The banker loving, baby-eating Tory party thread (regenerated)

[hippo]

12 minutes ago, sharkyvilla said:

Nobody is going to get a deal agreeable with the EU through parliament, especially the hard-Brexiters who are now proven to be by quite a distance a minority of the Tory party.  The only option for me is to put it back in the hands of the people which is even more scary.

But Hard Brexit is the default if no deal gets through the HOC 

[peterms]

Post-match analysis.

 

[Jareth]

I'm pretty certain there will be a no confidence vote in the government at the end of January when the vote on the deal gets delayed again - or if it is voted down. To work It needs a few tories to vote for it and now we have some very bitter ERG members who's only chance left to secure their vision is a general election.

In short, there will be another election before March and the deadline will be extended to allow time. And amusingly Theresa May will still be Tory leader. 

[mjmooney]

The people of Britain and the USA are both being very ill-served by their politicians atm. 

[peterms]

Dancing round the Maypole: the current state of the tory party.

 

[HanoiVillan]

Stephen Bush:

Theresa May survives as Prime Minister – but the chances of a no-deal Brexit have gone up

'Victory? Theresa May has survived as leader of the Conservative Party and any close observer of her political style will know that any margin would have been enough for her to carry on. (Anyone who thinks this Prime Minister would be moved by anything without the force of legal statute hasn’t been paying attention to how she responds to dissent.)

What saved her was that Conservative MPs in the middle of the party, despite their irritation with her, for the most part looked over the cliff, and realised that while many of their present problems can be laid squarely at the door of Theresa May, they can’t be fixed by getting rid of her and many of those problems will simply get worse. One of their number, who only yesterday was spitting blood about the Prime Minister, put it to me like this: “It’s keep the pilot who crashed the plane or hand the keys to the people who want to set the plane on fire.”

While she pledged to Conservative MPs that she would not lead them into the 2022 election, May has said nothing about a 2019, 2020 or 2021 election, and in any case, she once promised nervous MPs in marginal seats that she would not risk their jobs on a snap election – and look what happened there. It’s not unthinkable that May could yet lead the Tory party into another election.

The bigger blow is not to her authority as Conservative party leader but to her hopes of passing the withdrawal agreement into law. Just seven Conservative MPs are needed to overcome the combined Conservative-DUP majority: 117 MPs have voted no confidence in her (and given that the government has no policy agenda other than Brexit, beyond “occasionally set up a commission”, it is hard to read that as anything other than Brexit-related).

That means that May cannot pass any Brexit deal without substantial support from the opposition, and to put the scale of the task into perspective: while 117 Conservative MPs voted against her today, only 100 Labour MPs in total have rebelled against Jeremy Corbyn over Brexit. That includes MPs who did so because they feared a Liberal Democrat revival (not something one regularly hears from Labour MPs since the 2017 election) and 25 MPs who have done so to harden Brexit, who are unlikely to bail out May’s deal.

To pass a Brexit deal, Britain is going to need a Prime Minister capable of reaching out to other parties, showing considerable flexibility over policy and with the softness of touch to facilitate a cross-party vote in favour of a Brexit deal. Theresa May has done very little so far to indicate she is that Prime Minister. The United Kingdom’s ability to avoid a no-deal exit now depends on her discovering those skills before 29 March 2019.'

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2018/12/theresa-may-survives-prime-minister-chances-no-deal-brexit-have-gone

[hippo]

1 minute ago, mjmooney said:

The people of Britain and the USA are both being very ill-served by their politicians atm. 

I think the Media and populism have nullified the effect of voting as a way of oiling the wheels of Democracy

[peterms]

Mostly a good piece, though it seems to stop abruptly on the verge of another section.

And I don't think she wears high heels,  does she?

Quote

The end of May
The majority of Tory backbenchers voted against Theresa May in the "confidence vote" this evening. A total of 117 MPs voted against her, a much bigger rebellion than the hard Brexit-backing European Research Group (of about fifty MPs). By any reasonable standard, this is awful news for Theresa May.

Naturally, the Tory leadership has run a very disciplined spinning operation. They briefed the press that the support of 200 or more MPs would be deemed a victory, since this would be one more MP than supported May in the 2016 leadership contest. Once they were sure they had 200 MPs in the bag, they sent whips and ministers out to "smile" and "look relaxed".

But the spin won't work. In 2016, she had two opponents. In this case, she had no opponents and over a hundred MPs on the government payroll. She gained a smaller share of the support of Tory MPs than John Major did against John Redwood in 1995. Further, the symbolically important 200 MPs was reached only by restoring the whip to two backbench Tories who had been suspended for alleged sex offences, because they were known to be guaranteed supporters of May.

To put this in concrete terms, no one looking at this result can believe that Theresa May can come back from Europe with a deal that she can get through the House of Commons. Look at the supposed 'meaningful vote' on the Brexit deal. The best bet for the Tories was always to delay the vote to the very last minute, ratchet up the tension, turn Project Fear into overdrive and in the meantime hand out as much funding and career chances to potentially supportive MPs -- including across the aisle -- as possible. Instead, May called for a vote before Christmas. Then, it was clear that Project Fear wasn't working and there weren't enough Labour MPs clearly ready to defect, she pulled it. She made the worst of a bad situation.

So if she plays her hand so badly, and can't get assemble a majority on her number one legislative issue, the issue on which she has staked her leadership, what is the point of carrying on?

Why, indeed, has Theresa May stumbled on? Right up until her catastrophic decision to call a snap election, May's leadership appeared to fulfil a purpose. She was the red-white-and-blue-Brexit leader. She was the leader who, though sensibly ensconced in the Tory establishment, reached out to the grassroots and the 'left behind' voters. She sounded the 'Red Tory' notes. And it was working; as long as the Tories were for Brexit, their voting bloc was well over forty per cent. Tory MPs and news editors were filled with eroticised admiration for the new "iron lady" in her very special high heel shoes. But that aura was blown away in June 2017, so why is she still in her job eighteen months after her election debacle?

Don't get me wrong. I understand why the Tories have wanted to keep her on. She is their sacrificial leader, their whipping post. She is there to take shit from all sides until Brexit is done, and someone else can ride to the rescue. No one else in the cabinet wants her job right now. Or, if they do, they're crazy. But why does May stick around? Is this a masochistic drive barely sublimated as 'duty'? What on earth could 'duty' amount to at this point?

As delusional as the Brexiteers are, May doesn't have any ideas about how to deal with the structural problems with British capitalism. Her only answer is to limit the damage of Brexit while defending the basic economic model from which the Conservatives' main social base (big capital, finance, etc) has benefited. But now it's increasingly clear that she can't even do that.

So what is the point? What, beyond a martyr complex, could keep her in a job that she can't do, pursuing a goal that is clearly out of reach?

 

[mjmooney]

11 minutes ago, hippo said:

I think the Media and populism have nullified the effect of voting as a way of oiling the wheels of Democracy

Yep. In a parliamentary democracy, to a throw a decision on EU membership to to a referendum was a disgraceful action, and sets a dangerous precedent. To call it 'democracy' is disingenuous, to put it mildly. 

Edited December 12, 2018 by mjmooney

[NurembergVillan]

14 minutes ago, peterms said:

And I don't think she wears high heels,  does she?

 

On occasion.  Since becoming PM she tends to opt for kitten heels or flats, though.

[peterms]

 

[TheAuthority]

28 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

Yep. In a parliamentary democracy, to a throw a decision on EU membership to to a referendum was a disgraceful action, and sets a dangerous precedent. To call it 'democracy' is disingenuous, to put it mildly. 

[NurembergVillan]

31 minutes ago, peterms said:

 

May's never going to resign.

She's relentless like a cat trying to bury a shit on a marble floor.

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, StefanAVFC said:

Anna Soubry has absolutely had enough on SkyNews.

Says she hasn't changed and she's tired of the same tired rhetoric, that renegotiation is with the fairies, shouting at her Pro-May colleague. Wow.

Saw that; was remarkable.

In further 'rats in a sack' evidence:

 

[Awol]

9 hours ago, mjmooney said:

Yep. In a parliamentary democracy, to a throw a decision on EU membership to to a referendum was a disgraceful action, and sets a dangerous precedent. To call it 'democracy' is disingenuous, to put it mildly. 

I don’t think that’s right. Devolution was a series of massive constitutional issues settled by direct democracy, as was the 1975 Common Market vote.

The 2016 vote was following the established precedent of putting major constitutional decisions directly to the people. The difference this time was the result going against the preference of a majority of MPs, who are now trying to reassert the supremacy of the representative model over a decision they kicked up to be taken by direct democracy. 

Thats why it’s such as mess, Parliament was happy for the people to decide, as long as they gave the ‘correct’ answer.

[mjmooney]

8 minutes ago, Awol said:

I don’t think that’s right. Devolution was a series of massive constitutional issues settled by direct democracy, as was the 1975 Common Market vote.

And I maintain that they should NOT have been. 

[Awol]

8 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

And I maintain that they should NOT have been. 

That’s fair enough, but the precedent for doing so is decades old, it’s not a new thing. 

 

 

 

Dont look now but I think we’re going to have another one!

[choffer]

 

[Davkaus]

4 minutes ago, choffer said:

 

It's a parody account, mate...

[Seat68]

Parody account.

 

**** page break

Edited December 13, 2018 by Seat68