Rishi Sunak and the Conservative Party.

[SuspectUsual]

I think most people, when they are sceptical of the government and its motives, don't believe it's doing something deliberately and malevolently "bad", but rather looking after the interests of various special-interest groups over the population as a whole

Surely looking after the interests of special-interest groups over the population as a whole *is* bad?

 

[DynamicSpirit]

"Conservative Democratic Organisation" for the foaming at the mouth wing? As in various well known "democratic republics"?

Before you start slagging them off, you might want to try doing at least a tiny bit of elementary research to find out what you're criticising. It took me less than 2 minutes to find out a bit more of what the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) is about. You can find their aims here. They include such terrible right-wing foaming-at-the-mouth objectives as:

A Policy Conference, located in a more affordable location, where Ministers would listen to members’ ideas on policies in their subject area, selected by motions submitted through local associations

and

Constituency Associations should have the right to determine who their Parliamentary Candidate and Member of Parliament is and if necessary, deselect their MP.

and

A directly elected Conservative Party Chairman, and other Conservative Party officers

I'd love to know why you apparently think these kinds of things are so objectionable?

 

[MikeWM]

The country should be becoming more self-sufficient in its basic needs. That will take a lot of work over the coming years.

Totally agree. There's no real excuse for not being, our country is in a particularly advantageous position to be able to do that, it is quite shocking there isn't the political will to do so.

 

[Gloster]

Before you start slagging them off, you might want to try doing at least a tiny bit of elementary research to find out what you're criticising. It took me less than 2 minutes to find out a bit more of what the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) is about. You can find their aims here. They include such terrible right-wing foaming-at-the-mouth objectives as:



and


and


I'd love to know why you apparently think these kinds of things are so objectionable?

Without having examined or checked in detail, this sounds rather like what certain parts of the Hard Left have tried to do to Labour at times over the last fifty years. Then it was entryism and was seen as a danger to democracy. Now it is democratic.

 

[edwin_m]

Before you start slagging them off, you might want to try doing at least a tiny bit of elementary research to find out what you're criticising. It took me less than 2 minutes to find out a bit more of what the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) is about. You can find their aims here. They include such terrible right-wing foaming-at-the-mouth objectives as:



and


and


I'd love to know why you apparently think these kinds of things are so objectionable?

It may be democratic but it falls into the trap that brought Corbyn and Trump to positions of influence as well as Johnson and Truss.

Party members, moreorless by definition, are more committed to the party's aims and therefore more radical than the average floating voter that the party needs to attract to win power. The average MP also has a better view than the average member of what is realistic, attainable and likely to win wider support (though there are exceptions both ways on this!). So increased for rank-and-file members is likely to make that party less attractive and less electable.

 

[nw1]

Before you start slagging them off, you might want to try doing at least a tiny bit of elementary research to find out what you're criticising. It took me less than 2 minutes to find out a bit more of what the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) is about. You can find their aims here. They include such terrible right-wing foaming-at-the-mouth objectives as:



and


and


I'd love to know why you apparently think these kinds of things are so objectionable?

Was looking at the range of names present, the usual rabble of right-wingers. If it were a group of relatively middle-of-the-road Tories like Theresa May and so on, I wouldn't make such a comment. And anyway, it was only supposed to be a light-hearted post: don't take it so seriously!

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 4 May 2023 ==

Surely looking after the interests of special-interest groups over the population as a whole *is* bad?

It is, and that was my point. But when I used the term "bad" in that reply, I meant "deliberately causing misfortune to people". My point was that governments tend not to deliberately engineer crises but they can sometimes tend to look after "their kind" of people and neglect everyone else.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Without having examined or checked in detail, this sounds rather like what certain parts of the Hard Left have tried to do to Labour at times over the last fifty years. Then it was entryism and was seen as a danger to democracy. Now it is democratic.

I don't think I'd quite agree. I would say the entryism by the hard left during the 1980s was the fact that they were joining Labour, despite not really agreeing with Labour policies at the time, largely in order to change Labour to be more left wing (rather than, joining primarily in order to support the party). As part of that process, the 'hard left' campaigned to change party rules to democratize Labour (presumably because they figured that if members had more say, the hard left would get more say), but those rule changes weren't the entryism: It was the joining a party they didn't really agree with in order to take it over that was the entryism, and was the bad thing. By themselves, you could argue that some of the rule changes were a good thing - democracy is after all usually good in politics.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 4 May 2023 ==

It may be democratic but it falls into the trap that brought Corbyn and Trump to positions of influence as well as Johnson and Truss.

Are you saying that it's a bad thing for party members to get to vote on who the leader should be? (Or, maybe: who the candidate should be in the case of Trump: I'm not quite sure of the details of how the Republican primary system works). To my mind, that kind of democracy seems a good thing in principle, even though it may have bad results if members vote for someone not competent

Party members, moreorless by definition, are more committed to the party's aims and therefore more radical than the average floating voter that the party needs to attract to win power. The average MP also has a better view than the average member of what is realistic, attainable and likely to win wider support (though there are exceptions both ways on this!). So increased for rank-and-file members is likely to make that party less attractive and less electable.

It's very true that party members tend to be more radical and further from where the population is. But I'm not sure the solution to that is to deny members a voice. Personally I am very sympathetic to the CDO's aims because it seems to me that the Conservative party structure is much more opaque and less democratic than that of either Labour or the LibDems, and it looks to me like the CDO is campaigning - basically to bring the Conservatives' organisation more in line with what would be regarded as completely normal in either of the other two parties.

 

[Thirteen]

On a side note, I do tend to get irritated by journalists and presenters from both sides of the political spectrum whether that be Owen Jones, Ash Sarkar, James Max to name but three and that applies to politicians as well both sides have those who when I see someone I know retweet them on social media like say Zarah Sultana for example, I switch off.

 

[Broucek]

The country should be becoming more self-sufficient in its basic needs. That will take a lot of work over the coming years.

Perhaps. But globalisation has had a MASSIVE positive impact in reducing global poverty (even if the consequential negatives in mature countries were not adequately planned for)

 

[yorksrob]

Perhaps. But globalisation has had a MASSIVE positive impact in reducing global poverty (even if the consequential negatives in mature countries were not adequately planned for)

Unfortunately the globe is only becoming more unstable, therefore it is time for the West to start actively securing its position in terms of energy, food, technology etc.

President Biden clearly recognises this with his Inflation Reduction Act (in spite of the unfortunate acronym).

 

[Typhoon]

Are you saying that it's a bad thing for party members to get to vote on who the leader should be? (Or, maybe: who the candidate should be in the case of Trump: I'm not quite sure of the details of how the Republican primary system works). To my mind, that kind of democracy seems a good thing in principle, even though it may have bad results if members vote for someone not competent

I don't really care who the leader of any political party is, I am not a member of one so have no say. If the Conservative members wanted Liz Truss as the leader of the Conservative Party that is fine, but my problem is that they were effectively electing the Prime Minister whose policies on the economy veered away from her predecessor (as far as I can gather). This of course is not unique to the Conservative Party, there was Blair -> Brown and Wilson -> Callaghan (and Campbell Bannerman -> Asquith for that matter) but in none of those changes was there such a swift change in the situation thanks to Kwarteng's budget; in these cases it was 'business as usual'. It could be the crisis of September/ October 2022 would have happened under Johnson, we don't know but this has thrown up the issue of unelected leaders. Maybe there needs to be a General Election within, say, four/ six months or a change of leadership?

Regarding Trump, the Republicans are electing a candidate for President, not the President. The US has a system where there is a replacement for a President unable to continue for whatever reason in that there is a Presidential ticket so the Vice President has been effectively elected as the replacement. 1974 being an exception.

 

[ainsworth74]

If the Conservative members wanted Liz Truss as the leader of the Conservative Party that is fine, but my problem is that they were effectively electing the Prime Minister whose policies on the economy veered away from her predecessor (as far as I can gather).

Which made it especially galling when sections of the media and wider Conservative sphere attempted to claim that she had a "mandate" or that even her "mandate" was being frustrated. The only mandate she had was that of the 2019 manifesto her party had been elected on. The 80,000 odd Tory party members who voted for her had no facility to give her a mandate to do anything for the country. If she had wanted a real mandate to implement the policies she wanted then she should have called a general election and stood on a new manifesto.

 

[yorksrob]

Which made it especially galling when sections of the media and wider Conservative sphere attempted to claim that she had a "mandate" or that even her "mandate" was being frustrated. The only mandate she had was that of the 2019 manifesto her party had been elected on. The 80,000 odd Tory party members who voted for her had no facility to give her a mandate to do anything for the country. If she had wanted a real mandate to implement the policies she wanted then she should have called a general election and stood on a new manifesto.

But she and the rest of them knew how far they'd get in putting such a suite of policies to the electorate.

The whole fiasco was an exercise in corruption.

 

[Yew]

Most people have enough sense to know that if you are proposing lots of things that involve spending more money, then you are going to have to find the money somewhere. So while many of those policies you cite might be individually popular, put them all together and a lot of people are going to end up with an uneasy sense of, something not adding up.

There is this concept called investments, things that pay back in the longer term, you know...

 

[185]

Any bets on how many days after the local elections Mr Harper announces an extension of Firstgroup's TPE contract?

Remember 'a good day to bury bad news' = is any day after the election.

Extension Within the hour 10-1
Extension 1 hour to 3 days 3-1 favourite
Extension 3-days to 3 weeks 17-1
Contract terminated for dishonesty and gross incompetence 1000-1 outsider

 

[DynamicSpirit]

There is this concept called investments, things that pay back in the longer term, you know...

There is indeed such a concept. However, I was replying to a post that suggested numerous specific things the Government could spend money on, and on a quick check, only one of the things that post was suggesting (building houses) would reasonably count as an investment that would pay back in the long run!

 

[Yew]

Haha! That reminds me of the time during the Corbyn era when Labour was proposing to nationalise the water industry and were telling us that

(a) Nationalizing the industry would be effectively free because the cost of buying it could be recouped from the future profits, which would now be available to the Government, and ...
(b) Nationalizing the industry would save everyone money because any profits could be ploughed back into reducing prices.

Ummm...

I'd like to think that Keir Starmer has a better grasp of logic

You do realise that you can split money across multiple things?

 

[DynamicSpirit]

You do realise that you can split money across multiple things?

Doesn't work in this case. The market value of a company is basically the value of its assets plus the expectation of future profits. That means that, if the Government expects to pay at market rates to buy the companies by using future profits, then as a minimum, it will need to allocate the entire future profits to paying for the company (in practice, probably more than that to pay for the asset value too). There will be none left to reduce prices. So if Labour (under Corbyn, to be clear) expected to use the profits to do both, then it was planning to spend the same money twice.

The only way round it is if, by chance, at the time the Government was trying to renationalise the companies, the market happened to have grossly underestimated the value of those companies, in which case the Government would be able to get away with paying less. In practice, that's unlikely: Company share prices usually tend to rise and become over-valued if it's known that some entity is willing to buy them all.

 

[WelshBluebird]

Before you start slagging them off, you might want to try doing at least a tiny bit of elementary research to find out what you're criticising. It took me less than 2 minutes to find out a bit more of what the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) is about. You can find their aims here. They include such terrible right-wing foaming-at-the-mouth objectives as:

Their rhetoric also includes far right american dogwhistles like "where you’ll join like-minded patriots who, like you, want to save our party and country."
Sounds literally identical to the nutjob wing of the american republican party who still think Trump won the election over there!

 

[jfollows]

Their rhetoric also includes far right american dogwhistles like "where you’ll join like-minded patriots who, like you, want to save our party and country."

They’re the “bring back Boris” campaign.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Their rhetoric also includes far right american dogwhistles like "where you’ll join like-minded patriots who, like you, want to save our party and country."

1. Out of interest, where does it say that on the CDO website? I just had a browse round and can't find anything like that, but maybe I missed it.

But assuming that text is there...

2. Newsflash... Some of us actually think patriotism is a good thing and not some kind of dog-whistle. Seems to me pretty sad if you equate being proud of/loving your own country with some kind of extremism. (And to be clear, I don't believe patriotism should imply any particular political point of view on either the left or the right. I'm sure it's possible for people on either left or right to feel patriotic).
3. Save our party and country sounds to me like the kind exaggerated stuff that politicians like to say. It's overdramatic, but I don't see how it's necessarily far right. And actually, given the rather sad state of the Tory party at the moment, 'save our party' is possibly not too exaggerated anyway .

Sounds literally identical to the nutjob wing of the american republican party who still think Trump won the election over there!

2nd newsflash. Just because some other group in another country happens to use language that's superficially similar to the language you are using doesn't mean you necessarily support that group.

 

[Yew]

Doesn't work in this case. The market value of a company is basically the value of its assets

All of those leaky pipes that they've not been replacing?

plus the expectation of future profits.

Future profits to the end of time?

 

[DynamicSpirit]

All of those leaky pipes that they've not been replacing?

Haha! Yeah, but those will presumably be pipes that they haven't yet replaced either because they've figured that the cost of replacing them outweighs the benefit from replacing them, or because they intend to replace them but you can only do so at a certain rate because you only have so many trained staff to do that etc. A nationalised company would presumably make the same calculations, unless the Government changed the regulations to enforce more replacement (but the Government could do that anyway if it wanted to - no need to nationalise)

Future profits to the end of time?

Kinda. But allowing for the rate of interest. If - say - the rate of interest is 10% then a profit of £1000 next year is only worth roughly the same as a profit of just over £90 this year. As you extrapolate that further and further into the future then at some point the future profits become effectively worthless as far as estimating current value is concerned.

Unfortunately for Corbynite-Labour's buying-the-water companies ideas, the Government would have to do basically the same calculations because in order to pay today to buy the companies, funded out of future profits, they would have to borrow the money today, and they pay interest until the future profits show up. (And before you tell me that the Government could pay a lower interest rate: If the Government borrows more money, that increases its total debt, which means people become slightly less willing to keep lending the Government money, which then puts upward pressure in the interest rate that the Government has to pay in the future on all it's debt (not just the extra amount borrowed))

I've simplified a bit. There is an issue that a company's market value is based on a lot of estimating future profits because you can't know them for certain plus various other random factors probably including how investors feel on that day , but overall, to a good approximation, if the Government wants to use future profits to buy a company, then the cost is likely to absorb future profits in their entirety, and therefore to cancel out the profits you expect to make.

 

[Typhoon]

They’re the “bring back Boris” campaign.

They seem to have forgotten that he reason he was forced to resign is that ministers (ie Conservatives)refused to serve in his government. 7 resignations on the 5th July, 35 on 6th July, 13 on the 7th July.

I have yet to hear any saying that they should have stood by Johnson after all. Whether the grassroots party wanted him or not, he would have struggled to put together a ministry with accountable people in post. As far as I can see he has failed to do much in the last six months that merits reconsideration. Apparently he has been touring the country trying to drum up support - I only know that because of the seat-belt video. His time has come and gone, his lucrative speaking tour of the US awaits. (He must just hope nothing happens in Uxbridge during that time.)

 

[nw1]

They’re the “bring back Boris” campaign.

I wonder whether it's actually "bring back Boris" or install someone much more concerning, i.e. someone on the hard-right of the party who actually believes all that stuff, rather than opportunistically getting behind it as a route to power.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 5 May 2023 ==

1. Out of interest, where does it say that on the CDO website? I just had a browse round and can't find anything like that, but maybe I missed it.

But assuming that text is there...

2. Newsflash... Some of us actually think patriotism is a good thing and not some kind of dog-whistle. Seems to me pretty sad if you equate being proud of/loving your own country with some kind of extremism. (And to be clear, I don't believe patriotism should imply any particular political point of view on either the left or the right. I'm sure it's possible for people on either left or right to feel patriotic).

I have rather mixed views on patriotism, erring towards the negative yet recognising it can be useful in certain situations.

For example pro-Ukrainian patriotism is obviously a desirable thing right now. Pro-Russian patriotism, on the other hand, most definitely isn't.

I tend to think it has more value with smaller and/or more oppressed countries, and less with bigger and/or more powerful countries. I'm not convinced of the value of UK, US or German patriotism, for example.

That said, I obviously want a government who will look after the interests of the country's population. That's a bit different, though.

 

[Broucek]

3. Save our party and country sounds to me like the kind exaggerated stuff that politicians like to say. It's overdramatic, but I don't see how it's necessarily far right. And actually, given the rather sad state of the Tory party at the moment, 'save our party' is possibly not too exaggerated anyway .

Exactly - the other side uses the "save our country" language too:

24 hours to Vote Labour and save the NHS​

 

[DynamicSpirit]

I have rather mixed views on patriotism, erring towards the negative yet recognising it can be useful in certain situations.

For example pro-Ukrainian patriotism is obviously a desirable thing right now. Pro-Russian patriotism, on the other hand, most definitely isn't.

At the risk of opening a sub-thread that may need to be moved to the Ukraine discussion .. What makes you think that Russian patriotism must mean support for Putin? Is it not possible for that some of the Russians who have opposed Putin, or even been locked up for opposing Putin, are motivated in part by patriotism? (Think for example about how Alexei Navalny risked returning home after treatment in Germany, facing prison in his home country rather than feel that he'd abandoned it).

 

[ainsworth74]

To me patriotism is about taking pride in ones country and what it does or has achieved or what it stands for and I consider myself to be a patriot. That isn't an issue. The issue is nationalism. A belief that ones country is inherently better than other countries, that one should support your country no matter what it does, that saying your country has flaws is something bad to be punished (whether by state action or just social norms). That to me is the problem. I think this quote sums the issue up quite neatly: "The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does."

I worry that things like this CDO are far more of the nationalist "Britain can do no wrong" sort than they are the former.

 

[jon0844]

Their rhetoric also includes far right american dogwhistles like "where you’ll join like-minded patriots who, like you, want to save our party and country."
Sounds literally identical to the nutjob wing of the american republican party who still think Trump won the election over there!

Very diverse team too. I wonder if they only want specific patriots?

 

[najaB]

Most people have enough sense to know that if you are proposing lots of things that involve spending more money, then you are going to have to find the money somewhere. So while many of those policies you cite might be individually popular, put them all together and a lot of people are going to end up with an uneasy sense of, something not adding up.

Generally speaking, people aren't against paying higher taxes provided that they can see that the money is going to pay for things that they care about and where the tax rises are targeted so that people don't pay any more (or less!) than they can afford.

What is objectionable is tax hikes on the working class while large businesses and the upper classes make out like bandits, even more so when the tax revenue disappears into the pockets of the rich and government cronies.