I expect that to be thrown back in her face a great many times over the course of her disastrous time as PM. A more dynamic orator than Starmer would have brought the house down off the back of that.
It's alright; the post-Brexit breeding project has finally come to fruition and there are whole squadrons of Economic Warrior Unicorns just about to hove into view. Those Anti-growth Coalition Orcs have got no chance.
I read that as more outsourcing (something that de Pfeffel promised to do, and did, from day one of his reign). The "mini-budget" had the fingerprints of the IEA all over it...
At least they've got FREEDOM and we've TAKEN BACK CONTROL so we can all be royally screwed by a malignly dogmatic bunch of zealots.
What worries me are the millions who (for a variety of reasons) will not vote in the next GE. The higher the turnout the better the chance of the "Anti-Greed Coalition" ousting the Tories.......
But it’s a nonsense. You may get more for your money (they won’t) and therefore not have to increase so much in following years, but not cutting spending means spending the same amount. If she meant ‘not cutting delivery’ she could have said so. Explanations include, she’s a liar or she doesn’t know what she’s doing. I’m going to say both because that seems a safe bet. The public sector has already been pretty comprehensively outsourced. There is no big outsourcing waiting to happen. It was mostly completed under Blair and nothing much has changed. The only thing not outsourced are NHS Trusts, but most of what they do is outsourced anyway. Outsourcing the rest of it means full NHS privatisation and this lot don’t have a cat in hells chance of doing that in two years. They would be ripped to shreds.
Lots of the Westminster bubble journos tweeting tonight about Truss having tanked before the 1922 Committee this evening. Loads of MPs briefing against her.
Their only chance (and it's extremely thin) imho is for them to choose a centrist unopposed leader that the majority of the parliamentary and wider Tory voters can unite behind. The problem is that I can't think of a single current Tory MP that fits the bill thanks to the Brexit purge. It's certainly an interesting watch if you disregard the absolute mess they are making of the country.
Had a conversation with an ardent Brexiter who voted for Johnson. Not a fan of the current lot because he's watching his pension pot evaporate while all his bills rise. Mortgage is almost paid off but isn't fixed so he's being clobbered with more interest. Doesn't want house prices to plummet because he wants to downsize and pocket a nice wedge to supplement his pension. Calculated he'll have to work another 18 months just to cover what's been wiped out in three weeks by Truss and Kwarteng and their abacus of incompetence. "Just imagine if we hadn't Brexited," I said, "the economy would be in even worse shape but fortunately all the benefits of Brexit are at least insulating us from the very worst." He shot me a look. "Don't start," he said. I didn't dare mention how relived he must feel to have avoided cHaOs wiTh Ed MiLLiBanD.
I wonder if Truss and Kwarteng have something really left-field in mind like an increase in the standard rate of VAT? We have one of the lower rates in Europe Not generally levied on essentials (food, rent, energy (5%)) Margaret Thatcher almost doubled the rate of VAT when she was elected in 1979 (8% -> 15%) - AFAIK this was not in the manifesto It would be anti-growth and inflationary, but they are in a real hole at the moment......
No way does Truss get growth without eroding her base, unless she gets incredibly lucky. She'll need significantly more immigration or the destruction of the green belt or closer ties with (thus taking regulatory instructions from) the EU. I can see why she's taking the actions she has, but I doubt any of it will get through parliament, at least without being significantly watered down. So she'll go for the lowest hanging fruit. She'll ravage our foreign aid fund which will probably be pretty popular among her base, but will diminish our reputation further and lead to long term economic loss further down the line. She'll push care reforms onto future parliaments, blocking NHS beds as we go into the winter. Question is whether this is no cuts in real terms or not.
Labour can’t avoid all blame. They had one of the most PM-worthy candidates since Blair, and they chose his far less articulate and talented brother, who was willing to stab his family member in the back, before nominating the least electable politician in living memory. The Tories are getting tonked at the next election, but when votes are counted I doubt even Truss will do worse than Corbyn.
Should have known it was Labour’s fault all along. Literally every single thing about the current economic situation is a direct result of the Conservative party’s policies and actions. Every single bit of it. Yet somehow a party that’s been in opposition for 12 years must take some of the blame. Incredible - and precisely the reason the public gets the Government it deserves.
“The public gets the Government it deserves” because someone thinks David should have been leader instead of Ed? Mmm.
that’s not the part of the post I was replying to with that comment is it! My reply is a broad response to the idea that this current mess is in any way Labour’s responsibility.
But I don’t think that was really the point of the post. It was more, if Labour had made better choices, we might not be in this mess. I wouldn’t construe that as blaming them for it.
@miked2006 better choice was to simply to pick the more handsome looking brother, however redundant his policies were by then. This is another historical rewrite that pretends, with a bit of presentation, that the Country would have chosen reheated New Labour over Nationalism through the last decade. Despite David Miliband, nice as he is, having no alternative political philosophy to the Gordon Brown one the voters soundly rejected. Despite Nationalism itself being at least in part a reaction to New Labour failings. Fact is, since then, the endless march to self-destruction with the Tories is partly on those who claim to oppose the Tories, but are easily frightened off Labour for, often, superficial reasons.
Yeah, well we’ll never know now, will we? You’re also rewriting history to say Brown was “soundly rejected”. The 2010 election resulted in a hung Parliament.
Fair enough, everything is open to interpretation, but the first line of the post does say: "Labour can't avoid all blame." That does sound a bit like blaming them.
It’s certainly blaming them and it’s part of a trend to demand that Labour is the party that middle class people want it to be (Tory lite, favouring privatisation and ‘wealth creators’ in exchange for strong public services) over what working class people want it to be, which is largely both protectionist and redistributive. And if you don’t believe the latter just look at the politics of the North and ‘levelling up’. That trend has run Labour aground and while it will (thankfully) win next time, it will run aground again if it fails to learn this lesson or if the middle class interests in the Party hold too much sway.
Are you arguing that there are enough working class voters for Labour to win just by capturing those votes? If so, you are living in the 1940s. How do you explain 1997, then?
Where is it you think Labour can win? The Chilterns? The West Country? It needs to win in the Red Wall and in largely working class towns like Basildon. It needs to win in Stoke and Southampton, those sorts of places. It’s not going to be 1997 again. You will never be hip again or know what is top of the music charts And Brown was soundly rejected. He got under 30%.
Labour simply won’t win if it relies just on working class votes. It needs to capture at least some of the middle class vote. Exactly as it did in 1997, in fact, although I agree that the scale of that result won’t be replicated. Hence, it needs to devise some policies which appeal to those voters. That doesn’t necessarily mean throwing the socialist baby completely out with the bath water, but it’s entirely sensible for the party to consider how to sell itself to those voters, who are very likely to determine the result of the next election. It’s more likely, of course, that it will end up in some pact with the LibDems and/or SNP.
The trouble is the national opinion polls aren't showing that the LD's picking up those disaffected Tory votes. A Tory campaign of a vote for Labour would be a vote for the SNP to Destroy Britain might work (again?) especially if it's spun as England losing its access to independent hydrocarbon reserves. Those "...working class votes..." or more commonly called the "Traditional Labour voters" - they weren't or never were. They were the non-voting (working class populations) who were energised by the Brexit vote because here was an issue that "...mattered..." and 'they' fully "...understood...". Be interesting to see if "They're going to steal YOUR Brexit" will work as a rallying call (again?) for the Tories.
Well yes, economic stability is likely to be chief among its promises. But if it does promise to the working class and the middle classes get scared off by the Mail and Express, they will have another five years of the Tories. And if they don’t promise enough to win back the Red Wall they will again get five more years of the Tories. So it’s pretty simple. Vote for a working class focussed Labour Party and avoid it at your peril, because no way are there enough middle class votes for Labour to win it.
Isn’t that terribly negative? Labour shouldn’t be formulating its policies on the basis that voters may get scared off. It should be making policy which is appealing enough to outweigh those headlines. And no way are there enough working class votes for Labour to win just relying on those. Wilson only just managed it, and the social structure of the country has changed hugely since the 1960s.
They're extremely touchy about the funding of this 'charity', that as someone points out the thread, wields so much 'influence' over our political landscape: https://twitter.com/mrjamesob/status/1580302170221531136
