ml1dch

Not sure that anyone had said that, have they? There are thousands of decisions that the government makes every day without consulting parliament and legally this is one that is within their right to make. Parliament's job is to then scrutinise the executive and hold them to account for the decisions that they make. As they will do on this issue. And the scrutiny will amount to "all good, we're fine with it".

It would definitely have been a nice courtesy, but he doesn't legally have to. And given parliament will overwhelmingly back the decision does it matter that much?

I don't think there has ever been a Prime Minister from any party who would respond to a drone attack on a Navy ship with anything other than retaliation. Particularly as this isn't really a hand-wringing, "faults on both sides" situation (like most of the other thread is). It's an Iranian militia chucking missiles at merchant shipping and hijacking civilian boats. It's pretty sensible to try and do something about it, given three months of asking them nicely to stop hasn't done the trick.

Interesting graphic for polling fans, showing the trends of where voters are moving to and from based on current averages and the 2019 result:

Nah, I reckon he just turned up and pointed out that he and his billionaire family would want to move to the area and that sounded more impressive to a bunch of Tories than anything the two or three middle-aged councillors that he was up against could muster. That was his competition.

I bow to nobody in my dislike of this Government, but it didn't take a TV show to get them interested, they got interested in September 2020 when they set up an Independent Inquiry, which was promoted to a Statutory Inquiry in 2021. The TV programme means that their constituents and the media are now starting to ask them questions about it, the responses to which are now being more widely reported than they were.

...and as a nice little blackmaily twist, there was lots of talk that Bone would stand as the Reform candidate, and he threatened do so if the Tories didn't select his missus. Hence Reform parachuting in Brexit embarrassment Ben Habib as candidate at the last minute, and Bone just has to live out his days with the shame of being Peter Bone.

I like this new way of forcing a General Election by removing MPs, one at a time until there is no majority left. Does seem a bit inefficient though.

He looks like Ken Barlow if he were receiving end-of-life care.

I imagine this will be well-received on here.

I don't think it was being discussed at all on this nice, chilled Christmas Eve until you decided that you had to rock up to tell us how these horrible savages are unsatisfactory immigrants.

I wouldn't say it's obvious at all.

Next eleven months of politics in the US is going to be wild.

Nope.

Whoops.

Always time for this 2012 tweet...

They couldn't find any decent candidates last time and they still romped home.

Nice, busy Westminster day to bury awkward stories.

Well, yes. Hardly any legislation passes which hasn't been amended on the way.

Problem is, that only helps one faction. The One Nation lot are keen to do that as it kicks the whole thing into the long grass. The nutty lot have realised that if they don't set fire to it now, there's probably a chance they never get the opportunity to in all the Lords / Committee / Amendment stuff. But they probably don't have the numbers, so they're in a bit of a bind about "their" bit of the party looking weak if they go for it, and their point of view being relegated to a position of as irrelevance if they don't. The conundrums you can face when you're an idiot.

So pessimistic. Given no asylum seekers are going to be sent to Rwanda, the cost per asylum seeker will be £0. Given the indivisibility of zero and all that.

On current polling, Labour take Wyre Forest, helped by a comparably high Reform vote.

You also need to look though at the changing sands of seats - it's very easy to get caught up in the results of elections and not see the trends underneath. Example - 2017 is broadly seen as a terrible election for the Tories, but May increased the Tory vote by 2m from the 2015 result, to lose thirteen seats. But those extra votes turned a load of safe Labour seats into marginals. In 2019, Johnson only added 300,000 votes to May's 2017 total, to gain forty eight seats - nearly all them the ones that May had softened up two years earlier. What else happened in 2019? The Lib Dems went from twelve seats to eleven and Jo Swinson lost her seat. But in the process, they added over a million votes to their 2017 total which was the most extra votes that any party gained by a mile in that election. And the majority of those went into turning safe Tory seats into Tory / Lib Dem marginals in 2024. If Starmer gets the stonking majority that looks likely at the moment, he's arguably got Jo Swinson to thank more than anybody on his own side.

As Bicks said previously, he has two wings of the party of a hundred or so MPs each who want completely different things. If he significantly upsets either side them they will probably bring him down. If he slightly upsets all of them, they probably just about leave him here.