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*unpopular opinion incoming* Lee Anderson is exactly the sort of person who should be in politics. Ten years as a coal miner, ten years working for the Citizens Advice Bureau, councillor, MP. It's just a pity that it's Lee Anderson in this particular case. Similar to Nadine Dorries, the career path of nurse - entrepreneur - successful author is the sort of varied life experience that the House of Lords is supposed to have rather than "bag carrier for the PM for two years", as now appears to be the custom. It's just a pity that it's Nadine Dorries. In principle that's the sort of person parliamentarians should be, rather than PPE at Oxford --> work for a think-thank that aligns with your political beliefs --> SPAD for current minister --> MP --> Government. Just a shame that the examples don't back up the theory.

Well....yes. That's what I'm saying. They don't care about Gaza any more or less than anyone does. As I've said, they're chucking stones and seeing if they can break a few windows. If the thing that had exposed divisions in other parties and made Westminster look like a pointless waste of space to make an extra few people in Scotland think "we might as well be out of that nonsense" had been council bin collections or the coup d'état in Gabon then they'd have used that instead.

That's not really something that the SNP need to give much a toss about though, is it? They don't have potential voters in Wigan or Truro that they need to make sure they are keeping up political appearances to appease or persuade. Their whole Westminster raison d'être is to convince slightly more than half of Scotland that they shouldn't need to be there and they can do the same thing just as well or badly in Edinburgh.

Yup. I imagine that's all they wanted out of the whole thing from the start. Turn up, kick a few bins over, chuck a few stones, make the whole thing look ridiculous. Which is fair enough, it's literally the point of them being in Westminster.

Given (s)he is installed by a majoriy vote of MPs, presumably (s)he is also removed by a majority vote of MPs. And given Labour don't want him gone, and the Tories have got no interest in setting the precedent that any speaker that makes a decision unhelpful to the Government should just be removed and replaced, it's hard to see where the majority for Hoyle's removal comes from.

Just another 230 or so to go then.

The various factions of the Judean People's Front appear to devastated by this defection to the Red Tories.

I've got stamps both in and out of Girona. So the Spanish are.

And all it would have taken to stop them dying was Labour voting for the SNP's Opposition Day motion.

Nah, reckon I got it

My best attempt at a summary, but I don't claim to be an authority, so any corrections are welcome: It's opposition day. So the opposition parties get the chamber to debate and vote on stuff that they think is important. None of it has any legal standing and the Government can ignore all of it, if it so chooses. The SNP wanted to discuss and vote on a ceasefire in Gaza. Obviously that's not going to do anything in Gaza, or even change Government policy, but it means that something important that isn't currently being discussed that a lot of people want to be discussed - is discussed. A cynic might say that the SNP want there to be a Commons vote to highlight and intensify Labour divisions on the subject. Lots of Labour MPs and their constituents would want to vote for what the SNP says. The Labour leadership don't want to align with the SNP or have that Israel / Palestine conversation opening up more than it needs to be What tends to happen is that the other parties amend these motions, so if it's on something that they care about, then they amend what is being proposed, then the biggest party votes for what the biggest party wants it to say, and it always passes like that. They can pretty much just stick a Wayne's World-style NOT! at the end, and completely reverse what is being proposed at the start. So Labour do their slightly more mealy-mouthed Labour version and the Tories do their Tory version. Where it gets complicated is that normally the speaker doesn't pick multiple amendments on a similar theme. But apparently the Labour whips went all Mafia on Hoyle and basically said "nice Speaker role you've got here, shame if something were to happen to it when we're the biggest party next year and you're up for reselection..." So Hoyle went against precedent, selecting the Labour amendment when he normally wouldn't have (normally he'd have just chosen the Government amendment to the original text), meaning that Labour MPs now have a third choice, rather than just SNP or nothing. So can then go to their surgeries on Friday and proudly say "I voted for a humanitarian ceasefire, (in the fullness of time, at the right juncture, when the stars align)". So the SNP (for whom this is all about Palestine, honest, and not about trying to cause political problems for their biggest electoral rival) and the Tories have gone all Just Stop Hoyle and are VERY ANGRY about a relatively boring part of procedure and not because Hoyle has obviously helped out Labour a bit more than he should have done by helping them avoid embarrassment. Hoyle's since apologised and said he shouldn't have done it. Basically, literally everyone involved should be utterly ashamed and wonder if they really went into this just to be politicking bell-ends about dying children.

I reckon there is a lot of merging between the popularity of ideas and popularity of those promoting them. I bet that for a lot of the country "tax cuts" are that thing that Liz Truss wanted that blew up the economy. And are therefore A Bad Thing, then hearing the also unpopular Jeremy Hunt talk about them mean that both he and they become less popular. I've not checked this, but I bet the popularity of Brexit as a policy and the popularity of the Tories would probably track each other on a graph. Are the Tories becoming less popular because Brexit is a shit-show, or is Brexit becoming less popular because it's synonymous with those Tories that people also hate for a load of other reasons?

You've probably not said anything wrong, but any "endorsement" will be judged by the number of MPs returned and nothing else. Nobody in December 2019 was caveating the 80 seat Tory majority with "well, actually it's not really that impressive to go from May's 13.6m votes to Johnson's 13.9m. Look at Jo Swinson weeping in the corner in happiness at adding four times that number of new votes to the Lib Dem total from last time..." Or take 1997. Blair's majority was created by the Tory vote dropping from 14m in 1992 to 9m in 1997. In the run-up to that election, all the same "lack of enthusiasm for Labour" opinions were being had. All forgotten the moment they doubled their number of MPs.

It's plausible if you're talking about a five / ten year scenario. Any sooner than that, I'd be curious as to the mechanism you think would be play out that sees Farage go from owner of another political party --> Tory party member --> prospective Tory party parliamentary candidate --> Tory MP --> Tory leader. Isn't it quite likely that (a) a lot of people in charge in the Tory party might try to stop the first two of those happening, and (b) doesn't the third one rather depend on the Tories being able to win a seat?

How big a lead in the polls would Labour need for you to consider that they were winning?

Really just confirming an earlier one, but good to keep the by-elections frequent and regular. Just to build that "Tories get smashed in elections" narrative ahead of the General Election.

If you're The Wrekin then it's currently 60-40 to turn Labour according to the Electoral Calculus site.

I should also caveat though my "last voted Labour in 2001" though with "...but would have voted to make Brown, Miliband, Corbyn and would vote to make Starmer PM, if I lived in a place where Labour were the obvious challenger to the Tory".

Same. I've voted Labour once in my life, back in 2001 and I can't imagine that will be changing for the foreseeable future.

Isn't "displeasure with the party in charge" the story of pretty much every Government by-election loss in history? Don't see why these ones are different to all the others.

Definitely seems harsh on Gen Kitchen, who seems pretty pleasant overall. Not to be confused with General Kitchener, obviously.

Maybe this is one of those things where people only vaguely paying attention is going to work in Labour's favour:

I remember seeing it described that purely in economic terms, the nation's GDP hero is a terminal cancer patient going through a costly divorce.

All going well then.