2015 UK General Election campaign & aftermath discussion thread.

They won't do it, but EU could concede to every one of Cameron's demands and there would still be thundering demand for a referendum - I can't see any way in which he can get out of holding one while remaining Prime Minister.

I've been so far out of the loop the last months due to baby I think I've missed tons because I don't understand half of what's being said at the moment wrt what the Tories are now champing at the bit to do - repeal the Human Rights Act, lift foxhunting ban, EU referendum - I think I assumed most of it was Twitter silliness but are there specific actual reasons for trying to do these things?
this is what happens when you get all your 'news' from social media and ignore it

Fox hunting is a dead cert. It's a totemic issue for a lot of their rural support. The rest looks up in the air.

it's Blair's legacy legislation, placing his feelings about the value of the lives of foxes vs the value of the lives of Iraqis in clear relief

Tory voters, they and their views are fucking repulsive.

Ugh, I've got to stop watching this shit.

having a go at the Human Rights Act is pretty certain - it's a manifesto pledge. They want to replace it with a British (English?) bill of rights, some shit like that. I assume they can do it now - I don't know if it's the kind of thing that'll show up the cracks.

in good news Lib Dems lost £170,500 in deposits.

heavy and aggressive kettling and arrests at the parliament square protests while elsewhere a heavy police presence is protecting an edl march, c'mon now there's plenty of time to ease in to our dystopian future this is just crude

Right, that's what was going on, i was passed by a dozen police vans while waiting for bus earlier

Nothing about this on the BBC News website. Sign that the Beeb is going to be even more cowed by a Tory government than it was by the coalition?

awful lot of division in senior lab ranks between Umana (not well-liked politically it seems, but with *some* powerful backing), Hunt (number of senior figures backing him), Burnham (same) and Cooper (again, seemingly not well liked, esp among blairites)

Burnham is awful. But then, they all are.

xxp beeb generally not great at reporting on protests until it has a number of arrests to put in the headline tbh

choosing a new Labour leader is like picking your favourite member of the 1970 Leeds United squad

says David Peace in a 500 word thinkpiece for the Observer tomorrow

so the fox hunting thing is purely because a bunch of posh twats aren't over it yet, not for any demonstrable 'reason'
I was wondering if there was a specific Human Right they want to get around idk maybe they can ramp up the kettling even further

ramp up the kettling

I find this phrase pleasing :)

Nothing about this on the BBC News website. Sign that the Beeb is going to be even more cowed by a Tory government than it was by the coalition?

BBC News, especially at the weekend, has never really been a breaking news type of organisation. They report news broken by others, sometimes very quickly, but they work off-diary an awful lot of the time. The protestors PR should have rung the newsdesk last week. And what Merdeyeux said.

Human Rights: Fuck, where to start? They don't think criminals or the unemployed should have any rights at all, and May in particular has the hugest hard-on for Stasi-style snooping.

afaik, they can't actually change any human rights without leaving the ECHR. What they can change is the way they are enforced in British courts. The final court that decides is still Strasbourg - it just makes it much more of a nuisance for people if they have to take it there rather than a domestic venue.

xxxppps yes it was kael about nixon, and it she wasn't making the point she's often implied to have been making

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/10/The-Fraudulent-Factoid-That-Refuses-to-Die

ramp up the kettling immediately scans to the m/a/r/r/s track

I think most Tories are confused about the difference between the ECHR and the EU, and are thinking this renegotiation will mean the "Europe's crazy judges" won't have final say over good old British laws. They'll probably end up lobbying to pull out of the council of Europe as well when they realise

on human rights act, prisoner voting is I think the particular thing that had them frothing - Europe telling us what to do etc

prisoners could sometimes vote in the ussr afaik

Soviet elections in the late 40's were quite predictable, but it was ill advised to protest about the lack of any discernible choice!

Seeking the appearance of democracy, the Soviet Union held elections, but only one Communist Party candidate appeared on the ballot for each office. Fear of punishment ensured that nearly all Soviet citizens “voted” by taking their ballot and ceremoniously placing it into a ballot box.

In 1949, Ivan Burylov, a beekeeper, protested this absurd ritual by writing the word “Comedy” on his “secret” ballot. Soviet authorities linked the ballot to Burylov and sentenced him to eight years in camps for this “crime.”

Job application from Chuka Umunna http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/09/labours-first-step-to-regaining-power-is-to-recognise-the-mistakes-we-made

Even more horrific

This it is "absolutely time" for a new generation to "step up to a leadership role" thing from Lammy would actually mean he is ruling himself out.

there's increasing calls on the backbenches for dan jarvis to run. i don't know much about his ideology but his appeal is clear on paper.

ex-forces so xelab's a fan

It is academic in this case because I will never vote for labour again, but yeah he does look like an appalling tosser as well!

Who better to break with the toxic legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan than a guy who fought in both?

yeah but how can the sun and daily mail attack the character of one of our boys?

(they totally can and will)

xxp beeb generally not great at reporting on protests until it has a number of arrests to put in the headline tbh

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32678518 ah there we go

cheap lols at the sky website report having the caption "the police claimed around 100 people were involved in the protest" under a photo of several hundred people

These fucks haven't even begun to absorb or comprehend what has actually happened before falling back on whatever their one entrenched position happens to be. Calling for more Blairism at this point is the equivalent of bombing out of a World Cup in the group stages and then immediately calling for a team built around Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard. It's evident from that Chuka Umunna piece that he has no answer to what happened in Scotland (and doesn't want to look too closely in case it leads him to a conclusion he doesn't like).

Jarvis looks at surface level to be meant to appeal to the UKIP/white van man vote, but I'm not sure that vote is big enough to swing seats in the right areas, and UKIP support may collapse anyway without Farage at the helm and with an EU referendum in this Parliament.

I have no idea who Andy Burnham is meant to appeal to.

this is incredible (can be viewed in an incognito tab if you don't have a login)
http://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/scottish-politics/scottish-labour-inside-the-campaign-from-hell.125560928

It's evident from that Chuka Ummuna piece that he has no answer to what happened in Scotland (and doesn't want to look too closely in case it leads him to a conclusion he doesn't like).

And if you needed any confirmation of that he's just been on the Andrew Marr Show saying that Jim Murphy had done a good job as leader of the Scottish Labour Party! SNP supporters are delusional on so many fronts but the main one is the idea that "they're going to have to listen to Scotland now", the Labour Party aren't, if the Blairites win the day (which they surely will after Milliband) and the Tories certainly aren't. "We have 56 MPs now, they can't ignore us", yeah well they managed it well enough for decades with the Lib Dems as third party.

By the way, interesting interview with (leading Eurosceptic) David Davis where he said (basically) that benefit tourism from within the EU doesn't exist and that the free movement labour from country is not a big issue and all that he really wants from EU negotiations is an opt out on things the UK doesn't agree - straight bananas and the like I'm assuming. So seems like even Eurosceptic Tories are rowing back on the anti-EU rhetoric and demands now that they've got their majority.

I don't think that Labour can win without a structure that allows them to simultaneously attack the SNP from the left *and* appeal to soft Tories in the South of England. Ironically Cameron, in one of his moves with unintended consequences, may actually create the conditions for that that if he does offer Scotland more powers as an excuse to slash funding. Whether such a Labour Party deserves to exist is another question entirely.

Has any senior Labour figure come out and said that the party was wrong to hitch its wagon to austerity-lite? That's the biggest single break with the Blair era and it has been largely ignored in the initial soul-searching.

No, all I've heard is how Labour is has failed to appeal to people with 'aspiration', which people on benefits and on low incomes don't have apparently and who it appears they've wasted their time appealing to. I'm not sure how promising to be tougher on those out of work than the Tories is appealing to them though.

Blairism is everything but the answer to Labour's current problems. Ed Miliband managed to coax a lot of people back to Labour who were alienated by the real legacy of Blair, which was Iraq. I find it incredible that the people running down Miliband for whatever are praising Jim Murphy, who is obviously an idiot. It's too soon to see what the SNP will be able to do opposing Tories but I'm not

Why oh why was Liam Byrne not thrown on the naughty step for that stupid note at some point in 2010? I do not care if he was joking; well-off white guys always be joking, and we're always supposed to let them. Emily Thornberry had to leave the shadow cabinet for so much less.

David Cameron mentions his son when talking about the NHS *because* it pisses off his political enemies. This can be nipped in the bud merely by saying Ivan Cameron's short life, with all that excellent care he keeps banging on about, happened when the NHS was being enhanced by Labour, because it's true.

*not optimistic.

Remember, David Cameron is all about divide and rule. It's literally the only thing he's good at, and he doesn't give a shit who gets hurt.

I don't think that Labour can win without a structure that allows them to simultaneously attack the SNP from the left *and* appeal to soft Tories in the South of England.

I don't know, it's beginning to look like some Blairites think they can cut Scotland loose and concentrate on the people that really matter to the Labour Party and movement, Tory voters.

Boundary changes might make this, electorally, a good policy to follow.

The thing is that the Blairites are probably right about the South of England. Where they are completely wrong is in Scotland and parts of deindustrialised England, and it's apparent they don't know how to cope. Miliband might have attracted back a bit of core vote, but share of the vote means little under FPTP. Labour's share of the vote actually went up a little bit and they still did worse than in 2010. I doubt that the SNP will be exactly desperate to get rid of FTPT at Westminster either, given it's effectively granted them a one-party state.

The problem with the "core vote" is that it's unevenly distributed and quite a bit of it is drifting towards UKIP. I suspect that a lot of the core vote (in England) will, in five years' time, be so desperate to get rid of the Tories that they will vote for any old shit if it's wearing a red rosette. The exception is the voter base who lean left on economic issues and hard to the right on social issues, and that's very difficult territory for Labour.

Let's not forget that Miliband positioned himself significantly to the right of Blair on issues like welfare and immigration, and that strategy comprehensively failed.

All of this only holds if you think the only thing that matters is that the red team beats the blue team at the end.

Don't see the current levels of support for UKIP persisting tbh.

going to be some difficulty reconstituting SLAB as an independent party in-and-of-itself. afaik labour doesn't even exist as a registered party in scotland, & is just an accounting unit of labour UK. where will it get its money? no way the unions & union members will agree to transfer their pecuniary allegiance to a brand-new scottish registered party. what will its founding principles be? how will it organise itself? who owns john smith house and, if UK labour, will they relinquish any of it? etc etc

and the irony surely can't be lost on those within labour that they banged on & on so much about the union & brotherhood etc but they're now citing irreconcilable differences - or differences of policy required to address a different political landscape - and becoming separatists. are they giving any thought to the deeper issues that that is a response to... well

that chuka umunna article is embarrassing, what a dire communicator - there's enough there to assume he can never be a success, harsh as that may sound. like that's a pretty big moment for him, laying down the gauntlet like this, and he has no clear vision whatsoever. it's just a rambling screed, he writes like someone who lost something irreplaceable at his 1000th four-hour westminster meeting.

it's time to confront things, which in retrospect, we should have done years ago

bad grammar cliche time machine.

That’s why I’ve always argued you cannot be pro-business by beating up on the terms and conditions of their workers and the trade unions that play an important role representing them

i don't know what he means here. i don't understand what this thing he has always argued is.

And sometimes we made it sound like we saw taxing people as a good in itself, rather than a means to an end.

taxing people is a bad!

we should have been the ones championing a smart, efficient public sector that uses technology, co-operative and mutual principles and a pragmatic “what works” approach to get things done.

definitely need more what worksism in government.

he direction we need to taketo rebuild is clear. We must stop looking to the past and focus on ensuring everyone has a stake in the future. Our vision as a party must start with the aspirations of voters: to get on and up in the world, to see their children and grandchildren do better than they did, to get that better job, to move from renting to owning, to take the family on holiday, to move from that flat to that house with a garden. That means offering competence, optimism not fatalism, an end to machine politics, an economic credo that is both pro-worker and pro-business and, most of all, a politics that starts with what unites us as a country rather than what divides us.

sounds really clear. twirling always twirling toward freedom.

He's just not very intelligent, that's his main problem.

new vision from Tristram Hunt

Labour need to show they are also on the side of families who want to shop at John Lewis, go on holiday and get a new extension.