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Politics Today

Mr Jinx

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I can’t believe I voted for this rabble last time round.
You and me both mate. Won't get fooled again... And we're certainly not alone!
 

IndoMike

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Touring Central Java...
Apparently, his popularity rating is lower than Michael Foot's. Which, to be fair, can be classed as quite an achievement.
Yes me old mucker. But at least he is not dishonest and manipulative by surpressing discussion to cover for his manic friends.
 

tavyred

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Aug 23, 2004
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You and me both mate. Won't get fooled again... And we're certainly not alone!
Yep.
One poll this weekend showing a 15 point lead for the Tories. Clearly BJ’s ‘Parliament vs the People’ message has real resonance, not least because it’s true.
 

DB9

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Yep.
One poll this weekend showing a 15 point lead for the Tories. Clearly BJ’s ‘Parliament vs the People’ message has real resonance, not least because it’s true.
I do realize things are different than 2017 but Corbyn was over 20 points behind then and nearly sneaked it. His dithering on Brexit though this time could be his undoing
 

tavyred

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We need to remember TM’s woefully uninspiring campaign and to be fair on Labour a lot of people like me really liked aspects of Labours manifesto, it really captured the anti Tory austerity zeitgeist prevalent at the time. A huge factor though as Jinxy says, was the fact that a vote for Labour was a vote for the Brexit vote to be honoured. That wont be the case next time round.
 
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IndoMike

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Blair, like him or not, was a jovial, communicative chappy at the time who won elections in great part due to his personality. He even managed to charm Rupert Murdoch amongst others.
Although Corbyn has some good policies, he is absolutely not user-friendly and isn't a quick thinker. Overall he comes across as a miserable old bloke who is afraid to put the boot in and doesn't have the quick wit to put down his adversaries. There is not a chance in hell that he will win an election, so Johnson has a free rein.
Terrible luck that just when we want a young, dynamic, honest, clever PM we get stuck with Corbyn.
 

Oldsmobile-88

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In RaWZ we trust....Amen.
The man who bellows outside Parliament has decamped to Brighton by the sounds of it..:D

He shut up after about 10 mins of Corbyns interview by Marr..Don’t know if he was removed or paid off..:D
 

elginCity

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The aptly named Steve Bray, from Port Talbot. A right noisy pain in the arse, who should be muzzled and shackled. 😀

Counter productive to the cause IMO.
 

DB9

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During this weeks Labour Conference and the Tories one we'll hear speech after speech on the promises and pledges but I just think instead of all this back slapping and after conference parties this conference season should have been postponed and get on with sorting out Brexit
 

arthur

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this conference season should have been postponed and get on with sorting out Brexit
Yes, but how? Interesting piece stolen from Mr Murdoch which certainly rings true. Just like Mrs May, Johnson's government is riven with factions:

Inside No 10 a split and bruised government is divided over how to escape the quagmire it has marched into. By now Boris Johnson and his team had intended to be in the middle of an election campaign, giving him a new mandate for Brexit. Their mismanagement of parliament, party and the public has stymied all that. The government has only six weeks left before its own deadline to leave the EU, do or die. It is struggling not to die.

“They are riven,” says a senior Tory. “There are two schools of thought competing in No 10. The first faction is determined to double down on every legal and political trick, however constitutionally questionable. The second thinks the game is up, and they have to get a deal.”

The diehards are being led by Dominic Cummings and Dominic Raab and the pragmatists by Michael Gove. “Boris is listening to both. He’s undecided which way to go.”
Cummings and Raab think their strategy is the winning one. They know all campaigns stumble and their goal remains unchanged: keep positioning Johnson as the fearless defender of the Brexit cause and he will swing Brexit voters behind him.
Proroguing parliament, being booed in Luxembourg, fighting for the prime minister’s freedom of action in the Supreme Court; in the diehards’ view these are not embarrassments but vital signals to Brexiteers that Johnson is of the true faith. They are gambling that constitutional niceties look bafflingly irrelevant to voters in Middlesbrough or Grimsby who just want Brexit done. And they are prepared to push Johnson’s defiance much further.

The Cummings team are letting rumours swirl that Johnson might refuse to implement the extension law at all if he has no deal in place by October 19, leaving the Supreme Court to order someone else in his government to request it instead. That would allow Johnson to keep his promise of never asking for an extension. It would keep him pure.

If we aren’t out by October 31 and Johnson has refused to concede or co-operate in any way, he can weaponise that by telling the electorate that the malign forces of courts and parliament have boxed him in, and that only the people can set him free. His appeal in the next election, Cummings believes, has to be that he is prepared to fight every kind of establishment — legal, parliamentary and European — in the Brexit cause.
Inside the pragmatists’ team, led by Gove, there is nervousness about pinning the government’s every hope of survival on a policy of relentless defiance. As one anxious insider told me, after October the public might well see a trapped Johnson as a weak and diminished figure rather than a noble one. “If we don’t leave we get a rerun of Theresa May’s problem — a drop in the Tory vote and a big rise in the Brexit one. The only way to be sure we leave is to get a deal, and the quicker the better.”

There is a new and intense focus from the Gove team on finding rapid solutions to all the familiar obstacles; freeing the UK from European control while avoiding hard borders in Ireland and keeping the Union together. Under orders, Whitehall is frantically scrabbling around for proposals but, as one insider pointed out, if Theresa May, a dreary but diligent prime minister, couldn’t find those solutions over years, how likely is it they can be unearthed in days? Even insiders place the chances of a deal by the October deadline at 25 per cent.

The pragmatists’ preferred deal is to pass the withdrawal agreement, including a form of Northern Ireland-only backstop, with a whole muddle of untried ways to avoid a hard border and to prevent smuggling. The rest of the UK would leave the customs union and the single market, and negotiate with the EU for Canada-style free trade. This is a hard Brexit. The key problem, even supposing Europe were to bend its red lines by agreeing it, is that this too is unlikely to pass the Commons.
Lacking a majority, Johnson would need rebel Labour MPs behind him but they wouldn’t back a hard Brexit. Tory rebels would be torn; some would abstain. The DUP could balk at seeing its own red line trampled. Some ERG hardliners now oppose anything but no-deal. The risk Johnson runs in proposing a deal which might fail is both that he looks like a loser and that the purity of his message — I will deliver a good deal or no-deal — is lost.
Every option for Johnson now looks hazardous. Even supposing the public back him on either defiance or a deal, he can’t choose to go to the country; the power to decide that is now in Labour’s hands. Labour might choose, says one senior Tory, to keep him in office but not in power for weeks to come, dangling and looking weaker by the day.

The greatest criticism of him is said to be coming from the election strategist who won so many victories for the Tories and Johnson over the past decade. A furious Sir Lynton Crosby is reported to be “out of the game” after losing the fight with Cummings for strategic control.
Crosby thinks that mimicking the Brexit Party will prove a terrible error, damaging the brand and losing vital seats which won’t be compensated for by northern gains. But if Britain is still in the EU come November, he believes that the prime minister’s best hope is to avoid an election until Brexiteer anger dies down.

Whichever route Johnson chooses, this is now, as a former cabinet minister tells me, “a hell of a gamble” — with the party’s future, the country, our lives. But this is a trap he wilfully constructed. He has always thought details didn’t matter and that vim and vigour were the answer to any problems; tough reality may be about to find him out.
 
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