I agree.
I spend most of my time trying to not think about how powerful the Clockwork Orangemen are.
3 Likes
They’re recovering, sure. Especially since they got rid of Nick and staked out a clear pro-europe position.
But they’re still fourth in that metric too.
https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN05125
(Note for Americans- party membership in the UK works differently. You don’t register as a party member when you register to vote, so the figures linked above are dues-paying members of the party organisation)
1 Like
Sadly, I think you’re right.
The problem with that is that an awful lot of people did vote for the Tories. It’s a sad and unpalatable fact which both we and the US are having to come to terms with that a lot of our fellow voters are complete arseholes.
The alternative to the coalition would I suspect have been a rerun election with a Tory party shifted openly and significantly to the right and openly courting the xenophobic, pro-Brexiters much sooner than we did.
The 2010 election and the following coalition gave some hope that there were sufficient moderates open to appeal from the Conservative party to keep them from immediate full on panic about UKIP.
Instead that took a while to percolate through the local party structures and put the fear of God up Tory MPs just in time for the 2015 election.
If there’s anyone with a grip on the hands controlling the tiller of power over the last 20 years it’s Nigel Farage.
Even now when he is not party leader and UKIP is effectively eating itself, he personally still exerts staggering influence.
2 Likes
As evidenced on Newsnight last night, where he spouted yet more of his class A hypocrisy. Why they still give him - an unelected pundit not even leader of his party - airtime is beyond me.
1 Like
Well, if you want to ruin any given evening, tune in to his hour long radio show on LBC which he essentially uses as a soapbox but also free polling.
If you think Theresa May is a complete traitor who should be hung from the Tower battlements, call 0800…
If you think she’s doing the right thing, text on …
If you think Boris could sort it all out and should be made PM immediately, tweet on …
Edit to correct the contact methods - all neatly split up, see, so you can just tabulate the number of calls, texts and tweets for your instant free political poll.
2 Likes
No thanks. Blood pressure high enough as it is. LBC used to be a London-based public service broadcaster. Now it is a national soapbox for populist fuckwits.
2 Likes
They would have done better if they hired Norman Clegg.
7 Likes
a chorus that repeats decade after decade
Yes. Nobody ever seems to remember the universal mantra: “Never trust a Tory.”
3 Likes
Probably true, but Ian Paisley insisted on his Irishness and the Irishness of his fellow Ulstermen. This used to be a lot more common: when the Irish Free State renamed itself simply “Ireland”, Northern Irish unionists complained about what they saw as the appropriation of a name they felt they had an equal right to.
1 Like
I always find it interesting how much opprobrium gets heaped on the Lib Dems, and Clegg in particular (disclaimer - I’m also a Lib Dem), mainly from the left. It always seems to be sour grapes that we ‘helped’ the Tories into power rather than prop up an exhausted and morally bankrupt Labour government that had shepherded us into the financial crisis and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What actually happened was that we saw an opportunity to get into power and implement some of our policies, albeit as the junior member of the coalition (at the same time demonstrating that coalition politics was possible). For that you got the pupil premium funnelling money to schools with disadvantaged children, a higher threshold for basic income tax cutting taxes for the low paid (the Tories wanted it on the higher rate), restoring the link between pensions and earnings, 15 hours of free childcare for 2-4 year olds and gay marriage. Not a bad record for the junior partner.
And what was the alternative? The Tories would have formed a minority government, encountered or engineered a crisis, said ‘the country can’t work like this’, called a snap election and scraped a slim majority. And we all know how well that’s working out for us.
3 Likes
But didn’t he annihilate his own party partially via the use of Facebook? If so I think it shows he knows how to use the product as intended!
1 Like
Or Corporal Clegg!
2 Likes
That sounds like a sitcom id actually watch…
The Lib-Dems didn’t do much to stop or change the Welfare Reform Act 2012, an act that has left me suicidal on several occasions since it’s commencement.
5 Likes
Maybe I’m too old and too cynical (based on too much life experience) but who’d expect better from Zuck, Thiel, Sandberg and Facebook?
1 Like
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
