Now that half of Tory MPs have been cabinet members, it’s harder to demand loyalty by dangling a job for votes. Especially the ministerial roles that the public are aware of.
The article seems to be avoiding the term "lame duck period". It reads an excessively selective set of opinions, and it's unclear who should be trying harder.
Blair got 35% of the vote after 8 years of power and the Iraq war, against a decent challenger and experienced politician.
Corbyn got 32% — as the opposition — against an incumbent who’s approval ratings at the time were underwater and who led an unpopular party who’d been in power far too long already.
Poe's law never fails
Corbyn wasn't just deeply unpopular across the country outside of student areas. I spoke to life long remainer lib dems in the Tory/Lab marginal seat of Crewe and Nantwich who were voting Tory to stop Corbyn. Across rural areas in Cheshire people were voting Tory because they were scared of Lib Dems backing Corbyn.
Due to the way that FPTP works, his concentrated support in student/young urban areas was wasted, with the result being a Tory landslide.
This describes me. Luckily I was able to meaningfully vote LibDem, because I really could not see myself voting for BoJo or Corbyn in the last election. Neither Starmer nor Sunak would be my first choice, but in contrast I could hold my nose and vote for either of them if I had to.
I spoke to many who similarly voted to stop Corbyn - they were stopping Corbyn because of his vow to reintroduce gas chambers and exterminate every Jew in the land. I am not sure that was his actual policy but many were adamant it was.
The naive elector sees Corbyn pissing off the Jewish groups on front pages everywhere, and or course they do not want to associate with people of that ilk. The majority trust newspapers and politicians too much, so get routinely played like a fiddle, and the best liar always wins.
The similar shit show is going to play out next election with Reform UK if the liar extraordinaire Nigel Farage decides to front it.
Setting aside that in 2019 under 15% of the country read a newspaper, it's a moot point. Part of the job of being leader of a political party, just like any business, is to handle public relations. Corbyn's team was awful at this. It's no good whining about it, you have to handle it.
Personally his pro-wealthy attacks on making the care system fairer were one major thing that turned me off. He spent a lot of political capital trying to defend the right of millionaires to not pay for their own care (and thus increasing everyone else's tax burden).
Millionaires paying for their own care is how you end up with a terrible, underfunded, and eventually privatised public care system.
Despite it being a policy supported by all sorts of economic think tanks from the IFS to Adam Smith, and has support from the Green party to the LSE, somehow he managed to completely bungle it and push the cause back a generation. Another thing I can't forgive him for.
I recall at some point last election cycle an interview with a very passionate gentleman in the north who was adamant that we had to "Vote for Change, its time to get Corbyn and his failed policies out of Downing Street". He was utterly certain that Corbyn had been prime minister for the prior four years and the terrible state of the country was down to him.
I am no fan of labour but that environment is not good for anyone and has ultimately (ironically) destroyed the Conservative party.
The career politicians, the party functionaries and virtually the entire media had their daggers out for Corbyn.
The 2017 election was a different story. The elites hadn't closed ranks at that point.
https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/jeremy-corbyn-most...
I'm not sure it's really fair but that's kinda how the polls went.
It’s febrile at this point.
Not really sure what you're saying here. Did you mean to use the word "juvenile"?
Edit: Actually probably what the UK ppl are saying
Do you know who the article is saying should try harder?
There but for the grace of God...
That's the question I always ask when viewing the gerontocracy.
In academia at least it's been very clear that the boomers were shameless about working long past the time they should retire, preventing gen Xers from rising to top positions.
Apathetic? Maybe. But even if we were all on the same page as a group (which we're not) I don't see how we have the numbers to force a systemic turnover on our own.
I am, of course, a member of GenX. Sometimes, as Planck said, progress has to happen one funeral at a time. None of this brings me any joy to observe.
I don't like the GOP for many reasons (maga) and I think the current iteration of Democrats are horrifically inept with economics to a degree where they are a net harm for the people they strive to help. Belief in policies such as rent control is as anti-science as creationism.
Most Americans have fallen into the trap of lesser of two evils to a point where they don't hold their chosen side accountable at all and the result is predictable. Incredibly dysfunctional policy.
Lessig proved tiresome in the later parts of his media campaign, but I don't think he was wrong about this basic asymetry: there's some political positions that are far more likely to receive substantial financial support, and this distorts nearly everything in our political system. The people who crusade against this are generally speaking, doing something irrational out of principle, meanwhile the people they're fighting just get more money and power.
Johnson, Corbyn, Truss, Sunak - all voted in by relatively small numbers of people (e.g. 80k in the case of Truss IIRC), yet they are somehow the leader of the party and potentially even PM.
This is where labour shat the bed I think with Corbyn - totally obvious that he would be terrible as a PM yet the favourite of the popular vote of self-selected labour party, who of course are too extreme to represent the common person on the street.
Corbyn had popular support but, like Miliband, relied relatively heavily on unions...and one union at that: Unite (and btw, his popular support was always overstated hugely...in late 2019, you had a sizeable minority who thought he would walk it, he was massively popular in the Westminster bubble...this is despite him being regarded as a totally odious figure under Blair when he was a backbencher).
The Tories have never had this issue because their electorate is relatively diffuse, and MPs have been quite willing to stab their leader in the back at the first sign of trouble.
Blair (like Thatcher) was an accident. I agree with your point but the Tories have been generally able to produce more effective leaders with their constitution.
Blair took the realistic route: Socialism does not work, let's have a market economy create wealth that can then be used to finance social programs. A flavour a social democracy.
I think a reason Corbyn was so popular among the young is that enough time has passed so that this generation has no idea what socialist countries in Europe were actually like.
Brownites sound good but say nothing specific...often the specific stuff is bad too. I agree with you in that there is a route in the centre, but Labour aren't. The party is fundamentally broken. Starmer isn't it, Reeves isn't a leader, Streeting is a joke. Obviously, they have moved to the centre on immigration and crime but...the party are just mad, and it doesn't seem authentic at all (Starmer was a human rights lawyer, getting rid of ECHR is the only course...you would have to be an idiot to believe he would do that, it just isn't credible).
The ambiguity of Labour is causing part of these problems. For example, their position of ambiguity on healthcare...clearly, it is broken...but they decide to be ambiguous (again, classic Brown) so their polling numbers stay up. There needs to be some kind of cross-party move towards reform but it is impossible when one side just wants to score points as the "protector of the NHS" (and it will end up with Labour winning, then finding out they are neck deep in trouble trying to do reforms that don't work...it will never be fixed).
Yes, that's a good point, but not only the right. All the traditionally Labour constituencies in the North (bit not only) which voted for Brexit did so largely because of immigration.
Immigration control is not traditionally right wing only. The left has also been in favour of control and restrictions in order to protect workers' wages.
Immigration raises wages; more people = better economy. That's why every other Anglo country is doing better than them. And has food that isn't brown slop.
That's why businesses have been keen and workers have had enough.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-immigration-doesnt-red...
In particular Australia’s population is 1/3rd immigrants. Australia’s minimum and median wages are both significantly higher than the UK. Does that mean there are so many immigrants they’re taking each others jobs instead?
Things do not work out so great if immigration isn't balanced.
In the UK there has been a huge influx of unskilled or low skilled workers from Eastern Europe that has put a big dampener on wages at the low end of the spectrum.
One of the reasons the UK has a productivity issue is that cheap labour.
They also find that skilled immigration systems don’t always work, because all immigrants tend to be unusually highly educated anyway, but also significantly downskill the jobs they choose after arriving. So you’d expect them to always compete with low end natives, but in fact they don’t because they mainly compete with other immigrants instead. And “compete” isn’t how labor works anyway, since all workers are also customers.
> because all immigrants tend to be unusually highly educated anyway
That's obviously not true.
Blair won outright majorities in the three elections he lead Labour in
We'd all like public services that do everything for everyone but few of us would be willing to pay what that would actually cost and many of us literally couldn't afford it. Meanwhile expectations of government services are rising and in many areas demographics are against us. If you rule out reform of government services then you don't have a lot of options left to square a lot of circles.
It's important to consider that "reform" is not the same as "cutting standards". For example if we could redistribute the available resources for health and social care to focus more on prevention than cure then many problems might be detected and dealt with earlier resulting in lower overall costs and crucially also better outcomes for patients. Of course there is so much firefighting happening in the NHS now that it's hard to see how any radical reform could happen without a huge injection of both cash and trained medical staff over a period longer than a single electoral cycle and that makes it a political problem as much as an economic or healthcare one.
Most of these reforms have included injecting private sector and internal markets into the system.
You may agree or disagree with these reforms, but it's difficult to argue that they don't incur overhead. Outsourced contracts need administration, legal frameworks; private parties take profit or else they wouldn't exist.
I'd argue it is likely that most of the extra funding is seeping out through these reforms, plus the legacy of not nationalising the whole health system - GP surgeries, pharmacy, generic drug manufacturing - when the NHS was formed.
I agree with you on the prevention aspect. but my thought is that a more joined up system including GPs, pharmacy and especially social care, would manage a lot of lifestyle related issues much better.
There are probably a lot of real costs in our current healthcare system that never make it onto the books as well. For example in many parts of the country it is impossible for an adult to register with a dentist as an NHS patient right now. There are zero dental practices within a reasonable distance of many people willing to accept new NHS patients. That appears to be because the deal governments currently offer to NHS dentists makes no sense financially so it's hard to blame the dentists. But the effect is the same - many of those people are not getting regular dental check ups and preventative or early treatments. The ones who are went private and paid themselves.
That's money going into private healthcare not from the tax man but from the individual patient but that still means the individual patient no longer has that money to be able to afford higher taxes that could better fund the NHS. Unfortunately the lack of huge public outcry as this frog has been boiled only proves that a government strategy of slowly eroding even essential healthcare provision to encourage privatisation by the back door can be effective.
Given how far we've gone into a low wage and poor rights economy I don't think a hard left leadership would have been that bad, especially as it would have been tempered by the rest anyway. However, I don't like Corbyn's extreme passivism.
What do you call nationalising companies and handing control to the workers? (It's in the manifesto)
That's my point: people, especially the young, don't even recognise it when described under a microscopically thin veneer. That's very worrying.
They didn't hide it, either. McDonnell did say clearly that he was a Marxist [1] and Corbyn is a socialist in the very Soviet sense.
[1] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2018/05/how-john-mcdon...
Somehow we managed state owned railways and utilities for basically the entire Cold War without ever once feeling tempted to join the Warsaw Pact, and the Royal Mail was a government agency for nearly 400 years...
And of course there's also the little thing about McDonnell and Corbyn being Marxist and socialist.
Again, too many people still seem not to be willing to see what's not even hidden. History should really be compulsory over the whole of secondary school.
Consider the following: if you consider communism to be a bad thing which people should be vigilant against, arguments to the effect that the defining feature of communism is having rail decisions made by employees of a state railway company rather than the boards of Abellio and Arriva[1] probably aren't going to help. Firstly because there's a wee bit more to communism than that, and secondly because the consensus of British rail users is that decision making concerning our railways is currently crap.
There are plenty of decent arguments that Labour's 2019 nationalisation plans wouldn't solve the fundamental problems of those services, but the idea that it's basically Marxist-Leninism isn't one of them.
[1]incidentally entities which are wholly owned by governments, just not the British one
Firstly that involving workers in the ownership and running of a company is a successful model that is working in German for example. Focus on short term shareholder value is not good for employees or the company.
You are posting on a site that has a large percentage of people working in start-ups. Comments like your kind of goes completely against the audience.
Secondary, I've heard McDonnell describe himself as a Marxist. but he is also a politician. Unlike Corbyn he was the one to (incorrectly in my view) seek compromise and common ground with people who were seeking to undermine him. He was the key player in getting Labour to adopt a policy of second referendum, something that an ideological Marxist would certainly not go anywhere near, let alone drive.
There's no actual Marxist I know that would go anywhere near the EU.
Personally I don't believe Marxism to imply state control, or public ownership to mean state ownership.
I'd also see ownership models to include workers and customers. e.g. as a seasonal reference Building and Loan from It's a Wonderful Life.
Of course not everyone sees it that way.
Yes a large portion of readers probably works in startups, the pinnacle of market and financial capitalism and should in all logic despise Corbyn and McDonnell... although that's irrelevant to the discussion.
McDonnell and Corbyn indeed are life long euroseptics and very satisfied with Brexit, which made it even more ridiculous to see so many students cheering them.
There is a confusion here between the situation we have and how we address it.
My water supply - water being that thing that falls from the sky on to the top of my house, and humans die if we don't have any within 3 days - is owned by a Hong Kong investment fund that is incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
If you asked the person on the street then they would say that this ownership model is radical, and public ownership of water is conservative.
However, if you instead ask them to comment on taking water ownership from a private company into the public domain , they'd say that was radical.
The issue is that we've moved so far in terms of financialisation of nearly every aspect of our lives, that any attempt to address that will be seen as radical.
"Tax the rich!" Is great when you are not rich, and most young people are not (yet) rich. Coming out of uni saddled with debt and doing entry level jobs etc, it is easy to just think selfishly and say "The rich should pay for more! Not me!"
Eventually you run out of other people's money though.
This is completely backwards, they have the MOST skin in the game. They are the ones that are going not going to have things we take/took for granted like: living and working in the EU or being able to enjoy a pension.
I have received over the past several years a number of stupid tax cuts and energy bailouts that have had precisely zero effect on my family’s well-being or future prospects. Except now I can’t get a fucking doctor’s appointment, the local church is setting up a “warm bank” so that me neighbours don’t die, and my kids will have to pay tens of thousands of pounds for education.
Tax the rich.
The Tories haven't got to worry about having self-styled radical socialists on the ballot but have had exactly the same problems: candidates that appeal most to the Tory selectorate like Iain Duncan Smith and Liz Truss are neither in touch with the public mood nor competent.
Not sure that a presidential system with a public vote would necessarily do better though. The public loved Johnson and liked May at first.
There's also his support for Chavez/Maduro, his suicidally naive pacifism which helps the enemy, etc.
Oh, and the episode with the mural, where he was too stupid to understand why a picture of fat people with hooked noses oppressing "the workers" would be offensive to a certain group. And what kind of adult sees the world in that way anyway?
[edit] Whatever. Downvote me. You people will never win in the real world.
He said "let the bodies pile high" about his plan for COVID, a plan which ended up killing ~100,000 people.[2][2.5]
> "Oh, and the episode with the mural, where he was too stupid to understand why a picture of fat people with hooked noses oppressing "the workers" would be offensive to a certain group."
Is the certain group Jews? Were they offended by Boris Johnson's book with rude Jewish stereotypes?[3] Or his other racist public writings?[4]
> "Is it too much to ask that a candidate for Prime Minister should respect the Rule of Law?"
Is it too much to ask that the actual Prime Minster respect the law? Partygate, for example[5]
What's that saying "with Conservatives, every accusation is a confession".
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-62068421
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-pms-former-adviser-confi...
[2.5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/26/ons-figures-sh...
[3] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson...
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/jan/23/london.race
Everything the comment accused Corbyn of doing leading to "you people will never win in the real world" was done by BoJo, and it didn't stop him winning in the real world.
That's the actual interesting question here.
It was all out in the public domain.
It was the media's jobs to ignore this and pretend the main issue was one case where Corbyn liked a photo on facebook that he later claimed he hadn't paid enough attention to and apologised for (Johnson has never apologised or been called on to apologise)
No.
... the "party line" being decided by the small cabal in charge of making the "party line", usually the ones with the most access to monetary funds.
But the inability to see even 10% of party legislators deviate from party lines in various votes means that not only is rational policy not being well served, regional representation is being undermined since adhering to the party line does not optimize for the policy for their region/district.
And in the US house/senate, the seniority system is another undemocratic institution. Why should changing representatives reduce your effective power in a legislative house? I can't think of a system where codified seniority was a good thing
On the one hand, labour seem really similar to the Tories - disunited, dogma over common sense and oddly out of touch.
Their policies _were_ opposite to Tory policies but they are trying to be an opposition so… Yes Corbin was a leftie (corduroy elbow patches and all) but he’s a leader of a left wing party. It’s like complaining that Thatcher was a bit right-wing.
It seems like the core issue is that the voters want something like Tory-lite. Blair did that and no one wants to go back to it. So this is what you’re left with
Corbyn was hard left in a distinctly centrist country whose "Left Wing Party" is (despite its roots) very much left-leaning centrist, and who's only ever seen real success while occupying the middle-ground.
> voters want something like Tory-lite. Blair did that and no one wants to go back to it
If nobody wanted to go back to it then we'd have Rebecca Long-Bailey as Leader of His Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition, not another centrist.
There is a large constituency against the status quo in the UK. We have proof of that in the 2016 Brexit referendum, where 17 million people voted strongly against the establishment line and effectively against an economic model that we had had for 40 years. People voted in part to take back control, and what is nationalisation of basic aspects of our lives like water / housing / energy / drug manufacturing / transport etc if not taking back control?
Since the pandemic, the implementation of a chaotic version of Brexit, and the cost of living crisis. The underlying aspects of the 2017 / 2019 Labour policies are even more starkly relevant. Everything has been laid bare, and for some reason the two main parties are now completely devoid of ideas or vision.
That's very far left and is opposed by most people including in the Labour Party. Basically, those guys were the Communist Party and unsurprisingly people did prefer to keep the Tories...
It was the same in the 80s when Labour was essentially unelectable. Blair saw that the centre left was politically the best bet, and pragmatically that social policies needed the private economy to produce wealth.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/11/leaked...
> Blair saw that the centre left was politically the best bet, and pragmatically that social policies needed the private economy to produce wealth.
There are massive systemic issues in the country. Lack of housing, regional inequality, geographical inequality, falling real terms wages, chronic underfunding of R&D. Basically everything is falling apart. 40 years of financialisation of public services and nearly every aspect of our lives (there's virtually nothing you can do as part of your daily routine that doesn't trigger a transfer of wealth from public or household money to the top). The Brexit vote itself was partially a reaction to these issues.
These things need real solutions and real ideas. Any ideas that even start to address them let alone reverse the issues will look radical, and Labour 2017 / 2019 was barely doing that just offering a mild social democratic platform that would not be out of place in Northern Europe or indeed in the 1983 SDP-Liberal manifesto.
Adding to that we would have had a planned and controlled Brexit, with certain Eu agreements being replaced with equivalent things with different names.
All of this is mostly academic though as the first restrictions in the pandemic would have given the key to removing a Corbyn government by an effective establishment coup.
I think this is the problem: politicians representing the ideology X can afford to be mediocre because they have some room before "voting for mediocre politicians that still agree with what I believe is the best" is worse than "voting for non-mediocre politicians that disagree with what I believe is the best". If a party ends up with mediocre politician, it is its own failure, and the other parties (even if they themselves have bad politicians) are not responsible: the other parties represent other people. If the party that represents your ideology is managing to put forward mediocre politicians, then, it is your failure for letting that happens or accepting this situation.
(I'm not saying that you are incompetent: you may have failed because it was impossible. Still, it's certainly not the responsibility of people who have a different ideology)
In short, in a healthy democracy, there will always be a "worse" party. It cannot take away the responsibility of the party you have voted for for being bad. It's a bit like having giraffes and lions at the zoo, and having the lions saying "the meat is full of maggots and really bad quality, but the alternative is having the vegetables that suits the giraffes, so, it's the giraffes' fault".
So, yes, in the end people may have had issues with the sitting government but they concluded that they were the "least bad" option.
A healthy democracy needs a credible opposition.
That does not make of him a bad politician (he can be, but you keep saying "he is a bad politician because I don't like his ideology and his ideology was not popular enough", which is NOT a criteria to decide if it's a bad politician or not). In a democracy, every ideology must be represented, even if they don't correspond to the majority and are therefore unelectable.
But again, that is not my point: Corbyn was shit, unelectable, whatever, ... And yet, the other party had bad politicians. Corbyn is not the one putting those politicians there. Corbyn supporters neither. Neither Corbyn or his supporters have any say in this, because they have a different ideology and therefore cannot build a party with an ideology that does not agree to made of good politicians.
The fact that the restaurant A serves expired food is not a good excuse for going to the restaurant B, eating slightly less expired food, pay your bill, leave without complaining about restaurant B, and conclude that the main problem is that restaurant A was bad. Restaurant A is bad, and we can, and should, complain about it, but when there is an article about restaurant B explaining that they are failing to serve correct food, you cannot bring in restaurant A as an excuse for the failure of restaurant B. The MAIN REASON restaurant B serves bad food is BECAUSE RESTAURANT B IS FAILING.
You may even be centre-left and chosen Tories for the first time just because you did not like Corbyn. But as soon as you vote Tories, the quality of the politicians in the Tory party is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. If you vote for them, you are part of the process that reward their choice of bad politicians. (I use "you" as the "hypothetical you", not you in particular)
Also, your idea that what matter is the electability is really bad for democracy. Basically, it implies that minorities should never be represented.
> A healthy democracy needs a credible opposition.
If your definition of "credible opposition" is "an opposition that I would have maybe voted for", you are dead wrong.
In a healthy democracy, when you have two main parties, one in power, one in opposition, then, there is one party that you should think is okay, and one party that you should think is shit (it's more complicated than that, but it is to illustrate). If you like all the parties, it just means that you have just one ideology represented.
The 2017 / 2019 Corbyn manifesto were more aligned with the SDP-Liberal alliance manifestos of 1983.
Don't take my word for it, here is one of the members of SDP at the time who split from the Labour party because of Foot.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/11/leaked...
This belief is boosted by the fact the British press only ever compares our inflation with France, which has the lowest inflation in Europe due to substantial nuclear generating capacity and energy subsidies funded through borrowing. Our government was attacked for attempting even a fraction of those energy subsidies to the point they did a U-turn because ultimately the public pays for it, but that downside is ignored when talking about France. They also also have substantially more national debt for obvious reasons... but luckily the UK national debt is usually only compared with Germany's.
Why not?
I always think that comparing inflation or national debt to other countries is meaningless. A big national debt used for good investment is way better than a small national debt while the infrastructures fall apart, and the state and cost of the infrastructure can be very different in each country. And for the same level of inflation, the effects would be very different based on the resources and market characteristics of the country and which measures are taken.
I never really bought into the doomsday scenarios. Just a slow slide of Spanish package holidays getting more expensive and people not connecting the dots.
Also, 0.6% is probably noise or error
I don't think it's a British problem either. We've had populists dominating politics in quite a few countries in recent decades. France just had a close call where a neo fascist came close to winning the elections. The Austrians have actually gone there. My home country the Netherlands has had populists come close a couple of times as well. Italy just elected a populist. The issue is that the type of policies populists preach tend to not involve a whole lot of carefully considered long term planning. Big gestures that are supposedly popular and then all hell breaks loose when reality and fantasy meet.
Brexit sounded great to people with no clue about how economies work. Now they are dealing with inflation, lots of failing policies, and the notion that they might soon have to rename their country as it is won't be great or united anymore if Scotland and Northern Ireland cease to be a part of it. I don't think anyone voted for that in England. But it would be a direct consequence of what they did vote for.
Is there no one you disagree with politically who is just popular instead of populist, knowledgeable and yet disagrees with you? If you can't think of any then I'd suggest the problem lies within you.
By the way
> as it is won't be great
Great is a geographical term. Just as British people remain european after leaving the EU, they (those on the island of Great Britain) would remain part of Great Britain.
But do continue to regale us all from up high with your superior knowledge about economies and such, knowing things like why Great Britain is named as it is, that's just a trifling fact for plebs.
As is pointed out in every single one of these threads, inflation in the UK is no different to inflation in the rest of Europe. Like elsewhere, it's created by money printing to pay for lockdowns and other COVID measures, along with embargoes against Russia.
It's really quite impressive how often this claim about inflation and Brexit comes up on HN, despite it being so easily disproven by looking at the numbers. It seems to happen on literally every single thread about the UK. The idea that Remainer-ism is a bastion of economic logic and common sense doesn't fit with the frequency with which bad economic claims in support of EU membership are made.
How many MPs were removed in this witch hunt? And why is it a witch hunt if the electorate is told "this is the most important question for at least a generation", they vote on it, and the representatives in parliament do their damnedest to prevent carrying out the thing voted for, and thus the electorate decide to remove some of them?
That sounds like democracy in action to me (and anti-democracy by those who tried to stymie Brexit).
The result was a government forced to bang on about how great an objectively bad process was because nobody was left to say “if you’re going to do this then you need to be realistic about the cost”. And implementing a known-bad policy while trying to pretend it’s great completely fucks a government.
21 Tory MPs had the whip removed for defying the party line and signalling their intent to defy Brexit:
- Kenneth Clarke, sniffed the political winds and stood down. Got given a golden handshake to the Lords.
- Philip Hammond - you must be joking, right? Still managed to get a seat in the Lords though.
- Rory Stewart. Do you think those who voted Brexit respect him? Might win in a contest with Hammond over who is disliked less. So well respected he couldn't even keep his campaign for mayor of London going to the start line, even with London being a remain stronghold.
- Dominic Grieve would not even beat Guy Verhofstadt in a contest voted on by leave supporters over who is liked less, as evidenced by losing his seat to his Tory replacement. I half expected Guy Fawkes day to be renamed Dominic Grieve day. Still could.
- David Gauke has an instructive Wikipedia entry[1]:
> Gauke stood in his constituency as an independent candidate, and came second with 26% of the vote, by far the best result of any of those former Conservative Members who sought re-election as independents.
That'll make the rest of the list an anti-climax but let's have some fun drilling the point home:
- Antoinette Sandbach, stood as a LibDem and lost.
- Sir Oliver Letwin, didn't stand again. I don't know anyone that respects him[2].
- Justine Greening, did not stand. Why not? She was savvy enough to see what was coming.
- Sam Gyimah, stood as a LibDem, lost seat to Conservatives, coming third behind Labour.
- Guto Bebb, didn't stand. Previously managed to gain much respect by bullying a man with Asperger's[3].
- Anne Milton, lost seat in 4th place. Tories kept her seat with a leave supporter in her place.
- Alistair Burt, Caroline Nokes, Greg Clark, Sir Nicholas Soames, Ed Vaizey, Margot James, Richard Benyon, Stephen Hammond, Steve Brine and Richard Harrington had the whip restored. Soames didn't stand at the next election, Harrington, Vaizey and Benyon got bumped up to the Lords where they love remainer Tories. Stephen Hammond and Steve Brine kept their seats with much reduced majorities.
Jo Johnson and Amber Rudd also resigned from the cabinet in support of the rebels and stood down at the next election. Johnson was bumped up to the Lords, because there aren't enough anti-democratic lords, apparently, though their record (and entire structure and history) would suggest otherwise.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gauke
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Letwin#1985_Broadwater_...
[3] https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/aberconwy-...
That was half of your comment, the opening part, and in response to my comment, yet somehow, going into detail about
a) why it wasn't a witch hunt, and
b) refuting the premises upon which you relied
is somehow pretty tangential to my point?
> I think it goes to demonstrate quite tidily the utter mind-rot on the part of some people in the UK right now.
Do you always respond to cognitive dissonance with personal slights, and do you know that this is HN and not Twitter?
It’s a government who’s been in power too long, whose talent base was massively thinned by a Brexit Purity witch hunt and the impossibility of delivering the Brexit fairy-tale, and who weren’t simply ejected at the last election because of Corbyn’s overwhelming unpopularity.