Well? Jeremy Hunt - thoughts?

[mamabear715]

I can't believe how politician-like he is, compared to Liz Truss!
Happy enough with the changes on the whole, what do you think?

It was me that mentioned the electoral calculus. I don’t have any issue with a significant majority but the predicted majority was colossal. Blair’s largest majority was 179 and they were predicting 290 odd. That is the point at which a PM becomes totally unaccountable to their backbenchers.

And one key thing that I think they would do differently with a majority like that is abandon the idea of electoral reform. If they secure a huge majority by themselves I don’t trust them to move to a more proportional system.

Utmost respect. She is a truly awful. Has she told you she was a single mum at 16 a million times.

Agreed!

@Colderthanever

". crude abuse". 🤣.

Honestly some posters can only use cunt,shit show and mates as abuse.
It makes me think it's the same poster.

Yes. Respect to her for attaining a shadow cabinet job from a start like that. I thought the right respected hard work and bettering oneself. Obviously only selectively.

@Hmmph
<He has only taken this job because a) he supports Truss b) he agrees with her and c) he wants power.>

I don’t agree actually.

1. Being Chancellor is a thankless unpopular task at best of times, but especially now
2. He is very unlikely to become PM as a result of this
3. he never backed Truss for the leadership at any stage and so far has undone virtually everything she wanted
4. He’s already done the only “fun” senior job of being Foreign Sec
5. he made loads of money before he went into Parliament so he doesn’t need more cash

I am amazed and also quite grateful he went anywhere near the job

Any GE is two years away, the political landscape will be very different, the Tories wont be 35pts behind and IF Labour win it will be with a more modest amount.

Labour have spelled out plenty of times what they would do differently, you just don't want to listen.

But surely, after the debacle of the last few years, no one can seriously want more Tory Govt?

How many more chances do you give a failing party.

This!!
He has stood twice and not been voted for. It is totally wrong that he is acting as our Prime Minister. If the Conservatives can't sleep Truss they need to call a general election.

They scraped they bottom of the barrel, but didn’t find anyone. They then looked under the barrel and found Jeremy Hunt. Looking back at them with maniacal eyes, and inflicted him upon the public.

This guy is so bad, he makes Sunak look like the model of integrity, statesmanship and visionary ideas.

This absolutely morally vacuous snake has basically seized power by stealth. And if you needed any proof of how much of a danger he is, he as good as praised the way China was escorting people from airports to lock them up. He wanted Covid measures to be harder. The irony is palpable that this same charlatan is now punishing the public further through bad economic policy. As if the effects of the disastrous lockdowns didn’t screw up the coming enough.

She usually repeats that unparalleled achievement after calling someone ‘oi scum’.

I cannot believe anyone would want any more elections right now when we are teetering on the brink of financial collapse.

Everything is hitting us and unfortunately right now we are in the clutches of a delicately balanced financial trap.

We must have stability to get us through winter and the next few months.
An entire regime change would be absolutely catastrophic.

Jeremy Hunt
Rhymes with c--t

That's unfortunately the only words that come into my head when I think if him. He's deeply unpleasant but yes he seems like a competent adult compared to the utter dross we've had recently, but then we really are at true desperate bottom of the barrel levels now. It's all a disaster. We need a GM.

An entire regime change would be absolutely catastrophic

On the contrary, a complete reset is exactly what we need. Nothing could be more catastrophic than this torture.

Nobody WANTS a GE. We’ve been thrust into a situation where it’s hard to see where else to go from here. This government, the Tories…they have completely lost any credibility and the confidence of the majority of the country. There is no stability. That ship has sailed.

how angry the public are has no bearing on whether there will be a general election.

The only person who can call an election is the prime minister and that’s just not going to happen.

if labour are going to be elected, then it needs to be for better reasons than “we want the tories out.” Labour need to come up with better policies than “we’re not the tories,” and right now they’re saying very little about what they would do as opposed to what the tories shouldn’t be doing.

Without some greater credibility labour are going to lose a lot of votes because people just aren’t going to know what they’re voting for.

And while the tories might lose votes, if labour don’t gain them, then there’s every chance the tories will get back into power.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion on Johnson, Truss, Hunt etc however there are some shockingly ill informed comments on this thread.

The “markets” don’t have a political agenda, believe it or not. I know some bond investors and they are pretty left wing personally - but their professional priority day in day out is managing risk for their customers. Believe it or not their customers are not SPECTRE like yacht owning fat cats - they are actually people like your dad and your gran, most of whose pensions are locked up in these bonds.

Bond investors react to supply and demand - if they think there’s going to be too much of something and/or nobody is going to want that thing, they expect the price will come down so they will attempt to sell before it does. It is as simple as that. “Wanting austerity” is simply not a thing. All they really want is reassurance there will be a stable supply of bonds and stable demand for them, so your gran carries on getting her pension.

I agree. I don't think that the markets have a political agenda - they have an economic agenda. Labour or Tory, they don't care. They like stability in the supply/demand of bonds and that means that govt borrowing has be tightly controlled.

The political bar for tory leadership in this country is set so low only the worms can get under it.
It shows how low its gone when people think that reversing damaging cuts is heroic. He hasn't said how he is going to recoup the £65billion lost overnight, he hasn't taken the tax burden from the poorest and put it on the richest, and he hasn't said that public services will have the funds they need to get back to where they were before tory austerity.

I'm not planning any celebrations of his amazing job, as frankly they are still a shit show.

I can't believe that anyone thinks that, after 12 years of incompetence and corruption
, the tories should remain in charge for a single day longer.

^agree fully.
It does not bode well for lower incomed folks and the health and education sectors at all.
But hey ho, at least he can fake credibility.

Very amusing @MayThe4th. There are numerous ways a GE can be engineered without a lame duck PM calling one.

Labour’s policies make enough sense for the Tories to steal them, they’re obviously going to keep their cards close to their chests for that very reason. Their plans for funding the energy price cap are costed to the Penny and they don’t involve borrowing money.

Finally, you’ve either failed to see the latest polls or you believe in miracles if you think the next government will be a Tory one. Even most Tory MPs don’t believe that.

Labour’s policies make enough sense for the Tories to steal them, they’re obviously going to keep their cards close to their chests for that very reason. Their plans for funding the energy price cap are costed to the Penny and they don’t involve borrowing money. what bollocks. “Labour don’t tell anyone their policies because the tories will steal them”? No. Labour don’t tell anyone their policies because they don’t have any.

now is the time to start coming out and openly telling the electorate what their policies are in order to make them electable.

There are plenty of people who won’t be voting for labour because they are not considered to be a credible alternative, predominantly because they don’t have any policies to show.

So if there actually are any policies, then now is the time to show them.

And poles are notoriously unreliable. If I remember rightly the tories were predicted to lose the last election as well,and they won by a massive landslide.

And by the time two years has passed they will have restored some confidence from their members and will be more electable.

If they go to the poles now they would lose. If they go in two years, and labour don’t start to show their cards, they might well win.

Personally right now I wouldn’t vote for either of them. And I know plenty of people who say the same.

Put out a mini-budget full of uncosted, unasked for and unnecessary tax cuts for the rich.

FUBAR the economy.

Impose a new Chancellor who cuts the one bit of the financial plan that was going to help people and talks about tough spending cuts to come, but now he's the responsible grown-up come to rescue the country from the incompetents with a bit of tough love, not the usual Nasty Party state-smasher.

I think we're meant to feel relieved, but I don't. I just want them gone.

A GE might get you a change of faces and voices on the TV, but it is not going to reset the economic facts and the impact they have on people.

Labour will have struggled with the substance of Hunt’s u-turn today because they know they’d have to do and say something very similar if they were in power now. Maybe they would keep the cap on bankers bonuses as a PR device - but bankers bonuses don’t change any of the budget arithmetic.

Just like the Tories can’t hand out tax cuts at the moment, Labour can’t hand out big cash to the NHS, nationalise utilities (massively expensive), give public sector workers huge pay rises, increase state benefits, build more social
housing, invest in green infrastructure and do all the other things their supporters expect them to do, all the while lowering interest rates and keeping inflation under control.

If I were the Tories I think I would want a GE now because whoever runs the economy for the next two years is going to be deeply unpopular, and it might as well not be them. Meanwhile Labour will be hoping to blame all the unpopular decisions they’ll have to make on the Tories’ past mistakes - which they can and will - but they’d still be having to make unpopular decisions.