tonyh29 Posted September 17, 2012 Share Posted September 17, 2012 So. Call Me Dave vs. Barmy Boris. Place your bets. A small accident for William and we could have Harry as King and Boris as PM How cool would that be :-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon Posted September 17, 2012 Share Posted September 17, 2012 So. Call Me Dave vs. Barmy Boris. Place your bets. BoJo. Win via Stealth. Popularity to wane dramatically once the clown mask slips off. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon Posted September 17, 2012 Share Posted September 17, 2012 Harry as King The end of the German bloodline, Saxe-Coburg dynasty? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon Posted September 17, 2012 Share Posted September 17, 2012 Interesting article in Today's Grauniad on BoJo, and whether he can be the Tory saviour: Personality isn't everything. The Tories couldn't win in 2010, and with the worst yet to come, one man can't save them. A spectre is haunting British politics – the spectre of Boris Johnson. David Cameron's faltering leadership of the Conservatives is dogged by whispers that party donors and backbenchers are lining up London's mayor as his replacement. Liberal columnists tug at our sleeves, urging that we take seriously the prospect of a Johnson premiership. Senior figures within the Labour party are said to view him as a genuine threat. When I mention "the coming of Boris" to leftwing friends, haunted looks pass over their faces as they hurry their children indoors, murmuring gravely about the dangers of underestimating him. Their fears are not allayed by last week's poll showing that the bankers' cheerleader with a history of casual racism is now the most trusted politician in the country. Never underestimate the tendency in British politics to overestimate the importance of personalities. It would be foolish to predict that Johnson will not win the 2015 election if he does take over from Cameron. But it's long past the time to set out the reasons why it will be very difficult indeed for him or any other leader to pull this off. The Conservative party's prospects have become increasingly bleak, irrespective of the leadership it chooses or the image it projects. It has not won a general election for 20 years. It has not won one comfortably for 25 years. It couldn't win on a rightwing platform in 2001 or in 2005. It couldn't win in 2010, having attempted to detoxify its brand and pitch to the centre ground instead. This latest failure is the most telling, and is worth dwelling upon. It came against a washed-out, discredited government after a deep recession and the worst financial crash since 1929. The Tories were led by a plausible, fluent, telegenic young leader, solidly backed by the press and appealing outside of their natural voter base. These were the most benign electoral circumstances the Conservatives will ever enjoy. But where most serious opposition parties in the democratic world would have won by a landslide, the Tory zombie needed the likes of Nick Clegg and Vince Cable to heave its wheezing frame through the doors of No 10. The fundamental problem the Conservatives face is that support for their party has been drying up for some time. Their share of the vote, notwithstanding short-term oscillations within the political cycle, has fallen steadily overall since the second world war. When the academic John Ross first pointed this out in the mid-80s, he was met with incredulity – understandable enough given the Tory dominance of the time. But the subsequent generation of electoral failure has laid bare the reality of what Ross had identified. Tory shrinkage is relative as well as absolute. Labour's corresponding decline has not been as sharp, and its share of the vote is now shored up by the post-2010 exodus of centre-left Liberal Democrat voters, a reverse of the SDP effect 30 years ago. Johnson's challenge will be to lead a party that is fishing for voters in an ever shallower pool. Forty-two percent say they will never vote Conservative, against 30% for Labour. Only 58% say they might be prepared to vote Tory, versus 70% for Labour. Research shows that swing voters broadly support social democrat views on the crucial questions of tax and spend, the size of the public sector and the provision of public services. They express little appetite for Johnson's brand of small-state conservatism. In other parts of the country, anti-Toryism in has become what Owen Jones describes as a kind of "folk hatred", fuelled by memories of mass unemployment and deindustrialisation under Margaret Thatcher. Will these views have mellowed after five years of Conservative austerity, recession and stagnation? Possibly not. Before the 2010 election, Mervyn King warned that the party that won, and implemented its austerity programme, would render itself unelectable for a generation thereafter. King hadn't reckoned with the political effects a double-dip recession "made in Downing Street" on top of this. And remember that most of George Osborne's cuts are still to come. Will the ambition and personality of one Old Etonian be enough to defy long-term political trends, erase five years of pain from voters' minds and convince them to elect a Conservative majority in 2015 for the first time in 23 years? Nothing's impossible, but let's not underestimate the scale of the task that Johnson, or any other leader, will face. Against this backdrop, personal ratings may not count for very much. Link Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tonyh29 Posted September 17, 2012 Share Posted September 17, 2012 It couldn't win in 2010, but come 2015 the tory party have a secret weapon , well 2 actually ....... Ed and Ed clearly the lib voters are going to abandon them and most will head to Labour , we may see another coalition , it may turn out to be Lab - Lib ... (I can't wait for the outrage from Labour voters saying that it's a government without a mandate as nobody voted for a coalition :-) ) regarding 2010 , didn't it have a swing of 5.% , the second largest in history and the largest gain of seats ever by the conservatives at a general election ? it's was hardly a resounding "no" from the country ... I tend to agree with King , but take out the partisan voters and your average voter has the memory of Tony Blair at a war inquiry , so a few tax give-aways , a few boundary changes and a few decent headlines and it could still see a tory lead coalition or even a majority Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
drat01 Posted September 17, 2012 Share Posted September 17, 2012 Tony you are being delusional again. Firstly Blair and Iraq. A war inquiry, do you really think that the averag voter even thinks of that now. And a war inquiry, are you sure? especially when the Tory leading people, in Cameron and Hague called for more action than any Labour Gvmt did, and the only way the vote got through parliament is by Tory support. You cling to the hope that the media will try and do a character assassination on Ed Balls and Ed Milliband, which is like you admitting the Tory party is basically unelectable (as the article says) and the only way it can be voted in is to rely on a already discredited media to undertake a dirty tricks campaign. The reality as the article points out is that the Gvmt of today was not the one that majority of the UK population wanted and voted for. The Tory party despite its billions from tax exiles and avoiders still failed and that is why many of their backers, including a lot in the disgraced City are looking to rid its party of the idiocy and inefficiency of Cameron and Osborne. At the next election the key issues will be the NHS and how that has been killed off, the ever growing debt, the record levels on unemployment, ties with people like Coulson etc for Cameron, the complete farce of the education screw ups, the double dip recession that Osborne and Cameron have brought to this country etc etc. The only thing you are correct on is the Lib Dems, scandalously betrayed by Clegg (who I suspect will become a Tory party member again at some point in the future) - they have to take four or five steps back before they will go forward again Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tonyh29 Posted September 17, 2012 Share Posted September 17, 2012 the only way the vote got through parliament is by Tory support. Genuine question but i wonder if they were aware it was fabricated when they backed it ? We now know that Blair knew it was false before the event , but did anyone else ? You cling to the hope that the media will try and do a character assassination on Ed Balls and Ed Milliband didn't even mention the media in my post , I just called them the Tory party secret weapon ... NHS and how that has been killed off I just rung my local hospital , it's still open including a lot in the disgraced City a new hypocrisy high even by your standards the record levels on unemployment I'm no mathematician but i'm sure 2.59m is lower than 2.98m (1993) but overlooking that , what was the trend in unemployment in the period July 2005 to the present day .. pretty much a constant rise with a huge rise during 2008 and 2009 .... those incompetent Tories hey fancy letting unemployment rise even when they weren't in office ... before the entered office March 2010 unemployment was 2.51 .. latest figure is 2.59m .. it's not good but it's also false to say they are soley to blame recession I see it's only a Global crises when Labour are in charge :winkold: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon Posted September 18, 2012 Share Posted September 18, 2012 Great article from Poll Toynbee here. Hard to disagree with any of it, IMO. The PM wears a soft-Tory disguise, but his record speaks for itself: this is the most rightwing of all postwar governments This was a radical rightwing government before the reshuffle toughened up its Thatcherite credentials. From the start, David Cameron's mission was to break the postwar consensus on the welfare state that survived Margaret Thatcher. Where she privatised state-run industries, the Cameron government would dismantle the state itself. As students they hung posters of her on their walls. Now they go where she never dared – not boldly declaring it before the election, but hell-for-leather lest they only get one term. Yet here is the Tory party in turmoil, blaming its poor poll ratings on Cameron's lack of spine. Some seem so desperate to hold on to their seats that they even imagine the egotistical exhibitionist Boris Johnson as a saviour. How bizarre are these stirrings from the party's right. Last week Liam Fox and David Davis launched Conservative Voice, clamouring about Europe, lower taxes and deregulation, while backbench young turks of the Free Enterprise Group published Britannia Unchained, calling for much the same while abusing British workers as "the worst idlers in the world". Among the few still deceived by Cameron's soft-centred pre-election disguise are his own backbenchers. Stupidity is the only explanation. The idea that they are saddled with some milksop centrist kowtowing to the Liberal Democrats defies the most cursory glance at the Cameron record so far. This week in our new book, Dogma and Disarray – Cameron at Half-Time, David Walker and I publish an interim report. As with our books on the Labour parliaments, culminating in The Verdict on Labour's 13 years, we follow the facts on the ground, the policies carried out, avoiding the political noise at Westminster. Politicians' characters are intriguing, but what matters is what they do. When Cameron assumed leadership of a party that had lost three elections, the focus groups warned him to embrace welfare state values. Or at least to pretend to. How consciously he dissembled we don't know, perhaps he doesn't either. He retains the misleading aura of a pragmatist, disguising the fervour of his anti-state dogma. He may be no great ideas man, but for his Tory generation it's a reflex: they instinctively breathe free-market Hayek and Schumpeter on "creative destruction", applying it to government itself. Their Americanism takes the form of shipping in Tea Party Republicanism – how readily they would have let Murdoch create a British Fox News. Only dogma explains why Cameron risks all by stripping down the NHS, Britain's holy of holies. The only serious obstacle to his intent has been his own ineptitude at implementation. Yet for all the bungled U-turns, there has been no deviation from the great austerity. How ironic that he should be assailed from his right. In misleading voters as to his intentions before the election, he seems not to have let his own party into the secret. They only heard they were to be disinfected, detoxified, turned green and never be nasty again. The reality of welfare cuts the Institute for Fiscal Studies calls "without historical and international precedent" seems to pass by the likes of Fox and Davis. Let's reprise Cameron's audacity. Start with "I will cut the deficit, not the NHS", and "no top-down reorganisation". In office he has encouraged not just cuts but tumultuous change and wholesale outsourcing, this week with another £20bn worth of the NHS up for market bidders. How odd that the right fails to appreciate the radicalism of what will be permanent rupture. Cameron's Open Public Services white paper revealed "any qualified provider" as the template for universal outsourcing. If his pre-election "equality" soundbites made his right wing queasy, in office Cameron has proved as anti-woman as any reactionary might wish: promising a third of his ministers would be women, he appointed only 23 out of 121. He promised "the most family-friendly government ever", and "a more civilised work-life balance", amid pictures of him cooking his children's breakfast. Yet the IFS finds mothers and children hit hardest, the child trust fund abolished, and tax credits, childcare, Sure Start and much more cut. On child benefit, Cameron said, "I wouldn't means-test it", but he did. Education maintenance allowance would be kept: it's gone. Thousands more midwives were promised, none were delivered. He signed the pledge on child poverty, yet the IFS predicts half a million more poor children. He said, "I'd never do anything to damage disabled children": two-thirds will lose Disability Living Allowance. Big Society? Charities have suffered swingeing grant cuts. No rise in VAT, he promised; it rose. How his party hated him hugging hoodies – but now community sentencer Ken Clarke is replaced with prison-addict Chris Grayling, and G4S wins the contracts. Vote blue, go green? The new windmill-hating energy and climate secretary supports the dash for gas, cutting renewables. Days before the election Cameron said: "Any minister who comes to me and says here are my plans and they involve frontline reductions, they'll be sent straight back to their department to go away and think again." Tell that to the nurses and police whose ranks have shrunk by thousands. Why aren't the right satisfied when "We're all in this together" turned out to mean £14,000 tax cuts for millionaires? Or that 10,000 HMRC staff are cut from catching tax-dodgers? The party's trouble springs not from a lack of rightwing zeal but from failed austerity medicine, and the polls are grim. Cameron pledged national debt would be falling as a percentage of GDP by 2015: it won't. Instead the Office for Budget Responsibility says net debt will rise by £465bn. That's more than the £319bn it rose in all of Labour's 13 years. Tory turbulence is nothing new. Any sign of weakness and they shoot their leaders with a ruthlessness absent from Labour's tradition. If he looks like a winner, they will let Boris Johnson break any precedent he likes. If enough MPs reckon he can save their seats, they'll have him, egomania and all. The public are deceived again if they fall captive to Johnson's wit, let alone the preposterous pretence to be an "outsider". They'll find him cut from identical ideological cloth as the Cameron circle: he's no maverick. And for all his dog-whistling to the right, it's implausible he could offer them more than Cameron, at the head of the most rightwing of all postwar governments. Link Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tonyh29 Posted September 18, 2012 Share Posted September 18, 2012 it's such a one sided article it makes Drat look impartial and thus it's hard to agree with lots of it ( no surprise there I hear you say) ... promising a third of his ministers would be women, he appointed only 23 out of 121. maybe Osborne did the maths for him ? The new windmill-hating energy I'm sure I've read that windmills can't produce enough energy and also resulted in costs that households can't afford ? I suspect people would go green if it was viable , but the windmill route doesn't appear to be at present ?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peterms Posted September 18, 2012 Share Posted September 18, 2012 including a lot in the disgraced City a new hypocrisy high even by your standards The figures on donations to the tories from people in the city are interesting. ...Last year City money made up 50.8% of all Conservative Party donations, a leap from 25% five years previously, when Cameron and Osborne took over the helm. The City has donated a total of £42.76m since 2005. Last year City money accounted for £11.4m, compared with £2.75m when Cameron took over... Here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tonyh29 Posted September 18, 2012 Share Posted September 18, 2012 it was more that the city seem to have become "disgraced" only since they turned their back on Labour who openly courted them and gave the means with which to disgrace Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tonyh29 Posted September 18, 2012 Share Posted September 18, 2012 Today's polling puts Cameron well ahead of Miliband as the leader voters prefer for No 10 - by 60% to 31% seems there are a lot of delusional people out there :winkold: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peterms Posted September 18, 2012 Share Posted September 18, 2012 it was more that the city seem to have become "disgraced" only since they turned their back on Labour who openly courted them and gave the means with which to disgrace Most people would probably say the city has been disgraced by revelations about what they have been up to for years with things like misselling PPI, overcharging, failing to ensure proper financial controls within their own operations, LIBOR, crapping on small businesses, moneylaundering, facilitating taxdodging, handing out vast unearned bonuses on the back of all this, and so on. The disgrace stems from growing public awareness of these things, and the recognition even among their own cheerleaders in the press that the city is in need of a complete clean-up, not from the failure of the prawn cocktail offensive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ads Posted September 18, 2012 Share Posted September 18, 2012 I wonder where we sit in a league table of party/candidate doners, given the eye watering sums the Presidential candidates are able to generate in the US? The Bush campaign for 2000 was unbelieveable with the money it was able to hoover up, while our look a bit modest in comparison. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snowychap Posted September 18, 2012 Share Posted September 18, 2012 Today's polling puts Cameron well ahead of Miliband as the leader voters prefer for No 10 - by 60% to 31% seems there are a lot of delusional people out there :winkold: More than half of those people see him as (a lesser) evil, though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon Posted September 18, 2012 Share Posted September 18, 2012 Today's polling puts Cameron well ahead of Miliband as the leader voters prefer for No 10 - by 60% to 31% seems there are a lot of delusional people out there :winkold: A nice chap and a decent one, Ed Miliband. I hope the Labour leader savours the 15% lead over the divided and demoralised Tories – it's 12%, according to YouGov in the Sun - which today's Times/Populus poll reports that his party now commands. Link Labour appear to now hold a 12 to 15 point lead over the Tories, according to the latest poll today, despite Red Ed's 'unpopularity'. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tonyh29 Posted September 18, 2012 Share Posted September 18, 2012 ^^ that's the same article I quoted my stat from Jon :-) ( bit further down the page) The author also says 15% may not be enough and gives some examples Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tonyh29 Posted September 18, 2012 Share Posted September 18, 2012 Today's polling puts Cameron well ahead of Miliband as the leader voters prefer for No 10 - by 60% to 31% seems there are a lot of delusional people out there :winkold: More than half of those people see him as (a lesser) evil, though. hey with a 15% deficit in the polls a win is a win :-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Demitri_C Posted September 18, 2012 Share Posted September 18, 2012 is anyone going to bother voting at next election? just seems like a complete waste of time as much as i hate to say it both parties are shit, you just have to go with which party is shitter and im not sure which one is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tonyh29 Posted September 18, 2012 Share Posted September 18, 2012 both parties are shit, you just have to go with which party is shitter and im not sure which one is. 15 % have currently said they would vote for another party .. that could be Greens, UKIP , Monster raving or whoever it maybe more and more people go that way I had a look at the Green party manifesto the other day , some of it is completely barking but possibly if they could join the real world and be less Green :winkold: they could become a serious party at some point Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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