General British politics discussion thread

Gammon is a state of mind.

I think so especially with Farage on the scene

He is in his 60s so I think that's pretty accurate.

It's just not happening and people here just need to get over it and move on.

I see the Tory leadership contest has already reached the bitchy comments stage and the starter's gun hasn't even been fired yet.

69% of the population are completely unaware that they will need a visa soon. The popular opinion can soon turn.

I'd wager pretty much the entirety of the Tory MP gammon have snared Irish passports.

Fcuk the plebs.

I’m guessing it’s a misguided reference to ETIAS

UK citizens who don’t have hold passport from an EU country will have to get travel pre-authorisation to enter Schengen.

Expected to come in during 2025 (it was planned for 2024, but keeps getting pushed out).

It’s not a Visa - it’s a visa waiver scheme similar to ESTA for the USA.

The UK is planning to bring in similar ETA requirements for EU citizens (excluding Ireland) in the coming years also

Tbf, merging with Reform is probably their only path back to power. The right has splintered and remaining as two in a FPTP system will more than likely end up costing them both.

Tories have shown that they cannot beat Farage and the membership appear to be more aligned to Reform than a more central position

The last thing the Tories need to be paying any attention to at this point is what their members want. Remember, these are the peopl who elected Liz Truss as party leader. The members are part of the problem here.

The people the Tories need to reach out to is not Tory members; it's potential Tory voters — people who didn't vote for the Tories this time around but who might be persuaded to. Becoming even more reformy than they already are is not the way to do this. There is a cohort of people who still vote Tory or who might be persuaded to do so, but who are appalled or disgusted by Nigel Farage. I don't think the Tories can return to power without the support of this group, and merging with Reform is not the way to secure that support.

t's true that Reform picked up a lot of votes, and so split the right-wing vote, and people are saying that this is the reason for the massive Labour majority on what was, in fact, a not-massive Labour vote-share. This is correct. However we need to look a bit deeper than that.

One of the pollsters, More in Common, conducted a post-election poll in which (among other things) Reform voters were asked who they would have voted for, if they hadn't voted for Reform. Only 36% said they would have voted Tory; 25% said they didn't know because they never considered voting for anyone but Reform, 16% said Labour and the rest other parties or unsure.

Plugging this into an election model that uses the July 4 voting figures suggests that, if Reform hadn't stood on 4 July, the Tories wouldn't have had quite such an awful experience but they would still have lost, and lost badly — 162 seats to 384 for Labour.

In other words:

• If the Tories merge with Reform and become, or are seen to become, a Reform-influenced party, that's really bad - some existing Tory voters will go elsewhere, and its highly possible that some Reform voters will too.
• The best possible outcome of a merger for the Tories is that the Tories merge with Reform and then are seen to effectively strangle it and bury its cadaver in a deep hole — adopt no Reform policies or positions; fairly quickly marginalise or purge ex-Reform figures. This isn't in principal impossible; it's more or less what Cumman na nGaedhal did to the Blueshirts when they merged in 1933. Whether the Tory party in its current battered and bruised condition could pull it off is another matter, though. But, even if they could, and even if if in doing so they could retain the support of all Reform voters who said the Tories were their second choice, it still doesn't seem as if that gets then anywhere near winning an election.

They need to win back some votes from Reform, but becoming more Reform than Reform themselves is not the way to do that. More to the point, they also need to win back the centrist votes they have lost, and becoming more Reform than Reform themselves is certainly not the way to do that. They need to present as a more credible right-of-centre alternative than Reform is, and the key word there is "alternative"; they have to be different from Reform if they want to win back the centre and moderate right-of-centre votes without which they cannot return to power.

A lurch to the right will kill the Conservative party though it may take them some time to realise this when their most vocal, high-profile MPs are right-wing nutjobs/corrupt charlatans.

It's revival as a party will either rely on someone that most of the public don't currently know, or someone from the past who's seen to have a clean copy-book (Rory Stewart would be who I'd be trying to convince to do this if I were a Tory) emerging as a new leader with a mandate to clean house. From what I understand of their party structure, the only way to achieve this is a huge recruitment drive to re-align the membership of the party with the centre-right that makes up the majority of their voter base.

It's really hard to gauge how much support a Rejoin style version of Ukip would enjoy when the Johnson majority was essentially split with Reform. But if such a grassroots party was established it could well target seats in the way that Truss lost her seat to Labour even though the majority of the votes in her constituency went to pro Brexit candidates.

It's very long game stuff, but Ukip was laughed at until their mandate became government policy.

longer term, I doubt this is in anyway more damaging to the Tories than when Heorge Galloway left Labour to form the Respect party.

The Tories just need to go back to their original values and not further to the right. The British electorate simply don’t want it any more than they want a hard left. The only issue the Conservative Party have right now is a distinct lack of a good leader.