Liz Truss tries to lead the UK {and resigns as of 2022-10-20}

Destined to culminate in the Battle of Waterloo Station?

Haha my teenage daughter said “It is an affectation you should dispense with” when I used the word (and I pronounced it noose)

I corrected her by saying that it might have been more biting if she said “Stop saying that, you poser”

Sadly the irony was lost on her

If you’re asserting that low-income people tend to be bojo/tory supporters do you have evidence for that? I only say if bc I’m not entirely sure that’s what you’re saying.

C’est bon… (I do NOT say d’accord!!!)

The switch to the Tories in the post-industrial/depleted high street/zero-hours jobs “red wall” seats didn’t come from an sudden influx of the prosperous. But there hasn’t been much of his promised “levelling up” to show for his premiership, and of course any goodwill he might have gained personally has been trashed by the Truss interregnum: but the Tories could still think the anti-immigrant rhetoric will work for them there.

In all fairness, Reaganomics was a whole program and not just tax-breaks for the rich.

Wait… was the whole Liz Truss thing just a elaborate con to get Boris back in? :scream: :crazy_face:

Yes, it was tax breaks for the rich, cuts for anything benefiting the poor, and massive increases in defense spending based on government borrowing.

And gutting unions.

And empowering the Christian Right. That’s worked out really well, longterm.

O.k. I’ve never seen this guy (The Room Next Door) before, but he’s pretty damn funny.

It’s an extremely rare word in the US. I’ve only heard it used, maybe, once? And by an ex-pat Brit.

Sorry, for the double post – missed the edit window to get it in my previous post.

If our democracy survives the Republican attack, I could be convinced that Reagan has done more long term damage to this country than any other president. If…

There is no humour like British humour … commentary about the Truss fiasco from Count Binface – previously known as Lord Buckethead:

The rules for the Conservative Party leadership election are set by the 1922 committee, formal name the Conservative Private Members’ Committee. I personally have no idea how they come up with the rules, other than that I’m sure Graham Brady, the chair of the 1922 committee is mostly responsible.

The rules set for the current Conservative Party leadership election stipulate that each Conservative MP nominates a candidate for the leadership vote(s). A candidate then needs to have 100 nominations to be on the ballot for the vote(s). The reason for the bracketed “s” is that their are two potential votes - an initial one by Conservative MP’s and a second one by Conservative Party members. There are 357 Conservative MP’s. That leaves four possibilities (ignoring tie-breakers, which I don’t know how would work).

  1. No candidate gets 100 nominations. This is extremely unlikely and hasn’t been discussed that I’ve heard. My guess is that if this did happen, they’d revert to the previous rule of requiring 20 nominations and then do a series of run-off MP votes.

  2. Three candidates get over 100 nominations each. In that case, their would be a single run-off vote by the Conservative MP’s and the two candidates receiving the highest number of votes would be on a ballot for the vote by Conservative Party members. This scenario is also pretty unlikely.

  3. Two candidates get over 100 nominations each. There would be no MP’s vote and the vote would go straight to the Conservative Party members, unless a candidate withdrew from the vote. This is one of the expected outcomes, and there’s an active discussion about having a “unity” candidate with the loser of the MP’s vote dropping out to avoid the member’s election.

  4. Only one candidate gets over 100 nominations. In that case, that person will become Conservative Party leader and therefore Prime Minister.

One gloss on this: if there are two candidates who will be put to party members, there will first of all be an indicative vote of MPs to determine which of the two enjoys majority support in the parliamentary party. This is information that will then be available to the party members when they make their choice.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FfnD-GDX0AU_v6q

And that’s from the Telegraph (almost, the Tories’ house journal)

Not a literal bottom to this barrel. Rock bottom, I think, is usually determined in hindsight? I believe we’re not there yet.

I’m worried that Sunak will seem sane and competent next to Johnson and Truss. There’s a chance that if things are just a tiny little bit less awful and the Prime Minister is not as obviously a deranged muppet as the last two were, a lot op people will not be able to see it. Because them not seeing it is what got us here.

Everyone I know is thoroughly fed up, the Guardian-reading tofu-eating wokerati & the citizens of nowhere are fed up, but we’ve been fed up for a long time. The Tories may be down in the polls now, but they have a long time and people forget. If Sunak can get the Tories looking sane and things going back to the usual disaster level of Brexit and destroying the NHS, they won’t even notice.

Rock bottom is when people are far more fed up than this. It’s where everyone will be calling for getting rid of FPTP and where the Tories are truly finished.

Where we are now looks to me like an alcoholic realising that it’s pretty bad and still thinking that it can be fixed by drinking a bit less.

I hope the infighting gets ugly. I spent far too long hoping for “slightly better.”

I think it ended up happening by mistake, as someone in one such marginal seat in the midlands. I don’t think the tories planned it, but it was about Brexit, and the local newspapers becoming right wing mouthpieces,

In 2012, the Tories decided to put a cap on housing benefit, so people on the dole long term would no longer get paid enough to live in high rent areas in the UK, such as the south east and London.

At the same time they cut council tax subsidies by huge amounts, so local councils budgets dropped massively.

They offered councils a subsidy to take people moving from high rent areas to cheaper areas. That would be midlands/northern areas with low rent because of high unemployment.

So over a couple of years, areas with no jobs got filled up with people with no jobs, junkies and drunks, the ones from London on long term unemployment. The next door neighbours became Lithuanian, or Polish, or Latvian (they weren’t all foreigners, they were even all eastern europeans, but those were the ones which got noticed). There still wasn’t many jobs, but the few low pay ones there were, were filled by people willing to work for low pay. So if anything, it got worse, the north/midlands became a dumping ground, a ghetto, if you will, for the UK’s social security problems.

It fed into Brexit. But as slow burn, it fed further into being to blame for what in effect was the Tories in power. The immigrants always get the blame.

I’m not sure when it happened, but our local newspaper became a right wing rag about then. It wasn’t before, but all of a sudden it was covering such stuff with gusto. I think this happened across the board in the UK, as a large conglomerates bought up established local trusted news sources for buttons. I think I saw a John Oliver cover something similar happening in the US. This contributed a lot too.

When I visited my hometown in the North, an industrial town, where much of the industry had gone, the sentiment was very pro-Brexit.

I pointed out to relatives who were keen on blaming foreigners for everything that a great deal of their social and health care was provided by immigrants. That the jobs in the fields and market gardens and the serving and kitchen staff in hospitality relied on an immigrant workforce.

I was told that they did not mean for them to go if they were doing a good job. It was the others they read about in the newspapers like the Daily Mail and Daily Express. The stories about the foreign criminals who are allowed into the UK because of the EU free mobility of labour rules.

Brexit, apparently, will mean they will no longer find it easy to move to the UK and perpetrate social security fraud.

I was also told that it was their impression that all these immigrants cause an awful problem in London because of their numbers.

Having lived in London for a few decades I found this a bit odd because it benefits hugely from being a world city that attracts talent from everywhere.

In this working class northern town, only a small percentage of inhabitants are from overseas. They are must evident working as doctors and nurses for the NHS. They tend to come from Commonwealth countries because the UK does not train enough health care professionals.

Maybe another couple of thousand EU working in agriculture or hospitality - jobs that UK workers are not much interested in doing. They usefully fill in the gaps in the labour market. Most are simply working away from home for time.

Nonetheless the blame for the de-industrialisation of the generation of people who felt left behind by economic changes were easy to manipulate by the Brexit faction and the newspapers that support them.

Boris Johnson promised great things of Brexit. Nigel Farage, the leader of the UKIP Brexit party that so threatened the Conservative vote exclaimed the UK was ‘Free at Last! Free at Last!’. Suggesting that the tyranny of the EU regulations from Brussels was something akin to slavery. Conveniently forgetting that the UK had a big hand in fashioning the regulations required for the huge EU single market.

The Conservatives appealed to these working class communities and managed to persuade them to vote Conservative, many for the first time. Most would have normally voted Labour, supposedly the party of working class solidarity. But Labour was led by a radical faction under Corbin that was far to the left of the electorate.

The simplicity of Boris Johnson’s ‘Get Brexit Done’ slogan was attractive and they managed the remarkable feat of persuading this ‘Red Wall’ of northern industrial voters to vote Conservative and get this awful Brexit business over and done with.

Johnson created a policy of ‘levelling up’ to support the economy of the northern industrial belt and preserve these newly converted voters. A large number of Conservative MPs will lose their seats if improvements are not delivered.

Sadly Brexit has not solved any of the problems. International trade does not change instantly and there is no getting away from the fact that the EU is a huge trade block right next to the UK.

It is now more difficult to get the staff businesses need, there is a big skills shortage.

Brexit has also failed dramatically in not solving the fundamental division is the Conservative Party. It is completely divided. Johnson turned out to be good at electioneering, but not much of a leader. His party is riddled with factions and incompetents. They are clearly not in a fit state to govern.

Labour are now looking good and electable under Starmer. But it will be two years before a General Election and the country seems forced to endure more Conservative psycho-drama.

Politics in the UK is going through a very difficult phase.