A recent poll puts Labour down to 27% from their poor election showing of 34%. It puts the conservative opposition on 48%, split between the Conservatives on 27% and Reform on 21%.
The large Labour majority on a reduced vote share from Jeremy Corbyn’s was only possible because many conservative voters felt let down by the Conservative Party, staying at home or voting Reform.
Labour has lost support rapidly. It has revealed a wish to tax people and businesses excessively which it concealed pre election. It has found governing extremely difficult and has impaled itself on the freebie row
As we are likely to have four more years of this government this site will concentrate on what the government is doing and how it can serve us better. There will be jostling between Conservatives and Reform over who can best oppose which will delight the government, hoping to be re elected with less than a third of the vote and less than a fifth of all electors. Those who are primarily interested in the Conservative/Reform struggles should go onto their sites to debate. I will not usually be posting Reform criticisms of Conservatives or Conservative criticisms of Reform.
Any airtime Conservatives or Reform get should concentrate on what the government is getting wrong and what it can do to improve. There can only be a different government when enough Reform voters back the Conservatives or enough Conservatives shift to Reform.
This site all the time we had a Conservative Party government concentrated on the government and how it needed to change policy. It rarely commented on how the Opposition did its job.We need an opposition which can combine well researched criticisms of government actions and results with a better vision of how the U.K. could benefit from policies that promote freedom and prosperity.
This site is mainly about the conduct of government and the evolution of policy.
October 23, 2024
Reform can’t be ignored. Like it or not they have become the real opposition
This government is a disaster enabled solely due to the not so conservative last government reneging on every manifesto pledge
We’re just going to have to fasten our seat belts and ride out the political storm.
Maybe the faaaaar rite ie the majority of normal people will have to man the barricades.
October 23, 2024
I can understand the dilema of the rump parliamentary conservative party who I have always described as consocialists. A void has opened between their past benign opposition called the labour party, up to july 2024, and what is the real labour party without camoflage netting of today.
The conservative electorate have realised that what posed as their party up until july 2024 was not what they understood to be conservative in any shape or form. Hence their failure to vote at all or their voting for reform. The residual consocialists amongst them showed their disdain by voting lib/dem.
Now in terms of an opposition we have a consocialist rump, about to be led by a Robert Jenrick who has rediscovered conservatism and can identify all areas that have gone wrong. He is now espousing solutions. The alternative is to be led by Kemi Badenoch who realises that the problems facing any future UK government are much more fundamental, involving the very structure of the machine of government. I believe she sees it as having gone very wrong irrespective of party politics. I would be with her in the membership vote were I qualified. Either will find the battle within their own parliamentary party the greatest challenge.
Thanks to first past the post, reform are thin in Parliament but greater than the lib/dems in terms of electoral votes. They are sensibly building within the electorate until they reach that tipping point to power.
The current government are espousing the reform case enormously in all they do. The opposition to them will arise from within them when it is realised that there is little cake left to eat. With such a large majority, outside opposition however accurate will have little resonance with them. Fortunately it will build real opposition within the electorate who will increasingly dismiss them over the next four years. Unless the IMF get them first.
Pointing out labours sins in this diary is fine, they are becoming all to obvious to us outside already. However wishing to ignore everything else in gestation on the political battlefield by not allowing comment on it would be a big mistake. The electorate are feline, and you can no longer hurd cats.
October 23, 2024
The fact is Sir John we were completely failed by 14 years of Conservative administrations. Administrators that were definitely not conservative. This failure was much more than simple feelings this was plain fact. We were failed on both domestic policies of which immigration, Brexit and NHS dominated and foreign policy with too much slavish adherence to ideological aspirations of neocons in the US State Department. Now we’re lumbered with a radical bunch of utterly incompetent Labour Ministers most of whom have never had a proper job in industry or started their own business. Most have never employed anyone or indeed been responsible for managing large groups or teams of working professionals. And they are led by an arrogant chameleon whose personal greed and sense of self importance has cast a black shadow over his first 100 days in office. Here’s a man who previously supported every one of Jeremy Corbyn’s radical hard left policies including making every possible attempt to frustrate Brexit. Like Corbyn his roots belong in hard left dogma and he is clearly very authoritarian. The long drawn out Conservative leadership contest will hopefully determine whether the Conservative Party will return and reclaim Conservatism or whether they’ll remain essentially in the centre left of politics? Until we know the direction of travel we cannot properly make a valid judgement. I remain pessimistic.