UK Politics Thread

[STEED]

Scarred by election flop, British pollsters diverge over Brexit

http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-bri...-idUKKCN0VN0A9

Hey look all the pollsters are having a sing song..

[STEED]

Osborne's fiscal charter shows the Tories have lost touch with reality

http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2016...-lost-touch-wi

I think they lost touch with reality many many years ago. As for Osborne he has put it all on Black but Red is more likely, question is when and how big the hit will be.

[Jimbuna]

Have the 'opposition' announced a unified position yet?

[STEED]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

Have the 'opposition' announced a unified position yet?

What opposition?

Democracy is like ice cream now so easily melted.

[Jimbuna]

True that.

[MGR1]

From the FT:

Last spring, the Conservative minister Nick Boles noticed something exercising his constituents in Lincolnshire, in the English Midlands. Whatever their gripes with his party, they knew the Labour opposition could only govern after the 2015 general election with the parliamentary complicity of Scottish Nationalists.
And how they hated the idea. The MP had never known such a doorstep sensation, with voters irrespective of age, sex and class seething at talk of separatist influence at UK level. Smelling an unanswerable line of attack against Labour, he drove to London to confer with Lynton Crosby, the Tories’ campaign director whose research, it turned out, had picked up the same sentiment.
The party spent the subsequent weeks talking up a deal between Labour and the Scottish National party, which the SNP did nothing to talk back down. Thus were Labour’s existing flaws sharpened in English voters’ minds. How could a leader as shaky as Ed Miliband stand up to the SNP’s formidable Nicola Sturgeon? Why entrust the economy to two parties of the left?
What germinated in Lincolnshire streets and airless focus group rooms grew into a lethal campaign, and now something much more important. British politics rotates around an unofficial non-aggression pact between English conservatism and Scottish nationalism. As antagonistic as any two movements in the land — culturally, ideologically — they nevertheless have a mutual strategic interest in each other’s success that neither side can admit.
As long as Tories govern in London, Nationalists in Edinburgh have an ogre against which to define themselves and mobilise their voters. They can run Scotland and wear the rebel colours of opposition at the same time. While gaining from this insider-outsider status, they can promote independence as the ultimate hedge against never-ending Conservative rule from Westminster, which also doubles up as something to blame for perceived blemishes in their own administrative record.
Meanwhile, as long as the SNP commands a virtual monopoly of parliamentary seats in Scotland, it is structurally near-impossible for Labour to defeat the Tories in a UK-wide election. And the harder it is for Labour to win, the more the party favours a life of ideological indulgence by way of consolation. Its members chose the ageing socialist Jeremy Corbyn as leader last autumn not as a way back to credibility but as a source of pleasure while impotent. The Tories can rest on historically lavish poll leads because Labour has given up, and Labour has given up because the SNP is so strong.
The Scottish Labour party has proposed to raise income tax by a penny, as it tries to jump-start its demoralised troops north of the border by tacking to the left.
A principled unionist cannot object to a UK government that hinges on a Scottish party’s votes. England’s emetic reaction to the mere prospect of SNP clout in Westminster last year amounted to a dismal prognosis for the union. But Ms Sturgeon will hardly worry about that, and even some Tories, when pressed, only want to preserve the UK in the same way that most people want to lose weight. The present and tangible reality of power matters more than the still-distant dread of national break-up.
No, the status quo suits both parties too much to disrupt, even if they knew how to go about such a thing. They are two columns propping up a political structure that shelters their interests. The anguish is all Labour’s. The party can only get around its systemic exclusion from power by reclaiming lost territory in Scotland. If Mr Corbyn flunks that challenge — and polls ahead of May’s Scottish elections suggest he will have a hard enough time keeping the Tories in third — it should explode the idea, born of the 1980s, that Scots are wildly leftwing. There are cross-border differences, but they centre on identity first and ideology second.
Of course, Ms Sturgeon will continue to clash with David Cameron, the Tory prime minister, over nuclear weapons, budgets and the timing of the EU referendum. These grievances are real. The parties are so dissimilar in every way that journalistic coverage of parliament has turned into a kind of anthropology.
But if two prize fighters can insult each other monstrously while keeping a cold eye on the profit they make from the other’s existence, the two deftest politicians in Britain can perform a similar feat of cognitive dissonance. There is something of boxing’s orchestrated raillery about Tory-SNP hostilities nowadays. The real competition for each side has always been Labour, and they have managed to lock it out of power. Only Scottish independence itself — which would give Nationalists their existential prize — could suit either of these parties any more perfectly.

Assailed by Tory English Nationalism on one side and SNP Scottish Nationalism on the other, Labour is between a rock and a hard place methinks.

SLab still needs to die, nay, be completely purged, in Scotland, though.

Mike.

[MGR1]

Some more Scotland-centric deep background info:

Whatever Happened to Tory Scotland? by David Torrance.

Most people think of Scotland as a Labour country – Red Clydeside,James Maxton, Tom Johnston and all that. But there is a very good argument for saying that Scotland is, or was, a Conservative country, at least in the twentieth century. The Tories were the most successful party in Scottish electoral politics from 1912 till 1964. In the general election of 1955, they won a majority of votes and a majority of seats – the only party in Scotland ever to have achieved that double. Even the SNP landslide in the Scottish parliamentary elections did not match that. So what happened? Where did Tory Scotland go?

Most people would answer that Margaret Thatcher killed the Scottish Tories with her poll tax, and she certainly helped bury it, as most of the contributors to this collection of essays concede. But that does not entirely explain the collapse of Scottish Conservatism as a political movement. That was all their own work. They failed to secure their own core vote. (sounds familiar, doesn't it? SLab take note! MGR1) The key is in the name because, of course, the Scottish Tories only became the Conservative Party in 1965. Before that, they were the Unionist Party and that was a very different kettle of political fish.

The Scottish Unionists that won all those elections in the twentieth century were very odd fish indeed. For a start, the Union referred to is not the 1707 Union between Scotland and England, but the 1801 Union between Ireland and Great Britain. The origins of the Scottish Unionist Party lay in the split of the Liberal Party in the 1886 when the Liberal prime minister, William Gladstone, moved his Irish Home Rule Bill. The Liberal Unionists split and went on to form the Scottish Unionist party with the Tories in 1912 to oppose home rule for Ireland. Which means that the Scottish Tories were actually Ulster unionists all along. What made the SUP so successful was its appeal to the Protestant working class of West Central Scotland, who felt threatened by the migration of half a million Catholic Irish workers before the Great War.

Did the workers of Red Clydeside really vote for the sister party to the Ulster Unionists? Yes they did, many of them. The Scottish middle classes were too small to sustain a party of the Right on their own in Scotland, so they relied on working class votes. Richard J. Findlay suggests that, because most of his historian colleagues are sympathetic to Labour, there has been a disproportionate focus on the history of Red Clydeside and Labour politics in general.The Scottish Unionists have been hidden from history. Gerry Hassan, a writer who comes from the Left, agrees with Findlay and scolds the Scottish intelligentsia for perpetuating what he calls ‘the most enduring ’”Scotch Myth” that has grown up in modem Scotland, after kailyardism, tartanism and Clydeism: the myth of anti-Tory Scotland.’ That is quite a mouthful. Mind you, there is nothing mythical about the anti-Tory vote in Scotland today. The Conservatives lost all their Scottish MPs in the 1997 general election, when their share of the vote fell to a historic low of 17.5%. As John Curtice, Scotland’s leading psephologist, points out, they still have not recovered, despite the Tories turning their backs on Margaret Thatcher. In fact, their share of the vote slipped even further in 2010 and ‘11. And there is no sign of any halt to the Tory decline.

He asks why there has not been any Tory revival since the coming of the more liberal Conservatism of David Cameron. Is this because Scotland is an inherently more left wing country? Curtice’s answer is that Scotland is more fond of redistribution of wealth than England, but not by a very great deal. Certainly not enough to account for the minuscule Tory vote in Scotland. Curtice suggests that it must be the national question that accounts for the failure of the Tories to thrive in what is still, in all senses of the word, a fairly conservative country.

Alex Massie says the Tory problem is simple. There is, he says, no right wing party in Europe that is not a patriotic party, and the Tories are not seen, in Scotland, as a patriotic party. As every writer in this volume seems to agree, including the Conservative contributors, the Scottish Tories messed up over Scottish identity and by opposing devolution, and they are suffering still. Now, of course the Tories are a patriotic party, it is just that they are stuck with British patriotism at a time when Scots just do not feel very British any more. Not only that, Scots want more power for the Scottish parliament, so this is not like the old romantic Tory patriotism of John Buchan, the Unionist MP and novelist who famously said that every Scotsman should be a Scottish nationalist. The content of Scottish identity politics has changed. It is not about kilts and tartan any more but power.

I would have to say that none of the contributors to this collection offer much hope for a revival of the Scottish Tories, even under their gay, young, woman leader, Ruth Davidson. She started off on entirely the wrong foot by saying that there should be no more talk of powers for the Scottish parliament. She has since changed her tune, but few are likely to be convinced that the Scottish Tories have turned into modern political patriots. Their last chance was when the Davidson’s leadership challenger, Murdo Fraser, proposed scrapping the Scottish Tory name altogether and becoming a fully fledged home rule party. But it seems too late for that now. Perhaps the most intriguing observation in this volume is in the introduction by the journalist David Torrance. He says that the old Scottish Unionist Party in the twentieth century was ‘the SNP of its day… all it lacked was a 1950s version of Alex Salmond’.

The First Minister would claim to be horrified by that observation. After all, the SNP constitution bars the party from entering any electoral alliance with the Conservatives. But Torrance has a point. The SNP is patriotic, well organised and has prominent business support just like the old SUP. My suspicion is that, whatever he says publicly, Alex Salmond is well aware of his potential support from the patriotic right wing in Scotland, which is why he was so keen to back the Scottish regiments and abandon opposition to Nato. Whatever happened to the Scottish Tories? They turned into Scottish Nationalists. You read it here first.

So, to sum up, the Conservative Party itself has never done well in Scotland. Frankly, they're seen as Anglo-Centric and fundementally hostile to Scotland's interests (as is UKIP, TBH). What Tory Scotland voted for was the Scottish equivalent of the Ulster Unionist Party, with all the connotations of sectarianism that came with it. Protestants voted Unionist, Catholics voted for Labour, particularly in the Clyde Valley/Greater Glasgow area.

The decline of the SUP is generally considered to have begun with the Suez Crisis. That fiasco effectively demolished one of the three pillers that the SUP was built on - the Empire itself. Then you have the general decline in religious belief which has left Scotland as the most non-religious part of the UK. That was piller number two gone. Currently, the third and last piller, the Union itself, is looking a little shakey. Undoubtably, that's a slight issue for the SUP's successor, the Scottish Conservatives.

Another issue that affects things up here is the political clout that Glasgow and the surrounding area has by virtue of having over 40% of Scotland's population within it's boundaries. Glasgow views itself as left wing, therefore, to control Scotland politically, you have to tack leftward enough in order to get Glasgow to vote for you.

To put things in perspective for those south of the border, it's the equivalent of Liverpool and it's environs making up nearly half of England's population and it's political preferences being the dominant force in English politics.

Mike.

[Jimbuna]

The more press coverage on the EU negotiations that is broadcast must surely be serving little other purpose than 'educating' the population and bringing them to the realisation of how so little if anything will be achieved by Cameron.

In his official invitation to the gathering, Mr Tusk said there was "no guarantee" a deal would be reached, with "difficult" differences remaining on key issues.
He said the negotiations were at a "very advanced" stage and failure now "would be a defeat both for the UK and the European Union, but a geopolitical victory for those who seek to divide us".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politic...endum-35599279

Bring on the referendum.

[MGR1]

What a tangled web has been woven courtesy of the UK's EU membership:

EU referendum: Brexit 'would give Holyrood new powers'

Cue more wrangling between Westminster and Holyrood over finance and spheres of influence, should the vote be for "Leave".

In the meantime, there's been speculation about BoJo and Michael Gove coming out in favour of the "Leave" campaign: LINK.

In other news, SNP membership has now exceeded 155,000, or roughly 2.6% of adults in Scotland: LINK.

Finally, here's an interesting article from John Redwood MP: LINK.

Mike.

[Jimbuna]

All should be revealed by the end of the weekend.

[STEED]

SCREW YOU STEED, ME AND MY EU CHUMS WILL SCREW YOU MORE!




Thanks ToffBoy, first time you told the truth.

[STEED]

Stand by lads, we can expect illegal immigrants coming in here and here and here. We can also expect EU laws sneaking in here and in all cases there is sod all we can do about it. Lets wave the Union Flag and hand out Bully Beef and with lots of luck no one will spot what is going on.

[STEED]

Prediction time for 2016

Four questions for everyone, predictions close on Jan 23rd you got three weeks.

1. Do think Jeremy Corbyn will still be leader of the Labour Party at the end of the year?

2. Which party do you think is going to be the biggest winner of the local elections?

3. Who will be the new London Mayor?

4.Will we get the EU referendum vote this year?

Predictions
STEED
1. Yes
2. Labour (Long shot but may do it on the grounds of the recent flooding)
3. Sadiq Khan (Labour)
4. No

BossMark
1. Yes
2. Labour
3. Sadiq Khan (Labour)
4. No simple reason I do not believe a word toffboy says....

Jimbuna
1. Yes
2. Labour
3. Sadiq Khan (Labour)
4. Yes

Oberon
1. No
2. Conservative by a slim amount
3. Khan (Labour)
4. No, it'll be 2017.


Jim is out the blocks and on his way while the rest of us still going no where.

It was announced today by David Cameron there will be a referendum this year on Thursday June 23rd.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-35621079

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by STEED

Predictions
STEED
1. Yes
2. Labour (Long shot but may do it on the grounds of the recent flooding)
3. Sadiq Khan (Labour)
4. No

BossMark
1. Yes
2. Labour
3. Sadiq Khan (Labour)
4. No simple reason I do not believe a word toffboy says....

Jimbuna
1. Yes
2. Labour
3. Sadiq Khan (Labour)
4. Yes

Oberon
1. No
2. Conservative by a slim amount
3. Khan (Labour)
4. No, it'll be 2017.


Jim is out the blocks and on his way while the rest of us still going no where.

It was announced today by David Cameron there will be a referendum this year on Thursday June 23rd.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-35621079

[MGR1]

Since everyone's being distracted by the EU debate, what better time for Scottish Finance Secretary John Finney and the SNP to do a deal with the Treasury over further devolution of revenue powers to Scotland: LINK.

Considering the two sides have been dickering for months, it would be nice to get this over with in time for the Holyrood elections in May.

Mike.