Westministers: Happy New Year?

[RedToothBrush]

And so we enter a New Year full of hope that things might just be about to recover from our national nervous breakdown... or perhaps not.

As we have Damien Green ejected from his role as Deputy PM over allegations of inappropriate conduct towards woman and use of porn at the end of last year, 2018 sees a bright new progressive dawn with the appointment to the role of universities regulator of Toby Young. A man who has deleted 20,000 tweets including many which are inappropriate and offensive to women, is a fan of eugenics and hates the working class and disabled.

Meanwhile the NHS is facing a crisis which is totally unexpected to the government and couldn't possibly have been planned for by a man who has over seen it for over five years. Which naturally bodes really well for Brexit planning.

We are apparently planning to join the TPP. Never mind geopolitics we can move the UK to the Pacific region.

We still are not ready for trade talks because the Cabinet can not agree on anything. Not that it sounds like they have actually discussed anything along these lines yet.

Rumours are that the Cabinet - including arch leavers such as Gove - are leaning towards supporting May and a softer option, despite the disgust of Johnson, who once again is the subject of malicious chatter about his sacking in a forthcoming Cabinet Reshuffle.

There is talk of further Tory Party war with the revelation that membership of the party has dropped to a core of just 70,000 hardline authoritarian men, most of whom are over 60. Tory HQ now wants to (perhaps with some good reason to prevent the loons) rewrite the constitution and limit the power of local associations to select candidates. The Tory party is now lining up to be a power struggle between internal authoritarians, who don't like democracy voices or structure.

Meanwhile the Labour Party membership now apparently overwhelmingly looks upon staying in the customs union and single market favourably and is in favour of a second referendum. In opposition to the leadership who are utterly committed to Hard Brexit. Much to the annoyance of Lord Adonis who is pitching a fit about government corruption and incompetence and being accused of being elite because he going skiing. Unlike of prominent Leavers who are in touch with the working class.

And finally Nigel Farage has got a meeting with Barnier. Farage, unlike Clegg, Clarke and Adonis, will not be accused by the Right Wing Press of undermining the government's negotiating position because...

It appears that we are in for another year of Brexit nonsense then.

We've not even heard mention of Gibraltar yet.

The Tories' party membership of just 70,000 makes them ripe for entryism.

So for £70,000,000 (£1,000 per person) plus costs (£25/£5 u23, £15 Armed forces) someone could effectively pwn the Tory party ?

Less than £100 million to effectively run a country.

How much per MP was the DUP deal ?

What do you reckon, Vladimir ?

Thank you for the new thread... I'm going to try to keep up with this one! Thanks to everyone for their sterling work.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-42574540/viewsnight-the-brexit-generation-is-dying-out

In this Viewsnight, Times columnist David Aaronovitch argues that the majority of people who support Brexit will be reduced to zero as older voters die.

I'll give DA the benefit of the doubt, and put the "reduce to zero" hyperbole down to a sensationalist BBC (possibly pandering to an agenda).

Tory party is vulnerable to entrism from above and below.

The grass roots membership is reliant on funds from a small pool of investors making it difficult to resist an oligarch takeover and the small number of members also means they are vulnerable to a loony take over (or an orchestrated liberal takeover) which means the investors are more likely to insist that their money is listened to over and above the grass roots.

DH said to me not long ago, that he should stand for election as a Tory.

I think he has a point. He's young and articulate and there is no competition locally from candidates (cos they are all dead or literally dying). They are that desperate for young candidates who aren't crazy he'd be something of a shoe in. He'd just have to bite his tongue for a bit over just how liberal he is for selection purposes.

He might kill a few older members with the big reveal though.

Tory party is vulnerable to entrism from above and below.

Fnarr, fnarr

I wonder how many people come across "Conservative Party Membership" direct debits when dealing with older relatives estates ?

Tory party is vulnerable to entrism from above and below.

^all those public school boys innit?

😂

He'd just have to bite his tongue for a bit over just how liberal he is for selection purposes.

If you don't believe there would be some shady illegal data protection breaches going in in the background ...well I would ....

Remember all that "soft" intelligence the Home Office are squirrelling away ?

Place marking

Thank you oh award-winning OP for another epic thread opener.

I am not going to stress about Brexit until my divorce is finalised, I'm just going to let it all wash over me. I need a bit of mental peace and quiet at the moment - now that STBXH has got housing sorted and is about to move in (he is not living with us right now nor ever will again), I feel less able to bury myself in practicalities and more fragile.

But I will lurk and speak up when I feel I have something to say.

Locally we've joked that the only way we will get rid of our more ukip than ukip Tory is to sponsor a bright young up and coming more liberal one, though we may have to teach them to hide their liberalism

pointy I hope you feel less fragile soon

Wishing you escalation to place of peace in your life, pointy.

Johnson's PR machine and people who take him for a useful idiot talk him up and creates a whiff as if he is something out of the ordinary (in a good way). Don't know why people fall for it. I only remember him for a whiff of the sinister and/or being a downright dodgy Charlatan.

When he started stuttering the poem in the Temple, he had forgotten the words. He was googling his iphone to find them. All it showed is he had been exposed to it before. What really showed who he was is that he had to be told it was inappropriate?

All the best pointy

Congrats on the award, Red, and thank you for the new thread!

Good luck - and much peace, Pointy.

Place mat king

DG I expect that as the younger generations eventually outnumber the boomers and then dominate in GEs,
the UK nostalgic "exceptionalism" will reduce sharply and UK views of the EU will become more like those of other Western European countries

Maybe even swing around to the steady 80-85% approval of our nearest neighbour , the RoI

Take time to chill , to stretch out and enjoy your new freedom, pointy

Crikey, I just learned that Tory party membership was 400,000 in 1997 - and that was after years of sleaze and unpopularity in govt.

No decent HoC majority since 1987, over 30 years

The current Tory govt is just the camouflage sheet covering a hollow shell of a party

This is why the govt are so astonishingly ignorant and incompetent:
They don't have the human resources to draw on, that Tory govts enjoyed throughout the previous century

• no ranks of capable ministers, of competent MPs to advise them, because the mass membership is too small to provide enough candidates
• and too narrow in outlook to choose wisely from the available ones

Imo, this is why rightwing Brexit politicians and oligarchs are so aggressive and desperate to push Brexit
and their dream of slashing taxes for the wealthy, reversing the welfare state

they fear it is their last chance before the Tory party is out of office for a generation

Hence why the risk of a bad Brexit doesn't make them pause - they would be facing political Armageddon without Brexit drumming up temporary nationalist support

They need to persuade voters to prioritise nationalism and accept the rolling back of the welfare state

Are the other parties better wrt membership or is that a problem across politics?
I also think the trend for career politicians has left them exposed in Brexit negotiations. The govt would be more successful with some pragmatic people who have actually negotiated things before, as part of their job.
There is a reason why companies will pay bug bucks for good and experienced sales people.

Labour party membership is north of 550,000 now (huge surge in the lead up to and since Corbyn's election as leader); LibDems more than 100,000; even the Greens are snapping at the Tories' heels with about 55,000, Quentin.

Thanks lala
Why do they get so many votes but no-one wants to join? Interesting

The SNP has 100,000 members just in Scotland

The ridiculously low Tory party membership makes it a hollow shell of a party, which has led to the current ridiculous situation:
ignorant and incompetent 3rd rate politicians afraid to offend a very extreme membership

The Tory party hope the surge of nationalism from Brexit will be long-lasting;
otherwise their shell of a party will collapse and be visibly incapable of governing

The Tories had huge majorities in the 1980s, but have not had a good majority since 1987
So maybe the low membership is having some effect

Main reason Tories aren't way behind is demographics:

Labour win heavily among the 18-30 age group and are in the majority up to about age 50
Tories win heavily in the older age groups, especially the retired
BUT
there are more people aged 50+ than age 18-49

Engineering financial distress in the NHS

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2017/01/28/engineering-financial-distress-in-the-nhs/

…But why would a Health Secretary, charged with maintaining the health of the Health Department, adopt such a seemingly perverse strategy?

… Hunt’s book, Direct Democracy:
“Our ambition should be…in effect denationalizing the provision of health care in Britain”.

< keep reminding people of this, when they complain about NHS "inefficiency" >

The liberal democrats are federalised. At local level they are generally left alone unless its an election when the national party can get involved. They set policy this way. They also tend to leave candidates to local level unless its an important seat.

I do think the LDs have issues because of this inconsistency.

I've personally had a problem with this in the past. Some very dubious leaflets were sent out at a previous general election. I was so disgusted by them I complained. I was told that they had lots of similar complaints but these complaints were orchestrated by an organised Tory campaign. I later confronted the local LD councillor over it who admitted there were strained tensions between local and national level and the local party were not happy about how the campaign was handled in the area.

I do think that the LDs should have won that election in my area. They did do well and ran it close but they didn't win.

I would have voted for them that year but after being called a Tory plant and having my complaint so poorly handled by the LD call centre I didn't. They lost my vote as a direct result of the incident. For some reason, I felt that if I wasn't listened to over a complaint they weren't going to be too good at listening to me as my local representative.

I rather suspect that the same thing was exactly what played out with regard to Tories voters last year.

The Labour Party on the other hand tends to have problems with factionalisation. The general membership can often get really sidelined by this over popularity contests and personality politics which dominate over policy.

It also has the trade union thing, where union leaders can have disproportionate influence - in the same way that the tory party donors have disproportionate control.

Corbyn has messed about with the internal nature of the Labour party since becoming leader too, which has generally adjusted things to his favour and his agenda, rather than necessarily towards the mass membership.

I don't know enough about other parties to comment.

I don't think there is a perfect answer here for any party. I think the main problem is all of them fail to acknowledge their respective weaknesses properly which just exacerbates them.

Every party has had problems when they have stopped listening to their grass roots in the last decade. The fact they all have done it, says something for the management of parties and the extent of the Westminster bubble and reliance on PR over substance.