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Tory Leadership Runners and Riders

I think that just reflects the difference between politics and policy. I am much more interested in the policy because I have always been basically a geek and politics is full of annoying human, institutional and societal factors that make for a mostly tiresome and frustrating experience.

It's also a big difference and weakness of the centre and left of UK politics in that they are far too reliant on the idea that if only everyone was better in formed then we wouldn't keep electing such damaging governments, whereas the Tories have always known that none of that really matters as long as you can make a compelling and easily understood offering to the electorate they will happily memory hole all the terrible things your terrible people did just last month.

BTW I am always slightly amused by the way people talk about PFM here like it's the Bilderberg meeting rather than a small part of a small forum mostly populated by a very narrow demographic (middle aged white men who like nothing better than spending the day in the shed :) ).
Left and right have different conceptions of what mass involvement in politics means. For the left it means popular participation in power, for the right, popular identification with power. The right’s conception has almost completely won out in the U.K.: most people are either completely disengaged from politics or treat it like a reality TV show because those are the options available. It’s not really a question of the Tories understanding the electorate better, more that they’re better placed to reap the rewards of a system largely constructed for their benefit.

At least half the Labour Party feel the same way about the public as the Conservatives, which is why they’ve worked so hard to hollow the party out, as a democratic institution. The findings of the Forde Report and the response to it have to be seen in this light: if it discourages participation that’s all good, really. What they don’t understand is this doesn’t work for them the same way it does for the Conservatives.
 
Agree completely.
"I like Boris"
"Get Brexit dun"
"Starmer is boring"
"Level up the North" - wow four words.

Huge proportion of disengaged and ignorant people voting for I'm a Celebrity. Thus Truss impersonating Thatcher.
“Longterm economic plan”
“Strong and stable”
“Coalition of chaos”
“Take back control”
“Leave means leave”
“Enemies of the people”
“Will of the people”

…is this a tory thing or have all parties been doing it for years and I only noticed six years ago?
 
“Longterm economic plan”
“Strong and stable”
“Coalition of chaos”
“Take back control”
“Leave means leave”
“Enemies of the people”
“Will of the people”

…is this a tory thing or have all parties been doing it for years and I only noticed six years ago?
There is a lot of narrative in there, some of which is neoliberal generally, some more specifically Brexit. The Brexit one’s are obvious, but others have wider application

Strong and Stable for example comes from the same place as Strong Money, Sound money, stable currency etc, all of which mean Cuts to Public Services.

In fact a lot of our current narrative; Magic Money Tree, Maxing out the nations credit card, putting our children and grandchildren in debt, there is no money, who pays etc etc all mean, Cuts to Public Services.

The Brexit narrative also means cuts to public services

We live in a cuts to public services world
 
Kate McCan is blamess. Liz 'sugical' Truss and Rishi Suknacker's 'who can be more abusive to refugees and migrants' competition could floor the toughest, subject to a shread of humanity.

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Also union membership in the UK is now less than 25% of employees.
It's not all bad news. Between 2016 to 2020 employee union membership in UK increased by 250k before dropping in '21.
 
I wouldn't lump Gordon Brown with the other 2 disasters.
For all their talk of bringing down the deficit and debt, the Tories have never actually tried to do it, it is just a rhetorical devise to divert government spending away from public and into private hands. Blair and Brown did bring down the debt and the deficit, as did Clinton, which shifted money supply onto personal borrowing and led to 2008
 
The sad hilarity is that this is so ingrained in public thinking now that I spent an hour explaining to some people at work what a deficit meant for public wealth. As we concluded they agreed that a government deficit is equal to public saving. Then in the space of two minutes as we moved on the main fellow also said that 'bringing down the deficit' would 'save money' in case it was necessary, such as for disasters like Covid.

This is just par for the course. An hour is not a long time really, but flitting back to the default view in the space of two minutes is astonishing.
 
On what grounds? Because his incompetence work was mostly behind the scenes as chancellor?
Because he was not as obviously incompetent as the other two. I would have thought an MMT fan like you would give him credit for having kept Britain out of the eurozone :)
 
If only every one was as clever as you…
That's not the point. It's not about cleverness, but about the success of driving erroneous ideas so deeply into public consciousness that even discussion doesn't shift it. It's not like I haven't held common misconceptions on things and it has taken me a few tries to get past them until the penny drops. Though the public economics thing is so vast and widespread, yet so illogical . I'm talking about the power of habit over reason.
 
I’m intrigued by the idea of someone sounding off for an hour to his workmates. Most people I’ve worked with would be drumming their fingers on the table and making excuses to leave after ten minutes or so. The only exception was women talking about weddings (either their own, or ones they’d attended). An hour would just be warm-up time.
 
Because he was not as obviously incompetent as the other two. I would have thought an MMT fan like you would give him credit for having kept Britain out of the eurozone :)
His plan with the 'golden rule' was prepare Britain for entry. That was the aim. Back in the day newspaper articles would come from his pen explaining how Britain could be in a position to 'meet the criteria'. This was the view of a man completely unaware of the difference between monetary sovereignty and monetary constraint. In this he was far below Thatcher, who originally thought money was the same for all countries, but by about 1985-1987 had come to realise that it isn't.
 
Because he was not as obviously incompetent as the other two. I would have thought an MMT fan like you would give him credit for having kept Britain out of the eurozone :)
As I recall it was a Tory who negotiated the opt out and Blair who tried to negotiate to opt in
 


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