RandoEFC

Looking like Sunak might be the only one to hit the 100 MP threshold for the vote meaning the party membership won't get a vote. Best of a dreadful bunch in terms of some sanity and stability. Johnson might yet hit 100 but sounds unlikely.

There's talk from Tory MPs of defecting to Labour and triggering by-elections if Johnson comes back. I wouldn't rule it out but I also wouldn't be too worried about it.

Sounds like the 100 MP threshold will see Johnson off and it'll be Sunak or Mordaunt. Not that I'm arsed at this point. A general election is needed to put a stop to this. How anyone can argue the British public is democratically represented when two governments have disintegrated in the space of a few months and there hasn't been a vote for what follows is scandalous. I have no idea but I wouldn't have thought so.

You can have a recall petition for an individual MP if enough of their constituents don't want to wait badly enough until the next election to vote them out. It seems astonishing that this ruling party have caused so much absolute catastrophe and can just try again with a new leader whenever their polling gets bad enough until they're forced to call an election after four and a half years. Nobody else can force them to hold an election so long as they have a majority in parliament. It's mad that there's no mechanism to force a ruling party demonstrating this much negligence and incompetence in government to go to the public and seek a fresh mandate if things have got bad enough that they've had to change their leader once, let alone twice, in one term.

It's hilarious but so embarrassing for the country at the same time.

https://twitter.com/PickardJE/status/1583075797471875072?t=m-jb5rvpwiwJguApl2K77g&s=19

My entire twitter feed now is just the government disintegrating in real time. The chief whip has resigned tonight and now this.

The Tories face near-extinction if Truss leads them into the next election so personally I hope she clings on.

We are so fucked.

There was definitely some impact with the Usmanov/sanctions situation. How much that all has to do with our financial situation, Moshiri trying to sell up, etc. Impossible to know as usual when you get into all of this dark money stuff. Neither of them are particularly savoury characters, clearly.

It's not really been that long. She came back maybe a month ago, I was slow on the uptake . But we're figuring it out.

So this is actually 'back on' now and going really well. I don't know how to quote a post into another thread but happy for @Tommy to do the honours and move this post to the dating and relationships thread if he doesn’t like me ruining this one .

I think it's just hard for them to tell a story spanning decades in a ten episode season of television. The format of it looks very ambitious in hindsight. I don't think the execution has been horrendous by any means. It does lead to the problem of seeing characters die having been portrayed by two different actors in four episodes and it simply not being as poignant as intended. It also clearly suffers from them pursuing a quite similar narrative approach to what Game of Thrones had, but without there being 4-5 locations at a time to jump between. This also had an impact on the last season of the main series I think. It makes the pacing completely different and means they cover what would have been about 4 episodes worth of story and time progression in a single episode.

Not to jinx it but this looking like a decent bit of thrift from us so far.

Priti Patel's moral compass with more ambition. She was Attorney General under Johnson because she was the only one with little enough shame to be qualified in matters of law yet publicly support the breaking of international law over the Northern Irish border issue, and support him staying on as PM after being fined by the police for lockdown breaches, etc. Another empty bag of ambition who will simply say or do whatever she thinks she needs to to climb the greasy pole.

Why does nobody ever ask them who's going to do the (often essential) minimum wage jobs if their expectation is for everyone to just move into the careers that pay better?

I can't keep up

I think the sheer impact on people's bills and living standards has become so pronounced now that they won't be so easily seduced by those headline figures of GDP and such. As an economics student at A Level and undergraduate it has always frustrated me how people assess political parties on how they handle "the economy". Obviously you want GDP to be increasing, but if the majority of the population isn't feeling the benefit of it in their day to day lives then what good is it? The state of things at the moment though, I don't think many people will be swayed by "GDP this" and "reduced national debt" that or any of those headline figures if their energy bills and mortgages are still through the roof.

Hahahaha what the fuck.

Jesus christ.

Not to be too optimistic because it feels wrong after all these years of misery but while Truss and what's his face trash the economy, there are some positive noises coming out of the Labour annual conference. Starmer's speech today (I haven't watched myself) and the policy platform being put together by the leadership has received enthusiastic support from the "Liberal centre left" which is probably the closest thing to being his core vote, but also a reasonable amount of approval from the traditional Corbynite commentators that have often been outspoken in their criticism of him. The country could look very different by 2024's general election but Labour are favourites with the bookies and the public expect them to win the next election for the first time. Like I said earlier, my hope is that if the Tories continue to set themselves on fire like they have been and give Labour an open goal, hopefully they can take the opportunity to stand on a solidly social democratic manifesto and implement some genuinely positive change. There's a lot to do but some of the announcements I've read about over the past couple of days are an encouraging start. The article I posted is a fair analysis in my opinion of how a lot of traditionally "left wing" policies have quite an overwhelming level of support in the country right now and describes some of the policies I'm referring to.

Yeah joint second best defensive record and third worst scoring record in the league so far tells its own story. There would have to be sizeable gains up front for there to be any serious hope of a top half finish. The only way that happens is if Calvert-Lewin comes back, stays fit and returns to his Ancelotti-era form but that looks increasingly unlikely. He has all the hallmarks of one of those players who will just have constant injury problems for the rest of his career now.

The Labour membership have backed electoral reform at the party conference as well. Targeting proportional representation. Starmer hasn't openly backed this yet and I don't think he will. Interesting to see how that compromise will pan out by the time there's a manifesto for the next election. Proportional representation is a double edged sword for Labour. On one hand, it makes it incredibly difficult for them to ever govern with a majority again, but on the other hand, it does the same thing for the Tories, who have fewer routes to building a coalition government than Labour. If the polls continue to look the way they are currently heading, Labour won't just get back into power but can afford to throw a few big policies out there which would be a bit of a risky gamble if things were a bit closer. The current leadership seem more likely to play it safe and cruise comfortably into government though sadly.