The Labour left and Owen Jones are gonna no doubt say the Wakefield result will be a bad sign for Starmer even if he wins it. ‘Not as high as 2017!!’ etc etc.
I’ve been critical of Starmer lately but a win is still a win. Some people are gonna inevitably spin it the other way around.
I have to say, I agree with OP. I also read the article and the first thing I thought of was the idiocy of the Labour left and Owen Jones.
Owen Jones is useless at politics as he is as a Guardian columnist.
Ignore anything he has to say
I suppose the question then for Operation Save Big Dog, or as it used to be called the Conservative and Unionist Party, is where the turning point will come from?
If this trend continues unabated, they’re doomed plain and simple. Their only hope then is to try to identify what if anything they can do (or which can happen in the wider world) in the next 18 months which can save them.
That is to say that it is a reasonable guess that the Rwanda deportations and the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill are likely only the tip of the pandering ice berg. I think we can expect the Conservative Party to shift gear into electioneering mode about 12 months sooner than would be normal in election cycles as they try to revive the populist spirit which saw Johnson sail into power in the first place. The difficulty is that populism often involves financial give aways and that’s challenging in an environment where the rising cost of living will see people not able to enjoy the money, but hand it directly to their utility supplier and chosen supermarket.
So they’ll have to double or triple down on rhetorical populism. Opening up new fronts “against Europe”, appearing even tougher on migration, bringing “back” imperial measures with great fanfare (although they never actually left) and probably bringing forward some kind of anti-trans or culture war Bill just so that they can accuse Labour of being ‘woke’.
EDIT I wonder if they might let indyref2 go ahead after all, just on the basis that it’s good for getting patriotic unionist sentiment worked up.
4 comments
The Labour left and Owen Jones are gonna no doubt say the Wakefield result will be a bad sign for Starmer even if he wins it. ‘Not as high as 2017!!’ etc etc.
I’ve been critical of Starmer lately but a win is still a win. Some people are gonna inevitably spin it the other way around.
I have to say, I agree with OP. I also read the article and the first thing I thought of was the idiocy of the Labour left and Owen Jones.
Owen Jones is useless at politics as he is as a Guardian columnist.
Ignore anything he has to say
I suppose the question then for Operation Save Big Dog, or as it used to be called the Conservative and Unionist Party, is where the turning point will come from?
If this trend continues unabated, they’re doomed plain and simple. Their only hope then is to try to identify what if anything they can do (or which can happen in the wider world) in the next 18 months which can save them.
That is to say that it is a reasonable guess that the Rwanda deportations and the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill are likely only the tip of the pandering ice berg. I think we can expect the Conservative Party to shift gear into electioneering mode about 12 months sooner than would be normal in election cycles as they try to revive the populist spirit which saw Johnson sail into power in the first place. The difficulty is that populism often involves financial give aways and that’s challenging in an environment where the rising cost of living will see people not able to enjoy the money, but hand it directly to their utility supplier and chosen supermarket.
So they’ll have to double or triple down on rhetorical populism. Opening up new fronts “against Europe”, appearing even tougher on migration, bringing “back” imperial measures with great fanfare (although they never actually left) and probably bringing forward some kind of anti-trans or culture war Bill just so that they can accuse Labour of being ‘woke’.
EDIT I wonder if they might let indyref2 go ahead after all, just on the basis that it’s good for getting patriotic unionist sentiment worked up.