Liz Truss has resigned. Part 4: The Desolation of Boris

[sunnydaytoday0]

Continuation from last thread, for those of us following all the action on Monday.

And yes I'm a LOTR fan, so tried to continue the theme in the thread title 😉

Looks like he has just had his arse handed to him by a pensioner in Croydon hospital on nurses pay. He will have to get better at this!

I suspect he’s going to have to get very used to having his arse handed to him. It’s only going to get worse.

No, that's mad. They need to be building an identity and a narrative, a reason why people would switch or return to them because of emotional instinct and deeply held values. That's what Blair (supposedly Starmer's model) did for years leading up to 1997, and what the Tories did by fully embracing Brexit and the urgency of Getting It Done between 2017 and 2019. That's what wins elections, not a bunch of individual policies released a month beforehand, deliberately misreported by the media and ignored by most of the goldfish-like-attention-span population.

Up until now Starmer hasn't needed to do that, because his identity and narrative has been seriousness, professionalism and competence. Fair enough, but that's a deceptively easy fight to win against Johnson or Truss. Much less so against Sunak.

The next election will be won purely and simply on how much people have in their pockets. It won’t be about values, emotional instincts, narratives or identities, it will be £ and pence and which party offers coherent policies that will make people who are struggling better off. The rest is for the birds.

We were promised no more austerity by the Tories in 2019 and what are we getting?

This is the supposed honeymoon period for Sunak. I imagine it'll all be downhill once the budget comes out and starts impacting everyone over the winter and into next year.

@Blossomtoes The next election will be won purely and simply on how much people have in their pockets. It won’t be about values, emotional instincts, narratives or identities, it will be £ and pence and which party offers coherent policies that will make people who are struggling better off. The rest is for the birds.

Exactly: "Which party offers coherent policies. . ." Which brings us right back to the question I asked originally, that you seemed to be claiming didn't need to be answered: What are Labour offering that will change any of this?

You may well be able to answer it now. But the fact that there wasn't a big, simple, easy-to-understand answer in short words in capital letters - that immediately came to mind and naturally sprang forth as your answer instead of this uninspiring detour - is a problem for Labour, electorally speaking.

We were promised no more austerity by the Tories in 2019 and what are we getting?

So what? You seem to have a quaint but deluded idea that the electorate remember things from five years ago, compare them to reality and judge them rationally and analytically. Everything that's gone wrong since 2019 will be either Vladimir Putin's or Jeremy Corbyn's fault. There'll be a whole other slogan by 2024 that will wipe the slate clean.

Labour can either get a better slogan, or lose.

Labour can't give a budget right now because they haven't seen the books. They know it's bad, we know it's bad, but only the tories know how bad.

Call an election and let's find out with the change of government. I'd love to see the spreadsheet.

@sunnydaytoday0 yes the Tories can go lower. Sunak alone will not be able to shift perceptions about them.

As they say, governments lose elections, opposition rarely win them. This government has kneecapped itself. The bad news is yet to come.

These are all just perceptions from Labour or non Cons voters. What matters is how people who voted Cons last time feel. Someone who voted Corbyn isn’t going to be worth aiming for.

I wouldn’t make any definitive statements yet. The cost of energy is a big factor and that is an unknown:

Labour would face the same issues with spending or borrowing atm.

Someone who voted Corbyn isn’t going to be worth aiming for.

There weren’t many of those to be fair. Even I couldn’t manage that. And, of course, the Tories now have their own Corbyn who actually held the keys to Downing Street and fucked up in spectacular fashion. And of course Labour would face the same issues, they’d address them very differently though.

There weren’t many of those to be fair.

40% of the electorate in 2017, 32% in 2017. By comparison, Tony Blair's last victory for Labour in 2005 won 35% of the vote.

All who voted Labour in 2019 by definition "voted Corbyn". Is @MarshaBradyo seriously claiming that the Tories will make no effort whatsoever, and put no thought into, winning over previous Labour voters in any seats? That would be a first for a major political party strategy.

As for what Cons voters feel, that's what concerns me really. This thread is an interesting example of what I find to be a common phenomenon:

www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4659407-any-tory-voters-here-who-are-switching-to-labour-this-time?reply=120952449

There are some who say they've voted Tory all their life but the Tories are just too far beyond the pale now and they can't. Some of those will vote Labour because they can get behind Starmer (yay Keir). Quite a few who say they will just never vote Labour under any circumstances ever (so really makes no difference whether it's Keir or Jeremy, or whoever in between).

But the sense I get, on that and other threads, and elsewhere, is of people trying really hard to still find an excuse to vote Tory. "I can't vote for a party that doesn't know what a woman is". "I can't vote for Angela Raynor". "It's just as bad in other countries". "It wasn't Boris's faul war broke out in Ukraine!" There seems to be roughly a third of the electorate that are drawn to the Tories by some kind of primal magnetic force that would take a once-in-a-millenium seismic cleft in the order of nature to disrupt. Don't ask me to explain it, it's like some kind of weird masochistic dependent relationship. But there you go.

It was quite an achievement on Johnson's and Truss's part to be SO UNPRECEDENTEDLY AWFUL that even some of these people felt they couldn't go on with it. And to be fair, no small achievement on Starmer's part to consistently manage his centrist Tory-friendly brand so well that he could soak a lot of them up.

But all those people need is one little excuse to go back to their comfort zone, and I fear the Tories finally putting an apparently capable, respectable and intelligent human in charge of the country will be that excuse.

32% in 2019.

Disagree that tories can disregard Corbyn voters, you're talking about young people en masse. At some point tories have to make some effort with a younger demographic or they become entirely obsolete.

The growing tory disregard for green issues is likely to be particularly unpalatable to most younger voters.

Great post @scaredoff by the way, totally agree!

This is so long I’m not sure what you are driving at.

Can you distil it down? What’s the issue that is causing you angst

The point about Corbyn voters was more that I see so many posts from the left talking about what they would or wouldn’t do but it’s biased, on this thread most people said they didn’t vote for Johnson - when obviously a fair few did.

I don’t care if someone who voted for Corbyn then votes for Sunak btw, great if that’s what they want.

Can you distil it down? What’s the issue that is causing you angst

A large proportion of conservative voters seem to have an incredibly strong, emotional bond to the Tories that can resist an incredible amount of good reason not to vote for them.

Starmer has juuuust managed to prise them away from the Tories for the moment, by selling his image as centrist, grown up and capable, while the Tories were led by donkeys. And by not espousing any policies likely to offend those people too much.

Now that the Tories have found a more respectable and capable leader, many of those people can "allow themselves" to vote Tory again. Starmer's strategy is now defunct: he's no more grown up and capable than Sunak, so what's the point of voting for him?

Thanks for this. Yes I agree

Are some middle and low-income voters drawn to the Tories because they represent (in very broad terms) putting yourself and your family first?

Labour represent their intentions as more altruistic. Some people aren't altruistic and will admit it, some can be persuaded but get annoyed by the fact that the welfare state, which is essentially a Labour invention, can enable irresponsible behaviour.

I'm usually a Labour voter but we shouldn't label these people as irrational, bigoted or arseholes. They can be persuaded to vote for a more altruistic programme but you need to convince them that it will benefit their own self-interest as well. I've always felt the best way to do this is to demonstrate it. Get into power and start doing stuff. That's why I got so dirty on Corbyn and his followers, who seemed much more interested in making the Labour party more left-wing than running the country.

He's the media darling right now because he's young and handsome and looks very smart in his suits. And he appears not to be an alcoholic or pervert and to have some standards of professionalism. But the desire for change is still very strong and after April, when the energy support will presumably end for many or most people, that will only increase. Labour might not be able to do anything about it - just like the Conservatives couldn't do anything about the recession in 2010, but people still voted for them. They weren't necessarily voting Conservative, some did of course but most were just voting for change. Every now and then there is a sea change and the opposition is voted in, and I think both parties know that's how the next election is going to go.

But the Conservatives were clear in 2010 they COULD do something about it - they could do austerity. That's what people voted for.

You're right that people will sometimes just vote for change, but that has to consist of more than just a change of name. I find it interesting that we've been having this discussion all evening - loads of posts from various people - and nobody has come up with a single major policy or approach that Labour stands for.

Starmer's strategy for his first year or two as Labour leader basically consisted of "not being Jeremy Corbyn", and for the next year as "not being Boris Johnson". What's he going to do now? Not being Rishi Sunak isn't going to work because people mostly respect Sunak. And also because, well, he kind of is Rishi Sunak.

I would love to see Labour running big ad on Johnson and Sunak partying while the late Queen sat alone. It's not dirty politics - integrity in public office is an issue even more vital than the economy, crime, Europe, education and so forth. I think you have to live outside the West for a bit to realise just how fragile and important this virtue is - what the consequences are when it's gone, and how difficult it is to rebuild. Johnson was the thin end of a very, very big wedge, the other end of which is kleptocracy and schools and hospitals closing and poor people dying because a politician fancies a new yacht and doesn't want to pay for it.

But I worry about what its effect of such a Labour campaign would be. It might backfire. The response would probably be nonsense about how Beergate was just as bad, or alternatively that the ad was in bad taste (regardless of the fact that the Tory partying was in even worse taste.)

I agree that there seems to be this weird Teflon greasy quality about the current Tory government. A lot of people in England really, really want to believe in them even though they know they're hopeless. I don't remember this attitude back in the 90s when John Major's government became a joke.

Public finances are public aren't they?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election

This page is worth following. A party normally gets a lift in the opinion polls when a new leader is appointed, and this is showing in the polls - Tories have gone from low 20s to high 20s.

@scaredoff how about Labour's green energy UK policy? A nationalised green energy provider and a focus on renewable energy generation In Britain.
That's one of Labour's policies that's been announced and not immediately nicked by the Tories with the name slightly changed.