>>98566 You know how every party has its lunatic fringe? Imagine a party that agreed to merge with another and wind itself up, but the lunatic fringe stayed behind. That's your modern day SDP.
>>98566 All of our fringe parties have been irreparably ruined by the anti-lockdown movement sadly.
If you think about it a party that's Labour without the bollocks or propensity to put bricks through their comrades windows and LibDem without wanting to be ruled from another country should do well but anyone with sense would stick with the internal politics of a mainstream party while the new core would be people who are actually mental. Like Amy Gallagher who came into politics because she was set off by a poster about white privilege - and actually lives in Surrey!
>>98569 You're missing a few steps - they split from Labour when it was going through a new periodic "let's be unelectable" phase and took prominent MPs with them including Roy Jenkins, a ChangeUK before Nandos ever existed. They didn't do terribly either and formed an alliance with the Liberal party but got fucked by the Falklands War and Michael Foot's disastrous election forcing Labour to shift rightwards.
Once the SDP-Liberal alliance fell into trouble it formally started the process of merging with the then Liberal party. Some in SDP didn't like this and splintered (along with a Liberal party that also still exists) which then got massacred in polls and the leadership disbanded the party - only for membership to bring it back in a third iteration. Unfortunately a party run by its membership rather than its leadership is a bad idea.
It's an interesting What-If to look at, there's a timeline where the SDP replaced Labour and had it already created mirror party structures. One where you had Charles Kennedy in charge in the 90s and George Galloway's political career ended before it ever started. We might have brought in proportional representation, EU membership would be a pillar of the leading opposition party and there could even have been a split in the Tories.
>>98597 I ducked out of work early but also voted Lib Dem so make of that what you will.
Like any good liberal democrat I'm seeing a foreign woman who can vote for the first time this year. I didn't have an answer when she asked me why everyone who runs for office in the west is so old.
>>98600 Rishi gives a fuck and he'll use the polling to decide if he will call an election now or limp on for a few more months. This may be the only chance in your life to vote Tory in order to trick them out of office.
>>98598 I didn't get home 'til 9, and the only ballot was for PCC, which I'd have had to spoil given their statements, so fuck it. Likewise, first time ever.
The cunts have broken the social contract, I feel that direct action is in my future.
The BBC's election coverage is wheeling out all the exact same talking heads that are never off these programmes. I was hoping they would bring in a higher class of pundit, but it's Sonia Sodha right now, and they've already had Henry Hill. That godawful American bitch (Kate Andrews) hasn't come on and forced me to change the channel yet, but I know she'll be on at some point because it is her whole raison d'etre.
>>98611 He was already fucked from the start, nobody likes unelected PMs. A damning display of his irrelevance was when he mooted leaving the ECHR and found nobody cared, whether they're opposed to the ECHR's legal primacy or not. And why? Because nobody on any corner of the political mosaic believes for a second that he would (or could) ever do it. His tenure is, in the parlance of our times, a nothingburger.
Is there a party that will address the average persons concerns around immigration? I really feel like there's no party that represents a sensible concern. The state of this country these days is upsetting, really.
Comprehensively so, yes. The Tories have almost zero chance of winning the next general election. Sunak would need the biggest comeback ever just to get Labour down to a small majority. There is now a very real risk that the Tories could be pushed into third place behind the Lib Dems.
I'm pretty sure that Labour's policy is "stop the boats by doing a deal with France to process asylum claims in an orderly way", which seems quite reasonable to me.
>>98614 I don't think it's as bleak as things look once you remember that we live in a system of FPTP. Reform stole Tory votes which looks scary for them until you realise that's translated to 2 council seats, which is half what the 'Workers Party of Britain' have secured.
There's a reason the Lib Dems electoral strategy now involves targeting resources and having local parties adopt whatever polices they want at the doorstep to win votes. Even to the level of having opposite positions as soon as they cross the boundaries of electoral wards. Ed Davey gets criticism for being invisible and a policy vacuum but it's the game he playing.
>>98613 Is there a single country that manages this?
>>98616 Labour's policy will actually be to bring in ID cards by 2027 under the argument that it will be a deterrent. Man with a hammer and all that. The 'deal' with France won't work at the implementation phase and everyone can see it because neither the French nor the illegal immigrants have any incentive to cooperate in good faith.
>I don't think it's as bleak as things look once you remember that we live in a system of FPTP.
That's precisely why the Tories are in so much trouble. In a PR system, there's a roughly linear relationship between vote share and seat share. In FPTP, that relationship is highly non-linear - dropping from 25% vote share to 24% costs you far more seats than dropping from 26% to 25%. There's a very narrow margin between getting a reasonable number of seats and getting almost nothing.
The Tories are right on the brink of that inflection point. They're currently polling at about the same vote share as the Lib Dems won in 2010. Labour's vote is very efficiently distributed. The Tories will be doing well to win 100 seats. It isn't quite unprecedented, but you need to go back to 1931 to find anything like it.
It's Tory hopium of course but it would be scandalous if the Tories manage to win on an utterly unelectable candidate by partly stacking the deck. Also there's a conspiracy theory that the delay in counting votes in London is so Sadiq Khan can personally rub out all the votes made by pencil.
>>98619 >dropping from 25% vote share to 24% costs you far more seats than dropping from 26% to 25%
But 24% can also win you more seats than 26% if you win them in the right area. We're seeing it right now in the disparity between councillors and councils.
I looked up the council results for Greater Manchester, and in almost every seat (ward?), the winning candidate got more votes than every other candidate put together. Is that normal?
>>98621 A lot of the country is like that, where voting boils down to a performative exercise. I have a lot of respect for the local parties that operate in these conditions, they might be stuffed with swivel-eyed loons but they're normal people getting involved.
Yes. It's a natural result of our First-Past-The-Post voting system and our very strict laws on campaign funding. You get nothing for coming second, so there's no point wasting resources on campaigning in a seat that you don't think you'll have a realistic chance of winning. The parties feel obliged to field candidates in as many seats as possible, but they're often just paper candidates. At the general election, they tend to be young campaigners who are paying their dues in the hopes of being offered a nomination for a winnable seat. At the local elections, they're often just a random person from the local party who was willing to put their name down. They're basically left to their own devices unless they do something seriously embarrassing.
This is one of the reasons why the Tory party is so shit at the moment. At the 2019 election, a lot of Tory candidates won seats in the North against all expectations - the constituencies were solidly Labour in the past, but went Tory because of a combination of Get Brexit Done, the unique "charisma" of Boris Johnson and a general loathing of Jeremy Corbyn. Because no-one expected them to win, these candidates were relatively young and inexperienced, they weren't very carefully vetted and they weren't really prepared for life as an MP. Suddenly the parliamentary party was flooded with nutters and morons who would never have been put forward as candidates if anyone thought they might actually win.
Do you think they're not calling for Rishi to step down is because they know they're fucked regardless, and it's easier to blame him than try stop the ship sinking with another captain?
Very sad about Jamie Driscoll losing the North East mayorality. The way Labour treated him was disgusting – probably the prime example of how vengeful and petty the right of the party truly is. Despite this they manage to skirt any accusations of being "Stalinists" or such like.
>>98626 The majority of the parliamentary Conservative Party seem to have realised they can only look even worse by changing leader five minutes before an election. There also isn't one guy or girl ready to step up and proclaim themselves successor, so it'd be another contest, which would take at least several weeks and involve even more Tories blaming Tories for Torying. Then who do you even end up with? Probably a complete freak like the Evangelical Kemi Badenoch or another non-entity like they have already. Of course, they might go completely bananas first thing Monday and start another bloodletting regardless.
I'm probably insane for thinking this, but they might have been better off sticking with Johnson. For whatever reason, he's the Pied Piper for morons and we've got plenty of those in the UK, sadly. I don't think stage 4 Borison would have won another election, but would it have been worse than the ruthless bloody beating CCHQ are eyeballing now? I guess we'll never know.
Would you like to hear a mentalist do gymnastics? How long can you last in the world of Peston and Truss:
>>98626 There's been no shortage of rumours of a coup for months, I think the problem is that they can't find a willing captain. You'd not only ruin your entire career but also whatever faction of the party you take with you.
ARE Priti would never do it either because she knows that the longer it is until an election the more chaos we're going to get for government spending plans. It's already been shown that you can run a party election very quickly but this time anyone setting departmental budgets is touching cloth:
>A new paper from the IfG says failing to complete a quick-fire spending round by December will lead to "high levels of instability" because of the delay to government departments, local authorities and devolved administrations knowing what their budgets from April 2025 will be. It says that because the general election will now not take place until June at the earliest, any spending review will already have to take place closer to the point at which departmental budgets run out than at any time in more than four decades.
>Report authors Olly Bartrum and Ben Paxton said an autumn general election could leave ministers and officials with just weeks to set spending plans, while a winter polling day "could land the next government in unchartered territory from day one". They suggest that the next government will be best advised to conduct a rapid one-year spending review exercise for 2025-26, and then begin work on a multi-year spending review for the remainder of the parliamentary term, for confirmation in autumn 2025. Even so, their report notes that, historically, comprehensive spending reviews can take more than a year to prepare.
https://www.civilserviceworld.com/professions/article/departments-face-uncharted-territory-because-of-spendingreview-uncertainty
I mean as absurd as it would have sounded if you told me this at the time, I definitely think the country as a whole would have been better off if we stuck with Johnson. The absolute shambles that followed have only accelerated the harm being done, and I am pretty convinced the electorate was already turning against the party by the end of covid. We'd be more or less where we are now but w wouldn't have had it quite as bad with the mortgage shocks and sudden currency turbulency and all that while the Tories shat the bed.
The majority of Tory MPs simply don't care, because they know they're going to lose their seat no matter who is leading the party. They're too busy lining up a job to care about party infighting.
No-one even vaguely sensible would take the job, in the knowledge that the election would be humiliating and they'd likely face a leadership challenge afterwards. They're keeping their powder dry for a leadership bid after the election.
There's a minority of nutters who would want to replace Sunak with their preferred nutter, but they're too factionally fragmented to make anything happen.
>>98630 No-one even vaguely sensible would take the job, in the knowledge that the election would be humiliating
So, Liz again?
Met her at a constituency thing recently. She did understand the issue, and appears to have done what she promised, so it's possible she's a usable constituency MP, or maybe reckons her seat is safe enough that it's worth putting some effort in. PM, though, I really hope not.
Anyone know where I can get a hooky copy of Britannia unchained? I'd hate to give her money.
>>98625 The Conservatives are now the third-biggest party, yes, but I have just noticed that their number of councillors very nearly halved in just one election. That really is apocalyptic.
>>98633 They're the third biggest and lost half their seats of those being contested this year. They're still the second largest party in local government in England, though after this week's results they will have almost 1000 fewer councillors than Labour.
>>98633 Lib Dems just do very well in council elections. They run local candidates to each ward rather than parachutists that then work very hard on the things residents care about like potholes while HQ mostly lets them run their own strategies. You can in a way compare them to a lot of the independents who have challenged Labour over Gaza, they've mustered local opposition on a single issue and been a face in the community - with a smattering of vague populist positions where they exist.
The problem becomes that parliamentary seats are much larger and in a national contest people vote against the other guy. So for example Rishi might get middle England fired up about Starmer not being able to identify a woman and Corbyn-era foreign policy positions. The kind of stuff that makes people say 'yeah, fuck that guy'.
The Lib Dems are likely to do quite well at the general election. The Tories have been moving towards the populist right in an attempt to court the Savile sympathisers in the Red Wall, but that's badly alienating lots of traditional centre-right Tory voters in the Southeast.
There are an awful lot of well-off people who want low taxes, but are nonetheless pro-EU and socially liberal. The sort of person who likes Rory Stewart very much does not like Lee Anderson, which is where the Lib Dems can capitalise. They're acutely aware of this and are aggressively targeting their campaigning at the significant number of Con/Lib marginals.
On a 13% swing they could be looking at gaining 40+ seats, which is entirely realistic. Things get considerably tougher for them beyond that point, but I think they'd be delighted with that result.
I am currently in Belgium, and today was local-elections day for the Belgians. I am very passionate about electoral reform, and the Belgian election system is completely different, with proportional representation and absolutely no first-past-the-post bollocks. So I've got to see how it would actually work if we had it in England.
Almost every seat has a tiny party to represent local interests; the big parties are so much less powerful that it really is a dream. The results for the small town / large village next to mine had four parties running, all of which name either the postcode area or the name of the place. Yay!
However, they are not real parties. Each one is a coalition of several other parties, who have acknowledged that they won't be able to win on their own so they clubbed together into teams, and told their voters to vote for the team instead.
My issue with this is that I looked up the "team" for my area, and the team I looked at contains both Open VLD and Groen. Who are they?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Flemish_Liberals_and_Democrats >Ideologically, Open VLD started as an economically liberal[12] and somewhat libertarian Thatcherite party under its founder, Guy Verhofstadt, which mirrored some of the original ideology of the PVV. The VLD rapidly became more centrist and gave up much of its free market approach, partly under the influence of Verhofstadt's political scientist brother Dirk Verhofstadt. However, the VLD continued to contain conservative-libertarian and classical liberal wings with ties to think-tanks like Nova Civitas.
So, the Tories then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groen_(political_party)
>Groen (Dutch: [ɣrun] ⓘ; lit. 'Green'), founded as Agalev, is a green[2][4] Flemish political party in Belgium. The main pillars of the party are social justice, human rights, and ecologism.[5]
The Green Party of Belgium.
As someone who, in England, voted Green last time but hates the Conservative Party more than I like the Greens, I don't really know what I would do if they pledged to unite on my local council if I voted for them.
There are also dozens of parties, and there are even two sets of election results (for your "community" and your "province"). Maybe it's just because I haven't lived here full-time for nearly 20 years, and never voted when I was growing up here, but I am super gay for politics and I still don't understand any of this at all. Also, most polling stations shut at 1pm instead of the 10pm that we have, which I think is outrageous. However, that's more likely because Belgium is very serious about Sunday trading laws, but they hold the elections on Sunday because they normally have compulsory voting and want everyone to be able to vote. So we probably wouldn't have to deal with this lunacy if I got my way for UK electoral reform.
>>100169 >As someone who, in England, voted Green last time but hates the Conservative Party more than I like the Greens, I don't really know what I would do if they pledged to unite on my local council if I voted for them
Sounds like you wouldn't like what happened in Brighton.
