General Election 2024

[UndercoverElephant]

https://x.com/YouGov/status/1797659498427154538

Our first MRP of the 2024 general election shows Labour winning a majority of 194, larger than even Tony Blair's landslides

Labour: 422 (+220 from GE2019)
Conservative: 140 (-225)
Lib Dem: 48 (+37)
SNP: 17 (-31)
Green: 2 (+1)
PC: 2 (-2)
Reform UK: 0 (=)

[clv101]

More realistic than Election Calculus 300+ majority, but I still don't think Labour's majority will exceed 150.

[Mark]

Clacton is going to be a very interesting vote....
The Tories are going to be desperate to stop Farage....
Could we see some Tories tactically voting for Labour ?

Interestingly, Electoral Calculus in Clacton has now changed....
From - LAB 51%, CON 48%
To - CON 67%; LAB 31%; REF 2%

So..., they're predicting Tory voters more likely to turn out as a result of Farage....
Can't see many Labour voters tactically voting Tory, but some may go Reform...?
Anyway, could now end up being a CON HOLD....

[Potemkin Villager]

I guess whoever owns a party can pretty much ignore mere members!

[Potemkin Villager]

Farage, the right-wing party’s founder and majority owner, will contest Clacton in Essex, a seat once held by his previous UK Independence Party, he announced on Monday.

Fascinating concept this, owning a political party, sounds very undemocratic! Wonder how that works and what is the legal structure of a political party?

Wonder too exactly who "owns" the other political parties in this election?

[Mark]

Fascinating concept this, owning a political party, sounds very undemocratic! Wonder how that works and what is the legal structure of a political party?

Wonder too exactly who "owns" the other political parties in this election?

I guess it's like football clubs....
As I understand, most of the clubs in Germany are owned by the fans - they have a say in how their clubs are run...
In England, most of the clubs are owned by Foreign Governments, US Baseball Tycoons, Indian Chicken Farmers etc. - the fans have no say at all....

[UndercoverElephant]

Nobody owns most political parties. Reform UK is unique in that it is a plc.

There is no constitutional thing called a political party in the UK. A political party is any group of people who choose to stand for election on a joint platform. How they are internally organised is entirely a matter for the party itself.

[UndercoverElephant]

Labour Party video about what Rishi Sunak did before getting into politics. Hilarious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaejKZWUWqY

[Potemkin Villager]

Nobody owns most political parties. Reform UK is unique in that it is a plc.

There is no constitutional thing called a political party in the UK. A political party is any group of people who choose to stand for election on a joint platform. How they are internally organised is entirely a matter for the party itself.

Are political parties not essentially "owned" by those they accept subscriptions from?
This is fine, from a democratic point of view, if these are a large number of small subscriptions
from party members. However a huge democratic deficit is created when the finances become dominated by huge donations from
a small number of very wealthy individuals and organisations. You have to wonder why such a situation is allowed to persist.

[UndercoverElephant]

Nobody owns most political parties. Reform UK is unique in that it is a plc.

There is no constitutional thing called a political party in the UK. A political party is any group of people who choose to stand for election on a joint platform. How they are internally organised is entirely a matter for the party itself.

Are political parties not essentially "owned" by those they accept subscriptions from?

Not if we are using the word "owned" in the literal sense that Farage owns Reform UK. Large donors certainly wield influence over political parties.

This is fine, from a democratic point of view, if these are a large number of small subscriptions
from party members. However a huge democratic deficit is created when the finances become dominated by huge donations from
a small number of very wealthy individuals and organisations. You have to wonder why such a situation is allowed to persist.

There are already caps on election spending, regardless of how much money is in the kitty. But there is clearly a more general question here, which is not so much about who owns political parties but the extent to which extremely wealthy individuals can influence politics. This extends beyond donations. The single most influential non-politician on British politics for the last 50 years has been Rupert Murdoch, who for most of that time has used profits made elsewhere in his vast business empire to subsidise loss-making newspapers in order to influence the outcome of elections. He already did it in this election, not by donating money to Labour but by doing a deal with Starmer whereby the Murdoch press would acquiesce to a Labour victory in return for Starmer agreeing not to introduce any new restrictions on the activities of Murdoch's newspapers.

Clearly this situation is contrary to the interests of both democracy and most of the population.

[UndercoverElephant]

https://www.politics.co.uk/politicslunc ... ing-sunak/

And what of the potential implications of a Reform-Conservative crossover? Well, if Reform does pass the Conservatives in the polls ahead of 4th July, the primary political outcome would be mass panic. Reverse Midas Sunak would feel duty-bound to respond; but no single policy announcement, such as a pledge on the ECHR, would rise to the occasion without the risk of making matters worse.

The politics of panic would also envelop the wider Tory party. Already today, right-wing Conservative candidate Marco Longhi has asked Farage directly: “Why target certain MPs who have a track record of Reform type politics?”. Longhi wants the Reform leader to stand down candidates in constituencies with right-wing Tories — it’s the sort of Conservative freelancing we should get used to with Farage looming large.

Above all, however, a Reform-Conservative crossover would be so dire for the Tories because of what it would symbolise: that British politics really could be following in the footsteps of Canada c.1993. If senior Conservatives start to take this eventuality seriously, nothing is off the table.

Ultimately then, Rishi Sunak is on the verge of a political cataclysm unlike anything Britain has ever seen. And Nigel Farage holds all the cards.

This is clearly a moment of extreme danger for Sunak. He desperately needs to "win" the head to head televised debate tonight, but the odds are surely on him "losing". Starmer is clever, well prepared and much better at politics than Sunak. But it is Farage who is the real threat here -- he is well within his rights to make this election all about immigration, and he can use it as a stick to beat all the other parties. A pledge to net zero migration is music to my ears, and may well have secured my vote (assuming they even stand in Ceredigion). The tories can pledge to let parliament vote on a limit, but nobody is going to believe anything they say on this particular topic anymore -- it is very hard for them to talk about it at all without sounding absurd. As for Labour, "Read my lips: I will get immigration down" now looks like a pathetic anachronism. It just doesn't offer enough, so why bother with the "read my lips"? The bottom line is that Farage may well have a very good campaign, may well win in Clacton, and that poses a long-term existential threat to the tory party as we know it. How can the tories get rid of the threat from their right? Brexit was supposed to do exactly that, but in order for that solution to stick, immigration had to come down. Farage may not hold all of the cards, but he's got the Ace of Spades.

[clv101]

Immigration is going to be a huge issue in the coming weeks. The key question to ask, the key question to understand is exactly *why* the most nationalist Tory party, with a big majority, on the back of Brexit *chose*, because it was a series of specific policies they enacted, to have the highest level of migration in decades.

Tories need to explain why they did that, and what has changed so they (& Labour, Reform etc) won't do it anymore. They need to explain the impact of moving from many hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands, or zero.

Without asking and understanding these questions, the immigration discussion will be a load of uninformed, reactionary nonsense.

[UndercoverElephant]

https://modernity.news/2024/06/04/farag ... e-a-penis/

Nigel Farage started his campaign to be elected as an MP by making clear his views on gender identity, declaring, “I do know one thing, that a woman can’t have a penis.”

The Reform Party leader shocked the political world yesterday by announcing he had changed his mind on running in the upcoming general election and will now stand for office.

That set off a wave of excitement not seen in British politics for half a decade, with Farage launching his campaign in Clacton earlier today.

Farage immediately sought to distance himself from wokeism by refusing to embrace transgenderism.

“You won’t get any woke PC nonsense from me because I’ve always told it as it is,” he added.

[Ralphw2]

Yougov tracker shows immigration as third after economy and health as key issues, but has been rising steadily from 20% to 40% in the last 3 years.

[Potemkin Villager]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQBWdrrHHtk

A lot of stuff Novara do can quite clunky and didatic but this extended vox pop in true blue Godalming is very
instructive as to how sensible and perplexed the average voter in the street is over this election. This is much more
informative than the endless opinion pieces and debates on Beeb, ITV, Sky etc.