ddt
Mafia Penguin
And the Sun is running the headline "Blue Murder".
It's almost as if one dead MP is not enough for them.
UK General Election
- Thread starter Darat
- Start date
And the Sun is running the headline "Blue Murder".
It's almost as if one dead MP is not enough for them.
dudalb
Penultimate Amazing
In the US both parties have a tendacy to blame the press for their defeats.
With the GOP it's "The Liberal Media" (Trump's "Fake News" is just a variation on this);
With the Democrats it's the evil Right Wing media;they blame Fox News and Rush Limbaugh for every setback they have.
IMHO it is a cheap way to try to excuse away your mistakes.
Not at all. The very opposite in fact. The coalition was pretty much exactly where my very centrist politics lies: socially liberal, economically/ fiscally conservative. I personally would welcome Lib-Con coalitions more often. I would also welcome the Lib Dems replacing Labour as HM Opposition, or at least, I would have done with the last couple of iterations of Lib Dem leadership. Not so sure now, although anyone would be better than Corbyn's Labour in that role.
Rolfe
Adult human female
It's probably more about narrative. In 2015 the SNP hit a sweet spot it's unlikely to repeat quite so spectacularly. That election happened after the huge rise in support for the SNP but before the unionist element of the Labour vote had collapsed towards the Conservatives in the way it has since. The party got 50% of the vote in that election and is currently polling around 47%.
So it's quite likely that it will slip back slightly from the 2015 mark. My friend Calum who is MP for Berwickshire may well lose his seat (which won't faze him too much personally as he was finding the London commitments a bit wearing as he has a young family). There could be one or two more. We don't know if the seats won by the two SNP MPs who subsequently lost the party whip can be retained by the new candidates.
Ian Murray won Edinburgh South for Labour on the back of the Tory vote going to him tactically. They may do that again, thought it's bucking the trend elsewhere in Scotland which is for the section of the Labour vote that hasn't already gone SNP to go Tory.
Alistair Carmichael is a proven liar who has disgraced his office, but the Northern Isles seem to vote LibDem on some sort of spinal reflex so he may hold on again.
In my own constituency of Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale we have the solitary Tory. Lots of people gloating that he'll go, as he won by a smaller margin than the Green vote last time and the Greens have sensibly decided not to stand this time, but it'll be tough. We need a seriously heavyweight Big Beast candidate and I don't know who we can scrape up. (Well, I do know actually and he says he's considering it, but he didn't sound too enthusiastic so maybe that idea is a bust.)
So yes, the SNP could end up on maybe 53 or 54 seats instead of 56. And on 47% of the vote instead of 50%. And May intends to narrate that as a fall in support and "no mandate" and the SNP doing really badly. Even though she can only dream of polling 47% and getting (proportionately) that number of seats. This happened last year too, when the SNP actually increased its share of the Holyrood vote and the number of constituencies won over 2011 but because of the vagaries of the top-up system ended up with slightly fewer MSPs overall than before. This was then reported as Sturgeon having "lost her mandate".
Because the SNP got an absolute fluke of an unbelievable victory, any fall-back from this point, no matter how slight, will be spun as a loss. They're now saying Sturgeon has no mandate in Holyrood because she doesn't have an overall majority in an electoral system specifically designed to prevent overall majorities, just because the SNP fluked it once.
The SNP will do eyepoppingly well in June by any normal metric, it will do better in Scotland than the Conservatives do in England and it will knock the Conservatives in Scotland out of the park. However it will be spun as a loss and a rejection of another independence referendum and so on. And if the Conservatives do a bit better in Scotland than they did in 2015 that will be spun as an enormous victory and Scotland embracing the Tories and so on, even though they're still beaten into a cocked hat by the SNP.
We'll just get on with things anyway.
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Hlafordlaes
Disorder of Kilopi
Dear lord, elections. Yet another reason I'll be seeing endless Ms. May on the tele, much to my grim dismay. Please stop being in the news, madame, I beg of you, enough.
So the turkeys not only voted for Xmas but head turkey Corbyn is making plans for his summer holidays.
It simply beggars belief, this is the political equivalent of the charge of the Light Brigade, any number of those Labour MPs who voted for this must know they are going to lose their seats and yet they've voted in favour of May's desperate desire to undermine any parliamentary accountability for her actions in the Brexit negotiations.
It simply beggars belief, this is the political equivalent of the charge of the Light Brigade, any number of those Labour MPs who voted for this must know they are going to lose their seats and yet they've voted in favour of May's desperate desire to undermine any parliamentary accountability for her actions in the Brexit negotiations.
Dear lord, elections. Yet another reason I'll be seeing endless Ms. May on the tele, much to my grim dismay. Please stop being in the news, madame, I beg of you, enough.
Oh don't worry she's already said she won't participate in any TV debates. but don't dare suggest she's high handed or authoritarian.
Honestly...........a working majority of 16 means 8 of her backbenchers can conspire to kybosch the whole 2 year long negotiations. There is also the Lords/ Parliament Act/ Manifesto point. Tell me, in May's situation what would YOU do?
If you think what May is doing is morally and ethically okay, well then there's little point in answering your question.
Look, you may not agree with May’s policies. You may in fact think that they will be terrible.
However, the above is a separate issue to whether she is under any moral or legal obligation to “go easy” on Labour when it comes to timing her appeal to the electorate. The obligation is on Labour to be a credible, effective opposition and not a flock of turkeys voting for an early Christmas.
May is being a politician. Corbyn is failing both at being a politician and an opposition and thus is also failing the British people.
dudalb
Penultimate Amazing
Once again, what is May doing that is different then any other PM who called for a new election at a time he or she thought would give an advantage to their party? Standard Tactic IMHO.
And whatever rules were put in place to keep this from happening, have failed miserably.
If you don't like this kind of crap, consider going to fixed terms for PM's.
I dislike May a lot, but don't get why this is so reprehensible.
Do you think a Labor PM in the same situation would not do the same thing?
And whatever rules were put in place to keep this from happening, have failed miserably.
If you don't like this kind of crap, consider going to fixed terms for PM's.
I dislike May a lot, but don't get why this is so reprehensible.
Do you think a Labor PM in the same situation would not do the same thing?
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ddt
Mafia Penguin
You try to gloss over the fact that it's a CONVENTION, not a law. Conventions can be broken, and that is illustrated by the fact that the LibDems announced in 2005 that they didn't feel bound by the Salisbury Convention. So, the Lords can actually go against the convention and say No to a proposed Brexit treaty.
The fact that the Commons have only seven times since 1911 overruled the Lords is also no convincing argument: we're dealing here, after all, with the most important legislation in a generation; and if the Lords would reject it, surely the Tory leadership will give the vote to overrule it a five-line whip.
Lastly, I think you overblow the whole issue. Right now, May can go into the election with explicitly Brexit in the manifesto. But in 2015, the Tories went into the election with the Brexit referendum in the manifesto. Did they promise that referendum just for fun? Brexit is the direct outcome of what they promised in the manifesto. Maybe they didn't write in the manifesto explicitly "and if the referendum yields leave, we'll actually leave the EU", but that's really hairsplitting.
This is nothing to do with Labour, the fact is the woman doesn't even think she can get her own parliamentary party to back her plans. If May had won the court battle over article 50 I don't for one minute believe this election would be happening. She simply cannot tolerate the idea that her plans might be subjected to proper parliamentary scrutiny, so she wants a whole bunch of newbie backbenchers who will shut up and vote as they are told.
ddt
Mafia Penguin
Oh, it refers to oddly-coloured crows?
Next to it it says "PM's snap poll will kill off Labour". You may say that's meant figuratively, but there's literally a ton of people out there who can't quite make the distinction between figuratively and literally.
It's at the least very offensive.
Oh, and the Daily Mail headline "Crush the Saboteurs" is a quote from Lenin.
ddt
Mafia Penguin
McHrozni is actually right here. The Daily Mail headline is a quote from Lenin, and we all know what he did with saboteurs.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/apr/19/crush-the-saboteurs-how-hard-brexit-rhetoric-turned-leninist:
It's quite ironic.
Oh, it refers to oddly-coloured crows?
Next to it it says "PM's snap poll will kill off Labour". You may say that's meant figuratively, but there's literally a ton of people out there who can't quite make the distinction between figuratively and literally.
It's at the least very offensive.
.
There aren't enough rolleyes for this.
After pmqs today where may managed to answer no questions, again, Tory polling is up to 48%, and that's with the refusal to do debates.
Interesting article in the grauniad, espousing David Miliband as leader with call me dave's policies as a winner, ignoring the fact Tony Blair's lurch to the center right got labour into the current situation.
A look at twitter, the main reasons to not vote labour appears to be blairs single-handed/lapdog bombing of Afghanistan and Iraq, let's forget Libya and Syria, while corbyn's refusal to use nuclear weapons is the other main factor.
Interesting article in the grauniad, espousing David Miliband as leader with call me dave's policies as a winner, ignoring the fact Tony Blair's lurch to the center right got labour into the current situation.
A look at twitter, the main reasons to not vote labour appears to be blairs single-handed/lapdog bombing of Afghanistan and Iraq, let's forget Libya and Syria, while corbyn's refusal to use nuclear weapons is the other main factor.
baron
Unregistered
- Joined
- Dec 8, 2006
- Messages
- 8,627
Oh, it refers to oddly-coloured crows?
Next to it it says "PM's snap poll will kill off Labour". You may say that's meant figuratively, but there's literally a ton of people out there who can't quite make the distinction between figuratively and literally.
It's at the least very offensive.
Oh, and the Daily Mail headline "Crush the Saboteurs" is a quote from Lenin.
Jesus wept.