Results like these at a general election would mean Tory annihilation

[noblegiraffe]

Says a BBC headline this morning.

Anyone else stockpiling popcorn?

This is where the Tories have really gone wrong over the last 13 years and particularly post-2015 without the Lib Dems. They were meant to be for the middle classes, instead they've gone to war with more traditionally middle class professions (doctors, teachers, police, train drivers, civil servants etc etc) and only seem to be for the very rich.

Labour were meant to be for the working class but at least under Blair tended to focus on the middle class. Since then I think everyone has been screwed bar the very rich.

For clarity it might be better to write.

Tories lost a lot of people when the locked down to late, then repeatedly broke the laws they made and lied about them. You can't repeatedly ie to people and then expect them to vote for you.

I heard that this sort of issue was exactly why Labour would not win the Rutherglen and Hamilton by-election. And that proved to be an accurate prediction.

By voting for Brexit Farage was elected to what role?

Thatcher is relevant because she was the last PM to really make a difference and revolutionise the way the country is run and the economy etc.

Therefore she was a successful PM, but a lot of what she put in place has long since come home to roost. It was all short-termism but many got filthy rich and the poor got poorer, plus all the social problems that resulted from that era.

Reagan had a similar impact in USA.

And as the post by @JassyRadlett at 21.58 yesterday showed, it's possibly not even true that the previous Tories stayed behind and didn't vote this time.

Same thing happened mid-90s. Labour swept up in all the by-elections and in the '97 election a lot of Tory voters stayed at home.

Well yes - there is also that pertinent point 🤣

I was just highlighting that it won't matter how Labour win - if they win they win and right now it appears that's what will happen.

And I for one am glad about that. I trust Starmer, Cooper, Streeting and Reeves. It'll be refreshing to have a government I trust are for the people of the country - rather than those in their what's app contacts.

That was to Zonder

No because every government since Thatcher has basically carried on her legacy.

Kinnock in 1992, arguably Brown in 2010, Milliband in 2015 and Corbyn in 2017 and 2019 very much ran on a platform of overturning Thatcherism and they lost.

I think the fear of Boat people and a corrupt media will sway people to the status quo

Johnson won a huge majority because voters in often poor areas were persuaded to vote for Brexit against their own interests. The election was basically a Brexit referendum.

For all his faults Corbyn overturned May's majority in 2017, but Brexit was kept out of the campaign. Labour pledging for more referendums wrote their own suicide note.

I always thought that the Tories won the 1997 election and now I know I was right. Thanks.

Corbyn back a second referendum. That lost the election campaign.

You weren’t a Tory voter.

I know the people they lost.

People who hate

1. Govt abuse
2. economic destruction

Lockdown was both. The Tories permanently lost many voters over it.

The parties at no 10 were not a surprise to those of us who had been protesting from day 1.

Obviously it was bollocks. Obviously they didn’t believe it.

So we were happy when it came out that they had acted as rulers always do and ignored the rules themselves. It proved what we had been saying from day 1.

The only way to avoid Govt forcing one rule for the people and another for themselves is to cut Govt. They should have much less power in every way.

This isn’t going to happen in my lifetime. People in he UK haven’t learned from the suffering of other nations so the UK will need to suffer itself before this gets better. Sadly.

And there was no party unity so the party (including Starmer) railroaded him into a second referendum position seeing it as a win-win. Either Corbyn won and they could stop Brexit or he lost and they didn't want him as PM anyway. Starmer as leader would never have backed a second referendum. Corbyn got a credible result in 2017 without that stupidity.

The Tories were at war between 2016 and 2019 but they united behind 'get Brexit done' for that election at the end of 2019 and Johnson got rid of all the MPs who opposed him.

That was a big part of it, especially their unworkable second referendum plan but Labour voters also stayed at home. They didn't vote Conservative in massive numbers, so it want the massive vote of confidence in the Tories it was made out to be. Yet this is the same. Conservatives stayed at home.

A lot of Conservatives have been disillusioned for a while during these 13 years but the bogeyman of Corbyn helped them to the voting booth in 2019, along with the need to rid the endless impasse over Brexit since the 2016 vote.

In 1997 a lot of Tories stayed at home. Arguably in part because they were relaxed enough about Blair and New Labour (as opposed to a left wing Labour leader). I guess it'll be similar next year. Sunak just won't inspire enough. Cameron had that middle England appeal that Blair did and Johnson had the populist appeal. Sunak won't.

Enough Labour voters shifted to lose seats that were usually Labour giving the Cons a big majority. It was all about getting Brexit done. Sadly people are persuaded by three word slogans and don’t understand the issues in any depth. I’ve read around 5% of the population understand basic economics. When you hear debate, this is clear. We are under educated in many ways as a nation.

How do you know who I voted for?

A good example of this is the number of times we hear on these boards that there is a housing shortage in the UK. How can there be a housing shortage when there are a million empty homes in England alone? There isn't a housing shortage at all, there is a crisis in the distribution of housing.

There absolutely is a housing shortage in the U.K. Anyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot. Of those 1 million empty homes only 250,00 have been empty for more than six months - this is a fairly stable figure stretching back over many years. Another 250,000 are second homes. The remaining are usually just at various stages of the buying/selling process. It’s impossible to ever be in a situation where there are no empty homes.

We could start with the 250k that are long term empty then! So for 250000 families it's a problem of distribution.

I think I'm probably repeating myself, but thete is also commercial stock that can be converted to homes. Part of the housing shortage is caused by many more single or two person households. So these could be converted I to flats, revitalising towns and cities that at the moment have empty office blocks all over the place. Where I live, the local environmental and heritage campaigners need to be given far less power. They block every planning proposal, dragging the council through expensive court procedures at every turn and we are left with empty buildings with no planning permission for years because they have dug up some church ruins that may still be there or something. It's a Roman city fgs. There's old ruins all over the place. They can't possibly live in the deprived areas of the city they complain about being knocked down, as they seem to have unlimited pots of money to throw at every planning application!