Not unpopular to everyone, and not unpopular to me but unpopular enough to a sizeable chunk of labour voters to make it a tricky sell without losing votes. And you are bang-on about the presentation. Labour’s message is muddled and incoherent.
And I think every reasonable persons knows that such horse-trading will be the way of these negotiations, May’s starting position is at least clear and we all know (as she does) that there will be compromises on the way.
To be clear, I’m not saying that the Labour party can or would frustrate the government very much in reality (as you say, they haven’t so far) just that if they try to build a platform on doing just that in the future I’m not too sure they are able to formulate it well enough or sell it to enough voters.
Agreed, but it’ll take a better class of front bench than they currently have to make that case.
The true stand of opposition is clearly from the Lib-Dems, I have a feeling that Labour will leak remain voters to them and that UKIP will hemorrhage pro-brexit voters to the Tories. I still don’t see an attractive Labour proposition that wins them the shedload of votes they need.
That’s a valid position certainly, not without merit but I’d balance that against the E.U. throwing bones to potential rebels within and without a small-majority Tory government in the hope of sowing discord, rebellion and extracting greater concessions.
In Australia the Howard Government (LIB/NAT) was first elected in 2 March 1996 in a landslide winning 94 seats.
They won a 2nd term 3 October 1998 with a reduced margin holding 80 seats.
Howard won a 3rd term in 2001 increasing his margin and winning 82 seats.
Then in 9 October 2004 Howard won his 4th term increasing his margin again to hold 86 seats.
Great quote in this morning’s Guardian from Banks’s spokesman. It seems the great man is planning to stand in Clacton (currently held by Douglas Carswell, who left the Tories for UKIP and just recently left them too to be an independent):
“Whether Banks stands as an independent, Patriotic Alliance or UKIP, these things are all up for discussion,” said Andy Wigmore, Banks’s spokesman. “We were due to launch it on 5 May, but events supersede everything. We will just concentrate on the Clacton swamp. Make Clacton great again.”
There’s also the question about Tory Remainers and whether they’ll feel that, as May will definitely win overall, it might be worth leavening her majority with a few Lib-Dems. There were quite a few areas in the South-East and along the M40 corridor which went Tory in 2015/Remain in 2016 that will be interesting to watch (although I think it would take a huge surge to overcome Tory majorities there.)
I’m reminded of how first Reagan and later Bush II and finally Trump managed to get a large segment of the working class on-side with the Business Conservative enterprise. Having poached those voters, the US right has held them well, while forcing the US left to tack into the wilderness in search of replacement voters. This realignment may last for decades yet.
IMO May’s stealing that playbook and so far playing it adroitly. The Brexit vote is a godsend in that regard: a nice shiny wedge issue for the Left placed front and center where she can use it without being blamed for having put it there.
Well played Theresa. Your move Jeremy.
IMO the big wildcard here is the LDs, the SNP, and the various splinter groups. Had UKIP not already mostly imploded May’s calculus would be far more difficult. As it is, Labor’s likely to be pretty thoroughly carved up; what’s unclear to me is who collects the lion’s share of the spoils.
They did, with the exception of Ken Clarke, because they were all elected on a manifesto commitment to “respect” the result of the referendum.
But that’s not to say that they can’t make trouble for the Prime Minister, or use their influence within the party to press for a softer Brexit than might otherwise happen. Remember, May fought all the way to the Supreme Court in an (unsuccessful) attempt to avoid having to involve Parliament in the Brexit process. It wasn’t the prospect of opposition from opposition MPs that worried her enough to make her do that.
Pro-EU Tory voters, of whom there are a fair chunk in SE England, will either vote Tory if their MP is pro-EU or vote Lib Dem. That will be good for the Lib Dems, but I don’t think it’ll get them more than 10-15 extra seats. If you compare the Tory Remain areas on the map herewith the Lib-Dem vote share in the map here, you’ll see that the Lib Dems have a massive hill to climb. Especially when you consider that a lot of the UKIP vote in the same areas may well switch to Tories, because the Tories are offering what UKIP want.
By the same token, wherever Labour is under threat from Tories in Leave areas, it can expect the Tories to get a boost from 2015 UKIP voters who now back the Tories to deliver Brexit. This Buzzfeed analysisshows just how many such seats Labour has to defend (and is generally quite useful at laying out the state of play).
I’d be more tempted to vote Lib Dem if they had a decent leader. Whether it’s because I can’t get past his religious views I don’t know, but I don’t like what I’ve seen of Tim Farron. I realised I made an error in my earlier post - in the 2010 GE I lived in a marginal LD constituency, and as such voted for the incumbent, partly because the Tories/UKIP couldn’t even be bothered to find a local candidate (I vaguely recall UKIP not having one at all, and the Tories listing someone on the ballot with a London address - I find few things more offputting than that), partly as a vote against Labour, but mainly because I liked the man himself and felt he was doing a good job. It helped that many of our views were aligned on local and national issues, of course.