General British politics discussion thread

Yeah I don't think the Met can just let this Peter out after telling Sue Gray to hold back her hottest material in case ir prejudiced their investigations. There will have to be a few fixed penalty notices handed out at the very least.

You need 325 seats for control of the House of Commons. So if the above projection came to pass would Labour go into coalition with the SNP or the Lib Dems?

Presumably the SNP would make another Independence Referendum their price whereas the Lib Dems might ask for another referendum on the voting system (in order to introduce some form of PR).

Do people think this is Johnson actually revealing a strategy, or actaully trying to explain why he was making gaffs like he was doing it intentionally?

I think it is more likely to be the latter, than the former.

Not sure when exactly the video is from, suspect it might be from his time as London Mayor. Whatever his motivation, the sentiment of the tweet is still accurate.

Why exactly do sufficient numbers of people vote for the likes of him and his US version when they are clearly immoral and incompetent? I presume in both cases it's because they are voting more for the party than the individual.

And with Labour still focused on inhouse fighting and bickering, they're playing in to the Conservatives hands in being able to say later, 'Yes, we messed up a little bit, but look at the alternative'.

I don't think Johnson will be the Tory leader for the next GE anyway so they'll be able to add that all the mistakes were his and he's gone now.

This is probably a low point for them but I wouldn't be surprised if they were still favourites to be returned after the next election.

Yeah you see the exact same thing in America when they show who each county voted for in the presidential elections. Rural counties are almost always won by conservative candidates. The thing that jumps out first is that almost the entire map is red apart from the coasts and little patches of blue here and there. If you then show the population densities though it all makes sense as most of those red areas are extremely sparsely populated while the blue areas are metro areas.

That lends to the expression "Land doesn't vote, people do". The gif in the tweet below shows it well

But he as at least a case to make to his parliamentary party:" Look the big black mark against me with the voters is this party stuff, and that'll be ancient history by the time the next election rolls around. And maybe the support I attracted at the last election was a mile wide and an inch deep, but there's at least a chance I can win it back, or most of it. Whereas Sunak, Truss, very best you'll get with them is a tie with Labour."

Might be enough to sneak him a vote of confidence.

No NI figures to go on there unfortunately, but you'd expect ~8 SF abstentions to make it 322; plus the Speaker is one of the others also.

The likely 2, possibly 3 SDLP would be under the Labour whip (a 3rd SDLP seat would be the cost of SF though and change the numbers marginally).

A Lab bare minority, buying off Lib (22 with the one probable Alliance seat under whip), Plaid, SNP as required - SNP sit out English issues anyway - could work but it would be horrible to have to do and at the mercy of every pissed off backbencher, sweating every by-election.

I suspect the Lib Dems would insist on PR or no coalition this time.

I think they've always been 'marginal veering towards Tory', but definitely not pin-a-blue-badge-on-a-donkey safe seats like you get in the Shires.

The most westward one (St Ives?) is a former Lib seat and perennial target for them which they tend to just miss out by a few points, and George Eustace's seat to the east was nearly taken by Labour in 2017.

Theres no way the Labour parliamentary party will ever admit this to themselves no matter how many times the grassroots point it out. Also don't forget the unions have to be brought round and i still cannot comprehend why they voted it down at the conference last year.

Many people in the UK experience of AV/PR. Scotland, NI, Wales and London are all using some sort of list or AV for instance.