General British politics discussion thread

You could say "flushed" too in particular instances, but gammony is more accurate when a person's recurring stance is belligerence.

Call it a hue of politics if you like.

Just continue with your bad faith argument knowing full well what you are accusing everyone of isn't actually what they are doing.

Also since attacking the poster is against forum rules you should go ahead and report any that have done that...... Although I'll bet your interpretation of "attacking" is really just others mocking your own opinions and posts.

Lets face it, their system is entertaining if nothing else !

I think the Pointless sword is the perfect symbol of how stupid this all is.

Is this for the British people or just to keep the monarchy involved ?

@ancapailldorcha "No. What's keeping them together is FPTP. Splitting into two would mean a rump Tory party and some sort of 21st century BUF obsessed with nonsense. Labour would just win with no effort in this scenario and we all know it."

Yes, FPTP leads to strange bedfellows but my take would be that at this stage the Conservative Party is so divided and so damaged from the past 14 years that it's the perfect time for them to either push out the corrupt and racist elements of the party, driving them towards their natural home with the other nutjob in Reform/UKIP (or to split from them if the official membership can't be separated from them).

With the Conservative party as it currently stands, Starmer's Labour would have to either be colossally unlucky or monumentously stupid to not win a second term. The bar is so low that simply being seen to be a safe pair of hands for the next four years should be enough to win them another term.

That gives a reformed (or new) centre right conservative party 8 years to win over the (admittedly far less vocal) but far larger element of the Conservative party's vote base who recognise that Johnson / Mone / Mogg et al are crooks and abhor the cruel racist bile that Patel comes out with but who have, until this election, held their nose and voted for them anyway through fear of / disagreement to the "tax and spend" reputation of Labour. I suspect they'd be in with a good shout of getting proven vote winners like Rory Stewart (whose profile has grown massively since leaving the party) to return to the fold too.

In short, without a purge of the criminal, incompetent and racist elements of the Conservative party, I think they're doomed. The old adage that people become more conservative as they age is becoming less of a truism in my opinion. The vast majority of Millennials and Gen Z simply won't stand for bigotry, racism, sexism or homophobia and the boomers who push those vile agendas within the Conservative Party will almost all be dead before the party has another realistic chance of winning a majority…

Maybe I'm being naive but if we look at vote share from this election, it's very hard to argue that even half of the 6.8 million people who voted for the Conservatives are racist fools who support the "wrong un" side of the party. At a conservative guesstimate, let's say a renewed party would hold 4m of those votes. With such an emphasis on tactical voting to "get the tories out" in this election, it's even hard to argue that all 4m odd voting Reform fall into that category either. Perhaps another 500k to 1m of those votes could be won back by a new or reformed, sane Conservative party.

A large part of the 3.5m votes cast for the Lib Dems would be up for grabs as it's safe to say that most of that number were votes against the government than in favour of a party who couldn't hope to be anything more than a junior opposition party in the next parliament.

That comes to around 7m votes. Add in the millions of conservative voters who simply didn't vote this time in a historically low turnout election (i.e. a lot of the 14m who voted for Boris didn't turn out for Sunak) and even if they jettison 40% of the voters who supported them this year in 2024 (which I think is a high estimate), a renewed Conservative party could well be contenders for power again in 2032 (by which time Labour will the party facing the "too long in power" vote).

I think we're broadly in agreement: the Conservatives need a purge. I don't know who it will be that'll lead the charge but a "take back control" movement within the party seems inevitable. It'll take a serious drive to recruit more party members to out-vote the current misalignment between the party and the vote but we might get a good idea of who'll be leading that charge when we see that drive begin.

If I had a vote over there, I'd still probably be voting Labour but it is a fascinating soap-opera to observe!

Very accurate TBH

I can't help but feel that the last true conservative PM was May, and everyone since then has been a brexit opportunist or fanatic.

I reckon old money Tory's are more likely to go libdem, at least the ones that were pro EU.

Having completely ingested the brexit mandate what's left to centre around?

It might end up been a labour + liberal coalition that eventually takes the British back into Europe. Labour will have plausible deniability then.

the red wall voted very definitely to leave the European Union and while Corbyn was generally anti the EU (or anti pretty much everything really) he was offering a new deal (which was about the fourth or fifth deal the uk had negotiated) and another referendum.

The red wall gave him their opinion.

A massive sledgehammer to fix reesmogg sounds good.