General Election 2019

Foot lost the election in June 83 but Kinnock did not take over until October. Foot resigned the day after the election but I don't think they had an interim leader.

Harriet Harman did two May-September shifts as acting leader.

Would it be possible in Italy to change the voting and bring in ID cards, fixed term parliament act, take away checks on the government just like this? Just wondering.

It is true they may care more about themselves, but the Libdems/SNP/Labour couldn't even properly work together. Sigh.

Explosive you say? We live in hope.

I still wonder who pulls his strings, I know he's had ideas and notions for a while (some which get one unfriended on FB quite quickly) but that gobshite surely is used by somebody?

So with so much doom and gloom around before Christmas, let me bring you more.

The genius of the Tory campaign was to avoid and detail; scrutiny or challenge. Their campaign was run on the basis of a slogan, attacking Labour and avoiding scrutiny. Their manifesto is a blank cheque.

Johnson faces a problem. Brexit, however it is done now, will depress the economy. He will not have the funds to spend as he has promised and make tax cuts. To get around this, he needs to fail to negotiate a trade deal with the EU. This will allow him to blame every negative economic occurrence on the EU's intransigence. It also frees him to give Bannon the US trade deal that Trump wants.

Once this is achieved, he can freeze and cut spending. He can plan all sorts of elaborate spending on infrastructure projects but never actually start them. Again, blame can be placed on the EU or local authorities or environmentalists. He will also be able to slip in a rise in VAT to 25%. Indrect taxation affects the less well off more than the well off.

One area that is covered in the manifesto is the constitution. The FTPA goes (good) but it will be replaced by something that gives more power to the executive and less scrutiny to the courts or Parliament. Constituency boundaries will be redrawn. This has been in the offing since Cameron. The plan is to reduce the number of MPs from 650 to 600. This is based on the electoral register of six or so years ago. The surge in registrations lately has altered the relevance of the old register and allows the boundaries to be changed in a way to benefit the Tories. This is a really serious issue.

He may also seek other gerrymandering under the guise of putting into effect non specific manifesto promises. The House of Lords, the Royal Prerogative, the Supreme Court.

The Human Rights Act will be repealed.

The BBC and the media also come in for scrutiny. Expect the requirement of impartiality to be watered down particularly if the BBC is to be broken up and sold off. Whatever your complaints about BBC bias are, expect worse when it is sold at a cutdown price to Fox News.

The Civil Service also comes in for an overhaul making more positions overtly political. Ambassadors and leading Civil Servants will be required to toe the party line. Rising Civil Servants will find their careers thrawted if they do not.

But, I hear you cry, these changes will also allow a future Labour Government to control the media, the Civil Service and the judiciary. Believe me, if these changes come in, the political infrastructure of the country will be such that we will not see a Labour government in my lifetime and probably not in yours.

Oh, and ignore the current media theme of Johnson being a one nation Tory. He might be but Bannon and Cummings are not. They win.

Happy days.

And a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all. As Emily Thornberry said, "the fight starts now". It is going to be one hell of a fight and the odds are stacked against us.

An interim leader still has all the challenges of choosing a leader as they’ll have a large influence on the choosing of the next leader. So agree with what “should” happen but can’t see any possibility of it actually happening

Any other large construction projects on temporary hold?
Parochially, I am only concerned with HS2 and Heathrow 3rd Runway,
which will affect mt 'manor'.

I can see HS2 being given a luke warm,
'Well, we've already spent/wasted £Xbillion, silly to stop now',
and delight at annoying the electorate of Hayes & Harlington who retained the temerity to return a Labour MP, with the announcement of the go-ahead for Heathrow's largest ever project.

It seems likely that the Tories will capitalise on everyone else having a prolonged period of picking their wounds (over the next months, years).

Internal political change (e.g. Civil Service) was always higher up Cummings' agenda than Brexit. He will press this relentlessly now he has the momentum.

I actually don't think anyone is pulling his strings and I think a lot of the statements and assumptions about him are false. Read his blog, it is actually interesting.

For me, the best case scenario is that Cummings sticks around and has a major influence over the government. Worst case is that he gets forced out by likes of Raab, Patel and Truss, and we get their neo-Thatcherite vision of 'Brittania Unchained'.

Without wanting to @ or reply, I keep coming back to this from Will. Depressing indeed.

The most depressing thought I've had this week is that what did for Thatcher (to some extent) and Major and Cameron and May was the Tory party's internal disagreements about the EU. With that out of the way they are much better placed to be united and disciplined and not so given to fratricide.

It's not impossible that the Tories will split when the contradictions and divergent visions of post UK Brexit become apparent.

Not that keen on reading his blog, and some snippets so far gave me a whiff of oh dunno, somebody who is not so interested in equality. I also can't stand the guy and his triumphant "I won't, if anybody else loses, meh".

A silver lining -might be- though that he has no strings, and a plan, so in that sense you could very well be right.

I found it interesting as well he was dissing the government that tried to implement the Brexit that he won for them, so let's see if he can do better then.

Though...is this plan for the NHS and keeping the USA away? If so, it is definitely be better, but then he is going to have a fight on his hands with the Brexit backers I'd say.

The civil service is going to get the knives out though. He hates them and wants rid of them so...

His analysis that politics and the civil service in this country are mostly useless is correct. Remains to be seen whether his diagnosis to improve them is implementable and whether it will do anything to improve the lives of the majority of people in this country. Odds are, we won't get the chance to find out as he will be gone by end of next year.

50/50 is a sensible position to take.

These are the four possible Brexit scenarios modeled by the Institute of Fiscal Studies:

No offence but I'm going with their predictions over your arbitrary 50/50.

Source: https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/14421

+1 to his blog. It's incredibly insightful. (see high performance govt)

@WornCleat

He will not have the funds to spend as he has promised and make tax cuts.

This seems to be a common view. However, I think people are still being naïve to Johnson's political ideology. There is nothing to stop him borrowing. In fact I expect him to. There will of course be stealth taxes and scapegoating, but my prediction is that he will give zero fucks about any supposed conservation fiscal ideology as long as he can spin some quick wins.

I said 50/50 on economic demise

Agree. Quick wins needed to prove to people they were right to vote them in. Soften Brexit so the damage is not too bad. Borrow heavily to mitigate/hide problems. Blame EU for downturn. There's no longterm economic plan, but they'll be working to ensure 5/10 more years in power already.

Quick wins

The manifesto and campaign lies are based on promises that cannot be 'quick wins',
50,000/31500 new nurses, 20,000 new police officers, 10 new hospitals.

They'll have to find some other cheap ideas:
a) repeal of Smoking Ban,
b) repeal of Hunting 'Ban',
c) ...........

The easiest and quickest win will be a tax giveaway in April.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-50776241

Silver lining at least in NI. With both SF and the DUP getting a kicking, and the DUP losing power in Westminster they are suddenly a lot more keen to compromise to restore Stormont.

And the SoS already told them if they don't play nicely there will be elections here.

With the STV system I'd say they get yet another kicking and then at least NI has moved to the centre/greens/socialist end.

what Dov said, plus;

• increase in min wage
  
• devolution of budgets to majors in the newly secured constituencies
  
• extra buses/trams in the newly secured constituencies
  
  

^ those will all help with the feels are super quick, and cheap. In the meantime they'll just say they've approved 10 new hospitals, etc.

...bear in mind these are things a random person on a bike forum has come up with off the top of their head. So I'm sure a PR team as strong and morally dubious as Johnson's will have no probs.

Genuinely no offence intended, but I think your post highlights the difficulty a lot of people here have in understanding politics as it is today. There is no reason for any objectives to correlate to the manifesto, and there is no reason to actually have 50k new nurses working to be able to say there are.

there is no reason to actually have 50k new nurses working to be able to say there are.

What will probably happen is of the current HCA workers, say, 10% get a job title rebranding, and voila, more nurses.

devolution of budgets to majors in the newly secured constituencies
extra buses/trams in the newly secured constituencies

mayors? how would this even work? in bury (to take an example completely at random) the council is labour controlled but the borough now has two tory MPs. and its buses and trams are run by a mix of private and public-controlled bodies (not least because thatcher deregulated buses outside london in the 80s, which is one reason why buses outside london are shit, but nobody in london knows that).

And didn’t provide any opposition.

What's the point? You're only keeping the seat warm. You can't establish policy and have no power over your MPs.