Watched Theresa May on Andrew Marr trying to apply her traditional politician answering techniques. Andrew Marr who is not the most aggressive of interviewers made her look desperate and essentially useless and her panic laden 'answers' were (to be kind) unconvincing and frankly unbelievable. Whatever the ins and outs of this particular cat's arse she is toast one way or another. This opens the way for Boris who almost defines the Prince of Darkness in a politician. God help us all.
For a brief moment I almost felt sorry for her. She clearly no longer wants to be PM but is hanging in there for the good of the Conservative party rather than for the good of the country.
A lot of people would argue (although maybe not a lot on here) that having May in, rather than Corbyn, is for the good of the country.
As a left leaning Corbyn supporter, I really do not want Labour to win the next election and be tainted by the Armageddon of Brexit.
On the other hand, if they clean up a mess they didn't start...
The chaos that will ensue after Brexit will be leapt upon by the rich and powerful who will continue to manipulate a weak and divided Tory party in order to make any undemocratic grabs they can in the power vacuum. I'd much rather have a party in power that isn't already gearing up to sell even more of the UK to the highest bidders.
Watched Theresa May on Andrew Marr trying to apply her traditional politician answering techniques. Andrew Marr who is not the most aggressive of interviewers made her look desperate and essentially useless and her panic laden 'answers' were (to be kind) unconvincing and frankly unbelievable. Whatever the ins and outs of this particular cat's arse she is toast one way or another. This opens the way for Boris who almost defines the Prince of Darkness in a politician. God help us all.
For a brief moment I almost felt sorry for her. She clearly no longer wants to be PM but is hanging in there for the good of the Conservative party rather than for the good of the country.
A lot of people would argue (although maybe not a lot on here) that having May in, rather than Corbyn, is for the good of the country.
Maybe, but whether or not she is PM at the moment is entirely down to Tory party machinations and nothing to with the Labour party or the electorate.
Watched Theresa May on Andrew Marr trying to apply her traditional politician answering techniques. Andrew Marr who is not the most aggressive of interviewers made her look desperate and essentially useless and her panic laden 'answers' were (to be kind) unconvincing and frankly unbelievable. Whatever the ins and outs of this particular cat's arse she is toast one way or another. This opens the way for Boris who almost defines the Prince of Darkness in a politician. God help us all.
For a brief moment I almost felt sorry for her. She clearly no longer wants to be PM but is hanging in there for the good of the Conservative party rather than for the good of the country.
A lot of people would argue (although maybe not a lot on here) that having May in, rather than Corbyn, is for the good of the country.
I get that, but if you ask those people what actual good she will do for the country it starts to seem less convincing. Perhaps they could start by explaining how what we have got at the moment is strong and stable, and then move on to the details.
Surely there is somebody out there, possibly below the age of 45, who is equipped to lead this country whatever their party starting point? There as 60 million of us FFS and look what we have! Mary Berry would probably do a better job and unite the country too, sadly she would fail the age test tho not the credibility test!
As a left leaning Corbyn supporter, I really do not want Labour to win the next election and be tainted by the Armageddon of Brexit.
On the other hand, if they clean up a mess they didn't start...
True, if you erase Blair's contribution to the whole sorry mess.
Or Thatchers ?
Possibly, but I'm not familiar with her immigration policies as it was before my time. I am familiar with Blairs cynical opening of the doors to mass immigration (or in Campbell et al's master plan, a million new Labour voters) for a decade.
An old article by the dubious migration watch people, but with quotes from the people at the time. Sadly the white working class did cotton on....cue the rise of UKIP;
''The strongest evidence for conspiracy comes from one of Labour’s own. Andrew Neather, a previously unheard-of speechwriter for Blair, Straw and Blunkett, popped up with an article in the Evening Standard in October 2009 which gave the game away.
Immigration, he wrote, ‘didn’t just happen; the deliberate policy of Ministers from late 2000…was to open up the UK to mass immigration’.
He was at the heart of policy in September 2001, drafting the landmark speech by the then Immigration Minister Barbara Roche, and he reported ‘coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn’t its main purpose - to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.
That seemed, even to him, a manoeuvre too far.
The result is now plain for all to see. Even Blair’s favourite think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), commented recently: ‘It is no exaggeration to say that immigration under New Labour has changed the face of the country.’
It is not hard to see why Labour’s own apparatchiks supported the policy. Provided that the white working class didn’t cotton on, there were votes in it.
Research into voting patterns conducted for the Electoral Commission after the 2005 general election found that 80 per cent of Caribbean and African voters had voted Labour, while only about 3 per cent had voted Conservative and roughly 8 per cent for the Liberal Democrats.''
Of all the difficulties Theresa May faces, the importance of denying the truth may be the most acute. There are certain things a prime minister cannot say; certain fabrications that must be insisted upon because political expedience cannot withstand too much daylight. Mrs May, then, must pretend her position is secure and that, contrary to the expectations of her party and the country, that she will lead the Conservative party at the next general election, whenever that may be. If this makes her seem modestly ridiculous then so be it; the alternatives are even worse.
Even so, some fictions would be better abandoned. Last week the prime minister was asked if the Conservative party needed to revisit the ‘modernising’ agenda that, in part, Mrs May was once a part of. Don’t be so silly, May said: ‘I think that’s an argument that we had in the past. I think there was a time when we needed to do that. But I think we’ve moved on from that.’
Oh really?
Even a cursory examination of the latest YouGov numbers puts the lie to that. According to them, Labour enjoys the support of 70 percent of 18-24 year olds and 52 percent of those aged 25-49. If you meet a voter under 50 there’s less than a one in three chance they’re a Tory voter. Only in the modern Conservative party can a 49 year old be considered a stripling.
There are Tories who understand this, recognising that the party has a serious and debilitating generational problem. George Freeman’s You-Can-Have-A-Tent-And-Still-Be-A-Tory ideas festival event was a start, not least because it identified the right problem. And even Theresa May appreciates that something must be done.
The suggestion tuition fees should be capped and a move to increase the threshold above which this effective graduate tax is paid is a start, a belated recognition that the costs of university attendance have spiralled out of control, increasing more rapidly than the benefit of a university education itself. Similarly, the renewed focus on housing – albeit a focus that has not yet delivered meaningful action – is at least a recognition that the housing market is no longer working the way it should.
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But, useful though such measures may be, they remain desperately modest. Policy is only part of the problem and, in many ways, the lesser part of it. The sense the Tories have stacked the deck against younger voters – a definition, remember, that now includes the early years of middle-age – is as widespread as it is corrosive. That can be fixed, however, more easily than the still worse problem which remains the sense, fair or not, that the Conservatives lack an instinctive sympathy with anyone under the age of, well, 50. It is a question of sensibility and perception and these are less easily-changed or fixed than mere policy matters.
The Tories’ de facto alliance with Ukip may have helped deliver Brexit but it sent a message to younger Britons too. It is not just that young Britain rejected Brexit, it is that young Britain rejected the particular type of Brexit envisaged by Ukip and its fellow-travellers. Since the referendum, Theresa May has generally – at least at a rhetorical and symbolic level – embraced that vision and the consequences have been as predictable as they are easy to understand.
There are millions of Britons who, while accepting their birthright and being modestly satisfied with it, are happy to consider themselves citizens of the world. This does not, they think, make them citizens of nowhere. In the great metropolises in particular, they see and enjoy a Britain they think relaxed and at ease with itself. Race and gender and even religion matter very little to them and they are repulsed by politicians for whom they do. This is, for sure, a form of liberalish identity politics but it is one which likes to think it rejects a cruder, more traditional, idea of identity politics. A kind of politics Brexit illuminated and encouraged. There is a reason a new Queen Mary University poll suggests the Tories might only win 29 percent of the vote at the next London local elections; a reason too why the Tories only win the votes of about one in four ethnic minority voters.
Brexit, then, is a proxy for other things much more than it is a problem in and of itself. The details of the negotiations or indeed the intellectual argument for leaving the European Union matter less than the general temper in which these matters are discussed. And the picture the Tories present is too frequently more Blimpish than might be thought wise. Symbols matter, of course, and the spectacle of Tory MPs obsessing about Big Ben or a new Royal Yacht has been as ridiculous as it has been telling. If history is a divide, these people are on the wrong side of it. That, at any rate, is how these matters are perceived by many younger and early middle-aged voters. Waffling about how Italian prosecco-makers depend on the United Kingdom for their own future prosperity carries an unwelcome whiff of Marie Antoinettism.
David Cameron’s quiet tragedy was not that he misdiagnosed the Tory problem but that, having diagnosed it correctly, he abandoned the cure only half way through the course of treatment. Fox hunting! Grammar schools! Blue passports! These might tickle the party memberships’ erogenous zones but they sent a very different signal to millions of voters who have no interest in joining the Tory party but could be prevailed upon to endorse Conservative candidates if those candidates seemed enthused by and comfortable in modern Britain. Again, it is a question of sensibility.
In the face of that, even laughable alternatives begin to look tempting. The opinion polls confirm as much. If the government has no plan, the opposition doesn’t require a credible one either. Ultimately, so much of what the Conservative party has done – and, just as importantly, said – in the past 18 months confirms the sardonic wisdom of Robert Conquest’s third law of politics. Namely that ‘the simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies’.
I understand where she is coming from but, as a Home Secretary, she should understand encryption in some depth.
Plus it’s not that hard to get an overview to a sufficient level.
Yes, but to anyone who even has a basic idea of what encryption is, it sounds like 'I don't need to understand how locks work to deny its use to criminals'.
What a completely insane comment to make. How stupid does Corbyn and the Labour leadership think people are? On what planet would any form of Brexit protect jobs, living standards and the economy? Everything that comes out of his mouth is 100% cliched meaningless nonsense. I am a life long Labour voter but if the Tories were to make Heseltine their leader going into the next election I would vote Tory. He is one of the few adults we have left amongst our political leaders.
Of all the difficulties Theresa May faces, the importance of denying the truth may be the most acute. There are certain things a prime minister cannot say; certain fabrications that must be insisted upon because political expedience cannot withstand too much daylight. Mrs May, then, must pretend her position is secure and that, contrary to the expectations of her party and the country, that she will lead the Conservative party at the next general election, whenever that may be. If this makes her seem modestly ridiculous then so be it; the alternatives are even worse.
Even so, some fictions would be better abandoned. Last week the prime minister was asked if the Conservative party needed to revisit the ‘modernising’ agenda that, in part, Mrs May was once a part of. Don’t be so silly, May said: ‘I think that’s an argument that we had in the past. I think there was a time when we needed to do that. But I think we’ve moved on from that.’
Oh really?
Even a cursory examination of the latest YouGov numbers puts the lie to that. According to them, Labour enjoys the support of 70 percent of 18-24 year olds and 52 percent of those aged 25-49. If you meet a voter under 50 there’s less than a one in three chance they’re a Tory voter. Only in the modern Conservative party can a 49 year old be considered a stripling.
There are Tories who understand this, recognising that the party has a serious and debilitating generational problem. George Freeman’s You-Can-Have-A-Tent-And-Still-Be-A-Tory ideas festival event was a start, not least because it identified the right problem. And even Theresa May appreciates that something must be done.
The suggestion tuition fees should be capped and a move to increase the threshold above which this effective graduate tax is paid is a start, a belated recognition that the costs of university attendance have spiralled out of control, increasing more rapidly than the benefit of a university education itself. Similarly, the renewed focus on housing – albeit a focus that has not yet delivered meaningful action – is at least a recognition that the housing market is no longer working the way it should.
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The best of the current issue – delivered straight to your inbox, every Thursday
But, useful though such measures may be, they remain desperately modest. Policy is only part of the problem and, in many ways, the lesser part of it. The sense the Tories have stacked the deck against younger voters – a definition, remember, that now includes the early years of middle-age – is as widespread as it is corrosive. That can be fixed, however, more easily than the still worse problem which remains the sense, fair or not, that the Conservatives lack an instinctive sympathy with anyone under the age of, well, 50. It is a question of sensibility and perception and these are less easily-changed or fixed than mere policy matters.
The Tories’ de facto alliance with Ukip may have helped deliver Brexit but it sent a message to younger Britons too. It is not just that young Britain rejected Brexit, it is that young Britain rejected the particular type of Brexit envisaged by Ukip and its fellow-travellers. Since the referendum, Theresa May has generally – at least at a rhetorical and symbolic level – embraced that vision and the consequences have been as predictable as they are easy to understand.
There are millions of Britons who, while accepting their birthright and being modestly satisfied with it, are happy to consider themselves citizens of the world. This does not, they think, make them citizens of nowhere. In the great metropolises in particular, they see and enjoy a Britain they think relaxed and at ease with itself. Race and gender and even religion matter very little to them and they are repulsed by politicians for whom they do. This is, for sure, a form of liberalish identity politics but it is one which likes to think it rejects a cruder, more traditional, idea of identity politics. A kind of politics Brexit illuminated and encouraged. There is a reason a new Queen Mary University poll suggests the Tories might only win 29 percent of the vote at the next London local elections; a reason too why the Tories only win the votes of about one in four ethnic minority voters.
Brexit, then, is a proxy for other things much more than it is a problem in and of itself. The details of the negotiations or indeed the intellectual argument for leaving the European Union matter less than the general temper in which these matters are discussed. And the picture the Tories present is too frequently more Blimpish than might be thought wise. Symbols matter, of course, and the spectacle of Tory MPs obsessing about Big Ben or a new Royal Yacht has been as ridiculous as it has been telling. If history is a divide, these people are on the wrong side of it. That, at any rate, is how these matters are perceived by many younger and early middle-aged voters. Waffling about how Italian prosecco-makers depend on the United Kingdom for their own future prosperity carries an unwelcome whiff of Marie Antoinettism.
David Cameron’s quiet tragedy was not that he misdiagnosed the Tory problem but that, having diagnosed it correctly, he abandoned the cure only half way through the course of treatment. Fox hunting! Grammar schools! Blue passports! These might tickle the party memberships’ erogenous zones but they sent a very different signal to millions of voters who have no interest in joining the Tory party but could be prevailed upon to endorse Conservative candidates if those candidates seemed enthused by and comfortable in modern Britain. Again, it is a question of sensibility.
In the face of that, even laughable alternatives begin to look tempting. The opinion polls confirm as much. If the government has no plan, the opposition doesn’t require a credible one either. Ultimately, so much of what the Conservative party has done – and, just as importantly, said – in the past 18 months confirms the sardonic wisdom of Robert Conquest’s third law of politics. Namely that ‘the simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies’.
It is all too little too late! Freezing tuition fees doesn't do it for us as parents of our son going to Uni and the rest of the announcements are window dressing. The Tories are about to enact a withdrawal from the EU which will either hit GDP by a little or by 10% and they do not have a clue!
Brexit is indeed a proxy and my findings are yet to be fully formed. All we can say is that Corbyn is offering a safe pair of hands and is the government in waiting whilst Johnson keeps putting in two footed challenges, hoping for a red card!
What a completely insane comment to make. How stupid does Corbyn and the Labour leadership think people are? On what planet would any form of Brexit protect jobs, living standards and the economy? Everything that comes out of his mouth is 100% cliched meaningless nonsense. I am a life long Labour voter but if the Tories were to make Heseltine their leader going into the next election I would vote Tory. He is one of the few adults we have left amongst our political leaders.
Not sure you are following the agenda? A Norway style deal with CU membership but outside the EU is the Labour policy: no impact on business and no impact on the Irish border. And it is also the only outcome which might fly with the EU as per Varoufakis last April. The whole Labour agenda is about people, jobs and services.
What a completely insane comment to make. How stupid does Corbyn and the Labour leadership think people are? On what planet would any form of Brexit protect jobs, living standards and the economy? Everything that comes out of his mouth is 100% cliched meaningless nonsense. I am a life long Labour voter but if the Tories were to make Heseltine their leader going into the next election I would vote Tory. He is one of the few adults we have left amongst our political leaders.
Not sure you are following the agenda? A Norway style deal with CU membership but outside the EU is the Labour policy: no impact on business and no impact on the Irish border. And it is also the only outcome which might fly with the EU as per Varoufakis last April. The whole Labour agenda is about people, jobs and services.
If the Labour agenda is about people, services and jobs then the only viable Brexit policy is to stop it happening altogether.
If Theresa May were a football team, she would be a team relegated with eight matches to go still having to fulfil the fixtures.
She's Arsenal. Failing, out the race yet hanging around like we're all gonna accept Europa league qualification is what we want for Britain.
It will be like that season Leicester won the Prem and Wenger came out with some flannel excuse. Like Leicester winning the Premier League, we could have a fairer country again. Yet May, and the rest of the senior Tory politicians, are like Arsenal. Struggling to keep up with a changing world, and falling behind because of it
Of all the difficulties Theresa May faces, the importance of denying the truth may be the most acute. There are certain things a prime minister cannot say; certain fabrications that must be insisted upon because political expedience cannot withstand too much daylight. Mrs May, then, must pretend her position is secure and that, contrary to the expectations of her party and the country, that she will lead the Conservative party at the next general election, whenever that may be. If this makes her seem modestly ridiculous then so be it; the alternatives are even worse.
Even so, some fictions would be better abandoned. Last week the prime minister was asked if the Conservative party needed to revisit the ‘modernising’ agenda that, in part, Mrs May was once a part of. Don’t be so silly, May said: ‘I think that’s an argument that we had in the past. I think there was a time when we needed to do that. But I think we’ve moved on from that.’
Oh really?
Even a cursory examination of the latest YouGov numbers puts the lie to that. According to them, Labour enjoys the support of 70 percent of 18-24 year olds and 52 percent of those aged 25-49. If you meet a voter under 50 there’s less than a one in three chance they’re a Tory voter. Only in the modern Conservative party can a 49 year old be considered a stripling.
There are Tories who understand this, recognising that the party has a serious and debilitating generational problem. George Freeman’s You-Can-Have-A-Tent-And-Still-Be-A-Tory ideas festival event was a start, not least because it identified the right problem. And even Theresa May appreciates that something must be done.
The suggestion tuition fees should be capped and a move to increase the threshold above which this effective graduate tax is paid is a start, a belated recognition that the costs of university attendance have spiralled out of control, increasing more rapidly than the benefit of a university education itself. Similarly, the renewed focus on housing – albeit a focus that has not yet delivered meaningful action – is at least a recognition that the housing market is no longer working the way it should.
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The best of the current issue – delivered straight to your inbox, every Thursday
But, useful though such measures may be, they remain desperately modest. Policy is only part of the problem and, in many ways, the lesser part of it. The sense the Tories have stacked the deck against younger voters – a definition, remember, that now includes the early years of middle-age – is as widespread as it is corrosive. That can be fixed, however, more easily than the still worse problem which remains the sense, fair or not, that the Conservatives lack an instinctive sympathy with anyone under the age of, well, 50. It is a question of sensibility and perception and these are less easily-changed or fixed than mere policy matters.
The Tories’ de facto alliance with Ukip may have helped deliver Brexit but it sent a message to younger Britons too. It is not just that young Britain rejected Brexit, it is that young Britain rejected the particular type of Brexit envisaged by Ukip and its fellow-travellers. Since the referendum, Theresa May has generally – at least at a rhetorical and symbolic level – embraced that vision and the consequences have been as predictable as they are easy to understand.
There are millions of Britons who, while accepting their birthright and being modestly satisfied with it, are happy to consider themselves citizens of the world. This does not, they think, make them citizens of nowhere. In the great metropolises in particular, they see and enjoy a Britain they think relaxed and at ease with itself. Race and gender and even religion matter very little to them and they are repulsed by politicians for whom they do. This is, for sure, a form of liberalish identity politics but it is one which likes to think it rejects a cruder, more traditional, idea of identity politics. A kind of politics Brexit illuminated and encouraged. There is a reason a new Queen Mary University poll suggests the Tories might only win 29 percent of the vote at the next London local elections; a reason too why the Tories only win the votes of about one in four ethnic minority voters.
Brexit, then, is a proxy for other things much more than it is a problem in and of itself. The details of the negotiations or indeed the intellectual argument for leaving the European Union matter less than the general temper in which these matters are discussed. And the picture the Tories present is too frequently more Blimpish than might be thought wise. Symbols matter, of course, and the spectacle of Tory MPs obsessing about Big Ben or a new Royal Yacht has been as ridiculous as it has been telling. If history is a divide, these people are on the wrong side of it. That, at any rate, is how these matters are perceived by many younger and early middle-aged voters. Waffling about how Italian prosecco-makers depend on the United Kingdom for their own future prosperity carries an unwelcome whiff of Marie Antoinettism.
David Cameron’s quiet tragedy was not that he misdiagnosed the Tory problem but that, having diagnosed it correctly, he abandoned the cure only half way through the course of treatment. Fox hunting! Grammar schools! Blue passports! These might tickle the party memberships’ erogenous zones but they sent a very different signal to millions of voters who have no interest in joining the Tory party but could be prevailed upon to endorse Conservative candidates if those candidates seemed enthused by and comfortable in modern Britain. Again, it is a question of sensibility.
In the face of that, even laughable alternatives begin to look tempting. The opinion polls confirm as much. If the government has no plan, the opposition doesn’t require a credible one either. Ultimately, so much of what the Conservative party has done – and, just as importantly, said – in the past 18 months confirms the sardonic wisdom of Robert Conquest’s third law of politics. Namely that ‘the simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies’.
It is all too little too late! Freezing tuition fees doesn't do it for us as parents of our son going to Uni and the rest of the announcements are window dressing. The Tories are about to enact a withdrawal from the EU which will either hit GDP by a little or by 10% and they do not have a clue!
Brexit is indeed a proxy and my findings are yet to be fully formed. All we can say is that Corbyn is offering a safe pair of hands and is the government in waiting whilst Johnson keeps putting in two footed challenges, hoping for a red card!
Corbyn a safe pair of hands?
It speaks entirely to the incredible ineptness of the modern Conservative Party that Corbyn is in the position he is in.
Their last election campaign looked like it had been strategised by Katrien Meire with special assistance by Karel Fraeye - it was a complete clusterfuck.
At times it was hard to understand how Teresa May had ever got beyond local Buckinghamshire County Council politics - she was beyond awful.
Corbyn has been in politics his entire life and has never run so much a minor government role - same goes for the likes of Diane Abbot and John McDonnell.
The thought of him as Prime Minister is absolutely incredible and yet - with the Tories tearing themselves apart over Brexit as they have been promising to do for 30 years - he is the heir apparent.
Clearly Boris is lining himself up to topple May but there are large chunks of his own party who will do anything to stop him taking the crown.
Thing is, typing that feels ridiculous in itself now! That's how much popularity and notability Corbyn has attained - he's the biggest news in Labour, by miles. For him to have an heir would require that heir to be in the public discourse already, and for the right reasons.
But we're off topic. We can swing it back on topic by musing whether the Tories have an heir who's in the public discourse for the right reasons. Maybe Frank Lampard should become an MP
It's a disaster. Corbyn is that woman who won celebrity big brother despite not being a celebrity who married that rock star who wasn't one, who stormed off that quiz show. Versus Theresa may, who is like someone who won the apprentice because the rest were shitter (can't narrow it down, as it's the same every year). Either way we're stuffed
If Theresa May were a football team, she would be a team relegated with eight matches to go still having to fulfil the fixtures.
Doesn't say much for the Labour party then, does it. Still got less votes and seats at the last GE, despite May seemingly trying her best to throw herself off an electoral cliff.
It's a disaster. Corbyn is that woman who won celebrity big brother despite not being a celebrity who married that rock star who wasn't one, who stormed off that quiz show. Versus Theresa may, who is like someone who won the apprentice because the rest were shitter (can't narrow it down, as it's the same every year). Either way we're stuffed
You're all wrong. Theresa May is like the person in one of those cartoons where when someone asks a line of people for a volunteer to take take one step forward, everyone else took one step back.
The notion that Labour lost the last election, and shouldn't behave like they won it is a) true when the winner is assessed and b) more nuanced. For example if there was a debate on fox hunting in front of an audience of 100 people and at the outset of the debate the audience were 75/25 in favour, but at the end of the debate the audience were 51/49 in favour then the triumph of 'winning' the debate is shifted in my view.
Comments
Perhaps they could start by explaining how what we have got at the moment is strong and stable, and then move on to the details.
Surely there is somebody out there, possibly below the age of 45, who is equipped to lead this country whatever their party starting point? There as 60 million of us FFS and look what we have!
Mary Berry would probably do a better job and unite the country too, sadly she would fail the age test tho not the credibility test!
I am familiar with Blairs cynical opening of the doors to mass immigration (or in Campbell et al's master plan, a million new Labour voters) for a decade.
An old article by the dubious migration watch people, but with quotes from the people at the time. Sadly the white working class did cotton on....cue the rise of UKIP;
''The strongest evidence for conspiracy comes from one of Labour’s own. Andrew Neather, a previously unheard-of speechwriter for Blair, Straw and Blunkett, popped up with an article in the Evening Standard in October 2009 which gave the game away.
Immigration, he wrote, ‘didn’t just happen; the deliberate policy of Ministers from late 2000…was to open up the UK to mass immigration’.
He was at the heart of policy in September 2001, drafting the landmark speech by the then Immigration Minister Barbara Roche, and he reported ‘coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn’t its main purpose - to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.
That seemed, even to him, a manoeuvre too far.
The result is now plain for all to see. Even Blair’s favourite think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), commented recently: ‘It is no exaggeration to say that immigration under New Labour has changed the face of the country.’
It is not hard to see why Labour’s own apparatchiks supported the policy. Provided that the white working class didn’t cotton on, there were votes in it.
Research into voting patterns conducted for the Electoral Commission after the 2005 general election found that 80 per cent of Caribbean and African voters had voted Labour, while only about 3 per cent had voted Conservative and roughly 8 per cent for the Liberal Democrats.''
Do they?
Alex Massie
Of all the difficulties Theresa May faces, the importance of denying the truth may be the most acute. There are certain things a prime minister cannot say; certain fabrications that must be insisted upon because political expedience cannot withstand too much daylight. Mrs May, then, must pretend her position is secure and that, contrary to the expectations of her party and the country, that she will lead the Conservative party at the next general election, whenever that may be. If this makes her seem modestly ridiculous then so be it; the alternatives are even worse.
Even so, some fictions would be better abandoned. Last week the prime minister was asked if the Conservative party needed to revisit the ‘modernising’ agenda that, in part, Mrs May was once a part of. Don’t be so silly, May said: ‘I think that’s an argument that we had in the past. I think there was a time when we needed to do that. But I think we’ve moved on from that.’
Oh really?
Even a cursory examination of the latest YouGov numbers puts the lie to that. According to them, Labour enjoys the support of 70 percent of 18-24 year olds and 52 percent of those aged 25-49. If you meet a voter under 50 there’s less than a one in three chance they’re a Tory voter. Only in the modern Conservative party can a 49 year old be considered a stripling.
There are Tories who understand this, recognising that the party has a serious and debilitating generational problem. George Freeman’s You-Can-Have-A-Tent-And-Still-Be-A-Tory ideas festival event was a start, not least because it identified the right problem. And even Theresa May appreciates that something must be done.
The suggestion tuition fees should be capped and a move to increase the threshold above which this effective graduate tax is paid is a start, a belated recognition that the costs of university attendance have spiralled out of control, increasing more rapidly than the benefit of a university education itself. Similarly, the renewed focus on housing – albeit a focus that has not yet delivered meaningful action – is at least a recognition that the housing market is no longer working the way it should.
Sign up to the Weekly Highlights email
The best of the current issue – delivered straight to your inbox, every Thursday
But, useful though such measures may be, they remain desperately modest. Policy is only part of the problem and, in many ways, the lesser part of it. The sense the Tories have stacked the deck against younger voters – a definition, remember, that now includes the early years of middle-age – is as widespread as it is corrosive. That can be fixed, however, more easily than the still worse problem which remains the sense, fair or not, that the Conservatives lack an instinctive sympathy with anyone under the age of, well, 50. It is a question of sensibility and perception and these are less easily-changed or fixed than mere policy matters.
The Tories’ de facto alliance with Ukip may have helped deliver Brexit but it sent a message to younger Britons too. It is not just that young Britain rejected Brexit, it is that young Britain rejected the particular type of Brexit envisaged by Ukip and its fellow-travellers. Since the referendum, Theresa May has generally – at least at a rhetorical and symbolic level – embraced that vision and the consequences have been as predictable as they are easy to understand.
There are millions of Britons who, while accepting their birthright and being modestly satisfied with it, are happy to consider themselves citizens of the world. This does not, they think, make them citizens of nowhere. In the great metropolises in particular, they see and enjoy a Britain they think relaxed and at ease with itself. Race and gender and even religion matter very little to them and they are repulsed by politicians for whom they do. This is, for sure, a form of liberalish identity politics but it is one which likes to think it rejects a cruder, more traditional, idea of identity politics. A kind of politics Brexit illuminated and encouraged. There is a reason a new Queen Mary University poll suggests the Tories might only win 29 percent of the vote at the next London local elections; a reason too why the Tories only win the votes of about one in four ethnic minority voters.
Brexit, then, is a proxy for other things much more than it is a problem in and of itself. The details of the negotiations or indeed the intellectual argument for leaving the European Union matter less than the general temper in which these matters are discussed. And the picture the Tories present is too frequently more Blimpish than might be thought wise. Symbols matter, of course, and the spectacle of Tory MPs obsessing about Big Ben or a new Royal Yacht has been as ridiculous as it has been telling. If history is a divide, these people are on the wrong side of it. That, at any rate, is how these matters are perceived by many younger and early middle-aged voters. Waffling about how Italian prosecco-makers depend on the United Kingdom for their own future prosperity carries an unwelcome whiff of Marie Antoinettism.
David Cameron’s quiet tragedy was not that he misdiagnosed the Tory problem but that, having diagnosed it correctly, he abandoned the cure only half way through the course of treatment. Fox hunting! Grammar schools! Blue passports! These might tickle the party memberships’ erogenous zones but they sent a very different signal to millions of voters who have no interest in joining the Tory party but could be prevailed upon to endorse Conservative candidates if those candidates seemed enthused by and comfortable in modern Britain. Again, it is a question of sensibility.
In the face of that, even laughable alternatives begin to look tempting. The opinion polls confirm as much. If the government has no plan, the opposition doesn’t require a credible one either. Ultimately, so much of what the Conservative party has done – and, just as importantly, said – in the past 18 months confirms the sardonic wisdom of Robert Conquest’s third law of politics. Namely that ‘the simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies’.
Plus it’s not that hard to get an overview to a sufficient level.
Brexit is indeed a proxy and my findings are yet to be fully formed. All we can say is that Corbyn is offering a safe pair of hands and is the government in waiting whilst Johnson keeps putting in two footed challenges, hoping for a red card!
It will be like that season Leicester won the Prem and Wenger came out with some flannel excuse. Like Leicester winning the Premier League, we could have a fairer country again. Yet May, and the rest of the senior Tory politicians, are like Arsenal. Struggling to keep up with a changing world, and falling behind because of it
It speaks entirely to the incredible ineptness of the modern Conservative Party that Corbyn is in the position he is in.
Their last election campaign looked like it had been strategised by Katrien Meire with special assistance by Karel Fraeye - it was a complete clusterfuck.
At times it was hard to understand how Teresa May had ever got beyond local Buckinghamshire County Council politics - she was beyond awful.
Corbyn has been in politics his entire life and has never run so much a minor government role - same goes for the likes of Diane Abbot and John McDonnell.
The thought of him as Prime Minister is absolutely incredible and yet - with the Tories tearing themselves apart over Brexit as they have been promising to do for 30 years - he is the heir apparent.
Clearly Boris is lining himself up to topple May but there are large chunks of his own party who will do anything to stop him taking the crown.
You couldn't make this up. Here we all are talking about how they need to change and they're just becoming more entrenched - it's hilarious
At least hug a hoody was an attempt by the Tories to connect with broken Britain
May just seems to want to appeal to men and women over 65 who live in hamlets
For example if there was a debate on fox hunting in front of an audience of 100 people and at the outset of the debate the audience were 75/25 in favour, but at the end of the debate the audience were 51/49 in favour then the triumph of 'winning' the debate is shifted in my view.