I think their origial plan was to try and ensure that Daniel Korski, the CCHQ preferred candidate, would get selected by putting him up against insane choices like Susan Hall. Unfortunately Korski had to exit because of sexual assault allegations (name a more iconic duo than Tory politicians and criminal sleaze) leaving only the insane candidates.
This sort of situation has become a bit of a classic Tory tale with the amount of times similar things have happened since 2019.
I never thought of it before but your comment just made me realise this would be a great backdoor way to get the PR ball rolling. Make the lord’s elected with a full PR system. Maybe with half the seats going up for election every 7 years or something.
They pay a lower rate.
If they were dead set on doing a tax cut (unfortunately for the good of the country) at least they made it an NI cut rather than an income tax cut.
I can see a way forward for labour if they want to raise more money without straight up reversing these cuts by abolishing NI (or gradually reducing it to phase it out) and correspondingly increasing income and/or capital gains tax.
They can chalk it up as making the tax system fairer by removing the tax on which employees pay more than self employed or those with passive wealth-based income. Simultaneously they can say they are building on the one positive outcome of the previous budget.
Thanks for writing this.
When a nationalised company is seen as inefficient or poor service. We all instantly know who to blame. The ministers in charge of that company. Whereas we see an extra layer of blame for privrate non competing companies.
Specifically this aspect is not something I’d really considered before but it’s an astute point.
The numbers quoted indicate much more of a sea change has occurred than I would have expected.
in the 1960s around an eighth of British voters switched their choice between elections. By the 1980s it was a fifth. At the last election Professor Edward Fieldhouse, a political scientist at the University of Manchester, and his colleagues concluded that most of the electorate were swing voters. Politicians see it on the doorstep. “In 1997 around 40% of voters were up for grabs but today it is probably around 70%,” says Jonathan Reynolds, Labour’s shadow business secretary and an MP in the north-west.
Maybe there’s hope for PR within the next 20 years.
Mr Robot, you missed an important sentence:
Abolishing the non-dom tax regime would raise an estimated £3.6bn a year.
Britons, for instance, think they live in a country where only 37 per cent of people would give 1 per cent of their income to the climate fight, but the study indicates the real figure is 48 per cent.
"48% Vs 52%” Oh god it’s the cursed numbers again!
If you’re handy with a screwdriver and a hacksaw + hammer you could disassemble it and put the smaller pieces in the bin one by one.
They’re really descending into the pits of weird fringe politics - like the sort of stuff you’d see from pre-Farage UKIP.
It also seems to be the opposite strategy to Johnson, who was essentially the bullshitting yes man that wanted great, wonderful, positive things for everyone but with no plan on how to achieve it. Instead of grand visions of new (unfeasable) infrastructure projects based on (non existent) future technology that the government will help develop, and impressive sounding targets (with no execution plan) to “make Britain world beating”, we now have policies seeking to actively block and slow development of anything new. Johnson was popular because he was promising progress and great things to everyone. Sunak is now attempting to do the polar opposite of what Johnson used to achieve electoral success, presumably because he’s aiming for the opposite of electoral success???
BNC connector, such a satisfying screw and click into place mechanism.
Very much agree with all these points. I also don’t think it’s that useful to be spamming this community with polls as they come out. But thought this was a helpful bit of information to see where things roughly stand at the beginning of campaign time.