Every former cabinet bod is running by the looks of it. I heard the 1922 Committee wanted to set some rules to make sure that didn't happen, but Kemi Badenoch just announced her bid so I think that ship's sailed.
Tangentially related but it turns out Johnson is guilt-free when it comes to "MPs not being charged for partygate because they just didn't return their questionnaires to the police" because the Met never sent him one to fill out.
Doesn't instil confidence. Say what you will about his role in Brexit, Cummings was exactly the sort of mind I was happy to see in government and I'm wary about his assessment.
>>96548 If it wasn't for the fact he disagrees with me on the very biggest issues, he'd be my favourite political figure, almost certainly. His honesty is so refreshing, and he is frequently right (except when he disagrees with me about things). And he absolutely does not give a fuck. He is, as other imageboards would say, "based". He is the most based man in politics.
He certainly would never have come up with the debate tactic to tell Rishi to just aggressively shout over Liz Truss continuously in order to win over voters.
Ehh. His honesty is always refreshing, but the only reason he can be honest is because he's not an MP. He's right about a lot of things, but all it comes down to is that he's capable of taking the blinkers off. I've seen him make points that anti-idpol classlad would probably scream "I told you so" about.
Other than that, though, I find his levels of cognitive dissonance quite staggering. Basically everything he says is a deflection, some variation on:
>it was a total disaster, but if we hadn't done wot we done, it would have been even worse!
He's got no choice but to rationalise everything him and his team are responsible as some sort of necessary evil, because admitting they are responsible for basically every problem the country is facing right now would presumably make it quite difficult to sleep at night.
Corbyn seems to have really put the willies up people like him an'all, which I will never not find equal measures of amusing and deeply telling.
>>96551 Regrettably, it was just the moderator fainting. She's come around now, but at least we get to say that Liz Truss talking nonsense caused someone to collapse.
In other tragic Talk TV news, Piers Morgan went to Ukraine and has sadly made it back alive.
>>96554 Thank you very much. I must say I think Liz Truss handled that moderately well; she shows concern but not in a way that is charismatic enough to make people pay attention. She's a real human being, who doesn't actually ask if someone is okay but instead shuffles awkwardly towards them, just like you and me. Rishi stands no chance.
I've tentatively defended him up til now on the basis that "safe pair of hands" is a relatively sound strategy, but nah, it's that old Labour thing of always fighting the previous election. Right now there's an appetite for a real alternative to the Conservatives, but he's still fighting 2019's battle for the populist centre ground.
>>96556 >>96557 If Liz Truss makes even a half-decent go at the cost of living crisis over the Winter it could quite possibly reverse Tory fortunes, and it's all because Starmer's not yet laid down the foundations for what Labour currently stand for, even after all this time. It might not even take that, and it's certainly not a given, but Labour just have nothing to "sell" to the electorate meaning they're very vulnerable to being swept away. It's important to remember that the government is unlikely to have another perma-meltdown like it's been having since November-December of last year, but Starmer and his team are seemingly, heheh... labouring, heheheh, ahem, under that delusion.
>>96558 Labour suggested the windfall tax; that was a policy they would have brought in if they had been in power. The Conservatives wound up taking it as their own policy. Perhaps, if we all just shut our eyes and hold hands in a big circle and just believe, Labour will have other policies that they're just not announcing until it's too late for Liz Truss to steal them all.
>It's important to remember that the government is unlikely to have another perma-meltdown like it's been having since November-December of last year
Yeah. This is the decline mate. The future is what it has been but worse.
Think about the time in your life where things were best. Work was well paid, your money went furthest etc etc. It will never be as good as that again. None of that is coming back.
Liz Truss has all of the flaws of Theresa May with none of the virtues. Think about that sentence for a minute.
I'd say that the Tories are having their Corbyn moment, but it's worse than that. They've fiddled the leadership election to put someone in Number 10 who is hugely unpopular with the wider electorate for no discernible reason. Why not Mordaunt? Why not Tudendhat? Why not anyone who is within sight of Starmer in the polls? Nobody seems able to tell me, other than vague inklings that they aren't Brexity enough.
My only way of explaining the decision is that Truss is a blank slate, sufficiently devoid of personality and principle that she can stand in for whichever leader you'd rather have. Her complete deadness behind the eyes is revolting to the average voter, but it allows the average Tory member or MP to pretend that their party isn't coming apart at the seams. No matter how daunting the issue or how bitter the division, Truss will be there with a meaningless platitude to lull you into a coma of complacency.
The electorate really doesn't care. Boris won a storming majority based on an entirely opportunistic three word manifesto - Get Brexit Done. Covid was if anything quite opportune for Johnson, because it concealed his complete lack of a plan beyond getting any kind of Brexit deal at any cost and delayed the political consequences of the awful deal that he did get.
Laying out detailed policy proposals at this stage is futile, partly because (as >>96559 suggests) the Tories will just nick anything that looks like a good idea and deliver a watered-down version, but mostly because it's impossible to predict what the next general election will be fought over. It's possible that Putin and Zelensky will have signed a peace treaty, gas prices will be returning to normal and inflation will be heading back to manageable levels. It's equally possible that people will be looking at paying £5,000 a year for gas and leccy. It's less likely, but still absolutely possible, that we'll be teetering on the brink of nuclear war and The One Show will have Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen on to show people how to decorate their fallout shelters. The tone of the next election could be "everything is returning to normal, so let's get things fixed" or "I promise you the plumpest, juciest rats in the new subterranean kingdom of irradiated mutants".
Starmer would be a fool to do anything more than set a general tone for his leadership - patriotic, pragmatic, competent, reassuringly dull - because any plans he might make will almost certainly be overtaken by world events. I'm not quite as pessimistic as >>96561, but the next ten or twenty years are going to have a lot of exceedingly ugly surprises in store. Chaos is the new normal for the foreseeable future and we need to get used to it.
>>96562 Starmer's been making plenty of plans that were overtaken by events. Let's say we're in the £5,000 a year for electricity timeline: why, then, rule out renationalising energy companies so far in advance? Particularly when it's a policy that has been popular with the public for at least a decade? It's not a demented nutter Corbyn policy - Macron went and did it. I'm not saying he should've committed to it either, but ruling it out in dynamic circumstances is just as big an announcement as ruling it in during stable ones.
The answer makes him sound clever now, but has elements of Shakespearean tragedy given historical precedent: Because the election won't be decided by voters directly, but through mediation by the press. It was the press that toppled Johnson, and Starmer thinks that if he gets them on-side (by performing the world's saddest Blair tribute act) then he'll win the next election with their support despite his lamentable personal qualities. Truss, the great unknown, may just piss off the papers and then he'll get in for reassuring the press he won't hurt anyone's share portfolios.
But my inner forensic lawyer looks at precedent: There are no Labour prime ministers who scraped in on the back of press support and an awful lot of Labour wannabes with odd voices and awkward personal mannerisms who polled like they could do it until they blew it. If the press turn on Labour at the last minute - most tragically if they just make up that he's a rabid lefty anyway while giving Truss the aura of an actual leader, not looking like a PM offset by her actually being PM - his place in history as yet another Labour loser will be secure. "The world's saddest Blair tribute act" will become the world's saddest Kinnock tribute act. Yet oddly when I retell confabulations of past elections and David Hare's "The Absence of War" to my tribal allies in the rubble of what used to be a park and ride, a grand tragicomedy from the old times, they always want to hear the 1992 version - never 2023.
Someone has just posted Im Nin'Alu in the "Songs in other languages" thread, and Wikipedia has informed me that it was sampled by a song called "Can't Truss It". I propose we try and make it Rishi Sunak's campaign anthem. I know nothing about this song but I assume it will be perfectly appropriate for such a thing.
>>96582 Sunak was handing out care packages to journalists. Coke in case they got thirst, Twix in case they got hungry, and sunscreen in case they got stuck behind him.
I'd start quoting Gunga Din, but I don't think my education was expensive enough for me to get away with it. I'll have to settle for calling Sunak the Captain Oates of Tory bastardry.
Hardly a surprise. Labour are doing their usual thing, taking advantage of an occasion where their enemy is in complete turmoil by attacking each other instead.
I really hate this tendency in the Labour party, I hated it when it was the Blairites undermining Corbyn, and I still hate it now that it's the Momentumites undermining Starmer. It's like they start feeling left out when there aren't enough articles in the papers slagging them off.
>>96586 You can't blame the far-left. Lisa Nandy is not exactly Rosa Luxemburg, I doubt the rest of the anonymous Shadow Cabinet members who are perplexed by Starmer's spasmodic opinions on strikes are of that stripe either. In fact I know they aren't, Jessica Elgot has written as much:
>Many shadow ministers – most not on the left of the party – said they had long resented the policy. One said those who had attended picket lines at the last strike had got the “full hairdryer treatment” from a senior aide in Starmer’s office and been given dark ultimatums about attending again.
>“Unhappiness on this is very widespread on the frontbench,” the shadow minister said. “It is not just on the left. Unions are where most people on the front bench have come from – or [they have] worked in unionised industries.”
You can't just stick your fingers in your ears and act like an entire Summer of industrial action isn't happening. Stamer's obsession with the internal discipline of Labour means he's neglected the outward facing stuff the public give a crap about.
>Liz Truss has scrapped a plan to link public sector pay to local living costs following a backlash from Tory MPs and opposition parties.
>The Tory leadership candidate had proposed regional pay boards, in a bid to save taxpayers a potential £8.8bn. But the policy was criticised by several senior Tories, who argued it would mean lower pay for millions of workers outside London.
>Ms Truss has now said the proposal would not be taken forward.
Rishi says people who "vilify" Britain will have to be reported to Prevent as extremists. These people really are just doing fascism-for-profit, aren't they?
I really don't like when people throw the word fascism around to describe what our conservative politicians are doing, or want to do. I have entirely too much respect for fascism to let it be associated with these worms.
I for one think it's a good policy and will be glad to see the back of you extremist wronguns. Indeed, should the authorities require assistance in tracking any of you down I would like to volunteer to help - especially if they'll let me on the case of finding the chap who makes unhinged posts in political threads using my IP address.
>>96548 How much would it take to get Dom to lube up and use Truss as a glove puppet? She's clearly hollow. Hell, maybe he could just wear her skin like in that Men in Black documentary I saw a while back. Or we've all seen him doing his dance from silence of the lambs - maybe that?
Fuck's sake, she's my MP, and she's a deranged simpleton. Surely someone, somewhere, can puppet her?
This is going to be dreadful, isn't it?
I can't believe we're still a month out from having a government. Even when we do have one it's looking as if it's only function will be to fly at you with a knife if you step out of line or question the wisdom of "what if no state?".
I remember how chuffed I was when the exit polls for the 2017 GE came in and I thought "bloody yes, we're turning this thing around, at last". What an utter buffoon I was.
They're interviewing Rishi Sunak on Sky News. I think it's a repeat of the last debate they had, so it's not live. Anyway, he reminds me of someone, and starting now I shall be referring to him as Ed Mili-tanned.
>>96608 Sunak trying to get all Brexit-y just doesn't work. Like I said earlier in the thread, he might have been there from the start, but he'll never one of them.
>>96608 I haven't been following that, and I cannot for the life of me imagine the context in which those words were said. Is Brexit dangerous somehow? Are we all going to die due to lack of white people becoming nurses? If we invade the EU, fuck you all, I'm fighting for them instead of us.
>>96610 As far as I can tell he didn't say it out loud, but it's on a Tweet about "reviewing" laws we've inherited. I assume it's just stuff like "you're not allowed to 'smoke out' tenents from properties you own" and "cadmium may not be added to food stuffs even if the COO of Kraft Heinz says it's super yummy and nice".
