Hangers, floggers, xenophobes, curtain-twitchers and technophobes. It's long way from the Cameroon vision of modernisation, for sure.
It does partly explain the continuous downward trend of Tory membership, at a time when Labour, LD, Green, SNP memberships have risen significantly.
Why would a moderate, socially liberal person want to join? other than while feeling for their wallet, and Brexit has interfered even with that.
Why would anyone want to join any party? Only < 1m political party members throughout the UK.
Most people just get on with it and register their interest at the ballot box.
Those who identify strongly with a party should join. Apart from the obvious fact that if everyone took the attitude of " just get[ting] on with it" (their life, presumably), they wouldn't then be able to "register their interest at the ballot box" as there'd be no-one to run the party, there's the point that larger memberships are less prone to taking erratic and bad decisions - and preventing that is obviously in the interests of those who feel an affinity with that party.
Does the election and re-election of Corbyn not test that premise rather severely?
No - on the contrary. Firstly, there were lots of entryists who are more noturally Greens, Respect and other wacky far-left inclined; but more importantly, Corbyn was able to win because the moderate centre-left weren't there in sufficient numbers whereas the more motivated radicals were.
Given the improvement in electoral performance weren't the members right to take the move they did regarding the leadership?
It can only really be called an erratic or bad decision based on differing political views as I don't think too many would argue one of the other candidates would have done better, I'd argue far worse.
The Tories need a spell in opposition. Big boosts in membership require it, and whilst in government their membership can only continue to fall - especially given that their age profile as recently reported must give their membership base a high mortality rate.
The average age of a Tory member is 57, though it is true the Tories got a big boost in members under Hague from 1997 to 2001 albeit less so in voters
The rearguard action of the PB tories defending the TY appointment is ludicrous. He's basically who SeanT wants to be when he grows up and shouldn't be in charge of anything. It's another typically poor May decision.
What's hilarious about this Trump book is that even with all of the disasters described in it, Hilary still lost to Don. What an awful candidate she was.
Indeed. Although you could make that comment in reverse too. Had the Republicans picked a bog-standard competent candidate, they would likely have won with their biggest ECV since 1988 - though that's a pretty hypothetical situation given the nature of the runners-up to Trump. Indeed, what's remarkable about the 2016 race is that despite the fact they were both dreadful candidates, you can't really say that the primary voters were wrong to pick Hillary over Sanders, or Trump over Cruz.
Sanders may well have won Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Hillary only lost them by 1% each and he won 2/3 of them in the Democratic primaries
The Tories need a spell in opposition. Big boosts in membership require it, and whilst in government their membership can only continue to fall - especially given that their age profile as recently reported must give their membership base a high mortality rate.
The average age of a Tory member is 57, though it is true the Tories got a big boost in members under Hague from 1997 to 2001 albeit less so in voters
So basically parties grow when in opposition and they feel they can enact change rather than in government.
Nothing new there. Although the tories to have a lot of work to do to attact new younger voters. that can and will only happen in opposition.
I must say that I'm not at all surprised by the revelation that members of the Conservative Party are right wing and Eurosceptic.
52:48. Who are the freaks?
When you take the entire worldview of Tory members as a whole - well....
The Death penalty still had a sizeable amount of support - but on issues like gay marriage....
Perhaps the trouble is that the views do pose an issue for the demographics the Tory party needs to attract - particularly those in their thirties and forties, who moved more towards Labour last time out. Somehow I doubt the views such as disliking gay marriage, and believing that everything is all fine with the current economic settlement are going to win them over.
Where is the evidence Tory members want to reverse gay marriage? It came in under a Conservative PM, albeit in a Coalition
The Tories need a spell in opposition. Big boosts in membership require it, and whilst in government their membership can only continue to fall - especially given that their age profile as recently reported must give their membership base a high mortality rate.
The average age of a Tory member is 57, though it is true the Tories got a big boost in members under Hague from 1997 to 2001 albeit less so in voters
So basically parties grow when in opposition and they feel they can enact change rather than in government.
Nothing new there. Although the tories to have a lot of work to do to attact new younger voters. that can and will only happen in opposition.
The Tories never attract younger voters really, the last Tory leader to win under 30s was Thatcher in 1983 and that was only because the Tories won a landslide and the SDP split the left.
The Tories need a spell in opposition. Big boosts in membership require it, and whilst in government their membership can only continue to fall - especially given that their age profile as recently reported must give their membership base a high mortality rate.
The average age of a Tory member is 57, though it is true the Tories got a big boost in members under Hague from 1997 to 2001 albeit less so in voters
So basically parties grow when in opposition and they feel they can enact change rather than in government.
Nothing new there. Although the tories to have a lot of work to do to attact new younger voters. that can and will only happen in opposition.
The Tories never attract younger voters really, the last Tory leader to win under 30s was Thatcher in 1983 and that was only because the Tories won a landslide and the SDP split the left.
I'm not saying they have to win the demographic. They just have to appeal more.
In the real world the impact of Brexit continues to change the economy. We will be poorer, but a more balanced economy both geographically and in terms of sectors. The size of economy will be smaller as we will have fewer people and critically fewer people of working age. There will be a transfer of wealth from the retired to the young which is overdue. House prices will stagnate and the pound will stay low for many years.
"Here was a key Trump White House rationale: expertise, that liberal virtue, was overrated."
This is some scary stuff... "In the Trump White House, policy making ... flowed up. It was a process of suggesting, in throw-it-against-the-wall style, what the president might want, and hoping he might then think that he had thought of this himself."
The Tories need a spell in opposition. Big boosts in membership require it, and whilst in government their membership can only continue to fall - especially given that their age profile as recently reported must give their membership base a high mortality rate.
The average age of a Tory member is 57, though it is true the Tories got a big boost in members under Hague from 1997 to 2001 albeit less so in voters
So basically parties grow when in opposition and they feel they can enact change rather than in government.
Nothing new there. Although the tories to have a lot of work to do to attact new younger voters. that can and will only happen in opposition.
During the Tories' last period in opposition, party membership collapsed. Can't recall the exact figures now but I think membership in 2010 was only around one-third of 1997.
What actions from 30 years ago, they were just words. He's not any longer but he set them up that way. I remember reading his fairly detailed articles in the telegraph all those years ago when he was struggling to convince people that taking a higher proportion of his intake from poorer backgrounds would work and setting them high expectations was part of the answer.
You need to step back and look at the whole picture, not just one or two isolated things. The fact that he has previously said these things and now has a different view is why he's an ideal candidate.
Take my own views as an example, I think everyone on here would agree that when it comes to housing investment I'm absolutely against private landlords and "investors" buying up existing property and pricing out FTBs. In my early 20s I was planning on having 7-9 BTLs by the time I turned 30 (which I probably could have done by now, if I had held the same views). If the government had a body which intends to help FTBs into housing, should I be excluded because of my previous views on the subject of ownership and investment?
I wouldn’t agree that ‘they were just words.’ They were reflective of his world view, and I think he needs to explain exactly why he had those views and how he’s come to a different conclusion now, given that he’s dealing with subject matters which concern students. His comments on inclusivity, especially his comments on wheelchair ramps are particularly alarming given that he’s supposed to care about the misfortunate.
Re your example of yourself, well you’ve explained your change of views on here and have been very critical of the situation regarding BTLs. Young hasn’t explained his changing views (as far as I’m aware) and has come out with a series of problematic statements fairly recently as well, to further complicate matters about how genuine he is.
After comparing the president’s tweets to Fox coverage every day since October, I can tell you that the Fox-Trump feedback loop is happening far more often than you think. There is no strategy to Trump’s Twitter feed; he is not trying to distract the media. He is being distracted. He darts with quark-like speed from topic to topic in his tweets because that’s how cable news works.
Here’s what’s also shocking: A man with unparalleled access to the world’s most powerful information-gathering machine, with an intelligence budget estimated at $73 billion last year, prefers to rely on conservative cable news hosts to understand current events….
Gogglebox USA, starring Donald J Trump. It was the Plato/Dilbert cartoonist (Scott Adams) line that Trump is a tactical genius in disrupting the media and disconcerting the opposition. Though they may have been right about Trump's effectiveness, there does not seem to be any great thought behind his words. It was just no-one knew (or knows) how to deal with someone who makes things up and can contradict himself on the fly.
The real trouble is that next time, it will be deliberate that politicians blatantly deny the real world. Arguably we have already seen it with, say, £350M in the Brexit campaign.
@TOPPING And? It hardly suggests Young is a great champion of big believer in the potential of working class kids. Then there’s his weird eugenics idea which is more recent....
On eugenics and selective breeding for high IQ In a 2015 essay for the Australian publication The Quadrant, entitled The fall of the meritocracy, under a section headed “Progressive eugenics”, Young proposed that poorer people should be helped to choose which embryos were allowed to develop, based on intelligence.
My proposal is this: once this technology [genetically engineered intelligence] becomes available, why not offer it free of charge to parents on low incomes with below-average IQs? Provided there is sufficient take-up, it could help to address the problem of flat-lining inter-generational social mobility and serve as a counterweight to the tendency for the meritocratic elite to become a hereditary elite. It might make all the difference when it comes to the long-term sustainability of advanced meritocratic societies.
Do you think he might have been indulging in hyperbole in order to highlight an issue which he evidently feels strongly about - the hereditary elite - rather than he actually thinks people should be socially engineered?
Um, nope. If he doesn’t feel people should be socially engineered, perhaps he shouldn’t suggest it?
OK I've skim read the article. Yes he does put it forward as an option (albeit with yet-to-exist technology). He cites it as redistribution of intelligence rather than wealth and yes that will be pretty objectionable to many (he also uses the example of hereditary diseases).
But more than that, given the pre-amble to that particular part of the essay, I maintain that he is citing radical solutions for radical, intractable problems. Did he mean it not as satire? Not 100% sure. Perhaps @TSE can enlighten us after he next bumps into him down the pub.
I have doubts that there aren’t other radical solutions he could have opted for, solutions which don’t look so bad....
Given the abortion rates around Down's, what makes you think that a reasonably large chunk of society wouldn't quietly agree with that position and follow through with it in their own private lives?
I must say that I'm not at all surprised by the revelation that members of the Conservative Party are right wing and Eurosceptic.
52:48. Who are the freaks?
When you take the entire worldview of Tory members as a whole - well....
The Death penalty still had a sizeable amount of support - but on issues like gay marriage....
Perhaps the trouble is that the views do pose an issue for the demographics the Tory party needs to attract - particularly those in their thirties and forties, who moved more towards Labour last time out. Somehow I doubt the views such as disliking gay marriage, and believing that everything is all fine with the current economic settlement are going to win them over.
Where is the evidence Tory members want to reverse gay marriage? It came in under a Conservative PM, albeit in a Coalition
The Tories need a spell in opposition. Big boosts in membership require it, and whilst in government their membership can only continue to fall - especially given that their age profile as recently reported must give their membership base a high mortality rate.
The average age of a Tory member is 57, though it is true the Tories got a big boost in members under Hague from 1997 to 2001 albeit less so in voters
So basically parties grow when in opposition and they feel they can enact change rather than in government.
Nothing new there. Although the tories to have a lot of work to do to attact new younger voters. that can and will only happen in opposition.
During the Tories' last period in opposition, party membership collapsed. Can't recall the exact figures now but I think membership in 2010 was only around one-third of 1997.
Conservative membership rose under both Hague and Howard but halved when Cameron was leader
I must say that I'm not at all surprised by the revelation that members of the Conservative Party are right wing and Eurosceptic.
52:48. Who are the freaks?
When you take the entire worldview of Tory members as a whole - well....
The Death penalty still had a sizeable amount of support - but on issues like gay marriage....
Perhaps the trouble is that the views do pose an issue for the demographics the Tory party needs to attract - particularly those in their thirties and forties, who moved more towards Labour last time out. Somehow I doubt the views such as disliking gay marriage, and believing that everything is all fine with the current economic settlement are going to win them over.
Where is the evidence Tory members want to reverse gay marriage? It came in under a Conservative PM, albeit in a Coalition
There is no gay marriage question asked there. Most voters support the death penalty for serial killers and want more discipline in schools so nothing out of kilter from Tory members there
@TOPPING And? It hardly suggests Young is a great champion of big believer in the potential of working class kids. Then there’s his weird eugenics idea which is more recent....
On eugenics and selective breeding for high IQ In a 2015 essay for the Australian publication The Quadrant, entitled The fall of the meritocracy, under a section headed “Progressive eugenics”, Young proposed that poorer people should be helped to choose which embryos were allowed to develop, based on intelligence.
My proposal is this: once this technology [genetically engineered intelligence] becomes available, why not offer it free of charge to parents on low incomes with below-average IQs? Provided there is sufficient take-up, it could help to address the problem of flat-lining inter-generational social mobility and serve as a counterweight to the tendency for the meritocratic elite to become a hereditary elite. It might make all the difference when it comes to the long-term sustainability of advanced meritocratic societies.
Do you think he might have been indulging in hyperbole in order to highlight an issue which he evidently feels strongly about - the hereditary elite - rather than he actually thinks people should be socially engineered?
Um, nope. If he doesn’t feel people should be socially engineered, perhaps he shouldn’t suggest it?
OK I've skim read the article. Yes he does put it forward as an option (albeit with yet-to-exist technology). He cites it as redistribution of intelligence rather than wealth and yes that will be pretty objectionable to many (he also uses the example of hereditary diseases).
But more than that, given the pre-amble to that particular part of the essay, I maintain that he is citing radical solutions for radical, intractable problems. Did he mean it not as satire? Not 100% sure. Perhaps @TSE can enlighten us after he next bumps into him down the pub.
I have doubts that there aren’t other radical solutions he could have opted for, solutions which don’t look so bad....
Given the abortion rates around Down's, what makes you think that a reasonably large chunk of society wouldn't quietly agree with that position and follow through with it in their own private lives?
I don’t think your analogy works - many people don’t want to have to deal with a disabled child (sadly) - that’s not the same thing as eugenics for working class kids.
I must say that I'm not at all surprised by the revelation that members of the Conservative Party are right wing and Eurosceptic.
52:48. Who are the freaks?
When you take the entire worldview of Tory members as a whole - well....
The Death penalty still had a sizeable amount of support - but on issues like gay marriage....
Perhaps the trouble is that the views do pose an issue for the demographics the Tory party needs to attract - particularly those in their thirties and forties, who moved more towards Labour last time out. Somehow I doubt the views such as disliking gay marriage, and believing that everything is all fine with the current economic settlement are going to win them over.
Where is the evidence Tory members want to reverse gay marriage? It came in under a Conservative PM, albeit in a Coalition
There is no gay marriage question asked there. Most voters support the death penalty for serial killers and want more discipline in schools so nothing out of kilter from Tory members there
Yes there is, look at the second picture ‘figure 7.’
In the real world the impact of Brexit continues to change the economy. We will be poorer, but a more balanced economy both geographically and in terms of sectors. The size of economy will be smaller as we will have fewer people and critically fewer people of working age. There will be a transfer of wealth from the retired to the young which is overdue. House prices will stagnate and the pound will stay low for many years.
What does greater 'wealth' mean anyway - when it's overly concentrated and not widely shared as has been the case since 2008. Iran has a higher GDP than Norway as it has more people - is it 'happier' or 'wealthier' - no because GDP per head is s better measure and Norway is a more equal society.
It may be a shock to many asset rich Londoners but there really is more to life than money - are we happier now than in the 50s or 60s?. Community, shared values, less division, less inequality within and between cities and regions and generations. If that is what Brexit gives us it sounds a net positive. Although I some how think buy to let Phil and Carney will do whatever it takes to avoid house price falls.
And for all that supposed 'wealth' Londoners on the tube do seem a rather unhappy and miserable bunch. Money doesn't necessarily buy you contentment and many who voted Brexit in the north and on low incomes think things can't get any worse for them or their kids or grandkids.
The Tories need a spell in opposition. Big boosts in membership require it, and whilst in government their membership can only continue to fall - especially given that their age profile as recently reported must give their membership base a high mortality rate.
The average age of a Tory member is 57, though it is true the Tories got a big boost in members under Hague from 1997 to 2001 albeit less so in voters
So basically parties grow when in opposition and they feel they can enact change rather than in government.
Nothing new there. Although the tories to have a lot of work to do to attact new younger voters. that can and will only happen in opposition.
During the Tories' last period in opposition, party membership collapsed. Can't recall the exact figures now but I think membership in 2010 was only around one-third of 1997.
Conservative membership rose under both Hague and Howard but halved when Cameron was leader
Suggesting the views of the Tory members aren't particularly voter friendly? And how foolish the Tories were to lose the leader who won them their first majority in nearly a quarter of a century?
I must say that I'm not at all surprised by the revelation that members of the Conservative Party are right wing and Eurosceptic.
52:48. Who are the freaks?
When you take the entire worldview of Tory members as a whole - well....
The Death penalty still had a sizeable amount of support - but on issues like gay marriage....
Perhaps the trouble is that the views do pose an issue for the demographics the Tory party needs to attract - particularly those in their thirties and forties, who moved more towards Labour last time out. Somehow I doubt the views such as disliking gay marriage, and believing that everything is all fine with the current economic settlement are going to win them over.
Where is the evidence Tory members want to reverse gay marriage? It came in under a Conservative PM, albeit in a Coalition
There is no gay marriage question asked there. Most voters support the death penalty for serial killers and want more discipline in schools so nothing out of kilter from Tory members there
Yes there is, look at the second picture ‘figure 7.’
OK but 41% still support it and most of the rest probably support civil unions. The issue with marriage was always the religious aspect and not even JRM has said he would make it party policy to reverse it despite his personal views
What's hilarious about this Trump book is that even with all of the disasters described in it, Hilary still lost to Don. What an awful candidate she was.
Indeed. Although you could make that comment in reverse too. Had the Republicans picked a bog-standard competent candidate, they would likely have won with their biggest ECV since 1988 - though that's a pretty hypothetical situation given the nature of the runners-up to Trump. Indeed, what's remarkable about the 2016 race is that despite the fact they were both dreadful candidates, you can't really say that the primary voters were wrong to pick Hillary over Sanders, or Trump over Cruz.
Sanders may well have won Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Hillary only lost them by 1% each and he won 2/3 of them in the Democratic primaries
That's true - but Trump would have hammered the well-documented "I'm a socialist" line against Commie Bernie, and that would likely have flipped other states. Trump's team went after those rusty Blue states because they identified - rightly - that they were in play given the nature of both Trump's campaign *and* Hillary's campaign. A Trump v Sanders race would have produced a different map.
Toby Young's real crime is to be a Conservative who has the audacity to want to work in a regulatory body overseeing the education sector, who see it as rightfully being a wholly-owned possession of the Left.
The Tories need a spell in opposition. Big boosts in membership require it, and whilst in government their membership can only continue to fall - especially given that their age profile as recently reported must give their membership base a high mortality rate.
The average age of a Tory member is 57, though it is true the Tories got a big boost in members under Hague from 1997 to 2001 albeit less so in voters
So basically parties grow when in opposition and they feel they can enact change rather than in government.
Nothing new there. Although the tories to have a lot of work to do to attact new younger voters. that can and will only happen in opposition.
During the Tories' last period in opposition, party membership collapsed. Can't recall the exact figures now but I think membership in 2010 was only around one-third of 1997.
Conservative membership rose under both Hague and Howard but halved when Cameron was leader
Suggesting the views of the Tory members aren't particularly voter friendly? And how foolish the Tories were to lose the leader who won them their first majority in nearly a quarter of a century?
60% of Tory members still elected Cameron of course Labour membership also had fallen significantly by the time Blair left office and is significantly higher now under Corbyn.
It was Cameron who called the referendum and Cameron who resigned after he lost it.
In the real world the impact of Brexit continues to change the economy. We will be poorer, but a more balanced economy both geographically and in terms of sectors. The size of economy will be smaller as we will have fewer people and critically fewer people of working age. There will be a transfer of wealth from the retired to the young which is overdue. House prices will stagnate and the pound will stay low for many years.
What does greater 'wealth' mean anyway - when it's overly concentrated and not widely shared as has been the case since 2008. Iran has a higher GDP than Norway as it has more people - is it 'happier' or 'wealthier' - no because GDP per head is s better measure and Norway is a more equal society.
It may be a shock to many asset rich Londoners but there really is more to life than money. Community, shared values, less division, less inequality within and between cities and regions. If that is what Brexit gives us it sounds a net positive.
Cos for all that supposed 'wealth' Londoners on the tube do seem a rather unhappy and miserable bunch. Money doesn't necessarily buy you contentment and many who voted Brexit in the north and on low incomes think things can't get any worse for them or their kids or grandkids.
It may come as a shock to northerners that London contains some of the most deprived parts of the country alongside the affluence. We are not all decadent authors, lawyers and former Chancellors on £650k for one day a month.
Hangers, floggers, xenophobes, curtain-twitchers and technophobes. It's long way from the Cameroon vision of modernisation, for sure.
It does partly explain the continuous downward trend of Tory membership, at a time when Labour, LD, Green, SNP memberships have risen significantly.
Why would a moderate, socially liberal person want to join? other than while feeling for their wallet, and Brexit has interfered even with that.
Why would anyone want to join any party? Only < 1m political party members throughout the UK.
Most people just get on with it and register their interest at the ballot box.
Those who identify strongly with a party should join. Apart from the obvious fact that if everyone took the attitude of " just get[ting] on with it" (their life, presumably), they wouldn't then be able to "register their interest at the ballot box" as there'd be no-one to run the party, there's the point that larger memberships are less prone to taking erratic and bad decisions - and preventing that is obviously in the interests of those who feel an affinity with that party.
Does the election and re-election of Corbyn not test that premise rather severely?
No - on the contrary. Firstly, there were lots of entryists who are more noturally Greens, Respect and other wacky far-left inclined; but more importantly, Corbyn was able to win because the moderate centre-left weren't there in sufficient numbers whereas the more motivated radicals were.
Given the improvement in electoral performance weren't the members right to take the move they did regarding the leadership?
It can only really be called an erratic or bad decision based on differing political views as I don't think too many would argue one of the other candidates would have done better, I'd argue far worse.
No. If May hadn't run the world's worst election campaign, she'd now be sitting pretty on a majority of 200, and Dennis Skinner would have provided the Portillo Moment of the election. Corbyn didn't know she was going to mess up so spectacularly.
It is true that Corbyn was in no small part responsible for Labour's recovery with his own meetings, rallies and campaigning - but that really only took effect *after* the Tory manifesto launch when he was given a hearing. Without that opportunity, and off the back of the disastrous local elections (Teesside, W Midlands metro-mayors etc), he would never have had the chance to fight back as he did.
In the real world the impact of Brexit continues to change the economy. We will be poorer, but a more balanced economy both geographically and in terms of sectors. The size of economy will be smaller as we will have fewer people and critically fewer people of working age. There will be a transfer of wealth from the retired to the young which is overdue. House prices will stagnate and the pound will stay low for many years.
The biggest impact of the Brexit vote was the fall in Sterling. That has cut consumer spending, but boosted industrial output and exports. Overall, growth will probably be about 1.7% this year, compared to 1.9% in 2016.
What's hilarious about this Trump book is that even with all of the disasters described in it, Hilary still lost to Don. What an awful candidate she was.
Indeed. Although you could make that comment in reverse too. Had the Republicans picked a bog-standard competent candidate, they would likely have won with their biggest ECV since 1988 - though that's a pretty hypothetical situation given the nature of the runners-up to Trump. Indeed, what's remarkable about the 2016 race is that despite the fact they were both dreadful candidates, you can't really say that the primary voters were wrong to pick Hillary over Sanders, or Trump over Cruz.
Sanders may well have won Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Hillary only lost them by 1% each and he won 2/3 of them in the Democratic primaries
That's true - but Trump would have hammered the well-documented "I'm a socialist" line against Commie Bernie, and that would likely have flipped other states. Trump's team went after those rusty Blue states because they identified - rightly - that they were in play given the nature of both Trump's campaign *and* Hillary's campaign. A Trump v Sanders race would have produced a different map.
Would they? It might have been closer in New Jersey and Connecticut and California but Sanders would still likely have won them and the Electoral College. Almost all the polls showed Sanders doing better against Trump than Hillary
"Here was a key Trump White House rationale: expertise, that liberal virtue, was overrated."
This is some scary stuff... "In the Trump White House, policy making ... flowed up. It was a process of suggesting, in throw-it-against-the-wall style, what the president might want, and hoping he might then think that he had thought of this himself."
I have doubts that there aren’t other radical solutions he could have opted for, solutions which don’t look so bad....
Given the abortion rates around Down's, what makes you think that a reasonably large chunk of society wouldn't quietly agree with that position and follow through with it in their own private lives?
I don’t think your analogy works - many people don’t want to have to deal with a disabled child (sadly) - that’s not the same thing as eugenics for working class kids.
People want their children to have better lives than their own - and that includes being more knowledgeable and more capable than they are. Couple that with the position that an early stage fetus isn't really a person, then abortion or radical-reworking of the fetus doesn't seem that radical a position to take.
Young's comment reads as if he expects the middle and upper classes to embrace interventionist re-working and retrying whatever; his thrust is that we should be making sure the working class (and lower) aren't excluded, that it should be an NHS offering rather than just a BUPA one.
Hangers, floggers, xenophobes, curtain-twitchers and technophobes. It's long way from the Cameroon vision of modernisation, for sure.
It does partly explain the continuous downward trend of Tory membership, at a time when Labour, LD, Green, SNP memberships have risen significantly.
Why would a moderate, socially liberal person want to join? other than while feeling for their wallet, and Brexit has interfered even with that.
Why would anyone want to join any party? Only < 1m political party members throughout the UK.
Most people just get on with it and register their interest at the ballot box.
Those who identify strongly with a party should join. Apart from the obvious fact that if everyone took the attitude of " just get[ting] on with affinity with that party.
Does the election and re-election of Corbyn not test that premise rather severely?
No - on the contrary. Firstly, there were lots of entryists who are more noturally Greens, Respect and other wacky far-left inclined; but more importantly, Corbyn was able to win because the moderate centre-left weren't there in sufficient numbers whereas the more motivated radicals were.
Given the improvement in electoral performance weren't the members right to take the move they did regarding the leadership?
It can only really be called an erratic or bad decision based on differing political views as I don't think too many would argue one of the other candidates would have done better, I'd argue far worse.
No. If May hadn't run the world's worst election campaign, she'd now be sitting pretty on a majority of 200, and Dennis Skinner would have provided the Portillo Moment of the election. Corbyn didn't know she was going to mess up so spectacularly.
It is true that Corbyn was in no small part responsible for Labour's recovery with his own meetings, rallies and campaigning - but that really only took effect *after* the Tory manifesto launch when he was given a hearing. Without that opportunity, and off the back of the disastrous local elections (Teesside, W Midlands metro-mayors etc), he would never have had the chance to fight back as he did.
The Tory lead was never really as back as suggested, in the local elections they got just 38% ie 4% less than in the general election in June, Corbyn just squeezed the LD vote. The LDs got 18% in May
In the real world the impact of Brexit continues to change the economy. We will be poorer, but a more balanced economy both geographically and in terms of sectors. The size of economy will be smaller as we will have fewer people and critically fewer people of working age. There will be a transfer of wealth from the retired to the young which is overdue. House prices will stagnate and the pound will stay low for many years.
That's largely speculation. None of the repatriated powers from Brexit have been realised yet, let alone any direct effects resulting from them due to different policy decisions between the EU and the UK. They won't be until the mid 2020s at the earliest.
It could be, by the end of the 2020s/early 2030s, that our services sector and productivity compares very favourably with the EU.
In the meantime, the economy is still growing pleasantly enough, and the pound is holding up, despite the doomsday scenarios of 20 months ago.
I must say that I'm not at all surprised by the revelation that members of the Conservative Party are right wing and Eurosceptic.
52:48. Who are the freaks?
When you take the entire worldview of Tory members as a whole - well....
The Death penalty still had a sizeable amount of support - but on issues like gay marriage....
Perhaps the trouble is that the views do pose an issue for the demographics the Tory party needs to attract - particularly those in their thirties and forties, who moved more towards Labour last time out. Somehow I doubt the views such as disliking gay marriage, and believing that everything is all fine with the current economic settlement are going to win them over.
Where is the evidence Tory members want to reverse gay marriage? It came in under a Conservative PM, albeit in a Coalition
It's one of those pathetic lines trotted out by folks on the Left, who think by their substituted prejuduces that they know how the Tory Party thinks.
They don't.
I have had gay marriage raised on the doorstep once - in two general election camapigns. And that person was still going to vote Conservative.
I must say that I'm not at all surprised by the revelation that members of the Conservative Party are right wing and Eurosceptic.
52:48. Who are the freaks?
When you take the entire worldview of Tory members as a whole - well....
The Death penalty still had a sizeable amount of support - but on issues like gay marriage....
Perhaps the trouble is that the views do pose an issue for the demographics the Tory party needs to attract - particularly those in their thirties and forties, who moved more towards Labour last time out. Somehow I doubt the views such as disliking gay marriage, and believing that everything is all fine with the current economic settlement are going to win them over.
Where is the evidence Tory members want to reverse gay marriage? It came in under a Conservative PM, albeit in a Coalition
It's one of those pathetic lines trotted out by folks on the Left, who think by their substituted prejuduces that they know how the Tory Party thinks.
They don't.
I have had gay marriage raised on the doorstep once - in two general election camapigns. And that person was still going to vote Conservative.
Hangers, floggers, xenophobes, curtain-twitchers and technophobes. It's long way from the Cameroon vision of modernisation, for sure.
It does .
Why would anyone want to join any party? Only < 1m political party members throughout the UK.
Most people just get on with it and register their interest at the ballot box.
Those.
Does the election and re-election of Corbyn not test that premise rather severely?
No - on the contrary. Firstly, there were lots of entryists who are more noturally Greens, Respect and other wacky far-left inclined; but more importantly, Corbyn was able to win because the moderate centre-left weren't there in sufficient numbers whereas the more motivated radicals were.
Given the improvement in electoral performance weren't the members right to take the move they did regarding the leadership?
It can only really be called an erratic or bad decision based on differing political views as I don't think too many would argue one of the other candidates would have done better, I'd argue far worse.
No. If May hadn't run the world's worst election campaign, she'd now be sitting pretty on a majority of 200, and Dennis Skinner would have provided the Portillo Moment of the election. Corbyn didn't know she was going to mess up so spectacularly.
It is true that Corbyn was in no small part responsible for Labour's recovery with his own meetings, rallies and campaigning - but that really only took effect *after* the Tory manifesto launch when he was given a hearing. Without that opportunity, and off the back of the disastrous local elections (Teesside, W Midlands metro-mayors etc), he would never have had the chance to fight back as he did.
Some of that lead was a chimera. And Corbyn would always have surged, in my view, as the Left rallied round him in opposition.
She realistically had a chance of a majority of 50-60, on a voteshare of 44-45%, which she blew off the back of piss-poor seat targeting and messaging, and the most atrocious General Election crack-suicide squad campaign I can remember in my lifetime. I was double face-palming myself 16 hours a day for 5 weeks.
It made Hilton/Coulson's Jan-May 2010 confused mess look like an Oscar-winning performance.
I knew that Momentum were going to have a field day with this.
So Momentum thinks it is fair game to attack people for *interesting* views and their past.
Game on.
Are appointment?
I appointment.
Were job.
But those aren't the only specs for the job.
On that.
I education.
I guess that's why Labour are pushing so hard to get rid of him, they can't afford for WWC children to get an education and get off a future of benefits/crime/poverty.
On ‘universally unattractive’ working-class students at Oxford In a 1988 book The Oxford Myth, Young wrote about working class students, or “stains”, arriving at Oxford.
It was as if all the meritocratic fantasies of every 1960s educationalist had come true and all Harold Wilson’s children had been let in at the gate … Small, vaguely deformed undergraduates would scuttle across the quad as if carrying mobile homes on their backs. Replete with acne and anoraks, they would peer up through thick pebble-glasses, pausing only to blow their noses
Yes, Tobes needs to explain his journey: how he went from sneering at the oiks who lowered the tone of his Oxford college to becoming their champion and saviour. It will be a fascinating story if he can tell it convincingly.
As noted previously, Toby Young was in the year below me at school. He is today what he was then: a smart bloke who likes to pick an argument and shock people. I have no doubt that his private persona these days is very different to his public one and I'd say almost all his Tweets are infantile cries for attention rather than anything deeply sinister. That does not make him anything other than a prat, of course. But some perspective is needed. He is one of 15 voices on a quango that to all intents and purposes has been set up to get some decent headlines in the Daily Mail. In other words, this is all a fuss about not very much. Where it will damage Toby a lot more - and what I think the attacks are actually about - is that he clearly sees himself as another Tory journalist who can make the jump from page to politics - just like his two undoubted heroes: Johnson and Gove. He wants to be an MP. That's now got a whole lot harder.
Toby Young's real crime is to be a Conservative who has the audacity to want to work in a regulatory body overseeing the education sector, who see it as rightfully being a wholly-owned possession of the Left.
Not really. His crime is being a prize cock of the highest order.
Given the improvement in electoral performance weren't the members right to take the move they did regarding the leadership?
It can only really be called an erratic or bad decision based on differing political views as I don't think too many would argue one of the other candidates would have done better, I'd argue far worse.
I think that's the general view among centrist Labour members now (around 45% of whom supported him anyway). Their objection to him was mostly that they thought he'd lose big time: the argument was very explicitly between "Put ideals first and then try to win" vs "Put winning first and see what we can do for the ideals".
When he did pretty well, they reconsidered. There are some members who really object to some of the programme - don't want to renationalise the rail industry and utilities, for instance - and some on both sides who just can't stop fighting the traditional left-right war (Labour First vs CLPD), but most are fine with it now. If a big Tory lead opened up in the polls that might reopen the issue (though people are a bit poll-shy now).
In the real world the impact of Brexit continues to change the economy. We will be poorer, but a more balanced economy both geographically and in terms of sectors. The size of economy will be smaller as we will have fewer people and critically fewer people of working age. There will be a transfer of wealth from the retired to the young which is overdue. House prices will stagnate and the pound will stay low for many years.
An obvious consequence of us playing our trump card: projections of continued low productivity growth by the OBR. Once they had declared that we were stuck with low productivity growth an improvement was absolutely inevitable.
I have doubts that there aren’t other radical solutions he could have opted for, solutions which don’t look so bad....
Given the abortion rates around Down's, what makes you think that a reasonably large chunk of society wouldn't quietly agree with that position and follow through with it in their own private lives?
I don’t think your analogy works - many people don’t want to have to deal with a disabled child (sadly) - that’s not the same thing as eugenics for working class kids.
People want their children to have better lives than their own - and that includes being more knowledgeable and more capable than they are. Couple that with the position that an early stage fetus isn't really a person, then abortion or radical-reworking of the fetus doesn't seem that radical a position to take.
Young's comment reads as if he expects the middle and upper classes to embrace interventionist re-working and retrying whatever; his thrust is that we should be making sure the working class (and lower) aren't excluded, that it should be an NHS offering rather than just a BUPA one.
People don’t see the fetus as a person when they don’t plan to have the child. By contrast when they are planning to have the child, they tend to confere the status of ‘person’ on to the fetus. That’s why I don’t think your analogy works.
Mr. Foxy, it's a combination of being in government and not being fashionable. Social media bubbles overall favour the bleeding heart left over the fiscally dry right.
Hardly, though the paranoid ranters of the alt. right perhaps could not be included in the fiscally dry camp.
Seriously, other than personal ambition, why would a socially liberal moderate conservative join the current local associations? just look at the abuse heaped on Soubry, Morgan, Wollaston etc. These are a few of the Tories that I would consider voting for, but increasingly atypical.
You clearly know nothing of the relationship between Wollaston and her local association.
I must say that I'm not at all surprised by the revelation that members of the Conservative Party are right wing and Eurosceptic.
52:48. Who are the freaks?
When you take the entire worldview of Tory members as a whole - well....
The Death penalty still had a sizeable amount of support - but on issues like gay marriage....
Perhaps the trouble is that the views do pose an issue for the demographics the Tory party needs to attract - particularly those in their thirties and forties, who moved more towards Labour last time out. Somehow I doubt the views such as disliking gay marriage, and believing that everything is all fine with the current economic settlement are going to win them over.
Where is the evidence Tory members want to reverse gay marriage? It came in under a Conservative PM, albeit in a Coalition
It's one of those pathetic lines trotted out by folks on the Left, who think by their substituted prejuduces that they know how the Tory Party thinks.
They don't.
I have had gay marriage raised on the doorstep once - in two general election camapigns. And that person was still going to vote Conservative.
That only 41% of the Tory party membership support gay marriage is something that the research shows. It’s not a ‘pathetic line trotted out by the left’ it’s simply what the findings show.
Toby Young's real crime is to be a Conservative who has the audacity to want to work in a regulatory body overseeing the education sector, who see it as rightfully being a wholly-owned possession of the Left.
Not really. His crime is being a prize cock of the highest order.
If he was a Labour supporter, any controversy surrounding his past utterances would be the excusable indiscretions of youth, fair comment taken out of context, or unfair discrimination or partisan attacks based on what is now well in the past.
As he's a Conservative supporter, it's evidence of his moral turpitude.
Toby Young's real crime is to be a Conservative who has the audacity to want to work in a regulatory body overseeing the education sector, who see it as rightfully being a wholly-owned possession of the Left.
Not really. His crime is being a prize cock of the highest order.
If he was a Labour supporter, any controversy surrounding his past utterances would be the excusable indiscretions of youth, fair comment taken out of context, or unfair discrimination or partisan attacks based on what is now well in the past.
As he's a Conservative supporter, it's evidence of his moral turpitude.
Spot on. One rule for the righteous, another for the scum.
Why would anyone want to join any party? Only < 1m political party members throughout the UK.
Most people just get on with it and register their interest at the ballot box.
Those.
Does the election and re-election of Corbyn not test that premise rather severely?
No - on the contrary. Firstly, there were lots of entryists who are more noturally Greens, Respect and other wacky far-left inclined; but more importantly, Corbyn was able to win because the moderate centre-left weren't there in sufficient numbers whereas the more motivated radicals were.
Given the improvement in electoral performance weren't the members right to take the move they did regarding the leadership?
It can only really be called an erratic or bad decision based on differing political views as I don't think too many would argue one of the other candidates would have done better, I'd argue far worse.
No. If May hadn't run the world's worst election campaign, she'd now be sitting pretty on a majority of 200, and Dennis Skinner would have provided the Portillo Moment of the election. Corbyn didn't know she was going to mess up so spectacularly.
It is true that Corbyn was in no small part responsible for Labour's recovery with his own meetings, rallies and campaigning - but that really only took effect *after* the Tory manifesto launch when he was given a hearing. Without that opportunity, and off the back of the disastrous local elections (Teesside, W Midlands metro-mayors etc), he would never have had the chance to fight back as he did.
Some of that lead was a chimera. And Corbyn would always have surged, in my view, as the Left rallied round him in opposition.
She realistically had a chance of a majority of 50-60, on a voteshare of 44-45%, which she blew off the back of piss-poor seat targeting and messaging, and the most atrocious General Election crack-suicide squad campaign I can remember in my lifetime. I was double face-palming myself 16 hours a day for 5 weeks.
It made Hilton/Coulson's Jan-May 2010 confused mess look like an Oscar-winning performance.
If it was a chimera, how did the Tories win Teesside or the W Mids conurbation during the course of the campaign? The 15-point leads were real and validated in the local elections. Had the campaign delivery and messaging (and leadership) been right then the targeting strategy would have fallen into line. It wasn't so it didn't.
I knew that Momentum were going to have a field day with this.
So Momentum thinks it is fair game to attack people for *interesting* views and their past.
Game on.
Are appointment?
I appointment.
Were job.
But those aren't the only specs for the job.
On that.
I education.
I guess that's why Labour are pushing so hard to get rid of him, they can't afford for WWC children to get an education and get off a future of benefits/crime/poverty.
On ‘universally unattractive’ working-class students at Oxford In a 1988 book The Oxford Myth, Young wrote about working class students, or “stains”, arriving at Oxford.
Yes, Tobes needs to explain his journey: how he went from sneering at the oiks who lowered the tone of his Oxford college to becoming their champion and saviour. It will be a fascinating story if he can tell it convincingly.
As noted previously, Toby Young was in the year below me at school. He is today what he was then: a smart bloke who likes to pick an argument and shock people. I have no doubt that his private persona these days is very different to his public one and I'd say almost all his Tweets are infantile cries for attention rather than anything deeply sinister. That does not make him anything other than a prat, of course. But some perspective is needed. He is one of 15 voices on a quango that to all intents and purposes has been set up to get some decent headlines in the Daily Mail. In other words, this is all a fuss about not very much. Where it will damage Toby a lot more - and what I think the attacks are actually about - is that he clearly sees himself as another Tory journalist who can make the jump from page to politics - just like his two undoubted heroes: Johnson and Gove. He wants to be an MP. That's now got a whole lot harder.
I think Toby Young's many achievements and experience in the education sector speak for themselves, and he writes eloquent and convincing arguments that make you pause and think, on a number of subjects.
I couldn't care less if he occasionally uses fruity language, that offends some people who choose to take umbrage at it.
Toby Young's real crime is to be a Conservative who has the audacity to want to work in a regulatory body overseeing the education sector, who see it as rightfully being a wholly-owned possession of the Left.
Not really. His crime is being a prize cock of the highest order.
If he was a Labour supporter, any controversy surrounding his past utterances would be the excusable indiscretions of youth, fair comment taken out of context, or unfair discrimination or partisan attacks based on what is now well in the past.
As he's a Conservative supporter, it's evidence of his moral turpitude.
And Guido and the Daily Mail and the Telegraph and any number of folk on here would be using those emails to claim that said Labour appointee was not capable of doing the job.
Given the improvement in electoral performance weren't the members right to take the move they did regarding the leadership?
It can only really be called an erratic or bad decision based on differing political views as I don't think too many would argue one of the other candidates would have done better, I'd argue far worse.
I think that's the general view among centrist Labour members now (around 45% of whom supported him anyway). Their objection to him was mostly that they thought he'd lose big time: the argument was very explicitly between "Put ideals first and then try to win" vs "Put winning first and see what we can do for the ideals".
When he did pretty well, they reconsidered. There are some members who really object to some of the programme - don't want to renationalise the rail industry and utilities, for instance - and some on both sides who just can't stop fighting the traditional left-right war (Labour First vs CLPD), but most are fine with it now. If a big Tory lead opened up in the polls that might reopen the issue (though people are a bit poll-shy now).
Renationalising the railways as the franchises come up is a fine idea that commands support across the political spectrum. The existing system is an international laughing stock, full of absurd contradictions.
1. We allow other countries to nationalise our franchises but not our own country
2. When one of our major franchises failed the government had to renationalise it to keep it running – and it was a major success story (East Coast). They then reprivatised it purely for ideological reasons (to Virgin) and it is now again becoming a national disgrace.
3. The busiest railway in the land (the Tube) is, erm, nationalised, which rather gives the lie to the insane idea that we can't have nationalised systems in the UK.
I knew that Momentum were going to have a field day with this.
So Momentum thinks it is fair game to attack people for *interesting* views and their past.
Game on.
Are appointment?
I appointment.
Were job.
But those aren't the only specs for the job.
On that.
I education.
I guess that's why Labour are pushing so hard to get rid of him, they can't afford for WWC children to get an education and get off a future of benefits/crime/poverty.
On ‘universally unattractive’ working-class students at Oxford In a 1988 book The Oxford Myth, Young wrote about working class students, or “stains”, arriving at Oxford.
Yes, Tobes needs to explain his journey: how he went from sneering at the oiks who lowered the tone of his Oxford college to becoming their champion and saviour. It will be a fascinating story if he can tell it convincingly.
As now got a whole lot harder.
I think Toby Young's many achievements and experience in the education sector speak for themselves, and he writes eloquent and convincing arguments that make you pause and think, on a number of subjects.
I couldn't care less if he occasionally uses fruity language, that offends some people who choose to take umbrage at it.
Toby Young's real crime is to be a Conservative who has the audacity to want to work in a regulatory body overseeing the education sector, who see it as rightfully being a wholly-owned possession of the Left.
Not really. His crime is being a prize cock of the highest order.
If he was a Labour supporter, any controversy surrounding his past utterances would be the excusable indiscretions of youth, fair comment taken out of context, or unfair discrimination or partisan attacks based on what is now well in the past.
As he's a Conservative supporter, it's evidence of his moral turpitude.
I don't really care about this story – it strikes me as a storm in a teacup really.
But he's a cock nevertheless – a real champion prat.
What's hilarious about this Trump book is that even with all of the disasters described in it, Hilary still lost to Don. What an awful candidate she was.
Indeed. Although you could make that comment in reverse too. Had the Republicans picked a bog-standard competent candidate, they would likely have won with their biggest ECV since 1988 - though that's a pretty hypothetical situation given the nature of the runners-up to Trump. Indeed, what's remarkable about the 2016 race is that despite the fact they were both dreadful candidates, you can't really say that the primary voters were wrong to pick Hillary over Sanders, or Trump over Cruz.
Sanders may well have won Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Hillary only lost them by 1% each and he won 2/3 of them in the Democratic primaries
That's true - but Trump would have hammered the well-documented "I'm a socialist" line against Commie Bernie, and that would likely have flipped other states. Trump's team went after those rusty Blue states because they identified - rightly - that they were in play given the nature of both Trump's campaign *and* Hillary's campaign. A Trump v Sanders race would have produced a different map.
Would they? It might have been closer in New Jersey and Connecticut and California but Sanders would still likely have won them and the Electoral College. Almost all the polls showed Sanders doing better against Trump than Hillary
Trump wouldn't have needed any of those. He could have had a decent shot at NH, Nevada, Colorado and Virginia. Even if Sanders won all three of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Trump would still have won with any one of those other four.
Why would anyone want to join any party? Only < 1m political party members throughout the UK.
Most people just get on with it and register their interest at the ballot box.
Those.
Does the election and re-election of Corbyn not test that premise rather severely?
No -
Given
No. If May hadn't run the world's worst election campaign, she'd now be sitting pretty on a majority of 200, and Dennis Skinner would have provided the Portillo Moment of the election. Corbyn didn't know she was going to mess up so spectacularly.
It is true that Corbyn was in no small part responsible for Labour's recovery with his own meetings, rallies and campaigning - but that really only took effect *after* the Tory manifesto launch when he was given a hearing. Without that opportunity, and off the back of the disastrous local elections (Teesside, W Midlands metro-mayors etc), he would never have had the chance to fight back as he did.
Some
It made Hilton/Coulson's Jan-May 2010 confused mess look like an Oscar-winning performance.
If it was a chimera, how did the Tories win Teesside or the W Mids conurbation during the course of the campaign? The 15-point leads were real and validated in the local elections. Had the campaign delivery and messaging (and leadership) been right then the targeting strategy would have fallen into line. It wasn't so it didn't.
Those were local elections that took place barely 2 weeks after the General Election was called.
I think any credible form of national campaign would have resulted in a squeezed lead by the end. CCHQ was too unprepared, the leadership of the campaign too confused and disparate, May was always going to be May, Brexit was too much of a motivato (both for and against) and Corbyn was always going to ramp it up massively in the last month, and it was always going to operate under different broadcast, balance and purdah rules.
But, with a short campaign, May engaging in debates and Q&As properly, decent seat targeting, greater focus on The Economy, and a decent, short crisp manifesto, majoring on Brexit, a 50-60 seat majority should have been possible.
The idea May ever seriously had a chance of a 200 seat majority is for the birds.
I knew that Momentum were going to have a field day with this.
So Momentum thinks it is fair game to attack people for *interesting* views and their past.
Game on.
Are appointment?
I appointment.
Were job.
But those aren't the only specs for the job.
On that.
I education.
I guess that's why Labour are pushing so hard to get rid of him, they can't afford for WWC children to get an education and get off a future of benefits/crime/poverty.
On ‘universally unattractive’ working-class students at Oxford In a 1988 book The Oxford Myth, Young wrote about working class students, or “stains”, arriving at Oxford.
Yes, Tobes needs to explain his journey: how he went from sneering at the oiks who lowered the tone of his Oxford college to becoming their champion and saviour. It will be a fascinating story if he can tell it convincingly.
As now got a whole lot harder.
I think Toby Young's many achievements and experience in the education sector speak for themselves, and he writes eloquent and convincing arguments that make you pause and think, on a number of subjects.
I couldn't care less if he occasionally uses fruity language, that offends some people who choose to take umbrage at it.
Why would anyone want to join any party? Only < 1m political party members throughout the UK.
Most people just get on with it and register their interest at the ballot box.
Those.
Does the election and re-election of Corbyn not test that premise rather severely?
No - on the contrary. Firstly, there were lots of entryists who are more noturally Greens, Respect and other wacky far-left inclined; but more importantly, Corbyn was able to win because the moderate centre-left weren't there in sufficient numbers whereas the more motivated radicals were.
Given the improvement in electoral performance weren't the members right to take the move they did regarding the leadership?
It can only really be called an erratic or bad decision based on differing political views as I don't think too many would argue one of the other candidates would have done better, I'd argue far worse.
No. If May hadn't run the world's worst election campaign, she'd now be sitting pretty on a majority of 200, and Dennis Skinner would have provided the Portillo Midlands metro-mayors etc), he would never have had the chance to fight back as he did.
Some of that lead was a chimera. And Corbyn would always have surged, in my view, as the Left rallied round him in opposition.
She realistically had a chance of a majority of 50-60, on a voteshare of 44-45%, which she -May 2010 confused mess look like an Oscar-winning performance.
If it was a chimera, how did the Tories win Teesside or the W Mids conurbation during the course of the campaign? The 15-point leads were real and validated in the local elections. Had the campaign delivery and messaging (and leadership) been right then the targeting strategy would have fallen into line. It wasn't so it didn't.
In May the Tories got 38%, ie less than the 42% they got in June, Labour got 27% and the LDs 18% and UKIP 5%.
So there was virtually no shift from the Tories to Labour from local election voters in the general election campaign at all, the main shift was from LD voters to Labour with a smaller shift from UKIP voters to the Tories
What's hilarious about this Trump book is that even with all of the disasters described in it, Hilary still lost to Don. What an awful candidate she was.
Indeed. Although you could make that comment in reverse too. Had the Republicans picked a bog-standard competent candidate, they would likely have won with their biggest ECV since 1988 - though that's a pretty hypothetical situation given the nature of the runners-up to Trump. Indeed, what's remarkable about the 2016 race is that despite the fact they were both dreadful candidates, you can't really say that the primary voters were wrong to pick Hillary over Sanders, or Trump over Cruz.
Sanders may well have won Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Hillary only lost them by 1% each and he won 2/3 of them in the Democratic primaries
That's true - but Trump would have hammered the well-documented "I'm a socialist" line against Commie Bernie, and that would likely have flipped other states. Trump's team went after those rusty Blue states because they identified - rightly - that they were in play given the nature of both Trump's campaign *and* Hillary's campaign. A Trump v Sanders race would have produced a different map.
Would they? It might have been closer in New Jersey and Connecticut and California but Sanders would still likely have won them and the Electoral College. Almost all the polls showed Sanders doing better against Trump than Hillary
Trump wouldn't have needed any of those. He could have had a decent shot at NH, Nevada, Colorado and Virginia. Even if Sanders won all three of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Trump would still have won with any one of those other four.
Sanders easily won the NH primary, the Hispanic vote would still have won Colorado and Nevada for him and Virginia is now trending Democratic anyway due to the DC exurbs. So winning the 3 rustbelt states would have won Sanders the Electoral College and the Presidency
Toby Young's real crime is to be a Conservative who has the audacity to want to work in a regulatory body overseeing the education sector, who see it as rightfully being a wholly-owned possession of the Left.
Not really. His crime is being a prize cock of the highest order.
If he was a Labour supporter, any controversy surrounding his past utterances would be the excusable indiscretions of youth, fair comment taken out of context, or unfair discrimination or partisan attacks based on what is now well in the past.
As he's a Conservative supporter, it's evidence of his moral turpitude.
I don't really care about this story – it strikes me as a storm in a teacup really.
But he's a cock nevertheless – a real champion prat.
We all have our personal opinions of others.
I'm much more interested in what someone brings to the table, and intellectual balance.
Toby Young's real crime is to be a Conservative who has the audacity to want to work in a regulatory body overseeing the education sector, who see it as rightfully being a wholly-owned possession of the Left.
Not really. His crime is being a prize cock of the highest order.
If he was a Labour supporter, any controversy surrounding his past utterances would be the excusable indiscretions of youth, fair comment taken out of context, or unfair discrimination or partisan attacks based on what is now well in the past.
As he's a Conservative supporter, it's evidence of his moral turpitude.
And Guido and the Daily Mail and the Telegraph and any number of folk on here would be using those emails to claim that said Labour appointee was not capable of doing the job.
Oh, of course.
We all know this is a game all sides play; they want the public policy sphere stacked to their advantage.
I have doubts that there aren’t other radical solutions he could have opted for, solutions which don’t look so bad....
Given the abortion rates around Down's, what makes you think that a reasonably large chunk of society wouldn't quietly agree with that position and follow through with it in their own private lives?
I don’t think your analogy works - many people don’t want to have to deal with a disabled child (sadly) - that’s not the same thing as eugenics for working class kids.
People want their children to have better lives than their own - and that includes being more knowledgeable and more capable than they are. Couple that with the position that an early stage fetus isn't really a person, then abortion or radical-reworking of the fetus doesn't seem that radical a position to take.
Young's comment reads as if he expects the middle and upper classes to embrace interventionist re-working and retrying whatever; his thrust is that we should be making sure the working class (and lower) aren't excluded, that it should be an NHS offering rather than just a BUPA one.
People don’t see the fetus as a person when they don’t plan to have the child. By contrast when they are planning to have the child, they tend to confere the status of ‘person’ on to the fetus. That’s why I don’t think your analogy works.
The ONS thinks that 80% of abortions happen before the test cycle even begins. And if you're going to abort anyway why bother with the wait and the additional unpleasantness of a down's test? If your not going to abort anyway then why bother? It's the positive test result that (in the mother/parent's eyes) move the fetus from a person with a future that they can project their hopes and dreams on to a grim future to be avoided when possible.
I have doubts that there aren’t other radical solutions he could have opted for, solutions which don’t look so bad....
Given the abortion rates around Down's, what makes you think that a reasonably large chunk of society wouldn't quietly agree with that position and follow through with it in their own private lives?
I don’t think your analogy works - many people don’t want to have to deal with a disabled child (sadly) - that’s not the same thing as eugenics for working class kids.
People want their children to have better lives than their own - and that includes being more knowledgeable and more capable than they are. Couple that with the position that an early stage fetus isn't really a person, then abortion or radical-reworking of the fetus doesn't seem that radical a position to take.
Young's comment reads as if he expects the middle and upper classes to embrace interventionist re-working and retrying whatever; his thrust is that we should be making sure the working class (and lower) aren't excluded, that it should be an NHS offering rather than just a BUPA one.
People don’t see the fetus as a person when they don’t plan to have the child. By contrast when they are planning to have the child, they tend to confere the status of ‘person’ on to the fetus. That’s why I don’t think your analogy works.
The ONS thinks that 80% of abortions happen before the test cycle even begins. And if you're going to abort anyway why bother with the wait and the additional unpleasantness of a down's test? If your not going to abort anyway then why bother? It's the positive test result that (in the mother/parent's eyes) move the fetus from a person with a future that they can project their hopes and dreams on to a grim future to be avoided when possible.
So in other words, they no longer see the child as a person once they get the positive test results.
Toby Young's real crime is to be a Conservative who has the audacity to want to work in a regulatory body overseeing the education sector, who see it as rightfully being a wholly-owned possession of the Left.
It's more he is a professional wind up merchant who is now acting shocked and stunned that there is a social consequences for winding people up.
Never mind that the AGW narrative runs contrary to the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Please tell me how it breaks the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
This paper produces a good summary with the final poignant sentence:
"The world it running riot with ignorant people practicing chemical engineering without a registered professional engineer license or degree from reputable college, reporting to UN IPCC and EPA. It is not running out of coal, oil and gas. It is running out of money and unbiased scientists."
Never mind that the AGW narrative runs contrary to the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Please tell me how it breaks the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
This paper produces a good summary with the final poignant sentence:
"The world it running riot with ignorant people practicing chemical engineering without a registered professional engineer license or degree from reputable college, reporting to UN IPCC and EPA. It is not running out of coal, oil and gas. It is running out of money and unbiased scientists."
Comments
It can only really be called an erratic or bad decision based on differing political views as I don't think too many would argue one of the other candidates would have done better, I'd argue far worse.
Nothing new there. Although the tories to have a lot of work to do to attact new younger voters. that can and will only happen in opposition.
In the real world the impact of Brexit continues to change the economy. We will be poorer, but a more balanced economy both geographically and in terms of sectors. The size of economy will be smaller as we will have fewer people and critically fewer people of working age. There will be a transfer of wealth from the retired to the young which is overdue. House prices will stagnate and the pound will stay low for many years.
"Here was a key Trump White House rationale: expertise, that liberal virtue, was overrated."
This is some scary stuff...
"In the Trump White House, policy making ... flowed up. It was a process of suggesting, in throw-it-against-the-wall style, what the president might want, and hoping he might then think that he had thought of this himself."
https://www.axios.com/the-wolff-lines-on-trump-that-ring-unambiguously-true-2522675021.html
Re your example of yourself, well you’ve explained your change of views on here and have been very critical of the situation regarding BTLs. Young hasn’t explained his changing views (as far as I’m aware) and has come out with a series of problematic statements fairly recently as well, to further complicate matters about how genuine he is.
The real trouble is that next time, it will be deliberate that politicians blatantly deny the real world. Arguably we have already seen it with, say, £350M in the Brexit campaign.
https://twitter.com/proftimbale/status/948873704678871041
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2013/09/conservative-party-membership-has-nearly-halved-throughout-david-camerons-premiership/
It may be a shock to many asset rich Londoners but there really is more to life than money - are we happier now than in the 50s or 60s?. Community, shared values, less division, less inequality within and between cities and regions and generations. If that is what Brexit gives us it sounds a net positive. Although I some how think buy to let Phil and Carney will do whatever it takes to avoid house price falls.
And for all that supposed 'wealth' Londoners on the tube do seem a rather unhappy and miserable bunch. Money doesn't necessarily buy you contentment and many who voted Brexit in the north and on low incomes think things can't get any worse for them or their kids or grandkids.
It was Cameron who called the referendum and Cameron who resigned after he lost it.
It is true that Corbyn was in no small part responsible for Labour's recovery with his own meetings, rallies and campaigning - but that really only took effect *after* the Tory manifesto launch when he was given a hearing. Without that opportunity, and off the back of the disastrous local elections (Teesside, W Midlands metro-mayors etc), he would never have had the chance to fight back as he did.
Young's comment reads as if he expects the middle and upper classes to embrace interventionist re-working and retrying whatever; his thrust is that we should be making sure the working class (and lower) aren't excluded, that it should be an NHS offering rather than just a BUPA one.
It could be, by the end of the 2020s/early 2030s, that our services sector and productivity compares very favourably with the EU.
In the meantime, the economy is still growing pleasantly enough, and the pound is holding up, despite the doomsday scenarios of 20 months ago.
They don't.
I have had gay marriage raised on the doorstep once - in two general election camapigns. And that person was still going to vote Conservative.
She realistically had a chance of a majority of 50-60, on a voteshare of 44-45%, which she blew off the back of piss-poor seat targeting and messaging, and the most atrocious General Election crack-suicide squad campaign I can remember in my lifetime. I was double face-palming myself 16 hours a day for 5 weeks.
It made Hilton/Coulson's Jan-May 2010 confused mess look like an Oscar-winning performance.
When he did pretty well, they reconsidered. There are some members who really object to some of the programme - don't want to renationalise the rail industry and utilities, for instance - and some on both sides who just can't stop fighting the traditional left-right war (Labour First vs CLPD), but most are fine with it now. If a big Tory lead opened up in the polls that might reopen the issue (though people are a bit poll-shy now).
As he's a Conservative supporter, it's evidence of his moral turpitude.
I couldn't care less if he occasionally uses fruity language, that offends some people who choose to take umbrage at it.
They should grow up.
1. We allow other countries to nationalise our franchises but not our own country
2. When one of our major franchises failed the government had to renationalise it to keep it running – and it was a major success story (East Coast). They then reprivatised it purely for ideological reasons (to Virgin) and it is now again becoming a national disgrace.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nationalised-east-coast-rail-line-returns-209m-to-taxpayers-8866157.html
3. The busiest railway in the land (the Tube) is, erm, nationalised, which rather gives the lie to the insane idea that we can't have nationalised systems in the UK.
Take back control – renationalise the railways!
But he's a cock nevertheless – a real champion prat.
I think any credible form of national campaign would have resulted in a squeezed lead by the end. CCHQ was too unprepared, the leadership of the campaign too confused and disparate, May was always going to be May, Brexit was too much of a motivato (both for and against) and Corbyn was always going to ramp it up massively in the last month, and it was always going to operate under different broadcast, balance and purdah rules.
But, with a short campaign, May engaging in debates and Q&As properly, decent seat targeting, greater focus on The Economy, and a decent, short crisp manifesto, majoring on Brexit, a 50-60 seat majority should have been possible.
The idea May ever seriously had a chance of a 200 seat majority is for the birds.
So there was virtually no shift from the Tories to Labour from local election voters in the general election campaign at all, the main shift was from LD voters to Labour with a smaller shift from UKIP voters to the Tories
I'm much more interested in what someone brings to the table, and intellectual balance.
We all know this is a game all sides play; they want the public policy sphere stacked to their advantage.
"The world it running riot with ignorant people practicing chemical engineering without a registered professional engineer license or degree from reputable college, reporting to UN IPCC and EPA. It is not running out of coal, oil and gas. It is running out of money and unbiased scientists."
https://principia-scientific.org/thermodynamics-is-essential-for-understanding-effect-of-co2-on-temperature/