[davidjay]

This time next week, post-Lineker, must be their last hope.

[kreuzberger]

What the fuck is this Lilliputian Lightweight on about now?

Today's BBC broadcasts have been giving pointless but endless air to "world-beating" armed forces and now "guaranteed prosperity" of the oceans.

Eh?

[mattomac]

They'll pick some votes up if the plan works (ie makes asylum impossible). That'll go beyond the core vote. And public finances being less bad than expected will help them too.

Couple of big ifs and people need to feel the latter and I read a report today that suggested the latter is.

I can see it easily being a hung parliament to be fair

[Bones McCoy]

They'll pick some votes up if the plan works (ie makes asylum impossible). That'll go beyond the core vote. And public finances being less bad than expected will help them too.

i'm not convinced people are as focused on niceties like GDP when a 75p loaf's nor £1.15 and the £1.80 cheese is now £2.75.

[mattomac]

Yup people have to feel it, I see the Tory papers are generally leading with the pension cap being lifted for the over 50s so they can return to work.

If they are that well placed to retire at 50 you can’t really see it being a massive vote winner, saw their policies talked about as “Cradle to Grave”, last time I heard that was in the DWP just after the Tories came back in, it fundamentally misunderstood it then and it seems to do so again, nothing for the 15-50 year olds though you can probably say until to 66-67 as that’s hardly a policy to attract the voters back.

Though I know Hunt has very little leeway.

[Crabcakes]

I can’t see anything shifting things back substantially, or at least nothing without a bloviating, arrogant counterweight called Alex Johnson lurking in the wings.

A very marginally better economy won’t help when people still have insane energy bills, high streets are full of boarded-up shops, there are shortages of foods we’ve come to expect as staples and you have tactless ministers superheating their pools and demanding we eat turnips. Braverman’s race to the bottom will only appeal to people who were already going to vote for them anyway - at best it prices in another Farage bait and switch where a more right-wing party pulls candidates to avoid a vote split. Hunt’s budget is shuffling pennies - they can’t raise taxes without internal revolt, can’t cut taxes without market revolt, and have the colossal dead weight of utter imbeciles like Truss, Kwarteng and the Tufton Street pundit mob desperately trying to reboot their shitty economic ideas.

They also have practically no talent. Sunak is a charisma-free, one-note petty middle manager who got extraordinarily lucky by birth. The vast majority of the rest are thugs, morons or moronic thugs. And they all reek of corruption.

And then there’s Boris. He won’t let Sunak win an election. He absolutely won’t. He’ll do something to scupper it so he can swoop in as the returning hero, assuming he hasn’t already fucked things by being thoroughly censured by the standards committee because there’s no way he’d go down without taking everyone else with him.

I think we crossed the line some while back, probably as early as Boris’s downfall but definitely by the time Truss was in No. 10. Adequate performance isn’t enough now - they have repeatedly made vast swathes of people worse off, and/or treated them like shit, and it is *directly* traceable to their policies and (in)actions. And they have very visibly made themselves richer, and at every turn refused to take responsibility for anything.

It won’t be a hung parliament. They are done. The only 2 questions left are when does the axe fall, and how bad will the outcome be for them - and that’s Sunak’s gamble now. Nothing is shifting the polls - so does he go for it early on the basis of not having much to work with, or does he risk waiting for a marginal improvement with the gamble that another incident (and you know there will be incidents) could see things drop to Truss-like levels of support.

[Andy McDandy]

Government cars and doors marked private. They'll hang on to the bitter end.

[Crabcakes]

Government cars and doors marked private. They'll hang on to the bitter end.

I dunno. This lot are particularly challenge-averse and can’t abhor their superiority being questioned, let alone have it proven other options are preferred. If there’s a choice between defeat and humiliating defeat, some may push to choose the former because the latter would be intolerable for them - the fact so many have already said they’re not standing is no coincidence. They’re not standing so they don’t have to have ‘loser’ on their Wikipedia page for evermore.

[Yug]

About that "improving economy" thing. This morning Sky News have reported that the number of job vacancies has shrunk for the eighth month in a row while the number of unemployed has stayed broadly the same. Companies are blaming uncertainties in the economy for their holding back on advertising vacancies.

[Bones McCoy]

Government cars and doors marked private. They'll hang on to the bitter end.

I dunno. This lot are particularly challenge-averse and can’t abhor their superiority being questioned, let alone have it proven other options are preferred. If there’s a choice between defeat and humiliating defeat, some may push to choose the former because the latter would be intolerable for them - the fact so many have already said they’re not standing is no coincidence. They’re not standing so they don’t have to have ‘loser’ on their Wikipedia page for evermore.

Regarding the stand downers.

Loser / Surrender Monkey - same difference.

[Crabcakes]

Practically speaking, I entirely agree. But it absolves them of ever having it proved that they would have lost (and in some cases, lost by *huge* margins). An abdication means they can maintain an inner monologue that they could have won it, but that other people’s ineptitude meant the odds were against them.

Abdication of responsibility, as per usual.

[mattomac]

OBR forecast living standards to continue to drag until after the election date.

I still expect them to go next spring/summer but a better than expected council elections might push them this summer. A bad one who knows, the hope on energy prices suggests to me they haven’t quite written off Summer 2023. There is really barely any time to implement election goodies and everything good announced won’t kick in til the next election.

They could drop a tax cut but they haven’t factored in any pay rises in the public sector. I do think if it is 2023 they will hold out to Inflation drops, end of the day and probably what will mean a disaster in the locals is I keep hearing “time for a change” once that settles in it’s hard to shift.

And Savanta seems to have straightened up a fair bit after last week, what must concern the Tories is that R&W Blue wall poll, yes they were up and yes they closed the gap on Labour but the LD took from Labour, that’s not good news even though I think the blue wall is rather a pointless exercise. If of course we start to see the global economy lurch southwards then they won’t recover, Brown couldn’t and the polling for Labour was dire in 2009, and he generally looked like he could do something and showed some optimism plus the Labour years were generally positive.

The last 13 years is a record of stagnation, drop a global economy collapse on it and well, Labour might be getting that Landslide. It might at least end the constantly retweeting of that note, about 29 times today at last count.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Lying liar caught telling a lie.

[Tubby Isaacs]

In other news.

[Crabcakes]

Your daily reminder that Sunak and Johnson are in fact remarkably alike.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Sober old professional Rishi not at all kicking an awkward decision till after the general election here.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/ ... r-election

Decision on bringing forward UK pension age rise to 68 delayed until after election
Move affecting millions born in early 1970s unlikely to come before general election expected in 2024

I'm agnostic on this one, not just because it affects me. Unlike in France, where I think there's no argument that 62 is unsustainable, 68 seems like a lot given that life expectancy has fallen. The IFS estimate cost of not raising it will be £8-9bn a year. The way the government are going, the cost of that might well fall.

[mattomac]

Any pension rise will have to or should come with better workers rights, better holiday leave, more open to Hybrid and flexi working and so on.

Failure to do so just creates issues further down the line. I read a piece by Rafael Behr most of it good but the analysis on Sunak is flawed, every real plus side for Sunak equally applies to Starmer and every downside he labelled for Starmer equally applied to Sunak, he maybe popular than his party but he still trails a fair behind Starmer on personal ratings and is roughly slightly or equal with Starmer on best PM (But he is the incumbent so would usually lead this), which doesn't really help him as the one thing he hasn't got that Starmer has is a 15-20pts lead in the polls and stable voting intention of 44-48 (Pretty much in this ballpark since the Sunak premiership settled in last Oct/Nov.

Voters who like Labour and will vote for Labour, also like Starmer, the figures are hardly different (This always seemed an issue on Miliband and why I was never sold), meanwhile Sunak leads his party but those who like him don't like his party and won't vote for him (What if this was a presidential race is a moot point as it isn't and Starmer would still be ahead).

I do think the council elections won't be bad for the Cons due to the aspect of WM vs Council, but I do think they will roughly confirm the Labour vote with polling isn't far off (LD popularity may completely shift the losses for the Tories into critical), If Sunak tries to woo the voters who don't like his party (ultimately these are his only chance of success), he may alienate the hard of thinking on the backbenchers, if he does the other then that will start to collapse his ratings, and will align with a party polling under it's expected core vote which is around 32-33pts

He is a bit of a illusionist and sadly some have fallen for it, a man who stood for little, seems almost too well off to run the country in a cost of living crisis and was promoted on the back of how bad others were. (Thankfully he hasn't yet told us we are all in it together, that would be tone death).

He was a hardline Brexiteer and yet some see him as a bit "Remain", my only wish is that the LD's become competitive again (This will effectively finish the Tories chances and might give Labour even more chance of large majority) and also that the Conservatives don't see through the Sunak illusion trick and tred to the right that they basically destroy themselves for several years, as a decade is needed to at least undo some of the damage caused.

One final thing is he isn't really the incumbent, he is defacto incumbent due to the other being corrupt, thick, awful and several other words. This means he had about 15 months to create a record (Though suggestion its a lot less), one of his policies was waiting lists and he had tried to go down his 5 point list each week in the lead up to the locals, so why this week did he release some incredibly week back of a fag packet policy on crime? *

Was it Labour's crime focus that moved him to do so? (if so that already speaks volumes), or was it the news they have reached a ten year high and NHS satisfaction has plummeted in err the last 13 years, so there is little positive to focus on.
On that the latest leak seems to suggest they will move the goalposts on cancer waiting times, waiting times that have seen the prolonged life of cancer patients and which any change actually risks lives, one I hope Labour would reverse almost immediately along with improving the ability to meet targets, we've never and probably will never have a welfare state election but it should be the focus on day one, get that down, get NHS satisfaction up and Labour may already be in a place to be able to stand on something if they were to be elected.

*The hastily badly run Q&A where Sunak appeared to be like Alan Partridge at that meet and greet with Sue Cook probably suggests it what I've listed, love the odd planted question like the one on NOS which then basically framed their entire policy for most of the day that and Air BnB's being holiday apartments which Graham had an issue with and which surprisingly Sunak was focusing his policy on, which is news to most considering the only Air BnB worthy story is the fact they are taking up alarming rates of property, putting up rents and housing prices in tourist places in the country, but no nothing about that.

[mattomac]

Latest bit of Sunak news seems to go around looking at potholes in a menacing way like they are refugees or the poor or pretty much any group that isn't Conservative.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Who could have seen this coming?

[Tubby Isaacs]

How are the polls? I was only 10 points down with Deltapoll the other week, wasn't I? Have I caught up yet?
To a point, Prime Minister.