The Theresa May General Election thread (edited)

Garthy

Snap said:

Have to say, she has been very poor over the last few days. My opinion of her has changed. She looks anything but "strong and stable". However, I'd have her as PM rather than Corbyn. I do think a Labour gvt would be very very bad news for the UK. Behind the ideology and socialist posturing, there is very little substance, just a wish list.

It's ok having a huge wish list if you don't have to deliver on it, his arsehole must be doing 5p-50p-5p-50p at the thought that he may win this outright and have to deliver £247bn of promises (at best) and steer the ship through Brexit too...

Fretwired

Oh dear ... some people will use a tragedy to support their political ends ...

 

Drew_TNBD

@Fretwired - who is that idiot?

Heartfeltdawn

Fretwired said:

I think the Tory strategists wanted to focus on May as they saw an easy win in terms of who would make the most credible leader - at the start May was far out in front but everything is unravelling. May is looking less like a PM and Corbyn is sticking to policies. It's like the fable the tortoise and the hare ... some commentators are predicting a tiny Tory majority unless things change. If that's the case what's the betting May will be gone soon after.

If she does win with a small majority, then you'd think they'd have to keep her. Having a third leader in just over a year would make the party look immensely useless and would give Corbyn an easy deflection if they ever tried criticising his competence.

A new leader in the wake of a narrow majority election win would also mean another Conservative Prime Minister in Downing Street who got there via party personnel changes rather than through a General Election victory. Given the shit Gordon Brown got for his unelected PM role, some of this shit could then rightfully be thrown back.

It in intriguing seeing how the tried and trusted Republican method failed so badly in America. It may be possible that the tried and trusted Lynton Crosby method has reached the end of its shelf life as well. Not defeated by socialism, marxism, or SJW snowflakism, but defeated simply by its own rigid approach and insular way of operating.  

Fretwired

Drew_TNBD said:

@Fretwired - who is that idiot?

No idea - I copied that from her live Twitter feed so it was real. She describes herself as:

Activist, artist, animal lover, humanist wanting to help create a more equal, just society by eliminating the class system and the corrupt City of London

Her Twitter account ... https://twitter.com/omandprem?lang=en-gb

Fretwired

Heartfeltdawn said:

If she does win with a small majority, then you'd think they'd have to keep her. Having a third leader in just over a year would make the party look immensely useless and would give Corbyn an easy deflection if they ever tried criticising his competence.

The problem is the EU now sees her as weak control freak who is prone to U-turns. They'll wind her up at every opportunity. She's going to have to change tack to win back and recover her credibility.

Heartfeltdawn

Fretwired said:

The problem is the EU now sees her as weak control freak who is prone to U-turns. They'll wind her up at every opportunity. She's going to have to change tack to win back and recover her credibility.

Absolutely. The U-turn on social care in the manifesto is a real arsekicking. Whether she can recover is hard to say. Now she could hope for the May-supporting press to give Corbyn a kicking but they've already fired everything possible at him. Unless the Mail is sitting on a story with pictures that show Corbyn gangbanging kids with a smiling Savile, there's nothing they can hurt him with (which technically makes Corbyn the equivalent of the Joker in the middle of The Dark Knight). 

ICBM

Drew_TNBD said:

@Fretwired - who is that idiot?

The terms "sheeple", "blue pill" and "wake up!" immediately identify them as a typical conspiracy theorist nutjob.

Fretwired

ICBM said:

Drew_TNBD said:

@Fretwired - who is that idiot?

The terms "sheeple", "blue pill" and "wake up!" immediately identify them as a typical conspiracy theorist nutjob.

Spot on .. a quick trawl through her Twitter feed confirms your suspicions.

Heartfeltdawn

She's one MSM mention away from needing sectioning. 

Jalapeno

I still think (and not support I might add) that the press will grill Corbyn on terrorism again, not today,  but they'll return to it. There's a lot of unpleasant stuff on social media, Manchester bombing will run as a an election issue (however distasteful). 

I do think May is doing her utmost to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory at the moment - a platform of controlled Brexit plus a dollop of working-class tory values would've seen her home and dry - but no, all this authoritarian control freakery, fox-hunting (ffs), plus a pensioner tax smash and grab could well sink her - big own goal.

Will it be enough though ? Too many older people who will vote remember the 1970s - Corbyn won't get their support. Might be good news for Farron (if he could just stop polishing his religious credentials).

Labour seems to be gaining at the expense of LibDems, Greens & UKIP, the Conservative dip is small so far - they're still 15% in the lead according to the latest FT's poll-of-polls.

Fretwired

Jalapeno said:

I still think (and not support I might add) that the press will grill Corbyn on terrorism again, not today,  but they'll return to it. There's a lot of unpleasant stuff on social media, Manchester bombing will run as a an election issue (however distasteful). 

Rumours circulating in the press are saying that the bomber is known to the police and is part of a cell made up of people who have returned from fighting in Syria. If true the police will say they didn't have the resources to monitor them all and public opinion will turn to May who is the PM and before that the Home Secretary. This could be bad news for her - didn't act as Home Secretary, cut police numbers at a time when the country was facing possible attack. Compare our police numbers to those in other countries. Just like the NHS .. not enough resources. Even Corbyn can land heavy blows on May.

Jalapeno

Wishful thinking imho if it turns into mudslinging Corbyn just isn't credible

Fretwired

Jalapeno said:

Wishful thinking imho if it turns into mudslinging Corbyn just isn't credible

I think May is not seeming to be credible .. from today's Times .. you wouldn't have seen this last week.

May’s flaws are now exposed for all to see

Theresa May prides herself on her competence. She is a “safe pair of hands” and, as we are constantly being reminded, the “strong and stable” choice at the general election. That self-declared identity has now been called into question by the fiasco over the Tories’ proposed shake-up of social care.

Not only did the prime minister perform an embarrassing U-turn just four days after announcing her flagship manifesto policy, she tried to pretend that the “basic principles remain the same” when they have in fact been turned on their head. As well as a £100,000 floor on what people will be able to keep after their care costs, there will also be an upper limit on what they pay. Although she accused Jeremy Corbyn of making “fake claims” about her plan, it was in fact the Tory leader’s own assessment of her actions that was false. The mishandling of such an important reform has highlighted serious flaws in the prime minister’s leadership style.

The truth is that the Conservative manifesto proposal on social care, which would have required thousands more elderly people to fund the care they receive in their own homes, was doomed from the start. This wasn’t just because voters were worried that they would have to pay for something they now get for free, or that Tory traditionalists were cross about the idea of reclaiming care costs from inheritances. It was a terrible policy because it failed to solve the fundamental problem that care costs are a lottery. Although half of the population will pay less than £20,000 over their lifetimes, one in ten of us will have bills totalling £100,000 or more and it’s completely unpredictable which way it will go.

If you die of a heart attack, after a life guzzling burgers, you will pay nothing, but if you develop Alzheimer’s, through no fault of your own, you may have to fork out £500,000. The system is deeply unfair, full of perverse incentives and disempowering because it is impossible to predict or insure against social care costs.

This is a perfect example of something requiring government intervention to pool the risk: as Mrs May herself put it in her Tory conference speech last year, “the state exists to provide what individual people, communities and markets cannot”. Yet the Conservative manifesto pledge did nothing to address this market failure. To go into battle over such an imperfect plan, which did not address voters’ real concerns, was not only politically foolish, it was also incompetent.

It is good that Mrs May has now changed her mind and announced that there will be an absolute upper limit on what people will have to pay for care. A cap set at a sensible level will alleviate anxiety and allow people to plan for old age. But the debacle reveals the shortcomings of the prime minister’s controlling and occasionally paranoid approach to power.

Sarah Wollaston, a GP and the former chairwoman of the Commons health select committee, was among those who urged No 10 to ensure individuals did not face catastrophic costs, through some kind of social insurance scheme. Sir Andrew Dilnot, who spent years thinking about the issue with his commission on social care, explained to Downing Street that a cap was an essential part of any solution. Ministers at the Department of Health could also have advised on the gaping hole in the Tory plan. But Mrs May, prizing loyalty over knowledge, relied instead on her small, close-knit team of advisers who appear to have failed to understand the basic issue. Even the cabinet was not consulted on this critical policy, which was reportedly inserted into the manifesto at the last minute by Nick Timothy, the prime minister’s chief of staff.

Although senior Tories insist that they always intended to consult on a cap in a green paper if they won the election, it’s hard to understand why, if that’s the case, they did not include the reassuring promise in the manifesto. As ever, Mrs May wanted to differentiate herself from her predecessor. There was a brittleness to her suggestion yesterday that her announcement did not represent a shift when it clearly did. None of this bodes well for difficult Brexit negotiations that will require flexibility and empathy as well as determination if she returns to Downing Street.

The problem is that it’s part of a pattern. Only a few weeks ago the prime minister had to abandon the key budget announcement about a rise in national insurance for self-employed workers because she and her team had apparently failed to spot that it clashed with a manifesto commitment made by David Cameron. Again, there was a tunnel vision in No 10 that prevented political perception. At the Home Office, where Mrs May also relied on her inner circle, she ignored all appeals by her cabinet colleagues to take students out of the net migration target, despite the damage the policy was doing to universities. Even though she repeatedly missed the pledge to bring the number of immigrants down to the tens of thousands, she stubbornly insisted on repeating it in her own manifesto.

Her decision as home secretary to curb the use of stop and search powers, following concerns that black men were being disproportionately targeted by the police, appears to have led to a shocking rise in knife crime. As with social care, Mrs May identified an injustice but came up with a solution that created just as many problems. There could be similar unintended consequences to the manifesto pledge to scrap free school lunches for infants because head teachers who have installed a kitchen and hired a cook are already warning that they may have to think again about their use of resources if demand is not guaranteed.

The Tory leader’s obsession with grammar schools as a way of improving the performance of poorer pupils is another example of a well-meaning policy that ignores the facts. Business leaders detect the same short-sightedness in her approach to corporate governance, which look more like kneejerk tokenism than practical reform.

Alicia Collinson, who was the prime minister’s tutorial partner at Oxford and is now married to the work and pensions secretary Damian Green, says that as geographers they would be out collecting rainfall statistics at 6am. Geographers “don’t discuss political theory, they go out and get evidence and on the basis of that evidence they construct what needs to be done”, Mr Green said at the weekend. But on social care, immigration, crime, education and Brexit, Mrs May or her advisers too often put their own assumptions before the facts.

Looking inwards not outwards makes for bad policy and ineffective government. The Tory manifesto is starting to unravel. The prime minister needs to learn to listen to those beyond her core team if she wins on June 8 or she will quickly see her premiership doing the same.

Jalapeno

Much as I agree with the article, it's still all a political commentators' circle jerk - it will take more than a Times opinion piece to displace her lead.

I do agree she's doing her level best to f*ck it up right royally but there's a long way to go yet.  This is an election and it  will take the agenda all over the place. Only needs one lazy word from Corbyn, O'Donnell or Abbot for the whole shebang to lurch in a very different direction.

tampadragon

I'm a political noob, I do vote, and normally conservative as I align best with their usual policies and stand points. I am one of the men in the middle, I'm not super rich, but I'm also not on or below the bread line.
I am trying to do a bit of research at the moment to find out about Labours policy for scrapping tuition fees going forward. How will this sort of thing affects the Open University, I never went to Uni, I'm now 33 and I did start an OU Maths degree a couple of years ago, but having a child meant I put it on the back burner for a while. However I will be looking to start it again soon.
So I'm trying to find out how it would affect that type of organisation.
Has anyone seen anything with regards this?

mellowsun

Fretwired said:

Jalapeno said:

I still think (and not support I might add) that the press will grill Corbyn on terrorism again, not today,  but they'll return to it. There's a lot of unpleasant stuff on social media, Manchester bombing will run as a an election issue (however distasteful). 

Rumours circulating in the press are saying that the bomber is known to the police and is part of a cell made up of people who have returned from fighting in Syria. If true the police will say they didn't have the resources to monitor them all and public opinion will turn to May who is the PM and before that the Home Secretary. This could be bad news for her - didn't act as Home Secretary, cut police numbers at a time when the country was facing possible attack. Compare our police numbers to those in other countries. Just like the NHS .. not enough resources. Even Corbyn can land heavy blows on May.

He might be wise not to though - he is seen (rightly or wrongly) as soft on terrorism or even previously as a sympathiser.

Also, when the electorate are fearful, as they are now, they always lurch to the right, not to the left.  

Heartfeltdawn

Jalapeno said:

I still think (and not support I might add) that the press will grill Corbyn on terrorism again, not today,  but they'll return to it. There's a lot of unpleasant stuff on social media, Manchester bombing will run as a an election issue (however distasteful). 

I do think May is doing her utmost to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory at the moment - a platform of controlled Brexit plus a dollop of working-class tory values would've seen her home and dry - but no, all this authoritarian control freakery, fox-hunting (ffs), plus a pensioner tax smash and grab could well sink her - big own goal.

Will it be enough though ? Too many older people who will vote remember the 1970s - Corbyn won't get their support. Might be good news for Farron (if he could just stop polishing his religious credentials).

Labour seems to be gaining at the expense of LibDems, Greens & UKIP, the Conservative dip is small so far - they're still 15% in the lead according to the latest FT's poll-of-polls.

Grilling Corbyn on terrorism is something he's had before so he knows what is coming. IRA commie sympathiser is old hat to him, he knows what's coming. 

For May, being grilled on a social care manifesto point you launched a week ago is new territory. She doesn't know what is coming. Trying to be the champion of the working classes doesn't marry up well alongside the fox hunting vote. Saying you want to reduce taxation whilst making no pledges beyond no VAT increase doesn't marry up well either.  

With the Lib Dem vote, I think a lot of people agree with the party policies but realise that there's no hope of the Libs making huge gains and so are prepared to vote Labour on the basis that it's better than letting May have her way. 

Jalapeno

tampadragon said:

I'm a political noob, I do vote, and normally conservative as I align best with their usual policies and stand points. I am one of the men in the middle, I'm not super rich, but I'm also not on or below the bread line.
I am trying to do a bit of research at the moment to find out about Labours policy for scrapping tuition fees going forward. How will this sort of thing affects the Open University, I never went to Uni, I'm now 33 and I did start an OU Maths degree a couple of years ago, but having a child meant I put it on the back burner for a while. However I will be looking to start it again soon.
So I'm trying to find out how it would affect that type of organisation.
Has anyone seen anything with regards this?

Not a peep. 

I'm a big OU fan - did my Post Grad Cert in Management with the OU Business School. I wish the OU got a higher profile as it is a truly great British success story.

Good luck restarting your Maths degree - I recall all the evenings, lunch hours (remember them?) and early weekend starts I had to do just to find the 9hrs a week needed. It is certainly not an easy option - anyone who gets an OU degree (in any subject) has really grafted, over a prolonged period to achieve it - it should be held in far higher esteem than other degrees.

Heartfeltdawn

Jalapeno said:

Much as I agree with the article, it's still all a political commentators' circle jerk - it will take more than a Times opinion piece to displace her lead.

I do agree she's doing her level best to f*ck it up right royally but there's a long way to go yet.  This is an election and it  will take the agenda all over the place. Only needs one lazy word from Corbyn, O'Donnell or Abbot for the whole shebang to lurch in a very different direction.

But we've had those lazy words. Nobody in this campaign has been mocked more than Diane Abbott (rightfully so) and the May lead got cut. We've gone into this campaign with Jezza as commie terrorist lover and Labour haven't been erased. 

May has been presented in isolation. Some leaders could come up with something out of the bag to quell those fears but she isn't that type of leader. I can't imagine that there's some stellar speech or inspirational address in the manner of Obama lurking in the back there. By refusing to debate her opponents on television, she has made her individual appearances on television all the more crucial and all the more difficult. Last night, she failed. The isolationist approach has highlighted the flaws in her campaign and it's also highlighted that her campaign is as cut off from the rest of the Conservative campaign as anything we've seen with the Momentum bunch versus the rest of Labour. 

What's more, Camp Corbyn's isolation has forced local Labour groups into real ground level action. The Conservatives haven't got this to the same extent because they've tried to rally around the Great Leader. Although Cameron did piss off a lot of grassroot groups within his party, they were still funded and mobilised and got the message out. The Conservatives are behind the 8 ball on this.