To think Kemi and Nigel will likely win the next UK election after making a pact of some kind and fighting on an immigration / identity politics platform?

[MumtananoBay]

Especially after Trump’s win today.

labour has a tiny lead at 27% today (6th nov, politico.eu polling )

tories have 27. Reform has 19.

so that’s a possible 46/27 which gives a right wing team up more MPs than Labour has now. (OFC in any pact they won’t get all those votes)

this Labour majority is paper thin. Everyone hates Keir.

She will get better and get briefings if she wants to win. But being punchy won’t be enough. Starmer was quite lucky with Johnson who said tons of inconsistencies and some outright lies. Sunak was terrible. He just didn’t play the game when the PM has all the advantages.

I don’t think Badenoch will be anywhere near as lucky with Starmer who is much more cautious. But you can be brilliant at PMQs and it makes no difference at all. Hague used to be great at tearing strips off Blair. It made no difference come election time.

Unless Farage changes his ways radically and actually starts doing the job we pay him to do as MP, he's not going to persuade Clacton voters to vote for him again. And he won't want to stay as MP anyway once he is no longer able to make money on the side.

I think Farage will continue to do well actually. Look at Badenoch’s style at PMQs. All him.

But he can go further than she ever will, do it better, and has those connections she doesn’t. Don’t discount him.

Whatever culture it is you think you espouse, it is not the culture of the UK. We have historically been a country that welcomed refugees literally for centuries, and that is one of our greatest strengths.

If we bowed out of all the treaties under which we accept the same obligations as other nations to take in refugees, we would become pariahs, and rightly so. Do tell, if we had refused to take Jewish child refugees in the 1930s and left them to the camps, would you be in any way ashamed of that?

It's not just a matter of getting out of the ECHR, it is way more complex than that, and if we refuse to accept obligations under the relevant treaties we would obviously lose the benefits we gain under them - to say nothing of what we would lose under sanctions that more enlightened nations would put in place.

If we only accepted highly skilled/educated and rich migrants, we would soon be in major trouble in terms of running the care system, the NHS, the hospitality industry, farming, and much, much more; to say nothing of the fact that many of our universities and research institutions would collapse without fees, research grants and the like from abroad.

Unless Farage changes his ways radically and actually starts doing the job we pay him to do as MP, he's not going to persuade Clacton voters to vote for him again.

Come to Clacton before making that judgment! (Which to be fair is more than Farage is likely to do.)

What part of equality do you object to then?

And yes, I do mean deprive asylum seekers of their human rights
What gives you the right to deprive anybody of their human rights?

I think I have heard it all now.

Hopefully, as it will mean the Tories have finally gone back to Conservatism rather than this pathetic soft leftie shite

Obviously they had the worst election result in their history because of the pathetic soft leftie shite.

And why the soft leftie shites got over 400 seats.

And who's going to pay for all this largesse Pollyanna? People don't want to pay more tax and your average Brit doesn't want to do the work.

I think it’s something of a failure to join the dots on this one. Why so much need for care? My take is that it is largely because women no longer do this for free for their own kin. You could, but you would need the will and the income.

The truth is that people don’t want to do it for free and they don’t like the pay. A massive state subsidy would required from tax to fund it, tax which isn’t likely to be sourced from a diminishing workforce but equally taxes on assets are unpopular too.

I think people have forgotten the good old days were when women had few economic choices, they did this work, and many older people died a lot earlier. Unless a lot of women are all going to become unpaid carers or there is a massive tax hike to sustain social care then this system of migrants supporting care will continue.

Even if (a big if) the British people are prepared to pay the taxes for this, it will take time. What happens to the people who need care NOW?

Apparently more and more men do care work, the split used to be around 70/30 in favour of women, now its 60/40 even less.

The Care sector is vast, employs more than the NHS and huge cross over with many companies serving the same areas & carers not being allowed/trained to do basic stuff, like recording obs... though my DD did say she did this but that was during Covid.

All this was explained by someone today being interviewed who has researched the sector.

He also said pay needs to go approx £2 above NMW, as most people enjoy care but can't afford to stay, so not true to say we refuse to do it....

Thats called a visa with a time limit on it.

Reality past and present should tell it isn't the quality and lack thereof of our politicians that is the greatest threat to us, it's the "in-house" relationship between our political system and the media that keeps us stupidly voting in lower and lower grade opportunists based in increasingly trivial and irrelevant personality traits.

Antivenom is produced by injecting small quantities of poison into horses and then extracting the antibodies which develop in response to it, not by injecting large quantities into bite-victims in the hope that two wrongs will make it all right.

The instruction manuals for the brain-dead have clearly struck again. Got a lot to answer for.

That's 5 years away (probably).

Who knows who will be heading any political party next year, let alone in five years. A lettuce faired better than one incumbent. We could have a banana and a cantaloupe melon in charge for all we know.

Please do!! Please stay politically engaged for the whole term not just election time.

It's way easier to spot bullshit during campaigns if you had your finger on or near the pulse the whole way through.

I don't care who you vote for...just stay engaged the whole term and vote when the time comes. 🙏🏻

The media is definitely the problem. I used to think that things might improve when Murdoch died, his reach is so huge, but social media is doing a lot of damage.
Plus everything being reduced to soundbites and three word slogans 'Get Brexit done!' 'Oven ready deal!' 'Stop The Boats!' with no depth or debate.

I live in what was previously a very safe Tory seat, but our complete absentee MP managed to lose 35 000 votes in July. It is still a novelty for Clacton having Farage as MP, but 5 years of an absentee will disillusion people.