Politics - The Non-Brexit Thread.

The latest victim of the Cost of Living Crisis. If you hear some rather strange "music", that'll be me playing the world's smallest violin...


https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-68133873

Anyone else feel like the country is poor?
In the past, times been I've felt poor or my family and friends felt poor but always felt the country wasn't but lately, I just feel like the UK just has nothing, no money, no growth etc.

The News Agents: Why is Starmer running scared of his own policies ?

So labour win both by elections by huge swings

Reform producing a result that is starting to match their polling, however i did see many analysts saying that given the nature of Peter Bone's seat & that their candidate has some name recognition they expected 15-20% as opposed to 13%.

This will embolden the ilk of Braverman/Anderson/Rees-Mogg in the party that The Tories need to be more like Reform in terms of immigration & culture wars to win but they are making 2 + 2 = 5 here. Surveys have shown a considerable number of Reform voters wouldn't vote Tory under any circumstances, Reform are also picking up protest votes from Labour voters who don't like the direction Statmer has taken the party.

Also a lot of the Tories who aren't voting at all are people who are more in the mold of Rory Stewart who are fiscally conservative but socially liberal who think the party are too much like Reform already but not won over by or would not ever vote Labour or Lib Dem. Winning back those voters plus the ones moving to left wing parties would be a better strategy

It goes back to that old fact of political reality that elections tend to be won from the centre, that when party's lose, they move to their respective flanks electing leaders like Foot, Miliband, Corbyn, Hague, IDS and lose, only to win when Blair, Cameron, Starmer take them back to the centre

Recent poll -

Who was the worst Prime Minister of the past 40 years?

Liz Truss: 34%
Boris Johnson: 22%
Rishi Sunak: 13%
Margaret Thatcher: 10%
Tony Blair: 8%
Theresa May: 6%
Gordon Brown: 4%
David Cameron: 3%.

Fair play,Liz Truss gets top marks for being utter shite.

Impressive Rishi Sunak is 3rd already.

Doing well but will never catch dizzy Liz.

Cameron doing far better than he should be