2015 UK General Election campaign & aftermath discussion thread.

Gove/Human Rights act: https://dominiccummings.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/on-the-referendum-1-gove-and-the-human-rights-act-cool-yer-boots-man/

He clearly wants to just get down the pub and fuck off on holiday for a few months, and then he realised that there's literally nothing than he would be expected to do for the rest of this year in any case.

He could bloody well turn up for his job in Europe, like.

xxp he's still an MEP! There was a letter to him doing the rounds on Facebook earlier saying hey Nige, your health seems to have improved and you're not bothered by the election any more, surely this tosh about you taking the summer off was some sort of typo, you're not one of those lazy slack MEPs you're always railing against, right?

Oh, Grant Scnapps has been demoted...

let's see if anyone can think of a new uk politics thread title before matt dc

actually that 'why did you vote conservative' one should do

"why did evil cunts vote conservative"

That thread should really just be allowed to die a quiet death.

Christ, 2020 is a long way away.

Leave it for a few days then lock it. Waste of time.

Spoke too soon, another customer!

thread title: 'Have you ever kissed a Shy Tory?'

Jesus.

https://twitter.com/50ShadesOfTory

keep the meme alive turrers

Was listening to Dave Mili on R4 earlier, he was sounding deluded and bitter. Like he thinks his version of opposition would have been a roaring success in comparison to his bro's because it includes "aspirational people", what a fucking worthless turd. Does he really think that in the labour heartlands people would love to vote for someone threatening to throttle you with both hands rather than just the one? And he would have bombed just as badly as bro in the tory marginals.

there may be truth in their argument that a "left of centre" (bitter, bitter lols) Labour party can't win an election. their conclusion - that you just keep moving right, chasing those votes, because that's what a political party does - is base cynicism.

blaming the electorate is a terrible thing, they are millions of nice people who just want what's best for their families and to live in relative security and comfort and the warm glow of knowing that every undeserving human being - which is basically everybody who is different to them who they have no understanding or knowledge of - gets nothing from the government but punishment.

That's the thing, "aspirational" is just code for a certain kind of voter, in reality most people are aspirational in one way or another, ways that aren't always about naked acquisitiveness.

But it isn't really about aspiration, it's about fear. Even relatively well off people feel insecure, especially post-2008. You can take any socialist or for that matter several right-wing policies and wave them under the electorate's nose and they'll say they like them in isolation. But if, fuelled by the media, they ultimately worry that you'll wreck everything either through mendacity or basic incompetence then they won't vote for you. It's why they rejected Brown and Major and it's much of the electorate took a look at Miliband and Balls and for that matter Hague and Howard and IDS if they'd had the chance and decided no.

Miliband just wasn't good enough at deflecting that fear, if anything he compounded it, while the SNP were able to convince people that they could both run Scotland competently AND give enough of a shit to show a way out for the thousands of people to whom the worst might already be happening.

There are many other factors at play, but the more the Tories run down the welfare state the worse these feelings of insecurity are going to get, and conversely they will probably continue to benefit from them, until such point as they suddenly don't.

One of the few surprising things to have come out of Labour over the past few days was Blair admitting he hasn't paid enough attention to inequality, and Miliband was right to focus on it. No senior Labour figure should even think about talking about "aspiration" without also talking about inequality and poverty. Aspirations don't mean shit if the government is systematically removing any means you might have to achieve it.

David Miliband just comes across like Harry Redknapp shaking his fist, oblivious to the fact he would have done just as badly. The tabloids would have printed that banana photo every day for five years and he'd have been ridiculed just like his brother.

Also they have to actually be honest about the fact that the aspirations and interests of different voters constantly clash with one another and stop pretending to be all things to all people. Actually it seems like they're already making that choice while ignoring the flood of people abandoning them from the other direction.

if one accepts the concept of poverty of aspiration does a central focus on the aspirational mean focusing on the privileged I guess so

the more the Tories run down the welfare state the worse these feelings of insecurity are going to get, and conversely they will probably continue to benefit from them, until such point as they suddenly don't

this is what this 'blue collar conservatism' thing is all about right? a vision of everyone treading on each others heads to get in to the lifeboat, which then starts sinking anyway

UGH. David Miliband was such a dick yesterday. It must have been difficult growing up as London's answer to Alex P. Keaton.

i liked what the Compass fella said on Newnight last night, that the Labour party needs to be about collective aspiration: the aspiration for good wages, an education, an affordable place to live, a fair society, for clean air to breathe

UGH. David Miliband was such a dick yesterday.

yeah - agree.
nagl.
but hey he now works for a big global charity raising millions etc, so, its all good.

"Blue collar conservatism" is probably a bit of reheated divide-and-rule Thatcherism aimed at winning back parts of the working class Labour vote, but particularly in hoovering up the voters who have defected to UKIP.

In my lifetime at least, the Tory view has usually been that there are two working classes, the ones who are interested in social mobility who should be helped (as long as it doesn't hinder the people with actual money), and the others, who policy makers basically shouldn't bother with. I don't really believe that "poverty of aspiration" is as widespread as these people say it is, certainly not among kids, but it is a useful tool if your aim is to decide who you should allow to basically starve.

We were sitting in the garden of David Miliband's local in Primrose Hill yesterday when news of that actual incident of filial backstabbery came through.

was it really back-stabbing? the newspapers had it as "blasts" ed but when i read the article it seemed there was nothing in there to justify the headline, as per usual.

Agree - in the bbc interview I saw he chose his words really carefully and took great pains not to be backstabbing. Tbh I think the interview was more to leave him open to come back at a later stage than to settle a score with Ed.

Scintillating curveball 'let's ask his betrayed brother what he thinks about this' tactics from the press.

i reckon he should have held back from any interview for a few weeks.
let things settle.
no matter what he said, it was going to be portrayed this way.

the only bit that felt cold to me, but not an attack, was when they asked if he's in touch with ed and his answer was something like "we speak" rather than "of course, he's my brother"... but that was more revelatory than critical.

Scintillating curveball 'let's ask his betrayed brother what he thinks about this' tactics from the press.

.. except it had been "DMil will be issuing a statement later on today", so I don't think the press were involved, directly.

'let's see if his betrayed brother will tell us what he thinks without any prompting at all'? got it

yup.

I think it was more "Oh well, now they'll all come asking, guess I'd better say something, oh well..."

so the conservatives want to repeal HRA and replace it with a UK-wide bill of rights but human rights are a devolved issue in scotland. this means that if WM wants to enact legislation which applies to scotland in this area, they either have to obtain the consent of the scottish govt first (under the sewell convention) or enact it anyway in direct contravention of the convention. the scottish govt have already signalled that they will withhold their consent to this

trust conservative toad michael gove to blindly trundle down a potentially constitutionally explosive alleyway in his first few days in office

Meanwhile the SNP are mischief-making in the Telegraph and saying they're trying to talk to the more liberal Tories about striking down the snooper's charter.

This would all be great fun if people weren't dying.

either (i) their plans have been sketched on the back of a fag packet or (ii) this is a political ruse they know can't go through but will appease their backbenches and also allow them to further bemoan the scottish horde (or even (iii) both.)

My guess is that they're not really that arsed about repealing it and just wanted the headlines, and the SNP will provide a convenient way out while ensuring they get to make the right kind of noises until everyone loses interest and the policy is quietly binned.

So yeah, ii there.

originally a Grayling fag packet scheme? I think he was pretty regularly called 'legally illiterate'. ianal but everything I've ever read makes it sound either pointless and hideously complicated or hideously complicated and unworkable.

Suspect it may have moved from cat i towards cat ii over time.

Add Ireland to that mix too http://www.caj.org.uk/contents/1293

But I think they do genuinely hate it. Rights for prisoners? Having to give Our Boys rights while deployed? Not being allowed send those filthy foreign back where they came from if their lives would be in danger? Not being allowed to snoop on people? Blood boils at the very thought.

all these people passing round the "why do Tories hate human rights" gifs shd know the answer is really simple - these are people who never fall foul of the law - not the real law - and don't give a fuck what happens to those who do, in fact they want the punishment to be as medieval as possible because hey, they've never broken the law so everybody who does is some kind of poison that needs excising from the populace

yeah if you've got nothing to hide why would you be against a snooper's charter *stuffs fist down own throat*

1901 hrs:  subject observed taking part in fisting incident

These stories of plane loads of bankers cheering things like "Ed Balls is gone" on Friday remind me what's at stake with these cunts.

Cameron: “For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/may/13/counter-terrorism-bill-extremism-disruption-orders-david-cameron

And we all thought Clegg was basically bullshitting about having watered all this stuff down.

i'd say it was an unbelievable quote but...

The definition of harmful is to include a risk of public disorder, a risk of harassment, alarm or distress or creating a “threat to the functioning of democracy”.

a risk of distress? fuck me

creating a rival threat he means

among the extremists theresa may has said she's looking to root out are the 'neo-marxists', i'm gonna be so bummed out when all of my friends are in prison

“For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone."

This is truly an astonishing quote.