[Politics] Tory meltdown finally arrived [was: incoming]...

[Audax]

This is exactly why the tories will be relaxed about this. . . Thdey'll pull some bullshit out of the bag and still cling on because no one else will co-operate

sadly half the nation are idiotic/selfish scum With no interest in the greater good. It's all they've known for over 40 years.

I actually looked through the ward-by-ward results for Wealden. Looks an awful lot like the left-sided parties agreed not to compete against each other. In the vast majority of cases where a Con was beaten by a LDem, Green, or Lab there was no 3rd party competition.

Edit: I love a spreadsheet... There's a few wards were Cons got in because the opposing vote was split (usually LDem vs Grn). Overall, Cons stood in all wards but 1 (and won one uncontested). LDem's stood in just over half (21 of the 41), Greens in 13, Labour in 10, and Independents in 19. Reform stood in 1 ward and split the vote (RFM + Con would have beat LDem who actually won). Overall, just under 26k anti-Tory votes cast (LDem + Lab + Grn), 19k pro-Tory (Con + RFM + UKIP), and 8.2k Indy votes. Looks to me like Ghani won't be hoovering up 60% at the next GE, question will be whether Lab/Grn/LDem voters can get behind a single anti-Tory candidate in enough numbers to take advantage of any collapse in Tory vote share.

From memory at the last GE Wealden was a problem for tactical voting. There were multiple tactical voting sites, none of them managed to gain traction as "the one" to rely on, and the two biggest ones disagreed on whether the best tactical vote was Lab or LDem. If for next year the anti-Tory groups can be sensible and all agree on a single tactical voting site, with a single advised anti-Tory candidate per seat, then something might happen. Question is, who? LDem's very strong showing in Council election this week, but very little in the way of Lab candidates for folks that way inclined to vote for. But also ... is there a groundswell of support for the Greens? A poor 4th at the last GE, but they've nearly tripled their seats on the council this week. Or is that just a product of the wards where they won being a Green vs Con race with no alternative?

 

[zefarelly]

I actually looked through the ward-by-ward results for Wealden. Looks an awful lot like the left-sided parties agreed not to compete against each other. In the vast majority of cases where a Con was beaten by a LDem, Green, or Lab there was no 3rd party competition.

Edit: I love a spreadsheet... There's a few wards were Cons got in because the opposing vote was split (usually LDem vs Grn). Overall, Cons stood in all wards but 1 (and won one uncontested). LDem's stood in just over half (21 of the 41), Greens in 13, Labour in 10, and Independents in 19. Reform stood in 1 ward and split the vote (RFM + Con would have beat LDem who actually won). Overall, just under 26k anti-Tory votes cast (LDem + Lab + Grn), 19k pro-Tory (Con + RFM + UKIP), and 8.2k Indy votes. Looks to me like Ghani won't be hoovering up 60% at the next GE, question will be whether Lab/Grn/LDem voters can get behind a single anti-Tory candidate in enough numbers to take advantage of any collapse in Tory vote share.

From memory at the last GE Wealden was a problem for tactical voting. There were multiple tactical voting sites, none of them managed to gain traction as "the one" to rely on, and the two biggest ones disagreed on whether the best tactical vote was Lab or LDem. If for next year the anti-Tory groups can be sensible and all agree on a single tactical voting site, with a single advised anti-Tory candidate per seat, then something might happen. Question is, who? LDem's very strong showing in Council election this week, but very little in the way of Lab candidates for folks that way inclined to vote for. But also ... is there a groundswell of support for the Greens? A poor 4th at the last GE, but they've nearly tripled their seats on the council this week. Or is that just a product of the wards where they won being a Green vs Con race with no alternative?

Adur has been blue for 100 years . . . Laughton needs shoving out to sea in a leaking dinghy, it will only happen if Green or yellew field a decent candidate and there is tactical voting. I don't think Labour can win here, but usually come a distant 2nd.

 

[Machiavelli]

That’s a “things went wrong” from a values and philosophy point of view.

@jcdenton08 was saying that strong majority government gets things done and coalition doesn’t. I was pointing out that the Con Lib coalition did get things done while the country has been in complete chaos under the huge majority won by Boris.

Personally I think a progressive coalition of Labour, Lib Dem, Green and SNP would be great next time out. It’s how the majority vote. The vast majority of the country couldn’t give a shiny shit about Brexit or the culture wars. They vote for parties other than the Tories but spread that vote across three or four of them.

Largely agree (although pretty sure that many gave enormous shiny shits about Brexit -- but think your point is that they no longer do)

 

[Guinness Boy]

Largely agree (although pretty sure that many gave enormous shiny shits about Brexit -- but think your point is that they no longer do)

Exactly my point. The Tories are still trying to weaponise something that many of us have now just accepted will make us worse off, less tolerant and more inconvenienced.

^^(irony intended. I mean very few people will now vote for or against the Tories purely because of Brexit)

 

[A1X]

At least I think that's what it's

Sir Kier needs to reverse some laws when he gets in.

Being arrested for peaceful protest IS NOT OK.

Dozens of protesters arrested during Coronation

Republic CEO Graham Smith was among 52 detained in London, as protests were held around the UK.

www.bbc.co.uk

It’s seems that pissing off Tories is an arrestable offence now.

Especially chilling given the protest had all been agreed and signed off by the Met before the event, sounds like the Home Office flexing their muscles and overruling them

 

[sparkie]

I really hope the Tories reflect and turn away from being a far right blukip libertarian cult and back into a 1 nation party delivering for the people. Sort the economy, join EFTA and refill the produce on the near-empty-little-choice-small-shrivelled-expensive-product supermarket shelves.

But sadly they won't

 

[Bodian]

Especially chilling given the protest had all been agreed and signed off by the Met before the event, sounds like the Home Office flexing their muscles and overruling them

Isn't this sort of thing what we were told wouldn't happen with the new powers/laws.......

 

[jcdenton08]

I honestly don’t see it that way. I would argue that single party governments often get drunk on their own power, and coalitions check the largest party from unleashing unpopular policies/vanity projects on the public without too much scrutiny.

The whole art of politics is meant to be compromise, it’s only in the U.K. and US that it’s entirely childish and adversarial. Our electoral system encourages these bizarre excesses, it leads to attention seeking children being given positions of power.

What coalitions do is force parties to find common ground. It’s possible for that to lead to better policy than a single party unchecked. Neither Labour or Liberal parties want to fail, through self-interest if nothing else. If it happens, they’ll find a way.

Didn’t the exact opposite happen when Clegg lied and backdoored his way into power, ruining his career, handing the Tories a majority and five consecutive terms virtually unopposed?

Liberals hurt the country just as much as the Tories by losing all their good will for a generation, letting the Tories secure their position and become the vulgar beast we see today.

Success is hard to measure, the only universally accepted successful coalition in the last two centuries was one of necessity in war time in the 1940’s.

 

[A1X]

Isn't this sort of thing what we were told wouldn't happen with the new powers/laws.......

The road to fascism is paved with people telling others not to overreact

 

[Thunder Bolt]

Didn’t the exact opposite happen when Clegg lied and backdoored his way into power, ruining his career, handing the Tories a majority and five consecutive terms virtually unopposed?

Liberals hurt the country just as much as the Tories by losing all their good will for a generation, letting the Tories secure their position and become the vulgar beast we see today.

Success is hard to measure, the only universally accepted successful coalition in the last two centuries was one of necessity in war time in the 1940’s.

More often than not, coalitions are not just two parties making up the numbers, which is what happened in 2010. I agree with you about Clegg, who took off, after messing up his role, and letting the students down.
Coalitions very often consist of three or more parties, so compromise is reached.

 

[virtual22]

One of the outcomes of a coalition could be a return to Europe. Secretly I think Labour would like to have another referendum on it but can't bring themselves to come out and say it, we know the lib dems wanted this at the last election. So they form a coalition and labour can "blame" the lib dems for forcing it upon them as part the coalition agreement.

 

[A1X]

One of the outcomes of a coalition could be a return to Europe. Secretly I think Labour would like to have another referendum on it but can't bring themselves to come out and say it, we know the lib dems wanted this at the last election. So they form a coalition and labour can "blame" the lib dems for forcing it upon them thus them as a condition.

Would be a certain irony that the gamut Cameron tried to pull in promising one then blaming the Lib Dem’s for not having one could go full circle.

 

[KZNSeagull]

One of the outcomes of a coalition could be a return to Europe. Secretly I think Labour would like to have another referendum on it but can't bring themselves to come out and say it, we know the lib dems wanted this at the last election. So they form a coalition and labour can "blame" the lib dems for forcing it upon them as part the condition agreement.

They don't need a referendum. If they have Big Balls they would put us back into the single market in some form ASAP.

 

[chickens]

I really hope the Tories reflect and turn away from being a far right blukip libertarian cult and back into a 1 nation party delivering for the people. Sort the economy, join EFTA and refill the produce on the near-empty-little-choice-small-shrivelled-expensive-product supermarket shelves.

But sadly they won't

Agree completely, both with the hope, and the slim chance of the Conservatives changing course. As we’ve seen in the US, once a party goes down this populist/fact denying rabbit hole, it seemingly has to keep doubling down on the misinformation because the alternative is to admit to misleading their voters. They’ve turned back to Trump in the Republican Party, and even now Boris Johnson will be looking for the opening that gets him back through the door of No. 10.

Our institutions (including the Conservative Party itself) have not proven well led or resistant to opportunism, and Johnson’s backers will be looking for a road back, which I hope the Conservatives are not stupid enough to provide.

Conservative values did once include compassion, pragmatism, and an understanding that efficiency gains could only be carried out if there were genuine improvements in efficiency to be made. You didn’t just underfund the service and then see what happened.

As the years have gone on and public services have continued to decline, even the hardest thinker may have started to see a correlation between the Conservative obsession (in rhetoric at least) with tax cuts and cutting public spending as a double-edged sword.

If Conservative government wanted to reinvent itself it should, frankly, look to lose its populist culture warriors, move sharply back toward the centre and set itself up as a party of competent, pragmatic technocrats, genuinely looking to improve all of Britain.

Sadly, like you, I fear the deal it did to ‘get Brexit done’ by purging its pragmatic centre and ensuring “ideological purity” has robbed the party of its reputation and a lot of its talent, and will be very difficult to undo.

 

[TomandJerry]

Good old Lee..

The Conservative party’s deputy chair, Lee Anderson, has said that anti-monarchist campaigners should emigrate rather than use their right to free speech to protest against the coronation of Charles III.

 

[WATFORD zero]

They don't need a referendum. If they have Big Balls they would put us back into the single market in some form ASAP.

I'm not sure they they need Big Balls, just a little common sense, the tide has turned long ago in every single poll

 

[clapham_gull]

Read a few books about the coalition, the Tories ate the lib dems for breakfast with help from the civil service.

 

[KZNSeagull]

I'm not sure they they need Big Balls, just a little common sense, the tide has turned long ago in every single poll

It's not going to happen then.

 

[aolstudios]

Good old Lee..

The Conservative party’s deputy chair, Lee Anderson, has said that anti-monarchist campaigners should emigrate rather than use their right to free speech to protest against the coronation of Charles III.

The berks' Berk

 

[jcdenton08]

Read a few books about the coalition, the Tories ate the lib dems for breakfast with help from the civil service.

What were the books called and who by? I’d be very interested in having a read if written in a non-partisan way