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

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11423777

fucking tories

The latest daily YouGov poll has Labour up two to 40 per cent, the Tories unchanged on 39 per cent and the Lib Dems down from a post-conference high of 15 per cent to 12. If repeated at the election on a uniform swing, the latest figures would give Labour a majority of 10 seats.

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/550pxGovtApp270910_1.jpg

http://today.yougov.co.uk/politics/govt-trackers-update-27th-sept

happens after every election, and they weren't starting from much of a lead in this one

Sometimes there are post-election honeymoons, though?

depends on the wider economic climate dunnit

well, in the sense that it takes while for everyone to hate them, yes. but even in these "honeymoons", approval rarely goes up. it's passed through zero earlier this time because they were starting from a pretty slim lead.

don't want to sound like capt obvious, but this govt didn't even win a clean majority among the near-minority of people who vote in elections. and all three parties fought fraudulent campaigns that kept the central economic questions in the background, so that the govt's actions seem even less legitimate. so no, the figures are unsurprising.

boom.

i don't think poll results like that (loss of ~10 approval points) are much to do with events since the government was formed. that's just how approval works.

Guys, Labour have just got a new leader.

Approval always goes up, pretty much.

In hurriedly googling to try to find some (apparently nonexistent) evidence to back up my sense that this has been an unusually brief honeymoon*, I find people** declaring this honeymoon over as far back as May.

*for the reasons HM notes, no doubt
** and Toby Young

Was that true for W Hague, Mark? Or M Howard? Genuine questions, I couldn't find the stats.

hague was just kind of ethered in the heady, 'be here now'-listening days of summer '97 iirc

can't remember howard coming in, not even which year. felt like a caretaker manager really.

There aren't really many visible effects of anything the government's done just yet, unless you happen to be working for a construction firm or architect whose project has been cancelled. Or if you're trying to get into the UK from outside the EU (but then again you won't be voting).

It's perfectly possible that Labour is enjoying a poll bounce by sheer virtue of not being led by Brown, but it's difficult to pin it on much the government's done up to now. Dread of what's about to happen, that's a different story.

amazingly, hague was made leader within a week of major being ousted

you can see why in a sense, but honeymoon periods don't get much more mooney than may 1997; it would have been just white noise at that point

on the other hand, they hadn't a hope in hell of gaining ground in the short, even medium term

Took a while for IDS to get elected though, the 2001 election was in... May? June? I think they were going to announce the result on 9/11 and then didn't for obvious reasons.

And then they announced the result and no one even remotely cared, for even more obvious reasons.

The only one I suspect didn't get one was Foot, but I may be wrong.

Tory conference coming up - they should be able to get some good press from that. Hardly likely to be any major upsets there.

A whole week of Cameron. Do you think he'll bring Endellion onto the stage?

Prime time BBC television under a Tory government. Once more, fuck you Liberal Democrats.

Much as I would love to blame the gov, this actually started last year. And it really is as bad as you might think.

Yeah, it was on last night: woman claiming for disability and absent husband for 10 years (neither true) gets 4 years in prison and a 20K reclaim bill.

Not stated: if she had to sell house etc to pay bill.

Also not stated: How much the govt saved by not checking claims on a yearly basis. Or why they didn't bother. Or what their fee was for having the BBC follow them around while "reconstructing" their fine and upstanding pursuance of the woman through shopping centres.

Still, on other channels, joyriding kids get to smash up cars, bollards, people and get 1 year suspended sentences.

Because there's nothing worse than 'stealing from the govt'

OK, rant ends.

tom, you should blame the labour government under which that show was commissioned and made

Man, does anyone read my posts?

Fuck them too. Here Comes the New Generation *leaps in air*

i do but i felt you weren't zingy enough xp

I think the % of benefit claimants prosecuted for committing fraud is about 1% - so, in a 30min show called "Saints and Scroungers", around 18 seconds of the show will be dedicated to scroungers?

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm nope.

the saints aren't the 99%, per the blurb

Am prepared to concede 99% of benefits claimants are not saints

yeah, that's "Your Hard-Earned Money" apparently.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Littlewood#Obsessed_Fan_Problem

That's rough but thank God this has not prevented him from resuming his hobby of waterskiing barefoot.

Dear Dave,
we're quite pissed off.
Love, the Right:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/defence/8031385/Defence-cuts-Liam-Foxs-leaked-letter-in-full.html#disqus_thread

hadn't really thought of liam fox as a 'wet' but i guess that's how it is

More like old-school King & Country Tory I think.

sure. but in terms of narrative, i guess he and ids are the wets.

It's quite amusing how small state Tories suddenly get very nervous about cuts as soon as they're in charge of a departmental budget.

I don't think that T-Baggy "small state" politics maps very comfortably onto the UK Conservatives, no matter how hard the odd sympathiser might try. Monetarism isn't exactly the same thing, and most Tories aren't against the State so much as against "immoral" use of public money i.e. dole scroungers, gay theatre companies etc.

famous, endlessly trotted out factoid, but yeah, thatcher didn't really shrink the state much, and her laissez-faire economics kind of led to lots more people needing welfare. i guess there are some tories who wouldn't mind turning part of the nation to vagrancy, but vagrants are pretty low-yield consumers.

Anybody commenting on the fact that after, what, 5 months, this government seems to be leaking almost as much as the last government did after 13 years, when it was clapped out and at the end of its rope?

that's a coalition government for you I reckon.

I reckon it's expected when you go about trumpeting how thousands of civil servant are useless and deserve to lose their jobs and use the word "Whitehall" like the Bush administration used the phrase "Axis of Evil"

Disagree, Cameron's project appears to be to devolve huge areas of state power out to "society" - volunteers/charities/the private sector.

And yeah, while Thatcher didn't shrink state spending, she still sold a lot of state-owned assets off and underspent on others (health, education etc). It's just that spending on other areas (defence, welfare, police maybe) ballooned in that time.

She also pretty much invented the Quango

But yeah, I'm aware that in practise the Tories haven't been that anti-big government when actually in power, but then again Labour aren't too hot on social democracy when in power either.

They were pretty good on early years stuff. It's almost like there was a religious thing with Labour - kids are innocent, so it's OK to help them out, but adults deserve everything that's coming to them.

Kids play better with voters, "child poverty" is really adult poverty most of the time. Poor single people don't resonate as much.