what you get when you change leader.
As someone who's an ex labour voter rather than supporter, that's a tough one. I think you need someone who can do the job Kinnock did - someone who loves the party, but wants to make it electable and is prepared to fight for it. I like Jess Phillips but don't know if she's leadership material. Anyone else is just going to be a prisoner of the Momentum tendency.
Kinnock was a clown and never got elected
Only Momentum supported candidates will be elected leader for the foreseeable future, due to the way the leadership contests work.
Given he has 0 zero chance of an outright majority, and the only way he leads this country is with a coalition with SNP at a minimum, his policies will naturally be pared back anyway
I don't get the impression that Jess Phillips has the right temperament to be leader, but she'd probably be a popular one.
I like Starmer as he's clearly intelligent, thoughtful, a very good debater and is capable of working with others for common goals. I also think he'd be walking this election as he'd be the perfect candidate to expose Johnson for the amoral bluffer he is.
I don't see many of these qualities in the current leadership, unfortunately.
I used productivity data to illustrate what many people back in the mid 2000's recognised as a given which was an overloaded public sector where money was spent without proper scrunity. The business I now run was a beneficiary of this... It was common knowledge that if it were a local authority project the price was inflated by 20%.
Of course our debt has a relationship with the amount we can spend. Our interest bill is currently larger than our transport, housing or policing budgets. How big do you think is too big? Plus even if you believe the deficit didn't matter, why not combine responsible spending increases over 6 years with tax cuts targeted at poorer people? It's a hell of a lot easier to reverse a £50b per annum tax cut when a recession hits than it is to try to claw it back via cuts.
I don't think it's the benefit of hindsight that shows spend was far too high. As I said every family knows that when times are financially good you put something away for when times aren't so good.
The problem was Blair genuinely (and stupidly) thought it was the end of boom/bust cycles. Him and Brown were naive in the extreme.
Ireland's tax to GDP ratio is around 23% compared with UK over 33%
Well there’d need to be a hell of a lot of watering
Kinnock was anything but a clown, he fought the fights so John Smith and Blair didn't have to. He wasn't electable himself but he helped make labour so.
Britain was in an unprecedented period of growth with full employment yet was running a 3% deficit. If Brown was truly the Keyensian he pretended to be, he should've been repaying debt or investing in our sovereign wealth fund instead at that point in the economic cycle.
Yeah, I agree and I am a traditional Labour voter but can’t support their some of their current positions and certainly can’t see JC as PM. Not the man to lead our country In my view.
"If you're convicted of a serious terrorist offence, there should be a mandatory minimum sentence of 14 years".
If Corbyn had said that you can guarantee they'd be driving home the 'soft on terror' angle.
I personally think Boris himself is a centrist. He's surrounded himself by more right wing Tory Brexit supporters as his entire platform was singing to the leave Tory base.
I think from that point of view a small Tory majority is the worst of all worlds for anyone left leaning. If he gets a 50 seat majority I can see the cabinet being completely reshuffled and I think he'll remove the likes of Patel, Mogg, Gove and Raab. In that sense a centrist in a marginal is better off voting Tory than anti-Tory.
His spending plans are certainly centrist.
I get why Corbyn is a welcome return to the left by Labour voters who felt deserted by TB in the late 90’s but equally there are a lot of voters now deserted by JC and the shift back to hardline socialism now.
Aside from being put off by some of Labours plans I think JC is totally unsuitable for being our country’s leader both at home and on the world stage and the thought of McDonnell in number 11 is scary.
Starmer would definitely be a better, more inclusive and acceptable ‘front of house’ no doubt.
I feel personally attacked.
By asking that question I wasn’t dismissing the current ‘youthquake’ at all. It is simply another wave in the political tides ebb and flow that has been happening since the birth of democracy.
And I’m not suggesting it is purely Labours leader that is stopping me from voting for them, far from it, policy is everything for me and I think the presumption of political default is in everyone’s political DNA isn’t it? We all want to see the ‘other side’ defeated, that isn’t the sole reserve of gen X liberals. We don’t necessarily ‘think’ politics any more than we ‘feel’ politics.
I personally think anyone who thinks Jess Phillips should be anywhere near our front bench politics need their head read. I always think she’d look more at home having a drunken slanging match outside a kebab shop on a Friday night than in the HOC and is one of the few people who make JC look good to me. Just my opinion mind you
I agree on your last paragraph.
Agreed but the leader is important.
I agree, I don’t think this is BJs ideal government at all, just one he had to form out of necessity just as I think long term he would have to change it to keep the Conservatives electable after Brexit.
I would hope it changes shape quite considerably if he gets a majority.
Absolutely agreed.
Evidently not given the majority we're going to get with what is quite literally a complete fecking idiot at the helm.
I think manifesto policies are only a small part of the decision voters have to make, as these plans are based on the assumption that everything goes smoothly. The much bigger part is weighing up how a government will react to events when they're in power - economic events, geopolitical events and domestic political events.
What happens if there's another huge recession in the next couple of years? All the manifesto pledges go out the window, so it's important to vote for a government you think is competent, adaptable and hopefully with values that broadly align with your own.
Richard Feynman said it well:
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