Farage’s latest grab for the headlines:
Why does it seem like Farage and Just Stop Oil are doing more to get people to vote Tory than Sunak is?
It wasn’t quite that; the PC coalition under Mulroney was breaking up two different ways: western alienation/Reform, and Québéc nationalism/Bloc Québécois.
Reform didn’t have a break-through in Central Canada in 1993 because they weren’t running any candidates there, that election. They were consciously a western party, campaigning on “The West Wants In!” They won 52 seats. They won 1 seat in Ontario, a bit of an outlier.
The Bloc had formed two years earlier, in 1991, after the failure of the Meech Lake Accord. Sovereigntists PCs, as well as some Liberals, left their former parties to form the Bloc. In the 1993 election, they won 53 seats, and formed the Official Opposition.
The PCs/Tories, pulled apart in two different directions regionally, and carrying 9 years of baggage that affected their support in Ontario, collapsed, and only won 2 seats: 1 in Quebec, and 1 in New Brunswick. Prime Minister Campbell lost her own seat in Vancouver, BC. The Liberals swept Ontario, gaining 98 of 99 seats.
Again, I would say it was a bit more complicated than that, not just a leadership change. The new party was a more clearly to the right, with the Red Tories leaving the new Conservative Party, usually for the Liberals. Scott Brison, Keith Martin, and Belinda Stronach were examples.
Well, here’s something that could (should) piss off half their base:
Eight Reform UK candidates have made a wide range of offensive remarks online about women in the past, the BBC can reveal.
The remarks include disparaging comments about the murdered MP Jo Cox, former Prime Minister Theresa May, and a black reality TV contestant…
And, hilariously:
Earlier this week, the party said it planned to sue a company it hired to vet potential MPs.
j
(Yes, I know that both men and women ought to be pissed off at this behavior; but we’re talking about Reform supporters - so I’m not overly optimistic)
Surely, even betting on something you could have had inside information on is illegal?
For a criminal prosecution, if there’s room for doubt, the defendant gets the benefit of it. “Could have done it” hardly proves anything: anyone who follows the news could have thought it worth betting on a July election.
Professional standards are something else, though.
For a brief time we had fixed parliament terms, but it turned out nobody really liked this arrangement, common though it may be in other countries, so we put everything back the way it was again.
The Fixed Term Parliament Act was a Lib Dem fantasy.
If government wants an election, no sane leader of His Majesty’s Opposition is going to say no.
Government voting Aye along with the Opposition will alway result in a GE.
That’s why one would presumably make it a crime for people in certain positions with access to certain information to bet. There’s room for doubt that members of the government did bet based on inside information, but there’s no room for doubt that it could have been based on inside information.
The criminal offence isn’t specified to particular offices or positions, just to cheating in general:
I’m not so sure that’s true. At least as a matter of game theory.
If the Government wants an early election, clearly they see themselves as winning it, and also are concerned that they expect their electoral position to weaken going forward. IOW, they’re willing to trade the small chance of losing now for a larger chance of losing later when their full term is up. They give up the sure thing of being in government for the remainder of the current term in exchange for the chance of renewal of their mandate and a longer total term. They expect to win; but they also know they might not.
If the Opposition holds similar views, namely that they are likely to lose this time, but will likely do better in a couple more years, they’d have no reason to back the government in asking for what looks to them like a slam-dunk extension of the other guy’s mandate.
To be sure, if both parties’ view of their electoral chances today are excessively rosy, they’ll both be eager to wipe out the other guys post haste. And hence vote unanimously for an early election.
While politicians are noted for their rosy optimism about their own personal specialness, that doesn’t necessarily scale to entire parties. And especially not in the current circumstances where Labour has large objective reasons for optimism and the Conservatives … do not.
Parliament doesn’t vote on whether there’s to be an election; when the Fixed Term Parliaments Act was dropped, it’s back to the old way - PM’s judgement and formal approval by HM. The requirement for a vote was to stop either party in the coalition from collapsing it to force an election.
More on that betting scandal…
Other people linked to the Conservative Party or the government are being looked into by the Gambling Commission, I am told…
…Part of the inquiries the betting industry conducts in instances like this is attempting to establish if bets have been placed not just by those who may have had access to privileged information, but those with connections to them too.
This can involve a trawl of social media, for instance, to try to establish digital fingerprints that may provide suggestions about how people may know each other.
j
In real politick, any opposition which does not consider itself, or at minimum projecting the capability, to be ready to govern now, gifts the government another term.
There is also the usual election drift from the (generally) commanding election win which brings them to power through the progressive and accumulated losses at general elections and by-elections that puts them in a position of being vulnerable to lose.
So each election offers the expectation of making the opposition stronger, allowing for bringing in new/fresher faces. Not that they have any say in the matter but the opposition always welcome elections.
But is this really cheating?
I mean, it’s sleazy and awful and morally abject, but how did they cheat?
This isn’t a horse race, where the only way to know the result ahead of time is to cheat in the race itself. Nor is it betting on a future event like a White Christmas, where no-one can possibly know for certain ahead of time whether it will occur or not.
The gambling companies, in their wisdom, chose to offer the public the opportunity to bet on the date of an event that by definition a small number of people would have certain knowledge of ahead of time. They meant of course to attract bets from people who did not have such certain knowledge. But of course they knew there would be insiders who could (sleazily) use that knowledge to place a sure thing bet. They seemed to have assumed (as we all had) that no-one would actually do that. But it’s not cheating. It’s not nobbling the favourite. The CCHQ clowns didn’t propose the bet to the bookies, or fake ignorance to sucker them in.
I don’t particularly see why the bookies should be protected for the consequences of what was a fairly silly thing to open book on.
In other news, the Institute of Fiscal Studies have come out guns blazing at both major parties for their dishonesty with the public:
Public services are visibly struggling. Despite these high tax levels, spending on many public services will likely need to be cut over the next five years if government debt is not to ratchet ever upwards or unless taxes are increased further.
How can that be? A £50bn a year increase in debt interest spending relative to forecasts and a growing welfare budget bear much of the responsibility. Then we have rising health spending, a defence budget which for the first time in decades will likely grow rather than shrink, and the reality of demographic change and the need to transition to net zero. Add in low growth and the after-effects of the pandemic and energy price crisis and you have a toxic mix indeed when it comes to the public finances.
These raw facts are largely ignored by the two main parties in their manifestos. That huge decisions over the size and shape of the state will need to be taken, that those decisions will, in all likelihood, mean either higher taxes or worse public services, you would not guess from reading their prospectuses or listening to their promises. They have singularly failed even to acknowledge some of the most important issues and choices to have faced us for a very 1 long time.
This is of course basically correct - public services are on their knees from over a decade of austerity, welfare costs are set to rise along with the median age of the population, even getting back to where we were in 2010 in terms of public services will require a massive increase in spending - and no one is talking about it. Worse, they are all merrily ruling out the sort of tax rises (or borrowing!) that would be needed to achieve this. So…either they’re lying or the plan really is to let things continue to slide.
What, you expect a political party to say it’s going to raise taxes - before an election? When they want people to vote for them?
Oh, I understand perfectly well why they’re doing it - they assume we’re a bunch of maximally selfish short-termist fucking morons who demand gold-standard public services and permanent low tax rates and decreasing government deficits all at the same time, and they’re afraid that if they did anything as dangerous as tell the truth (i.e. if you want a functioning NHS and water that isn’t full of shit then you’re going to have to pay for it) then we’d stamp our little feet and vote for the guys who happily write checks they can’t cash because we simply can’t comprehend trade-offs or cost-benefit analysis.
But we’ve spent at least the last 14 years operating on that assumption, and the point we’ve got to is: everyone agrees that everything is fucked. The reason the Tories are looking down the business end of an electoral landslide or even total wipeout is because everyone agrees that everything is fucked.
And Labour are in line for such a mahoosive majority that they could in fact dabble in a little truth telling, or at the very least not definitively rule out tax rises unprompted, so that when they get into government - even with a smaller majority than they might otherwise have had - they will have an actual mandate to do the stuff that needs done, rather than painting themselves into the corner of letting everything continue to go to shit because no-one voted for anything different.
Because if they do get in and let everything go to shit, that massive majority ain’t gonna last anyhow.
How it started:
How it’s going:
The politically smart way to do it is to (a) first get into power, and (b) then say “now we’ve got a close look, they’ve fucked things even worse than we expected, and some financial correction will be necessary due to their malfeasance.” I presume this will be the preferred model.