The fall of the Tory party

Here’s the £7.25m Berkshire stately home bought in July 2020 by Zoe Ley.

Ley made £20m brokering a VIP PPE deal alongside former Tory MP Brooks Newmark

Here’s the £1.5m pad brought by Tory donor and former Councillor Steve Dechan.

Dechan brought the mansion following a £200m+ PPE deal secured via the VIP lane.

And here’s the $9.5m pad snapped up by Gareth Hales.

Hales was the founder of Unispace. The firm secured £679m in PPE deals via VIP lane after lobbying Michael Gove.

https://twitter.com/RussellScott1/status/1780686322908487787

My dream is that they get convicted for fraud, their homes repossessed, then raffled off as an Omaze prize

“Labour are the same as the Tories”

It's generally the Keir Starmer thread where this tankie wank comes up every couple of weeks.

I very much agree with your comments, well said!

That line is tediously trotted out in the Starmer thread by a couple of trolls on a regular basis, doesn’t matter what is said or information provided in response, on they plough their bullshit furrow.

But you’re right, the rant probably best fits there

Lowest government approval by PM (Gallup/MORI):
Attlee 31%
Churchill (51-55) 40%
Eden 34%
Macmillan: 30%
Douglas-Home 36%
Wilson (64-70) 17%
Heath 22%
Wilson (74-76) 27%
Callaghan 17%
Thatcher 16%
Major 8%
Blair 22%
Brown 16%
Cameron 24%
May 8%
Johnson 14%
Truss 11%
Sunak 10%

Yeah, but, like, Angela Rayner bought a council house and then sold it

So he's likely got sufficient time to become the least popular post-war leader. In his shoes there really would be a lot of reasons for me to call the election quickly and just get out before you start breaking too many records .

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68841840

Another day in paradise.
This shit is normalised now, nobody bats an eyelid.

but, but Angela Rayner.....

New record low of 19% on the latest Ipsos poll

The latest Westminster voting intention from Ipsos shows Labour at 44% (-3 ppts), Conservatives 19% (-1 ppts), Liberal Democrats 9% (N/C), Green Party 9% (+1), Reform UK 13% (+5), Others 6% (-1) (changes from February). Note: Figures are based on those expressing a voting intention (excluding not voting, undecideds and refused).

Reform up 5 points. May be misremembering but I kept hearing recently that there was a threshold for reform where it would become very uncomfortable for the Tories and might prompt some movement. I think it was 10%, which has now been breached.

Yeah, I don't get it, at this point I would vote for the lettuce.

but, but Angela Rayner.....

Super sleuth Dan Hodges was clearly busy with this gotcha.

Lol, so Johnson was paid a visit by his own cabinet to lead him out of no. 10 lest he cause any more damage and Sunak is currently less popular than that.

some bad people have locked me in a flat and I need £5,000

Considering all Tory funds are money from bad people to pay bad people to convince bad people to give power to bad people, I find this all a bit academic.

So if I'm following her point Braverman was there to debate and challenge the views of far right extremism?

I mean, yeah, if that's why she rocked up to Natcom then more power to her. But call me a cynic...

A Tory activist since the age of 16, he had a career in retail before entering politics and was a graduate trainee at supermarket chain Marks & Spencer.

What a CV

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/conservative-mp-mark-menzies-got-dog-drunk-street-brawl-fylde-thames-valley-police-a7761486.html

The really depressing thing is that after the Brazilian rent boy incident, and the plying a dog with alcohol incident, Mark Menzies broadly maintained his majority in the 2017 election...gotta love our form of democracy.

There've got to be some wild details to come out of this. Its presumably known - the Guardian earlier commented that they wouldn't be supplying much further detail for legal reasons, but I imagine it'll come out from somewhere at some point.

I know this is a rant to get it off your chest, so sorry if this comes across as argumentative, but these statements—from the left at least—are generally not being literal about exact equality between the major parties' policy programmes, as I'm sure you've figured out. Any vaguely left-wing commenter can clearly see the destructive nature of the Conservative government and it's basically without question that Labour is preferable.

I don't like the simplistic framing of these statements either—they're not informative, they reduce the level of debate, but equally they're entirely valid value judgements. The most recent post by @chickenbones was sarcastically highlighting what they believed to be an indication of Labour returning to old rhetoric that blames the unemployed, for example.

Labour are far from perfect but they are good enough at the moment

^This is just as much a value judgement too, and that's totally fine, but pretending that Labour is beyond criticism pushes discussion in the same direction: more partisan, more derision, just vibes (take a look at some of your other replies calling people tankies for christ's sake).

The parties' directions are obviously different to me, but that doesn't mean Labour are meeting the threshold for the progressive change we need. There are certainly some problematic similarities, so I'd have thought that talking about the direction of the next government would be good and necessary.

LFGSS is full of lefties anyway, surely we can criticise both without pretending it'll have any serious electoral effect?

Re, the Menzies story, i got an alert from the Times about it last night, but when I clicked on the link the story had been pulled.

A further £14,000 given by donors for use on Tory campaign activities
was also allegedly transferred to Mr Menzies' personal bank accounts
and used for 'private medical expenses'.

"Mark Menzies suspended from role as unpaid trade envoy to Colombia, Chile, Peru"

Hmmmmm.

I hear/read the 'Labour are the same as the Tories' nonsense in lots of places so the rant wasn't about discussion on here.

Discussion and criticism is obviously fine but I will continue to call out the thunderers who come up with 'Keith' or 'Sir Kid Starver' if that's ok with you.

but I will continue to call out the thunderers who come up with 'Keith' or 'Sir Kid Starver' if that's ok with you.

ha, yes

I hear it from non-political folk too — my mate at work, who is conservative-leaning but "doesn't do politics", says it often and it irks me no end.