DEM not gonna CON dis NATION: Rolling UK politics in the short-lived post-Murdoch era

Britain-wide instant reaction poll (YouGov) :
Nicola Sturgeon 28%
Nigel Farage 20%
David Cameron 18%
Ed Miliband 15%
Nick Clegg 10%
Natalie Bennett 5%
Leanne Wood 4%

Which is pretty amazing since most people in Britain generally oppose the SNP and won't even have them on the ballot.

Or as the Daily Mail just published "Big TV debate of British election campaign yields no clear winner" LOL.

LOL UK (xp)

It's like anti-austerity rhetoric is popular or something insane like that.

Well, that's the closest to the truth so far (xp re DM)

Hard to see why Farage is not more of a target. It's doubtful he's a serious threat and of course the sheer narrowness of his vision and repeating the same talking points already work against him, but taking him down a few pegs would be cheap popularity for anyone here - especially Cameron and Milliband.

Leanne Wood >

Leader of fourth most popular party in Wales in slightly more impressive than Natalie "cough choke cough" Bennett shocker.

Is the debate worth watching? I was out last night.

Not really sure what the point of including the SNP and Plaid Cymru in last night's debate given that most people watching won't even have the chance to vote for them even if they wanted to. Surely it would have been better to have had Sturgeon up against Jim Murphy and whichever sacrificial lamb runs the Scottish Tories on a regional broadcast?

Possibly worth looking at highlights...Definitely worth avoiding reading any commentary from the main newspapers - the standard of reporting and analysis is mostly abysmal and depressing.

Surely it would have been better to have had Sturgeon up against Jim Murphy and whichever sacrificial lamb runs the Scottish Tories on a regional broadcast?

That's happening up here next week (her name's Ruth Davidson, btw). I assume including SNP and Plaid Cymru was to convince folk that they aren't scary nationalist flag-wavers intent on destroying the nation but viable parties to include in any potential coalition (even though both main parties have said it's not going to happen, with the SNP at any rate, have to confess I have no idea if they would let Plaid Cymru in, but they're nowhere near as popular in Wales as the SNP are up here).

No it wouldn't have been better leaving out Leanne Wood and Nicola Sturgeon because they were fantastic and showed the country wht sort of leader politicians we should have in our main parties: normal, down to earth, decent people.

lol hows that evil depraved snp going to eat every english first-born child strategy working out

It would help if they could get Salmond to shut up for the duration. Farage was worst by some distance.

I think Farage tried that "lol hows that evil depraved snp going to eat every english first-born child strategy working out" thing by including those greedy Scots in his list of EVIL FOREIGNERS, going on about lobbing money over Hadrian's Wall as if Scotland contributes fuck all to the UK and just takes from the English. It didn't work.

On This Week afterwards, David Lammy was on about it as well, wanting London's money not to subsidise others elsewhere, which I'm sure will win him mayoral votes but make him sound like a massive dick everywhere outside of the M25.

Um, meant to edit down BB's quote a bit.

If he actually said that then that's disappointing from Lammy given that he generally comes across as pretty decent by the standards of current Labour politicians (and I'm not sure he really believes it). I'm not convinced it's much of a vote-winner in London at all - but it does directly contradict what Miliband said last week and disagreeing with party leadership IS a vote-winner in mayoral elections.

Decent or not, he is a dimwit.

London is welcome to fuck off and become its own country imo

nice one

praise from caesar

u said that about me once but I fear there's not much hope for muggins there

Et tu?

the thing about all nihilist zingers is we get all protective about our own special areas of interest

http://wire.novaramedia.com/2015/04/11-quick-reflections-on-the-leaders-debate/

This has persuaded me to actually watch the thing.

can't do it, the whole premise of the debate is everything that's fucked and infantile about parliamentary politics in the UK

Cameron was under strict orders to appear Prime Ministerial and avoid any hand-to-hand with the serfs and underlings and he didn't look at all comfortable doing so. Mostly he just stood silently looking as if he was trying to remember where he'd left the car keys. The Bullingdon Bully PMQ persona only really surfaced once when he threw Stafford in Miliband's face during an exchange on the NHS, actually he didn't even throw it just lobbed over the net for Miliband to smash back reasonably convincingly.

Actually you heard quite a bit about anti-austerity from the minority parties (bar UKIP of course). Not as much of a car crash as you'd think going into this.

The most infantile moment was Farage re: HIV but that was confidently put down by Leanne Wood, to applause from the audience for the first time.

xp = Cameron just came across as tired/had enough. Doesn't look like he is hungry enough for a 2nd term of this.

I was most impressed with Sturgeon and liked Ed Miliband finally telling David Cameron to STFU about a) Stafford and b) the 2008 crash being Labour's fault, rather than that of global financial markets. I had to agree with Marina Hyde, who said sweaty Farage looked like he was having a whitey.

Later, it wasn't edifying watching This Week (is it ever?) since Lammy just sat there saying 'Nigel Farage made a good impression' less than two hours after everyone's favourite 19th Hole Nazi was banging on about darkie foreigners and their health-tourism HIV.

agree Cameron looked faded but most of his ilk don't like being held up to account so easily by so many like the debate showed.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CBnxySlUIAATUvr.png:large

Farage looked like he was having a whitey.

no debate on the crumbling environment in 2 hours of debate

You're too young to vote so what do you care?

hey, the kid's entitled to worry about whether there'll be any environment left by the time he is old enough

Watching this now and Cameron just defensively whacking out dry statistics is the worst approach here, it misses the human element altogether - he used to be good at that sort of stuff so this is presumably Crosby talking.

Clegg is doing the absolute worst here, he surely knows he doesn't have a leg to stand on when attacking the Tories but this is really feeble stuff.

dunno if it's just my hope (ambiguous hope) but ed miliband does seem to be growing into this campaign. he looks weak in pmqs but he comfortably outdoes cameron on compassion.

that said the entire farce of just voting in hope of no tories is beyond depressing.

Farage is even worse than I had anticipated in this, just talking completely over Leanne Wood for virtually the entire duration of her answer. It's like everyone else has taken a decision not to engage with him and he's responding by barging everyone else out of the way.

good point actually only young people care about environment

still not done comprehension at school eh?

The debate was broadly a positive thing, if only for showing that mainstream political discourse can extend beyond the miniscule pinhead we've experienced over the past however many years. The presence of three anti-austerity female leaders definitely rebalanced the debate and made it more empathetic, made Cameron look isolated on the right and made Miliband looks equivocating and feeble in places.

Clegg was definitely in the weakest position of anyone but that's hardly surprising. Farage toxic obviously but you fear that his core constituency would have lapped that shit up - I do wonder if UKIP are at the point where other people will start voting tactically to stop them winning certain constituencies.

Not including a question on poverty and welfare was an enormous omission. Miliband wasn't a disaster but I'm not sure he did well enough on anything to convince many undecided voters and his response to Cameron on the causes of the crisis sounded fumbled, and that he was lacking in conviction somewhat.

I was wrong upthread and both Nicola Sturgeon and Leanne Wood were strong. Sturgeon's pitch to the rest of the country was a very smart move, and she isn't a repellent figure to other parts of the country in the way that Salmond is. It will give a very different slant to the process of coalition-building or alliance forming that will surely follow the election.

Clearly no one gives a shit about Northern Ireland.

In the context of all that, it made Farage's repeated "See? They're all the same" look faintly ridiculous.

Thing is, there's a worrying amount of people who agree with Farage that anyone-who-isn't-Farage is some homogeneous lump of non-Farageness. All he has to do is go "See?" and people go "yes! he's so right!" because no-one else says stupid racist horrible things like he does therefore he speaks the truth, or something.

ILX should know all about Farage's debate tactics, we see it all the time here with those who hate the Arctic Noon

it's weird, you share the same outspoken forthrightness, soi-disant common sense and put-on persecution complex

I'm surprised to see lots of Lib Dem posters up in my neighbourhood. I thought they would be pretty much dead now.

I suppose it helps that this is the core area of a once-safe LD seat which went to the Tories last election after a boundary change: long LD history, current candidate was not involved in coalition govt and has been quite vocal about a couple of hot-button local-to-this-suburb affairs. I haven't even had any kind of leaflet from anyone except Tories/Lib Dems/UKIP.

Really don't know who I can bring myself to vote for and it's no easier trying to second-guess what everyone else will do for "tactical" voting. If the Tories stay in locally and I didn't vote for whoever's in second I'll be annoyed at myself, even though it's not going to be just one vote difference (or... is it?) so I should probably just forget about that.

At one point Sturgeon talked about how she favoured "strong and effective controls over immigration" and stopping people "abusing the system we all pay for" and this doesn't seem to have provoked the howls of rage you get whenever Ed Miliband does it. Admittedly she didn't put it on a fucking mug.

Thing is, there's a worrying amount of people who agree with Farage that anyone-who-isn't-Farage is some homogeneous lump of non-Farageness. All he has to do is go "See?" and people go "yes! he's so right!" because no-one else says stupid racist horrible things like he does therefore he speaks the truth, or something.

I agree, but that amount of people isn't likely to grow much from where it is.

incredible to see how utterly rattled the press are right now, and still with a month to go.

not entirely sure the strategy of the telegraph fabricating a story that was so easily dismantled by everyone in minutes, but i guess they've got little integrity to still lose after the past few months.

Milliband is shit. I really want Labour to be voteworthy but he comes nowhere near, and any of the Labour forced positivity about his performances makes me wretch. His looking into the camera on Thursday was excruciating in its obviousness.

If it was so obvious, why did none of the others try to do the same?