ChatterBank2 mins ago
Is The Tide Turning?
With Reform UK now predicted to win seven seats?
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“All reform need to do is attract enough votes to be an effective opposition.”
Precisely.
UKIP forced the Conservatives under Cameron to promise a referendum. Yet in the previous GE (2010) they polled 959,000 votes (3.1% of the total cast). That said, they were by far and away “the best of the rest”, with only the SNP, the British National Party and the Green Party polling more than 1% of the popular vote.
But such was their campaign between then and the 2015 election (even with no MPs) that they changed the course of this country’s political history to a far greater degree the any of the three main parties has in recent years.
In the 2015 GE UKIP went one better, with 3.8m votes (12.9% of the votes cast) and finishing behind only the Tories and Labour, though with only one seat. Nonetheless, in the light of the that level of support Mr Cameron had little choice but to honour his pledge to hold a referendum.
The greatest change in the UK’s political direction was achieved with just one MP in Westminster out of two General Elections. So anybody dismissing Reform's influence in this election, particularly when the two main protagonists are so unappealing, would be unwise to do so.
// So anybody dismissing Reform's influence in this election, particularly when the two main protagonists are so unappealing, would be unwise to do so. //
Of course the UKeepChangingYourName party will influence the result. They will harm the Tories emencely, and hand Labour an even bigger majority.
It will change a ripple of a win into a tsunami.
Brexit is officially done but while NI is forced into a ridiculous situation and there is an internal border through the UK in the Irish Sea there is a lot of loose ends to deal with, and plenty more issues needing reopening.
Labour is likely to be the largest party after the next GE, but as long as a more rational party takes sufficient votes as to be seen as an influence that needs coming to an agreement with, then the point of change may be near.
We'll just have to put up with a term of even worse government than we've had recently.
// but as long as a more rational party takes sufficient votes as to be seen as an influence that needs coming to an agreement with //
Unfortunately for Reform, they might take millions of votes, but end up with only a handful* of MPs - not enough to influence the party in charge.
* Sein Fein are defending 7 MPs seats in the UK General Election. Do you think Reform will get more or less seats than SF at the forthcoming GE ?
Nigel Farage Reform Party announced their manifesto.
Here are the key points…
▪️Reject the WEF agenda
▪️Cancel WHO membership
▪️Reject cashless agenda
▪️Laws to stop woke ideology
▪️Free speech bill
▪️Stop cancel culture
▪️SCRAP Net Zero
▪️Fast-track nuclear energy
▪️Support farmers
▪️SCRAP bans on fossil fuel cars
▪️Tax system to support marriage
▪️Opposed to CBDCs
▪️Scrap the TV licence fee.
▪️Big tax cuts - Raise the income tax threshold to £20,000
▪️Stop the boats
▪️Cutting the foreign aid budget by 50%
▪️Clear NHS waiting list in two years and pledges an extra £17bn pounds a year for the health service.
Not featured on the major "news" channels.
&ab_channel=CamelotTVNetworkJohnMappin
“Cameron called the referendum to shut his own brexiteer back benchers up, not UKIP.”
But who put pressure on the back-benchers?
“We'll just have to put up with a term of even worse government than we've had recently.”
It has to be endured from time to time to demonstrate to those who have never experienced it, just what it’s like living under a (proper) Labour government. Discounting the faux Labour administration under Blair and Brown, the country has not had a Labour government for 45 years. There are therefore plenty of people who’ve never lived under a Labour government and see one led by Mr Starmer to be a cosy repeat of the cuddly Blair era. They are in for a shock. But it has to be done.
“It will change a ripple of a win into a tsunami.”
Ripple or a tsunami, makes no odds Gromit. The current mob of so-called Tory rabble are a disgrace and need a swift boot up the Aris which they will duly receive in just over a fortnight’s time. Then those champing at the bit for “Change” will see that a Labour government has no better ideas for improving their lot than the current rabble. The only “change” they will see (for those of them who are self-sufficient, anyway) is an increased tax bill.
If Cameron had had a backbone, had been a real leader rather than just a jellyfish wrapped in a shepherd's hut, he could have won the 2015 election without making a shonky referendum deal which he then proceeded to botch. Cameron was the architect of Brexit, by being so supine as a Prime Minister. I don't think Thatcher would have behaved in the same way, for example ...
"Cameron was the architect of Brexit,..."
No he wasn't. He would never have been the architect of something to which he so fundamentally opposed. He just happened to be in the chair when the excrement finally hit the air conditioning.
Arguably the seeds of Brexit were sewn in 1972 when we joined the EC. Maybe that's a bit dramatic, but even as early as 1975, a third of those who voted in the referendum put their cross in the "leave" box.
But perhaps that a bit of a stretch. The real architect of Brexit was The Great Lady herself. Her "Bruges" speech in 1988 set the scene for the brutal infighting in the Tory party, that had, up to then been reasonably contained but which led to her downfall just two years later. She recognised long before most people did, that the real aim of the "European Project" was to form a federal Europe, with powers gradually sucked away from the members' governments.
She supported the "Common Market" but opposed, with a vengeance, the federal ambitions of the European Project. The Tory Party was split by her stance between those who supported federalisation (who were in a minority) and those who opposed it.
There are some who argue that her Bruges speech was really a rallying cry to the EC to reform and move away from "ever closer union". But that was never going to happen. The European Project had been on the go for more than three decades and making good progress. It was never going to be derailed by an intransigent "Perfidious Albion". Thus the real seeds of Brexit were sewn.
Something like that was way beyond the mediocre talents of My Lord Cameron.
"NJ. You won, get over it."
I'm well over it, believe me tomus. Not only am I just over it, I'm over the moon.
However, when somebody suggests that Mr Cameron was the "architect" of Brexit, it has to be challenged. He would not in his wildest dreams have come up with the idea of a referendum if left to his own devices. But having committed to it, the Remain campaign was so pathetic (presumably suggesting that he could not conceive the idea that Leave would prevail) that it's hard to imagine he actually designed such an outcome. That said, the remain campaign never really had a lot to work with and was somewhat restricted to issue warnings of the perils of leaving rather than trumpeting the advantages of remaining.
Still, that's all in the past, but the referendum and the ensuing vote to leave was never a plan on Mr Cameron's drawing board when he took the reins alongside Mr Clegg in 2010. He was just the poor sod who got saddled with it, so little wonder he chucked his toys from the pram the following morning.
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