There have certainly been plenty of fuckups this year (in large part due to the complete lack of talent and competence in their top team). But a lot of it is just chickens coming home to roost after 14 years of Conservative rule.
There's only so long that you can cut and underfund and outsource and privatise before everything starts to fall over.
It's like a factory that lost some money one year. Rather than invest in new equipment, they lay workers off. So the next year the sales are lower so they cut again until eventually the thing goes under.
Basically this. Since austerity most public services seem to have been running on fumes, like how if you stop peddling a bike you still go for a bit.
Now they're really wobbling and since Thatcher the ideology they subscribe too and the actions necessary to resolve said problems are just fundamentally at odds
What’s even dumber, is that Tories often claim that they are the party of the ‘Smaller State’. And that’s how they try to legitimise cutting public funding.
All the while they are piling on *more* responsibility onto Local Authority and Healthcare, not less.
So actually they are the party of making the state far, far bigger but funding it less so it does everything badly.
This. Like the Republicans in the US, they come into power telling us that government is the problem, “prove” the point by governing very badly and then use that “proof” as justification for selling off whatever is left to their friends and donors at closing down sale prices.
It’s always been their modus operandi,
always will be and I will be overjoyed if they are in 3rd place on July 5th. I’m sick and tired of this shit.
Amen. I remember Maggie doing just this between about 1985 and 1992. They just sold off every fucking thing - British Airways, British Telecom, British Rail (only the profit making bits - for some reason we kept the bit that costs money Network Rail), 12 or so Electricity Boards (but kept the unprofitable parts under National Grid), British Gas, Water Companies (but kept the unprofitable bits and put them in the Environment Agency).
The list goes on and on. Hundreds of billions going abroad in profits and so the govt now has to tax us to keep the rivers clean.
The only thing left for the govt now to raise money is us. Used to be dozens of profit making parts of the nation but that evil so and so sold them off.
The screw ups are the screw ups and part of the problem. A much bigger part is that they have spent so much effort to cater to a specific sector....namely UKIP leaning voters...that they left everyone else behind. Couple that with the removal of any experienced, empathetic, half way decent centre leaning politicians and the recipe for disaster is stirred, baked, and served on a platter of vomit.
Oh they didn’t get it. But the Tories have pandered to them every election with the promise of low immigration. Every year apart from this one, they have fallen for it.
And even now Farage is basically telegraphing his desire to jump ship.
It’s been catered to via Brexit. Those people think they got what they wanted, and are too stupid to realise in reality they got the opposite. The Tories winning so many red wall seats last time kind of shows it worked for a while.
Not just lower immigration, but deep cultural conservatism too. That's why Tories have been going so hard on transphobia, critical race theory, and other conspiracies like cultural Marxism. It worked for a short while, but alienated fiscally-right, socially liberal types, and always meant there'd be a party even further right who can go harder than them.
Because governments that don't fundamentally believe in governing eventually come unstuck when the fact they never had any interest in improving the lives of their constiuents becomes sufficiently obvious, in spite of their heavy investment in culture wars, media messaging and posturing.
This is the best answer so far.
The correct answer is typically very simple. We can boil it down to: grifters who are not intending to govern.
Governing means stewardship, seriously looking at the challenges of our day and seriously trying to identify ways to address those challenges. With the Tories especially Cameron and Johnson, there was no interest in governance. It was posturing and grift.
This - once the Tories were unleashed to govern alone they've been too busy with infighting to care about actually governing the country - lots of tactics from them but no strategy. It's somewhat ironic that the only stable parliament in the 21st century where the Tories were in power was a coalition government.
I think one of the biggest problems they have is a complete refusal to acknowledge that they are to blame for quite a lot of our current problems. Yes the pandemic did cause problems, yes the war in Ukraine has also caused problems but the reality is that the Tories have always caused so much of the problems through incompetence, delusion and intentionality. And after 14 years you can’t keep saying “but Labour” or this or that. It’s the refusal to recognise they have failed, the refusal to apologise which gets me and I think so many others so angry
I think Penny Mordaunt has said to Angela Rayner in 2 of the interviews "you've had 14 years and you've got no plan." The lack of self awareness from the Tories is unreal. All the talk about is raising taxes and getting rid of foreigners despite doing neither of those things.
But Tory plans would of course work perfectly if nothing major ever went wrong anywhere in the world that affects Britain. It’s just unlucky that there happen to been problems in the last decade and a half globally. As long as nothing ever went wrong and everything always got generally better with the Tories not having to do anything to achieve that then their plans would have been perfect. /s
This is the clear problem with austerity though; it creates pressure.
Take... A supermarket. It used to employ enough people to have 36 staff on the floor at a time. But the company wanted to make more money, so they cut staff, one by one, until the operation runs on a leaner, stressed out, 24 staff.
But it runs. And for a time, everything is fine. I mean sure, the staff are miserable but the shareholders in far off places don't actually care about them, so it's fine.
But then someone's ill for a week and suddenly the whole operation falls apart, because through austerity we found that 23.754 is the absolute breaking point. Now something critical can't be done because you just can't slim down any further.
This is ultimately what austerity policies do. They break things down to the point of ruthless efficiency, sacrificing things like reliability.
Yes 100% , they are a party of power hungry narcissistic career politician who don't governments two toffees about how you the common person lives but have simply used it as a path to elevate themselves. Zero integrity, zero desire to help people.
I wrote my college dissertation on food banks, and I drew a very clear connection between austerity and the rise in food banks. This was a synthesis of existing research, ans time and time again the causation was clear.
To this day the Tories still do not acknowledge that food Bank use rose as a result od austerity. Yet in 2013 alone, 3.14 billion in cuts was enacted.
Yea but the modern media, and us as the electorate, are completely savage when it comes to any mistake. If there’s a sound bite of an error, it’s in the papers, all over social media, repeated online. That means their behaviour is overly dictated by avoiding any such gaffes, over and above making sensible decisions and getting into the substance of governing (not that they’ve been good at that anyway). They’ve also purged anyone with an intelligent view on things because their party line has been brexit at all costs which is an innately anti-rational view.
A few months ago Carl Benjamin (otherwise known as Sargon of Akkad) did a video about the reasons for the current malaise facing the UK. The cause? Tony Blair. Yes, Blair who left public life a decade ago.
There are plenty of people who still blame Margaret Thatcher for everything that goes wrong. To a certain extent, both sets of people have a point - the effects of decisions made in government can last a very long time.
You get your world view from this guy? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9E2iEi6vMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9E2iEi6vMY)
Holy shit. Yes the last 14 years has been Blair's fault, it's so obvious now! If only the Tory party had any kind of power to reverse all those insidious things he did. Except they did didn't they. They reversed the highest satisfaction levels in the NHS, they reversed the lowest wait times. They reversed the growth we had seen under Blair's government. They reversed the raising life expectancy to lowering it. They reversed the revitalization and the building new buildings for public services. They reversed the mass reduction in poverty to create the highest level of food bank use we have seen.
I think its been a whole multitude of issues most of it i think can go back to 2016.
So we have Corbyn up against Cameron and a lot of the electorate just didn't support Corbyn (can get into that another time). Only a few months after that we get the Brexit vote and then had the fall out of that which i think most now agree has been a disaster. When it comes to Brexit either you hate it or think that the conservatives compromised on the exist so nobody is really happy.
So Brexit goes through, Cameron resigns then we have this total shit show with the Tories over Brexit, Cameron quits, May comes in, can't get Brexit done, May is basically kicked out and Boris swags in. Now we have Boris vs Corbyn (again he is a mess) and he calls an election because they can't get Brexit done.
Brexit "gets done" then we get slammed with disaster after disaster for the Conservatives, Covid, party-gate, Patel bullying, Big dom checking his glasses, getting fined for breaking lock down rules, ethics advisors quitting and finally we get pincher but that list could go on and on (mind that time the police turned up at his flat). Eventually Boris, with Rishi as his chancellor is forced out.
Enter Truss....less said the better but somehow the woman who was beaten by a lettuce somehow managed to beat Rishi.
All the while the public are just more and more pissed off and day one this lad is talking about restoring faith in politics....and reappoints Breaverman to the job she was sacked from for bullying and again with Rishi its been one disaster after another since. His wifes tax status, the green-card he kinda didn't tell us about, that weird thing at the petrol pump, the leaked video of him openly talking about relocating funds away from deprived area's then making light of Trans issues with Brianna Ghey's mother in the building to talk about trans issues....ah again the list goes on this is just of the top of my head.
Point is its been one fuck up after another with the Tories since 2016 and actually the only reason they've not been booted sooner is just because of how awful Labour where under Coyrbn and the cult of personality that Boris had. Now we get into this election and am sure i don't need to go over the list of fuck ups.
Still don't get that Rwanda thing....
Plus people are cottoning on to the fact that the Tory membership keeps on voting in nutters, populists and ideologues like Truss (and Johnson). Voting for a “sensible” Tory is meaningless if they’ll get booted out and replaced with a numpty by the tiny Tory membership.
It all went down with Boris and Liz Tuss
Boris eroded trust in the party. Not with the parties over lockdowns but by constantly denying it when the evidence was so strong. I feel, if he had just apologised and have an excuse around hard work and needed to lighten the mood a little he would have semi got away with it. But he lied and try story would not go away….
Secondly, the conservatives have always been a party trusted on the economy and people’s savings. Labour will tax more but have better services. Conservatives will have a smaller state., more bare bone public services, but more money in your pocket and a stronger economy. However Liz Truss made it so people where it hardest by economic incompetence. It’s like Labour totally miss managing up the health service or education.
Maybe Rishis best bet was to have an election after Truss’s exit when it was a bit of an unknown or the eat out to help out guy
It went down with May. Instead of seeking to bring the country together, she pandered to the nutcase wing of the Tory party and so we wasted years on Brexit. Imagine if Gove hadn't stabbed Boris in the back in 2016 and he'd been in from the start. At least we'd have got to the inevitable basic deal with the EU a lot sooner.
I'd argue that history should be far, far harsher on Cameron.
It was his premiership under which ideology-fuelled austerity was first inflicted. His government under which tens of thousands of people died due to cuts to benefits and services (May deserves scorn here, as she was head of that cabinet at the time), and in which his gambit to defeat the ERG extremists within his own party lead to brexit. Upon losing, he jumped ship to leave others to try and pick up the pieces.
His government discarded the plans Brown's Labour had, which economists have commented would have brought the UK out of recession sooner and lead to growth. Things like scrapping on and off-shore wind farms, massively delaying nuclear plant projects which could have utterly nullified the pressures on energy as a consequence of Russia invading Ukraine. The UK could have actually ended up being a net exporter of energy to the rest of Europe.
Even something as simple as the tories approving the decommissioning of the largest gas storage facility in the country, only to have to bring it back. The UK could have held a lot of gas in reserve, which would have been at much cheaper prices than after it kicked off in Ukraine.
All the growth attributed to the tories since they gained power has been almost entirely down to population growth, which means productivity in the country has ground to a halt.
The tories are riven with the rot of failed neo-liberal economic thinking, where the idea of any sort of strategic reserves or the state owning something is attacked as waste, even though in some circumstances you could consider profit to be waste (such as in healthcare, where that money given to shareholders and CEOs could have been spent on more doctors and nurses). It's why things won't get better for the tories, because they purge anyone who doesn't adhere to a fanatical vision of Thatcher's economic and governance policy.
The UK desperately needs to adopt a mixed economy, where the state deals with critical things that the market just isn't suitable for, and then regulates the market for the things it is good at.
> in some circumstances you could consider profit to be waste (such as in healthcare, where that money given to shareholders and CEOs could have been spent on more doctors and nurses).
Fantastic point, that. Turns the whole thing on its head!
Yep. This is really difficult to imagine now, but right after the referendum, a stateswoman would have attempted to heal the divide. Instead May sided with one faction (the faction that would never be satisfied) and denied us parliamentary scrutiny of the suggestion to leave the EU, in which debate the advisory referendum would have been one of many pieces of evidence to consider.
I always found it almost comical how May thought of herself was the clever adult out-manoeuvring the ERG when the public school boys never even took her seriously.
It remains really not great that the government were trying to pass such important legislation without a proper parliamentary consensus. Even a proper consensus within their own party. This is simply not how the British parliamentary process is supposed to work when it’s functioning properly.
It's always the same cycle. Tories don't spend, sell our assets, strip public services to the the bare bones. People get fed up with terrible public services and vote Labour.
Labour raise taxes, pump money into public services and infrastructure, public services are better. People get fed up of taxes, are lulled in by Tory promises of lower taxes and the same level of public services, and Vote Tory.
Repeat ad infinitum.
Tories seem to have somehow managed to spend more, tax more and still balls up public services. It really is a marvel of ineptitude.
Everyone likes to think they're independent and don't need any public services, right up until the going gets tough and they do. Then they're all *shocked Pikachu* when the public services they voted in favour of cutting aren't there any more.
My fear this time is that the incoming Labour government aren't going to do nearly enough to improve things then come the next election we are going to get some Johnson/Farage hellscape next.
1) They stored up a lot of trouble for themselves and managed to antagonise lots of different groups of people.
2) Sunak is the wrong person to lift and inspire the nation at the time when a lot was wrong by the time he came in - he was not a good person to 'turn it around' and win loyalties back.
1a) After the Brexit vote, they went for some short-term wins culminating in the Boris government. That meant we got to the end of 2019 with the government promising a lot (levelling up, benefits of Brexit, etc)
1b) Covid and Ukraine War were not the government's fault. But Partygate and other scandals/ corruptions were and pissed off a lot of older people, who were otherwise more likely to vote Tory.
1c) Truss caused economic damage at a time when the economy was just recovering. Traditionally, the voters trust the Tories more than Labour on the economy. So Truss's actions antagonised yet another group of traditional Tory supporters.
2a) For various reasons, some would say partly not unconnected with Brexit, the number of immigrants has shot up since we left the EU. Sunak has done nothing to change this situation, so another reason for voting Tory (control borders, tough on immigration) seems to be untrue. Sunak has responded by concentrating on trying on clamp down on unofficial / illegal migration (stop the boats) but he has not succeedeed in this either.
2b) Because of Covid, the War and Truss, taxes have had to stay high, and therefore another tradtional Tory strength (low taxes) can only be asserted, not shown.
2c) Sunak and his advisers could see all this, that they risked losing traditional Tory supporters. So they emphasised right-wing rhetoric (culture wars etc), but in doing so, for every person they keep on the right, they risk losing two on the left.
2d) To top it off, Reform, and specifically their new leader Farage, have started to attract a lot of these traditionally Tory voters who feel betrayed that the party is not low-tax, low-immigration. Farage himself is a far more plausible speaker than Sunak.
Sunak has no way of persuading people to believe in him personally- he is a technocrat and backroom beaver, not a charismatic figure.
3) It's not 'this year'- it is a culmination.
I'd say on 2a, immigration levels are the long-term consequence of austerity. They've cut public sector pay to the bone, not built houses (so people can't afford housing and put off having children) and under-invested in education, and now can only plug those roles with foreign labour. There's literally nothing Sunak can do, as immigration is a long-term issue mostly relating to skills, training and the birth rate.
I think its two main factors:
1) As Rory Stewart had written in his book, when Cameron was leader he altered the criteria used to select Tory MP candidates away from competence and prioritizing other factors, this is how people like Liz Truss ended up un parliament. Subsequently to that, Johnson purged the party of any remaining competent MPs who saw how bad brexit was going to be and replaced them with lunatic headbangers who were mainly judged on how loyal they would be (the Gullis' of this world). This has left a parliamentary party devoid of talent and experience.
2) Ideologically the right wing in the Anglo-sphere can't handle the problems we face today, because those problems are the natural consequences of the policies they have pursued since the 1980s. Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US were both very keen on things like small government, de-regulation, low taxes and privatization of public assets. These policies may have had some short term benefits, but in the long term they have been disastrous.
For example the privatization of water injected some money into the treasury and de-regulation might have cut costs for consumers, but long term 0it has meant that over time our services have got worse to the point that now our waterways are literally full of shit. This is due to under-investment by the private companies who now own these services to make short term profit because the CEOs know that by the time it becomes a problem someone else will be in charge. The Tories are not capable of fixing this because its their ideology that has got us here, and they can't see themselves as being wrong.
Illegally partying whilst people died
Illegally partying on the eve of Prince Phillip's funeral whilst HM Queen Elizabeth II grieved her husband and followed the law on social distancing
Unlawfully proroguing Parliament for their own gains
Brexit. They promised pie in the sky, but it was always going to be a shit sandwich. Now people have the shit sandwich in hand, they can smell it and they're pissed.
Brexit. It was never going to work out well, but no-one in the Tory party could admit that and keep a top job. So they selected for ideologues, fools and blowhards. Now there's no-one competent at the top.
And the maker of said shit sandwich bailed on it.
But now it's 'Lord' Cameron.... for fucks sake. Politics in this country is a fucking joke.
And making Blair, the war criminal, a UN ambassador...
It's no wonder people are gravitating towards Reform. Thankfully, Farage is too vile for me to vote for.
The Prime Minister gave the nation a choice between two policies, promising he would do either if voted for. And then it turned out he had no plan whatsoever for doing one of those two options and abandoned all responsibility for doing it when selected. The referendum was simply held in bad faith.
It’s like asking someone out for a date and offering them the choice of either an Indian or Chinese restaurant. Then when they pick the latter saying you have no idea where a Chinese restaurant is or what foods constitute that cuisine and decide that they can actually go on the date with someone else.
I've never bought this, no reason Cameron should have to deliver something he held no belief in. Even if it was a great idea, you want someone who wants it to negotiate it. Brexiter or Remainer alike.
I'd have done the exact same. Your idea, you do it. I'm off to make some money!
That would be fair enough, if that was the deal he proposed. Would have been a lot clearer. If he’d said beforehand that a Leave vote meant the Tories would pick a new leader that would have at least initially made things clearer.
Instead he dropped it as a bad idea despite it being an idea he said his government would implement.
A bit like if you offer someone chocolate or poop for dinner and promise you will respect their decision. Fair enough, you can’t actually serve poop. But it’s still you who offered a plate of poop.
To be fair, in his book he explained he wanted to avoid making it a referendum on his position - bearing in mind his government was fucking hordes of people through austerity and a solid 2/3 of the electorate constantly want you out, he wanted to reduce his personal popularity and prospects outweighing what was a constitutional decision.
Terrible idea, terrible result, but having someone who didn't want something doing it would be bad for absolutely everyone involved.
Actually I see Cameron's role quite differently: he tried (and failed) to keep the loonies at bay. Probably he was (hubristically) convinced by the Scottish referendum that his campaigning skills would just about win the day. When the Russians via Aron Banks, and with the parallel two Farage/Vote Leave campaigns unleashed an onslaught of completely novel proportions, he was the only one who actually seemed to put up a fight, while Corbyn refused to share a platform with him, having den Farage's fascist poster, and Labour on the whole were just as lukewarm.
When what he knew to be a vote for a catastrophically damaging policy was the barrow result, he said that he would not be the one to visit such a travesty on the country and resigned rather than pretending that Brexit could be made to work.
Starmer isn't there yet.
My conspiracy theory?
They're doing it on purpose. They're deliberately trying to lose the election because they don't want to have to deal with bankrupt councils, bankrupt universities, bankrupt NHS etc etc etc
I know people are talking aboy 70 or 80 seats, but I think it won't be less than 120 seats. I don't know why they're carrying on making things worse, it's just crazy.
Unless they're deliberately planning to be out of power for two terms to rest, regroup, and redefine themselves...
The next Conservative Prime Minister might not even be a Member of Parliament yet. They might not have even graduated university. I don’t think any sane person would plan things out like that.
Either that or they want to make sure they lose this election. I have my doubts whether Starmer and co will be able to fix anything to a satisfactory level in 5 years purely because of how fucked things are.
I also don’t think it’d be hard for the tories to get back into power in the next election if Starmer doesn’t improve things a lot
I don’t think this is a conspiracy theory, but more a potential explanation as to what is going on.
Lots of Conservative MPs are standing down. Some are getting older, sure, but it’s still record numbers for the amount standing down.
Rishi Sunak does whatever is best for Rishi Sunak. Similar to a few other comments on similar posts, I have a feeling that the party knew an election was on the horizon and were planning to replace him with someone else, with the obvious candidate being Penny Mordaunt.
Knowing this, Rishi Sunak decides he would rather lose to a political opponent from another party, who will have to deal with the consequences of the last 14 years of Tory rule, than an internal threat / rival.
In 5-10 years time, when Labour potentially struggle against some of the conditions the Conservatives have spent the last 14 years setting up, Conservatives (potentially even Sunak himself) will be on talk shows / have a books out all about “How we were actually right”.
I wouldn't give them that much credit. The truth is that any moderate sensible people have been fully purged or sidelined since 2019. The remaining are either red wall brexiters, ERG remnants, idiots who keep being told by right wing think tanks how smart they are, or coke heads.
They're the third party becuase people who generally consider themselves "conservatives" or more right leaning such as myself do not feel well represented by the current Tory party one bit...
There’s a complete lack of talent, commitment or interest in the country from the parliamentary Conservative Party, the party is now a bunch of loosely aligned chancers, looking and now failing to find the remaining substantial sources of public money that can be siphoned to their school chums or nepotistic relationships.
**(Mostly a rant...)**
Maybe I'm (American) wrong, but it seems more like a global issue, and one that has been happening for decades.
The problems I've read about in the UK are pretty much universal: Neo-liberal capitalism approaching its denouement -- "eating itself", as it were. All over the world, corporations are merging, financial firms are buying-up as many assets as possible, governments are colluding with companies to allow these things to happen. South Korea might as well be called the "Samsung Republic" -- because Samsung represents 22.4% of the total GDP! ([link](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1314374/south-korea-samsung-groups-revenue-as-a-share-of-gdp/#:~:text=Samsung%20Group's%20annual%20revenue%20as,GDP%20South%20Korea%202017%2D2022&text=In%202022%2C%20the%20revenue%20of,gross%20domestic%20product%20(GDP))) When was the last time you used a search service other than Google? ([91% market share](https://searchengineland.com/googles-huge-search-market-share-loss-wasnt-real-data-revised-440191)). South Africa popularized the economic term "State Capture" -- "a type of systemic political corruption in which private interests significantly influence a state's decision-making processes to their own advantage."
Look at housing costs across Europe (and the US). It's no coincidence that in almost all countries housing costs have been rising far faster than wages, and that's by design -- policy design. Funnel money upwards to the rich. I know that London housing costs are a nightmare, and that's by design. I grew-up in California and housing costs are insane, and that's by design. In the UK in the 1970s, the housing-cost-to-yearly-income ratio was 4.1 -- now it's 8.8 ([link](https://www.financialreporter.co.uk/income-to-house-price-ratio-more-than-doubles-since-the-70s.html#)). That across the whole UK, not just in the cities. In London it's now 14 ([link](https://www.standard.co.uk/homesandproperty/property-news/average-home-cost-times-typical-income-london-b1097122.html)). These housing costs have risen through both Left- and Right-wing governments. You're lucky you don't live in Beijing (41) or Shanghai (32) ([link](https://www.caixinglobal.com/2021-07-31/weekend-long-read-deciphering-chinas-housing-conundrum-101748985.html#:~:text=If%20calculated%20by%20usable%20area,)). In Canada, housing prices have increased almost 500%, in the big cities, in the past 20 years, and 375% nation-wide ([link](https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadas-unhinged-housing-market-captured-in-one-chart)). These housing costs are all the result of policy decisions by governments that favor the rich. Ireland has the most expensive housing in Europe!! ([link](https://www.irishtimes.com/your-money/2023/03/07/housing-costs-how-does-ireland-compare-to-the-rest-of-europe/)) And it was basically a third-world country 40 years ago.
Capitalism is supposed to be all about competition, but the trend has been simply consolidation. Here's a challenge for you: Next time you go to the pub, try to order a beer not owned by InBev. I would list them all here, but it's quite long... [here's the wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AB_InBev_brands). I mean, why compete when you can just [merge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_mergers_and_acquisitions#2020s)? These are all the result of government policies. Governments *allow* these mergers to occur -- seemingly in direct contradiction of fundamental capitalist principles.
You asked, "*How have the Conservatives managed to screw up so badly this year?*" It's a good question, but I would humbly expand it's scope to something more like, "*How have both Left and Right governments managed to screw up so badly in the past 40 years?*"
...
**Here's my secondary thesis: I blame the Left. Or, more specifically, the lack of action from the Left.**
All across Europe the left-wing parties mostly seem to be focused on boutique culture issues, rather than addressing fundamental materialist economic issues. AfD is Germany is surging because the German Left isn't addressing fundamental economic issues because they are also in thrall to neo-liberal capitalism. Here in the US, we're arguing about "drag queen story hour" and banning Tik-Tok while around 68,000 people die every year because they lack health care insurance. That's, what, twenty-three 9/11s every year?
Right-wing parties are quite chuffed about this because they can go about their business of gobbling-up resources, creating monopolies, and de-funding public services. While the Democrats were squabbling about alternative minimum tax, the Republicans suddenly turned abortion into a felony murder crime in about half the states. During COVID, the global rich transferred $5 trillion from the lower classes to themselves ([link](https://edition.cnn.com/2022/01/16/business/oxfam-pandemic-davos-billionaires/index.html)). This is what Naomi Klein refers to as "Disaster Capitalism" or the "Shock Doctrine". Brexit was a great example of that. Take advantage of the economic turmoil of Brexit to acquire even more assets and resources. The Left did nothing to combat this.
Jeremy Corbyn was sacrificed to the capitalist gods over a ghost of a non-issue. He actually threatened the existing capitalist order, and the (center) Left simply wouldn't allow that to happen. Bernie Sanders was, and is, the most popular politician in the United States, but the "Left" drove a spike into his heart because he threatened the existing capitalist order.
You guys have a "Labour" party. Honest question: What has the Labour party done recently to actually help the labouring class? I've heard public transportation tickets are exorbinant. That's a regressive tax on the working class. Of course housing costs are insane -- another regressive tax on the working class.
In the US and UK, political parties mostly talk about "messaging" -- how can they craft PR campaigns into to appeal to enough voters? Well, I have a "modest proposal", so-to-speak: How about proposing actual policies that help people? The problem with the Right is that they would have to say, "*Well, we propose to make your lives more miserable and destitute.*" That's why the Right has to focus on boutique cultural issues to appeal to voters, because otherwise they would have to admit that their agenda is laser-focused on transferring wealth upwards.
I can't think of any significant policy proposals from Democrats in the last 20 years. Obamacare was a wash... it hasn't made a dent in health care costs. Your boy Tony Blair completely supported the Iraq War, which is a policy of sorts, I suppose. During Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign 90% of her ads didn't feature any policy proposals. Okay, I have to be fair to Democrats: Here's [a whole list](https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/) of policy proposals on their website. The problem is, none of them will actually be implemented because they lack the will to actually implement them. All talk, and no action. Interestingly, the Republican [website ](https://gop.com/)doesn't actually feature any policies other than "End\[ing\] the witch hunt" against the "Political prisoner" Donald Trump.
The Left needs to step-up and start taking action that actually helps the bottom 90%. I mean, the solution is incredibly simple: Tax the goddam rich and corporations! Subsidize public transport. Build more public housing. Universal free childcare. Universal free (public) university education. Extended parental leave. Strong support for unions. Etc. If the Labour party said, "*We will tax corporations, we will eliminate tax havens like the Channel Islands, we will do these things,*" the entire population of the UK will throw themselves at their feet.
...
**Conclusion**
The Conservatives in fact haven't screwed-up if you consider the appropriate criteria: Making the rich richer. They've done very well at that. Republicans in the US have been doing a wonderful job at that as well.
As I wrote in the intro, capitalism is eating itself. I know that Accelerationism has a bad rap, but, it seems that the only way out is to keep going through. It looks like things won't get better until they get really, really worse. Once you bring AI and automation into the picture, it's even more bleak in the short term. What will governments do with 25% unemployment? 50%? 90% Well, the rich and the corporations will have two options:
1. Universal Basic Income
2. Die
We actually have a historical model for #2. In 1917, the peasants and workers of the Russian Empire humbly begged their capitalist masters for a little more money, shorter working hours, cheaper bread, etc. Well, their masters told the workers and peasants to go jump in a lake. So what did they do? They killed their masters, took their land, burned their manors. I'm not defending Communism or anything -- I'm simply pointing out an analog to what could happen if we continue on our current path.
It's not just this year, it's everything they've done over the 14 years they've been in government that is finally unravelling. This really could be the end of the party, at least as a party with ambitions of winning office. Assuming they get decimated at this election then I can't see them bouncing back quickly so you can immediately right off the next election unless Labour make an absolute pigs ear of it. So you're looking at maybe 10 years, by which time millions of their current voters will be dead, the print media industry will be dead or on it's last breath.
And for what? So they could stop people voting Ukip?
I agree with you and I actually have no idea how they've managed to cock it up so badly. They've seemingly pissed off virtually all their voters (including me, my entire family and most of my social circle).
We entered 2010 a bit battered after the global financial crisis but in general the NHS was performing well (to the point where in some places you couldn’t book days in advance because there were appointments today) and schools weren’t underfunded. Councils were collecting bins and providing services as you’d expect. The trains were shit though.
Fast forward 14 years and nothing works, all the services are shaved to the bone and in some places councils are so bust basic shit doesn’t even work. We have pissing rain all winter and then droughts in the summer because all the reservoirs have been sold and there’s shit in the rivers. Our mortgages are through the roof and they even took us out of Europe.
The trains still don’t even work.
It’s not just this year, this is just the worst year, the culmination of 14 years of wankpottery.
The constant lying I think has caught up with them and completely destroyed trust in them. It started under Cameron who campaigned hugging huskies and then reduced many green measures but from the Brexit vote onwards it has gone into overdrive.
Eventually you have to produce something and I genuinely struggle to think of one area that is better under the Torries. Why would you trust them when even their main attack point of the £2k Labour tax rise is another obvious lie.
They killed themselves, ironically, by trying to protect themselves from UKIP & Farage.
Had Cameron not held the referendum, or at least had held the referendum with a super majority, funny how they like that phrase now, then I think there is little chances that Farage could have got a foot hold with their core voters c
Corbyn.
Seriously; as a party they were spent by 2016. Cameron's gamble to heal the split and unite the party with the Brexit referendum fails massively and they were a spent force that desperately needed a few years in opposition to sort itself out; eject the weirdos and come back sensible and able to govern.
But Corbyn was so unelectable they didn't get that chance; they kept winning when they shouldn't have done and marginalising the sensible wing of the party even further. Now its so devoid of talent its no surprise the tories are where they are now; when you see Farage or Cameron speaking and realise they are several cuts above the current tory politicians you suddenly realise that no one who is left has any talent or skills.
It's funny really. Corbyn might just end the dominance of right wing politics in the country but not through any way he envisaged.
Anyone competent left after Brexit. Anyone wanting a career wouldn't work for them as the pounding they are about to get would look bad on the C.V.
It's why no one said D-day was a bad idea, announcing the election in the soaking rain looking like a slug and betting on the election while being in the election.
The absolute dregs are left at every level either that or opportunists and they simply cannot function anymore.
The country has been left to rot for a decade and a half. In 2015 they had the fear of the SNP to aide them into power. In 2017 they did badly but still just about beat a divisive far left (by UK standards) candidate. In 2019 they had Johnson and Brexit and faced a historically unpopular Corbyn.
Now they have... nothing. The economy is broken, we have more crises than we can name (NHS crisis, Housing crisis, Infrastructure crisis, COL crisis). We have new banks as well... plenty of foodbanks, but now also bed banks, clothing banks, and warm banks.
The writing was on the wall when Truss was elected and ejected and Rishi crowned, against the will of the Tory members. That made the members mad and a laughing stock to the rest of the country.
It's been 14 years of poor (or no) decision making, infighting, and purging of factions that has led to this. This was coming regardless of leader in my opinion.
In my opinion the current Conservative Party reflects the low interest rate environment we had up until Covid.
Loose money, easy financing… appealing to scammers and grifters.
In a high interest rate, tight financing environment they just fall apart.
Broader theory: the impacts of the pandemic - inflation, attitudes to authority, the role of the state, etc - on politics worldwide has yet to hit.
Think about it: in the coming months and weeks, voters in UK, France, and US will decide the first fully post-pandemic set of lawmakers.
Ok, the pandemic was essentially "over" in 2022 as a daily part of life, but the status quo was different.
What's crazy to think is that the current UK government was elected in 2019 - which feels like a lifetime ago.
I think the conservatives have been complacent because Labour have just looked so crazy and unelectable for so long.
I also think in general, the quality of people entering politics is low now.
Governments world wide are taking a hammering because of the cost of living crisis. This has been exacerbated for the Tories by a massive slump in the polling during Truss' administration, which Sunak hasn't recovered from due to a chronic lack of ideas.
They ran out of other people to blame. Can't blame the last Labour government (much as Truss tried to blame *the next Labour government* for her financial crash), can't blame the EU, can't find anyone else who could conceivably be blamed, so they can't hide the fact it's all their fault anymore.
All the talented Tories retired or defected to other parties once Boris Johnson became PM. So all they have left are a bunch of clowns and non entities.
I suspect immigration isn't being fixed as it's a nice littler earner for G4S and Serco, with the hotels, security, asylum centres and if it ever gets off the ground, Rwanda deportation, just like the orison industrial complex in America provides a incentive for crime to continue.
It has to be the case that the bosses of the two companies donate to the Tories in return for contacts, but that sounds a bit conspiracy theory.
I want to say it goes back to the Maastricht Treaty...
The better question is why didn't they screw everything up before? There is nothing new about the current Conservatives, they've been pushing the same ideology, the same general policy ideas, with the same levels of corruption and incompetence since at least the 90s.
In 2010 they were able to sell themselves as reformed; David Cameron was the young, hip, new guy, who would be different. And people were tired of New Labour - Gordon Brown being far less photogenic. But even then, they didn't win a majority.
2015 they won a surprise majority, in part due to the collapse in support for the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems had helped the Conservatives appear sane, reasonable and competent throughout the 2010-2015 Parliament, and got punished for it from both sides. They kept the worst excesses of the Conservatives in check.
From 2015-2016 politics was dominated by the EU Referendum, which was a colossal screw-up by the Conservatives. Cameron resigned, and we got May, who couldn't run the Home Office competently, never mind the whole Government. She made several major mistakes, screwed up many things, and only scraped through the 2017 General Election in part due to the lack of opposition on the hard-to-far right, and due to the Lib Dems still being unpopular. She didn't last, of course.
Then we get 2019 - Boris Johnson messed up his first few months in office, broke a few laws, lost all his first major votes in the Commons (so should have resigned, but didn't), but lied and cheated his way into a majority in the 2019 election against a historically unpopular (and generally useless) Labour leader, and again, with the full support of the hard-to-far right (particularly with Farage doing everything he could to ensure Johnson won). And then Johnson kept to his record of screwing everything up - leaving the EU, covid; everything he tried to manage he failed at.
The question isn't "how did they manage to screw up so badly this year", the question is why anyone is surprised?
Perhaps the difference is that their friends, family, and colleagues in the press aren't as invested in covering for them any more. They also don't have any competent-but-evil political strategists left. Partly because they cannot afford them, partly because no one wants to run a losing campaign, and partly because most of them have been kicked out (due to the many internal party struggles over the last 8 years).
Absolutely talentless bunch of rich losers basically. Boris Johnson pushed out the last of the normal conservatives. Now to be a Tory MP the only thing on your CV is which oxbridge college you went to
Hmm, good question. I'm beginning to have doubts about their claim to be the natural party of government, the party of personal responsibility, the party of economic competence etc.
It's starting to feel like they might be a shambolic mess of chancers, grifters, conmen, over-zealous ideologues and actual crooks.
But who am I to judge? I'm just some pleb without a single million quid to my name.
There’s a school of thought that they know they’ve fucked it and are actively trying to lose so they can stick Labour with all the mess, then start blaming them for it all
Imagine a political party promised for X, Y, Z policies and they did the exact opposite. I am not talking about doing nothing, they did the exact opposite in an extreme way for 14 years.
Now think about Tory Party and choose their top manifesto promises as X, Y, Z.
Because, ideologically, they've completely sold themselves out to the right, it's thinktanks and rich donors. They're (as a group) bought-and-paid-for charlatans who exist simply to make the rich richer.
Looking at the answers below reinforced my gut feel the real problem in Britain is Britons. Almost all have a sense of entitlement and an expectation that government has to sort out low rates of innovation, low productivity, overspending on software projects that go disastrously wrong, high annual fiscal deficits, cancelled rail projects, and on and on. Those flaws in our society can’t be solved by government, we already spend 200 billion a year on loan interest and suggesting there is no ceiling is dangerously wrong. The world is watching and Liz Truss made it clear global markets have paper thin confidence in the UK. Those markets know we are unable to keep our best and brightest and that they mostly leave for a better life. That combined with age demographics has justified the globalist view that open borders and the dissolution of the nation state is the future. The snag is we know nothing has changed and open borders are a huge net cost to Western Democracies both economically and politically
In part they've just run out of steam, in part it's a "chickens coming home to roost thing" and in part it's because over the last 14 years they've just burned up any goodwill they had.
Looking at the state of the country it's clear that it's been mismanaged, and all the determination to "cut costs" has just meant that nobody can get a dentist appointment and schools have crumbling roofs and noone is fixing the potholes etc
On top of that the actual party is literally being run by the dregs at the bottom of the barrel. They've had so many changes of leadership, so many reshuffles, so many scandals that it's actually difficult for them to find competent people for the top jobs, which is why James Cleverly of all people is Home Secretary and Hunt is chancellor, jobs neither of whom are really qualified for.
And frankly the country is just sick of them, maybe if they had a leader who was a bit more savvy and a bit more charming or charasmatic they might be polling higher, but you can't just blame Rishi for this
Brexit has destroyed the party over the past 8 years. Most of the competent politicians left or were fired by Johnson who promoted a lot of deeply inadequate people based on loyalty. They've had no plans or purpose beyond self enrichment for many years.
My theory is that it began with Brexit and Johnson. They ejected all the actual boring governing talent and replaced it with populism - flashy announcements, tight messaging, messy hair and headlines from the client press. It worked great for a while, they got 2019 off the back of simple answers to complex questions and kept with that pattern of making announcements for the Daily Mail or Telegraph to fawn over and didn't ever really bother with following through and fixing things.
Rwanda is emblematic of this, it's nonsense, even it's supporters accept that it's not going to work but it's all they have focused on for years. The problem is that the populism works great for a short period, but if you're constantly promising new great things and chasing the next Tory press headline about how you're a genius for cancelling HS2 to spend the money on potholes in north London, after a few years people are going to start tuning your headlines out. After all they've been seeing this stuff for years and _there's still potholes_.
You lose the faith of the electorate, and at that point you are _fucked_ because it doesn't matter what you promise, nobody is listening.
I'm pretty certain that it started with Brexit, then when that claimed May, along comes Johnson with his immense popularity catapulting him in. But when it became clear that Johnson responded to Covid and almost any other problem very, very badly (i.e. short term personal benefit, instead of the country) it was too late, and only so many scandals can happen before the party realises he's gotta go.
I feel Sunak could perhaps have steadied things a bit more had he (a) actually been any good at being PM, and (b) not kept up the pretence that the Rwanda plan was actually a real, workable policy. It's been painful listening to Cleverly being wheeled out to defend it.
Also feels like the Conversative brand involves never admitting a policy has failed, and constant propaganda (almost always lies now) that actually everything is fine. You can't govern like that forever - eventually enough stuff goes wrong where you can't talk about, or act on, the true causes because you can never admit they exist.
The post Brexit Tory brain drain has finally reached its end point.
The EU referendum forced the Conservatives into an impossible position. Their supporters and the press demanded they see Brexit through, yet any Tory MP with half a brain could see it wasn't going to work. Theresa May tried to find a compromise and it cost her the job. Later, Boris purged the party of the biggest Brexit rebels whilst promoting those who were loyal to Brexit.
Unfortunately promoting people based on loyalty to a bad idea over competance is not a good way to run a country.
This is what is was like after Labour had been in charge for a long while. The party, country and voters just get sick and tired of the ruling party and swings the other way
Not to this extent. Their vote in 2010 put them in contention for a rainbow coalition, and there was still some message discipline and enough talent knocking around the front bench to put together a decent shadow cabinet. Tories are on for double digits with a shadow cabinet made up of The Addams Family and an old Nazi guard that had been hiding in Argentina.
So that we carry on sheepling. We will be so happy when Labour come in, and will forget all about this in 4-8 years time and think that we have some sort of say in it all again.
If you want a substantial answer, see [this link](https://wandering.shop/@cstross/112625513982403069) and [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_H_1Akaip0) and [book](https://www.lse.ac.uk/european-institute/events/2023-24/Late-Soviet-Britain-why-materialist-utopias-fail).
And the Mastodon thread from C Stross concludes: "Which is why Starmerism will fail: he's like Gorbachev—too little, too late."
I'm starting to think the only possible answer to the question is that they are all so sick of it, and have cushy "consultancy" jobs or public speaking gigs lined up already, that they have just deliberately sabotaged their own campaign.
You have Boris. He was doing well in the polls and even destroyed labour at the 2021 local elections. What happens after? Partygate biting Boris at the back. Boris and that the conservative party broke their own lockdown rules they established. As a result, Boris starts dropping at the polls significantly but is still quite ahead of labour. He does lose the 2022 local elections.
Partygate was the centre of the news headlines. His own cabinet kept pressuring him to resign. Some of his cabinet resigned because they lost faith in Boris and wanted to oust him. Boris then resigns.
Fast forward to September 2022, Liz Truss wins the conservative leadership election and becomes prime minister. Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng crash the economy with their kamikaze budget. Bank of England intervenes to stop further damage. Inflation continues to rises. Mortgages became significantly more expensive as a result causing further struggle. She resigns a month later and is known as the shortest serving prime minister. Labour then overtook the conservatives at the polls at a significant rate.
Then here comes Rishi Sunak and people simply lost faith in the conservative party. They wanted a general election. Ever since then the labour party has been ahead at the polls.
They lost this election 2 years ago.
The Downing Street lockdown parties were truly despicable, then there was Boris clinging to power for additional weeks over the summer of 2022 without doing his job (and having a jolly good time flying in jets while the rest of us struggled), Liz Truss came, saw, broke the economy and fucked off, and even before that things were going downhill for them since May 2020 when Dominic Cummings broke the lockdown rules and the Tory Party closed ranks around him.
Keir Starmer as early as June 2020 had become the most popular opposition leader since Tony Blair in the mid 90s, it just took a bit longer to convince the electorate to extend that favorability to the rest of the Labour party.
The only person who was actually good enough to be a Tory Leader in the last 20 years has been David Cameron, and he ran away after burning down the barn.
Then we had May who by all accounts was an excellent MP for Maidenhead, but wasn't a leader.
Then we had Boris who was one of the few Tories who wanted the job and got over the line with the banter vote.
Then we ended up with Truss who had made promises to a select group of powerful and wealthy people, but who even the rest of the wealthy elite were scared of because they knew she would break things.
Then we ended up with Sunak because he was truly the last morsel at the bottom of the barrel.
They know it's not salvageable so why even try? Anyone smart enough to mitigate the damage is also smart enough not to ruin their career by putting effort into a failed enterprise.
From an outside perspective it looks like they fucked up with Brexit on a massive scale and failed to deliver a lot of promises that they made to you. And the consequences of that are finally coming to fruition, especially as your conservative leader keep playing the same tune but nothing is fundamentally improving.
The fact there’s been so many leadership contests I feel shows the Conservative Party have got a severe leadership issue, perhaps as a result of Boris chasing out all the Remain supporting MPs or anyone not loyal to him.
Their problems go back years. Basically there are two Conservative parties. One is the traditional "one nation" group who are centre right. Think John Major, Rory Stewart etc. In the other camp are the populist, Brexit, radical free marketeer, right wingers. Pre Cameron they maintained discipline and rarely let their mutual hatred for each other show in public. Johnson purged a lot of the traditionalists and the likes of the ERG took over.
I just get a sense that nothing has ever been done in the interests of the country, but only in the interests of the party. Brexit was presented as being in the national interest but in reality it it was just another dimension of Tory internal factionalism
I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m keeping everything crossed that this rotten mob will find themselves locked out of power for a generation (at least), but these shits always seem to find a way.
Tories screw up started back in early 2000s. Downfall started under David Cameron / Osborne. Failure of leadership and appeasing right of the party. Party management failure, delivery and incompetence.
Recent screw ups started under Boris due to COVID and party gate. Lizz truss budget was next negative drop in support. Rishi failure of leadership and poor party management is only one tiny part of the story.
Delivery and incompetence is often missing from analysis.
Partygate.
Not just that it happened, but that they honestly expected everyone to forget about it and *got annoyed* when people didn't.
They've fucked up in multiple places with multiple people, but I'm pretty sure that people burying relatives with no proper funerals, not being able to see people on deathbeds, seeing THE QUEEN have to sit on her own while Phillp's service was going on, jobs lost, lives upended, etc. - only to then see pictures of drunk tories feeling each other up at their party and for them to respond with 'no we didn't! Okay, some did but it was just a small party and we've been working really hard, shut up about it now'.
I think that was their mortal wound and ever since they've been stumbling around and bleeding out. Good fucking riddance.
14 years of bad policies.. with 5 awful prime ministers
Also…
It’s the first time the media has held them to account and are willing to get rid of them. I think that’s the key difference here
The downfall started with Boris. The corruption just became so obvious, and then the culture wars started the party just seems to have become weaker and worse ever since and seem to be offering absolutely nothing anymore.
2010 - Osborne and Cameron decision was the wrong decision to make cuts. I believe if they borrowed and gambled a little and invested in our public services and infrastructure we would be in a better position .
2015 - Cameron gambling for the public to vote in a referendum just to win a majority is the most idiotic and stupid decision any other government has made and that’s including the lettuce! And now has the title Lord!
2017 - May gambling to get more seats for Brexit and failed miserably which entered the road for Johnson.
2019 - Johnson v Corbyn. Corbyn might well be a good a speaker but his policies and the issues rife in the party allowed a narcissist into number 10 and probably the worst PM ever. The man should be in jail!
2020 - Johnson hiding in a freezer and the over parties.
2022 - Sunak in, and we are all exhausted in a government which has lined their pockets.
2024 - Farage playing on the emotions of the right wing who normally support then Tories. Hopefully Labour can give us hope!
**(Mostly a rant...)**
Maybe I'm (American) wrong, but it seems more like a global issue, and one that has been happening for decades.
The problems I've read about in the UK are pretty much universal: Neo-liberal capitalism approaching its denouement -- "eating itself", as it were. All over the world, corporations are merging, financial firms are buying-up as many assets as possible, governments are colluding with companies to allow these things to happen. South Korea might as well be called the "Samsung Republic" -- because Samsung represents 22.4% of the total GDP! ([link](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1314374/south-korea-samsung-groups-revenue-as-a-share-of-gdp/#:~:text=Samsung%20Group's%20annual%20revenue%20as,GDP%20South%20Korea%202017%2D2022&text=In%202022%2C%20the%20revenue%20of,gross%20domestic%20product%20(GDP))) When was the last time you used a search service other than Google? ([91% market share](https://searchengineland.com/googles-huge-search-market-share-loss-wasnt-real-data-revised-440191)). South Africa popularized the economic term "State Capture" -- "a type of systemic political corruption in which private interests significantly influence a state's decision-making processes to their own advantage."
Look at housing costs across Europe (and the US). It's no coincidence that in almost all countries housing costs have been rising far faster than wages, and that's by design -- policy design. Funnel money upwards to the rich. I know that London housing costs are a nightmare, and that's by design. I grew-up in California and housing costs are insane, and that's by design. In the UK in the 1970s, the housing-cost-to-yearly-income ratio was 4.1 -- now it's 8.8 ([link](https://www.financialreporter.co.uk/income-to-house-price-ratio-more-than-doubles-since-the-70s.html#)). That across the whole UK, not just in the cities. In London it's now 14 ([link](https://www.standard.co.uk/homesandproperty/property-news/average-home-cost-times-typical-income-london-b1097122.html)). These housing costs have risen through both Left- and Right-wing governments. You're lucky you don't live in Beijing (41) or Shanghai (32) ([link](https://www.caixinglobal.com/2021-07-31/weekend-long-read-deciphering-chinas-housing-conundrum-101748985.html#:~:text=If%20calculated%20by%20usable%20area,)). In Canada, housing prices have increased almost 500%, in the big cities, in the past 20 years, and 375% nation-wide ([link](https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadas-unhinged-housing-market-captured-in-one-chart)). These housing costs are all the result of policy decisions by governments that favor the rich. Ireland has the most expensive housing in Europe!! ([link](https://www.irishtimes.com/your-money/2023/03/07/housing-costs-how-does-ireland-compare-to-the-rest-of-europe/)) And it was basically a third-world country 40 years ago.
Capitalism is supposed to be all about competition, but the trend has been simply consolidation. Here's a challenge for you: Next time you go to the pub, try to order a beer not owned by InBev. I would list them all here, but it's quite long... [here's the wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AB_InBev_brands). I mean, why compete when you can just [merge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_mergers_and_acquisitions#2020s)? These are all the result of government policies. Governments *allow* these mergers to occur -- seemingly in direct contradiction of fundamental capitalist principles.
You asked, "*How have the Conservatives managed to screw up so badly this year?*" It's a good question, but I would humbly expand it's scope to something more like, "*How have both Left and Right governments managed to screw up so badly in the past 40 years?*"
Continued in part 2...
After 14 years they have spent their talent. They actually have very few good political operators left. Imagine a leadership contest, who would stand? Whose left. It's the dregs. I imagine it's the same for Cchq and the spads. The talent pool is now so slim that David Cameron was wheeled back into government.
They have brilliantly timed the General Election whilst students are home for the summer, meaning that [35 Tory seats are likely to be changing hands](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jun/16/students-summer-holidays-voting-uk-general-election-conservative-seats).
(not a Tory voter by any stretch)
The quality of the average conservative MP seems to be becoming more and more underwhelming in terms of intelligence and capability, whilst their opinions as to their own abilities seems to be soaring. I just hope that is limited to the Tories and not to Labour, but then I realise that Diane Abbott is still about and I worry. Before anyone tries to stone me, have you actually heard her talk? It’s eerily similar to Liz Truss!
The Conservatives are not conservative. The rot started under Woody and then the course towards mindless adoption of US fiscal, race and gender policy started. How else and frankly what other country would be taking the knee to race activists promoting a saint who had fentanyl up his bootay?
Not fixing the roof over the last 14 years (while the sun shines). So the rain has been coming in, everyone is soaked and the PS5 is simply ruined.
It's worse than that. They've been actively selling off the few remaining tiles, and no one knows where the money went..
Everyone knows where the money went.
Michelle Mone knows someone who can supply you some tiles. By 'someone' I mean her husband. And by tiles I mean beermats that incinerate well.
By tiles, you mean paper towels
Errr, tell me where!
Surely the sky box is ruined?!
Maybe that was Rishi's revenge plan all along
Not the ps5!
Not the comfy chair!
...and the soft cushions!
And my axe!
We never even got the PS5 as well.
Awwwwww no not the PS5 man................
There’s been a thunderstarm.
Then they’ve been pushing the narrative about how bad the roof is (while not fixing it).
And we're all out of Rishibucks to replace the PS5
There have certainly been plenty of fuckups this year (in large part due to the complete lack of talent and competence in their top team). But a lot of it is just chickens coming home to roost after 14 years of Conservative rule. There's only so long that you can cut and underfund and outsource and privatise before everything starts to fall over.
It's like a factory that lost some money one year. Rather than invest in new equipment, they lay workers off. So the next year the sales are lower so they cut again until eventually the thing goes under.
Modern business 101; it’s called “efficiency”
Basically this. Since austerity most public services seem to have been running on fumes, like how if you stop peddling a bike you still go for a bit. Now they're really wobbling and since Thatcher the ideology they subscribe too and the actions necessary to resolve said problems are just fundamentally at odds
What’s even dumber, is that Tories often claim that they are the party of the ‘Smaller State’. And that’s how they try to legitimise cutting public funding. All the while they are piling on *more* responsibility onto Local Authority and Healthcare, not less. So actually they are the party of making the state far, far bigger but funding it less so it does everything badly.
dont forget thye are the party of low taxes to
Do it badly in public ownership is the penultimate step before privatisation.
This. Like the Republicans in the US, they come into power telling us that government is the problem, “prove” the point by governing very badly and then use that “proof” as justification for selling off whatever is left to their friends and donors at closing down sale prices. It’s always been their modus operandi, always will be and I will be overjoyed if they are in 3rd place on July 5th. I’m sick and tired of this shit.
Amen. I remember Maggie doing just this between about 1985 and 1992. They just sold off every fucking thing - British Airways, British Telecom, British Rail (only the profit making bits - for some reason we kept the bit that costs money Network Rail), 12 or so Electricity Boards (but kept the unprofitable parts under National Grid), British Gas, Water Companies (but kept the unprofitable bits and put them in the Environment Agency). The list goes on and on. Hundreds of billions going abroad in profits and so the govt now has to tax us to keep the rivers clean. The only thing left for the govt now to raise money is us. Used to be dozens of profit making parts of the nation but that evil so and so sold them off.
The screw ups are the screw ups and part of the problem. A much bigger part is that they have spent so much effort to cater to a specific sector....namely UKIP leaning voters...that they left everyone else behind. Couple that with the removal of any experienced, empathetic, half way decent centre leaning politicians and the recipe for disaster is stirred, baked, and served on a platter of vomit.
They tried to cater to UKIP voters… while massively, massively increasing immigration. Just ridiculously stupid politics
[удалено]
Oh they didn’t get it. But the Tories have pandered to them every election with the promise of low immigration. Every year apart from this one, they have fallen for it. And even now Farage is basically telegraphing his desire to jump ship.
It’s been catered to via Brexit. Those people think they got what they wanted, and are too stupid to realise in reality they got the opposite. The Tories winning so many red wall seats last time kind of shows it worked for a while.
And now Farage tells this faction that the Tories have failed them and swears he'll do a proper job on legal migration.
The fact the Tories are going to be annihilated in this election shows they do in fact know that they didn't get what they voted for.
Yeah, it's only taken them about 5 years to work it out...
Not just lower immigration, but deep cultural conservatism too. That's why Tories have been going so hard on transphobia, critical race theory, and other conspiracies like cultural Marxism. It worked for a short while, but alienated fiscally-right, socially liberal types, and always meant there'd be a party even further right who can go harder than them.
Are we just ignoring the massive pile of shit draped in a union jack that is brexit?
A "vote for change" manifesto doesn't really work when the change is reversing the past decade of your own work
The talent has deserted the party
Because governments that don't fundamentally believe in governing eventually come unstuck when the fact they never had any interest in improving the lives of their constiuents becomes sufficiently obvious, in spite of their heavy investment in culture wars, media messaging and posturing.
This is the best answer so far. The correct answer is typically very simple. We can boil it down to: grifters who are not intending to govern. Governing means stewardship, seriously looking at the challenges of our day and seriously trying to identify ways to address those challenges. With the Tories especially Cameron and Johnson, there was no interest in governance. It was posturing and grift.
This - once the Tories were unleashed to govern alone they've been too busy with infighting to care about actually governing the country - lots of tactics from them but no strategy. It's somewhat ironic that the only stable parliament in the 21st century where the Tories were in power was a coalition government.
Almost as if you need multiple viewpoints in positions of power to come to a compromise together.
I think one of the biggest problems they have is a complete refusal to acknowledge that they are to blame for quite a lot of our current problems. Yes the pandemic did cause problems, yes the war in Ukraine has also caused problems but the reality is that the Tories have always caused so much of the problems through incompetence, delusion and intentionality. And after 14 years you can’t keep saying “but Labour” or this or that. It’s the refusal to recognise they have failed, the refusal to apologise which gets me and I think so many others so angry
I think Penny Mordaunt has said to Angela Rayner in 2 of the interviews "you've had 14 years and you've got no plan." The lack of self awareness from the Tories is unreal. All the talk about is raising taxes and getting rid of foreigners despite doing neither of those things.
But Tory plans would of course work perfectly if nothing major ever went wrong anywhere in the world that affects Britain. It’s just unlucky that there happen to been problems in the last decade and a half globally. As long as nothing ever went wrong and everything always got generally better with the Tories not having to do anything to achieve that then their plans would have been perfect. /s
This is the clear problem with austerity though; it creates pressure. Take... A supermarket. It used to employ enough people to have 36 staff on the floor at a time. But the company wanted to make more money, so they cut staff, one by one, until the operation runs on a leaner, stressed out, 24 staff. But it runs. And for a time, everything is fine. I mean sure, the staff are miserable but the shareholders in far off places don't actually care about them, so it's fine. But then someone's ill for a week and suddenly the whole operation falls apart, because through austerity we found that 23.754 is the absolute breaking point. Now something critical can't be done because you just can't slim down any further. This is ultimately what austerity policies do. They break things down to the point of ruthless efficiency, sacrificing things like reliability.
Yes 100% , they are a party of power hungry narcissistic career politician who don't governments two toffees about how you the common person lives but have simply used it as a path to elevate themselves. Zero integrity, zero desire to help people. I wrote my college dissertation on food banks, and I drew a very clear connection between austerity and the rise in food banks. This was a synthesis of existing research, ans time and time again the causation was clear. To this day the Tories still do not acknowledge that food Bank use rose as a result od austerity. Yet in 2013 alone, 3.14 billion in cuts was enacted.
Yea but the modern media, and us as the electorate, are completely savage when it comes to any mistake. If there’s a sound bite of an error, it’s in the papers, all over social media, repeated online. That means their behaviour is overly dictated by avoiding any such gaffes, over and above making sensible decisions and getting into the substance of governing (not that they’ve been good at that anyway). They’ve also purged anyone with an intelligent view on things because their party line has been brexit at all costs which is an innately anti-rational view.
A few months ago Carl Benjamin (otherwise known as Sargon of Akkad) did a video about the reasons for the current malaise facing the UK. The cause? Tony Blair. Yes, Blair who left public life a decade ago.
There are plenty of people who still blame Margaret Thatcher for everything that goes wrong. To a certain extent, both sets of people have a point - the effects of decisions made in government can last a very long time.
Agreed - it's difficult to do things like un-sell drilling rights and council homes once you've done it
You get your world view from this guy? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9E2iEi6vMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9E2iEi6vMY) Holy shit. Yes the last 14 years has been Blair's fault, it's so obvious now! If only the Tory party had any kind of power to reverse all those insidious things he did. Except they did didn't they. They reversed the highest satisfaction levels in the NHS, they reversed the lowest wait times. They reversed the growth we had seen under Blair's government. They reversed the raising life expectancy to lowering it. They reversed the revitalization and the building new buildings for public services. They reversed the mass reduction in poverty to create the highest level of food bank use we have seen.
>You get your world view from this guy? Not I.
I apologise, I missed the obvious sarcasm.
No worries!
I think its been a whole multitude of issues most of it i think can go back to 2016. So we have Corbyn up against Cameron and a lot of the electorate just didn't support Corbyn (can get into that another time). Only a few months after that we get the Brexit vote and then had the fall out of that which i think most now agree has been a disaster. When it comes to Brexit either you hate it or think that the conservatives compromised on the exist so nobody is really happy. So Brexit goes through, Cameron resigns then we have this total shit show with the Tories over Brexit, Cameron quits, May comes in, can't get Brexit done, May is basically kicked out and Boris swags in. Now we have Boris vs Corbyn (again he is a mess) and he calls an election because they can't get Brexit done. Brexit "gets done" then we get slammed with disaster after disaster for the Conservatives, Covid, party-gate, Patel bullying, Big dom checking his glasses, getting fined for breaking lock down rules, ethics advisors quitting and finally we get pincher but that list could go on and on (mind that time the police turned up at his flat). Eventually Boris, with Rishi as his chancellor is forced out. Enter Truss....less said the better but somehow the woman who was beaten by a lettuce somehow managed to beat Rishi. All the while the public are just more and more pissed off and day one this lad is talking about restoring faith in politics....and reappoints Breaverman to the job she was sacked from for bullying and again with Rishi its been one disaster after another since. His wifes tax status, the green-card he kinda didn't tell us about, that weird thing at the petrol pump, the leaked video of him openly talking about relocating funds away from deprived area's then making light of Trans issues with Brianna Ghey's mother in the building to talk about trans issues....ah again the list goes on this is just of the top of my head. Point is its been one fuck up after another with the Tories since 2016 and actually the only reason they've not been booted sooner is just because of how awful Labour where under Coyrbn and the cult of personality that Boris had. Now we get into this election and am sure i don't need to go over the list of fuck ups. Still don't get that Rwanda thing....
Remember they're being led by a man who came 2nd to Liz Truss, the worst PM in history. Hardly a glowing CV of competence
Plus people are cottoning on to the fact that the Tory membership keeps on voting in nutters, populists and ideologues like Truss (and Johnson). Voting for a “sensible” Tory is meaningless if they’ll get booted out and replaced with a numpty by the tiny Tory membership.
It all went down with Boris and Liz Tuss Boris eroded trust in the party. Not with the parties over lockdowns but by constantly denying it when the evidence was so strong. I feel, if he had just apologised and have an excuse around hard work and needed to lighten the mood a little he would have semi got away with it. But he lied and try story would not go away…. Secondly, the conservatives have always been a party trusted on the economy and people’s savings. Labour will tax more but have better services. Conservatives will have a smaller state., more bare bone public services, but more money in your pocket and a stronger economy. However Liz Truss made it so people where it hardest by economic incompetence. It’s like Labour totally miss managing up the health service or education. Maybe Rishis best bet was to have an election after Truss’s exit when it was a bit of an unknown or the eat out to help out guy
It went down with May. Instead of seeking to bring the country together, she pandered to the nutcase wing of the Tory party and so we wasted years on Brexit. Imagine if Gove hadn't stabbed Boris in the back in 2016 and he'd been in from the start. At least we'd have got to the inevitable basic deal with the EU a lot sooner.
I'd argue that history should be far, far harsher on Cameron. It was his premiership under which ideology-fuelled austerity was first inflicted. His government under which tens of thousands of people died due to cuts to benefits and services (May deserves scorn here, as she was head of that cabinet at the time), and in which his gambit to defeat the ERG extremists within his own party lead to brexit. Upon losing, he jumped ship to leave others to try and pick up the pieces. His government discarded the plans Brown's Labour had, which economists have commented would have brought the UK out of recession sooner and lead to growth. Things like scrapping on and off-shore wind farms, massively delaying nuclear plant projects which could have utterly nullified the pressures on energy as a consequence of Russia invading Ukraine. The UK could have actually ended up being a net exporter of energy to the rest of Europe. Even something as simple as the tories approving the decommissioning of the largest gas storage facility in the country, only to have to bring it back. The UK could have held a lot of gas in reserve, which would have been at much cheaper prices than after it kicked off in Ukraine. All the growth attributed to the tories since they gained power has been almost entirely down to population growth, which means productivity in the country has ground to a halt. The tories are riven with the rot of failed neo-liberal economic thinking, where the idea of any sort of strategic reserves or the state owning something is attacked as waste, even though in some circumstances you could consider profit to be waste (such as in healthcare, where that money given to shareholders and CEOs could have been spent on more doctors and nurses). It's why things won't get better for the tories, because they purge anyone who doesn't adhere to a fanatical vision of Thatcher's economic and governance policy. The UK desperately needs to adopt a mixed economy, where the state deals with critical things that the market just isn't suitable for, and then regulates the market for the things it is good at.
> in some circumstances you could consider profit to be waste (such as in healthcare, where that money given to shareholders and CEOs could have been spent on more doctors and nurses). Fantastic point, that. Turns the whole thing on its head!
Yes. Brexit can be blamed, in part, on him wanting to divert headlines from the matter of whether or not he put his pecker in a dead pig's mouth.
Yep. This is really difficult to imagine now, but right after the referendum, a stateswoman would have attempted to heal the divide. Instead May sided with one faction (the faction that would never be satisfied) and denied us parliamentary scrutiny of the suggestion to leave the EU, in which debate the advisory referendum would have been one of many pieces of evidence to consider. I always found it almost comical how May thought of herself was the clever adult out-manoeuvring the ERG when the public school boys never even took her seriously.
It remains really not great that the government were trying to pass such important legislation without a proper parliamentary consensus. Even a proper consensus within their own party. This is simply not how the British parliamentary process is supposed to work when it’s functioning properly.
It's always the same cycle. Tories don't spend, sell our assets, strip public services to the the bare bones. People get fed up with terrible public services and vote Labour. Labour raise taxes, pump money into public services and infrastructure, public services are better. People get fed up of taxes, are lulled in by Tory promises of lower taxes and the same level of public services, and Vote Tory. Repeat ad infinitum. Tories seem to have somehow managed to spend more, tax more and still balls up public services. It really is a marvel of ineptitude.
That’s about as succinct a summation as I’ve seen; how come so few voters have grasped this?
Everyone likes to think they're independent and don't need any public services, right up until the going gets tough and they do. Then they're all *shocked Pikachu* when the public services they voted in favour of cutting aren't there any more.
My fear this time is that the incoming Labour government aren't going to do nearly enough to improve things then come the next election we are going to get some Johnson/Farage hellscape next.
This time however there will be a total wipeout of tories. A new era begins.
1) They stored up a lot of trouble for themselves and managed to antagonise lots of different groups of people. 2) Sunak is the wrong person to lift and inspire the nation at the time when a lot was wrong by the time he came in - he was not a good person to 'turn it around' and win loyalties back. 1a) After the Brexit vote, they went for some short-term wins culminating in the Boris government. That meant we got to the end of 2019 with the government promising a lot (levelling up, benefits of Brexit, etc) 1b) Covid and Ukraine War were not the government's fault. But Partygate and other scandals/ corruptions were and pissed off a lot of older people, who were otherwise more likely to vote Tory. 1c) Truss caused economic damage at a time when the economy was just recovering. Traditionally, the voters trust the Tories more than Labour on the economy. So Truss's actions antagonised yet another group of traditional Tory supporters. 2a) For various reasons, some would say partly not unconnected with Brexit, the number of immigrants has shot up since we left the EU. Sunak has done nothing to change this situation, so another reason for voting Tory (control borders, tough on immigration) seems to be untrue. Sunak has responded by concentrating on trying on clamp down on unofficial / illegal migration (stop the boats) but he has not succeedeed in this either. 2b) Because of Covid, the War and Truss, taxes have had to stay high, and therefore another tradtional Tory strength (low taxes) can only be asserted, not shown. 2c) Sunak and his advisers could see all this, that they risked losing traditional Tory supporters. So they emphasised right-wing rhetoric (culture wars etc), but in doing so, for every person they keep on the right, they risk losing two on the left. 2d) To top it off, Reform, and specifically their new leader Farage, have started to attract a lot of these traditionally Tory voters who feel betrayed that the party is not low-tax, low-immigration. Farage himself is a far more plausible speaker than Sunak. Sunak has no way of persuading people to believe in him personally- he is a technocrat and backroom beaver, not a charismatic figure. 3) It's not 'this year'- it is a culmination.
I'd say on 2a, immigration levels are the long-term consequence of austerity. They've cut public sector pay to the bone, not built houses (so people can't afford housing and put off having children) and under-invested in education, and now can only plug those roles with foreign labour. There's literally nothing Sunak can do, as immigration is a long-term issue mostly relating to skills, training and the birth rate.
I think its two main factors: 1) As Rory Stewart had written in his book, when Cameron was leader he altered the criteria used to select Tory MP candidates away from competence and prioritizing other factors, this is how people like Liz Truss ended up un parliament. Subsequently to that, Johnson purged the party of any remaining competent MPs who saw how bad brexit was going to be and replaced them with lunatic headbangers who were mainly judged on how loyal they would be (the Gullis' of this world). This has left a parliamentary party devoid of talent and experience. 2) Ideologically the right wing in the Anglo-sphere can't handle the problems we face today, because those problems are the natural consequences of the policies they have pursued since the 1980s. Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US were both very keen on things like small government, de-regulation, low taxes and privatization of public assets. These policies may have had some short term benefits, but in the long term they have been disastrous. For example the privatization of water injected some money into the treasury and de-regulation might have cut costs for consumers, but long term 0it has meant that over time our services have got worse to the point that now our waterways are literally full of shit. This is due to under-investment by the private companies who now own these services to make short term profit because the CEOs know that by the time it becomes a problem someone else will be in charge. The Tories are not capable of fixing this because its their ideology that has got us here, and they can't see themselves as being wrong.
Blew £500Bn on COVID, crippling the economy
Illegally partying whilst people died Illegally partying on the eve of Prince Phillip's funeral whilst HM Queen Elizabeth II grieved her husband and followed the law on social distancing Unlawfully proroguing Parliament for their own gains
Brexit. They promised pie in the sky, but it was always going to be a shit sandwich. Now people have the shit sandwich in hand, they can smell it and they're pissed. Brexit. It was never going to work out well, but no-one in the Tory party could admit that and keep a top job. So they selected for ideologues, fools and blowhards. Now there's no-one competent at the top.
Michael Heseltine said that Europe would destroy the Conservative Party. It seems he was correct.
Just a shame they took the rest of us with them really.
And the maker of said shit sandwich bailed on it. But now it's 'Lord' Cameron.... for fucks sake. Politics in this country is a fucking joke. And making Blair, the war criminal, a UN ambassador... It's no wonder people are gravitating towards Reform. Thankfully, Farage is too vile for me to vote for.
The Prime Minister gave the nation a choice between two policies, promising he would do either if voted for. And then it turned out he had no plan whatsoever for doing one of those two options and abandoned all responsibility for doing it when selected. The referendum was simply held in bad faith. It’s like asking someone out for a date and offering them the choice of either an Indian or Chinese restaurant. Then when they pick the latter saying you have no idea where a Chinese restaurant is or what foods constitute that cuisine and decide that they can actually go on the date with someone else.
I've never bought this, no reason Cameron should have to deliver something he held no belief in. Even if it was a great idea, you want someone who wants it to negotiate it. Brexiter or Remainer alike. I'd have done the exact same. Your idea, you do it. I'm off to make some money!
That would be fair enough, if that was the deal he proposed. Would have been a lot clearer. If he’d said beforehand that a Leave vote meant the Tories would pick a new leader that would have at least initially made things clearer. Instead he dropped it as a bad idea despite it being an idea he said his government would implement. A bit like if you offer someone chocolate or poop for dinner and promise you will respect their decision. Fair enough, you can’t actually serve poop. But it’s still you who offered a plate of poop.
To be fair, in his book he explained he wanted to avoid making it a referendum on his position - bearing in mind his government was fucking hordes of people through austerity and a solid 2/3 of the electorate constantly want you out, he wanted to reduce his personal popularity and prospects outweighing what was a constitutional decision. Terrible idea, terrible result, but having someone who didn't want something doing it would be bad for absolutely everyone involved.
Exactly. Hardly the act of someone who's supposed to be leading the country. And the prick has been made a Lord.
Actually I see Cameron's role quite differently: he tried (and failed) to keep the loonies at bay. Probably he was (hubristically) convinced by the Scottish referendum that his campaigning skills would just about win the day. When the Russians via Aron Banks, and with the parallel two Farage/Vote Leave campaigns unleashed an onslaught of completely novel proportions, he was the only one who actually seemed to put up a fight, while Corbyn refused to share a platform with him, having den Farage's fascist poster, and Labour on the whole were just as lukewarm. When what he knew to be a vote for a catastrophically damaging policy was the barrow result, he said that he would not be the one to visit such a travesty on the country and resigned rather than pretending that Brexit could be made to work. Starmer isn't there yet.
I prefer to call "Lord Cameron" The Bolter
My conspiracy theory? They're doing it on purpose. They're deliberately trying to lose the election because they don't want to have to deal with bankrupt councils, bankrupt universities, bankrupt NHS etc etc etc
But why once it's clear they'd lose would they then continue to bury themselves so badly that it could become an extinction level event for the party?
I know people are talking aboy 70 or 80 seats, but I think it won't be less than 120 seats. I don't know why they're carrying on making things worse, it's just crazy. Unless they're deliberately planning to be out of power for two terms to rest, regroup, and redefine themselves...
The next Conservative Prime Minister might not even be a Member of Parliament yet. They might not have even graduated university. I don’t think any sane person would plan things out like that.
Or they are just unpopular and have a bad leader
Either that or they want to make sure they lose this election. I have my doubts whether Starmer and co will be able to fix anything to a satisfactory level in 5 years purely because of how fucked things are. I also don’t think it’d be hard for the tories to get back into power in the next election if Starmer doesn’t improve things a lot
I don’t think this is a conspiracy theory, but more a potential explanation as to what is going on. Lots of Conservative MPs are standing down. Some are getting older, sure, but it’s still record numbers for the amount standing down. Rishi Sunak does whatever is best for Rishi Sunak. Similar to a few other comments on similar posts, I have a feeling that the party knew an election was on the horizon and were planning to replace him with someone else, with the obvious candidate being Penny Mordaunt. Knowing this, Rishi Sunak decides he would rather lose to a political opponent from another party, who will have to deal with the consequences of the last 14 years of Tory rule, than an internal threat / rival. In 5-10 years time, when Labour potentially struggle against some of the conditions the Conservatives have spent the last 14 years setting up, Conservatives (potentially even Sunak himself) will be on talk shows / have a books out all about “How we were actually right”.
I wouldn't give them that much credit. The truth is that any moderate sensible people have been fully purged or sidelined since 2019. The remaining are either red wall brexiters, ERG remnants, idiots who keep being told by right wing think tanks how smart they are, or coke heads.
Because Sunak has the political acumen of a turnip.
I can see how they’re comparable to be honest. Bitter, commonly disliked, dragged out when there’s no other option…
*Baldrick has left the chat*
What do you mean this year? They have 14 years of aggregate cock-ups coming home to roost.
They're the third party becuase people who generally consider themselves "conservatives" or more right leaning such as myself do not feel well represented by the current Tory party one bit...
What could they do to appeal and bring you back into voting for them?
There’s a complete lack of talent, commitment or interest in the country from the parliamentary Conservative Party, the party is now a bunch of loosely aligned chancers, looking and now failing to find the remaining substantial sources of public money that can be siphoned to their school chums or nepotistic relationships.
Incompetance and preferring short term results over long term result throughout the last few decades.
**(Mostly a rant...)** Maybe I'm (American) wrong, but it seems more like a global issue, and one that has been happening for decades. The problems I've read about in the UK are pretty much universal: Neo-liberal capitalism approaching its denouement -- "eating itself", as it were. All over the world, corporations are merging, financial firms are buying-up as many assets as possible, governments are colluding with companies to allow these things to happen. South Korea might as well be called the "Samsung Republic" -- because Samsung represents 22.4% of the total GDP! ([link](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1314374/south-korea-samsung-groups-revenue-as-a-share-of-gdp/#:~:text=Samsung%20Group's%20annual%20revenue%20as,GDP%20South%20Korea%202017%2D2022&text=In%202022%2C%20the%20revenue%20of,gross%20domestic%20product%20(GDP))) When was the last time you used a search service other than Google? ([91% market share](https://searchengineland.com/googles-huge-search-market-share-loss-wasnt-real-data-revised-440191)). South Africa popularized the economic term "State Capture" -- "a type of systemic political corruption in which private interests significantly influence a state's decision-making processes to their own advantage." Look at housing costs across Europe (and the US). It's no coincidence that in almost all countries housing costs have been rising far faster than wages, and that's by design -- policy design. Funnel money upwards to the rich. I know that London housing costs are a nightmare, and that's by design. I grew-up in California and housing costs are insane, and that's by design. In the UK in the 1970s, the housing-cost-to-yearly-income ratio was 4.1 -- now it's 8.8 ([link](https://www.financialreporter.co.uk/income-to-house-price-ratio-more-than-doubles-since-the-70s.html#)). That across the whole UK, not just in the cities. In London it's now 14 ([link](https://www.standard.co.uk/homesandproperty/property-news/average-home-cost-times-typical-income-london-b1097122.html)). These housing costs have risen through both Left- and Right-wing governments. You're lucky you don't live in Beijing (41) or Shanghai (32) ([link](https://www.caixinglobal.com/2021-07-31/weekend-long-read-deciphering-chinas-housing-conundrum-101748985.html#:~:text=If%20calculated%20by%20usable%20area,)). In Canada, housing prices have increased almost 500%, in the big cities, in the past 20 years, and 375% nation-wide ([link](https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadas-unhinged-housing-market-captured-in-one-chart)). These housing costs are all the result of policy decisions by governments that favor the rich. Ireland has the most expensive housing in Europe!! ([link](https://www.irishtimes.com/your-money/2023/03/07/housing-costs-how-does-ireland-compare-to-the-rest-of-europe/)) And it was basically a third-world country 40 years ago. Capitalism is supposed to be all about competition, but the trend has been simply consolidation. Here's a challenge for you: Next time you go to the pub, try to order a beer not owned by InBev. I would list them all here, but it's quite long... [here's the wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AB_InBev_brands). I mean, why compete when you can just [merge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_mergers_and_acquisitions#2020s)? These are all the result of government policies. Governments *allow* these mergers to occur -- seemingly in direct contradiction of fundamental capitalist principles. You asked, "*How have the Conservatives managed to screw up so badly this year?*" It's a good question, but I would humbly expand it's scope to something more like, "*How have both Left and Right governments managed to screw up so badly in the past 40 years?*" ...
**Here's my secondary thesis: I blame the Left. Or, more specifically, the lack of action from the Left.** All across Europe the left-wing parties mostly seem to be focused on boutique culture issues, rather than addressing fundamental materialist economic issues. AfD is Germany is surging because the German Left isn't addressing fundamental economic issues because they are also in thrall to neo-liberal capitalism. Here in the US, we're arguing about "drag queen story hour" and banning Tik-Tok while around 68,000 people die every year because they lack health care insurance. That's, what, twenty-three 9/11s every year? Right-wing parties are quite chuffed about this because they can go about their business of gobbling-up resources, creating monopolies, and de-funding public services. While the Democrats were squabbling about alternative minimum tax, the Republicans suddenly turned abortion into a felony murder crime in about half the states. During COVID, the global rich transferred $5 trillion from the lower classes to themselves ([link](https://edition.cnn.com/2022/01/16/business/oxfam-pandemic-davos-billionaires/index.html)). This is what Naomi Klein refers to as "Disaster Capitalism" or the "Shock Doctrine". Brexit was a great example of that. Take advantage of the economic turmoil of Brexit to acquire even more assets and resources. The Left did nothing to combat this. Jeremy Corbyn was sacrificed to the capitalist gods over a ghost of a non-issue. He actually threatened the existing capitalist order, and the (center) Left simply wouldn't allow that to happen. Bernie Sanders was, and is, the most popular politician in the United States, but the "Left" drove a spike into his heart because he threatened the existing capitalist order. You guys have a "Labour" party. Honest question: What has the Labour party done recently to actually help the labouring class? I've heard public transportation tickets are exorbinant. That's a regressive tax on the working class. Of course housing costs are insane -- another regressive tax on the working class. In the US and UK, political parties mostly talk about "messaging" -- how can they craft PR campaigns into to appeal to enough voters? Well, I have a "modest proposal", so-to-speak: How about proposing actual policies that help people? The problem with the Right is that they would have to say, "*Well, we propose to make your lives more miserable and destitute.*" That's why the Right has to focus on boutique cultural issues to appeal to voters, because otherwise they would have to admit that their agenda is laser-focused on transferring wealth upwards. I can't think of any significant policy proposals from Democrats in the last 20 years. Obamacare was a wash... it hasn't made a dent in health care costs. Your boy Tony Blair completely supported the Iraq War, which is a policy of sorts, I suppose. During Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign 90% of her ads didn't feature any policy proposals. Okay, I have to be fair to Democrats: Here's [a whole list](https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/) of policy proposals on their website. The problem is, none of them will actually be implemented because they lack the will to actually implement them. All talk, and no action. Interestingly, the Republican [website ](https://gop.com/)doesn't actually feature any policies other than "End\[ing\] the witch hunt" against the "Political prisoner" Donald Trump. The Left needs to step-up and start taking action that actually helps the bottom 90%. I mean, the solution is incredibly simple: Tax the goddam rich and corporations! Subsidize public transport. Build more public housing. Universal free childcare. Universal free (public) university education. Extended parental leave. Strong support for unions. Etc. If the Labour party said, "*We will tax corporations, we will eliminate tax havens like the Channel Islands, we will do these things,*" the entire population of the UK will throw themselves at their feet. ...
**Conclusion** The Conservatives in fact haven't screwed-up if you consider the appropriate criteria: Making the rich richer. They've done very well at that. Republicans in the US have been doing a wonderful job at that as well. As I wrote in the intro, capitalism is eating itself. I know that Accelerationism has a bad rap, but, it seems that the only way out is to keep going through. It looks like things won't get better until they get really, really worse. Once you bring AI and automation into the picture, it's even more bleak in the short term. What will governments do with 25% unemployment? 50%? 90% Well, the rich and the corporations will have two options: 1. Universal Basic Income 2. Die We actually have a historical model for #2. In 1917, the peasants and workers of the Russian Empire humbly begged their capitalist masters for a little more money, shorter working hours, cheaper bread, etc. Well, their masters told the workers and peasants to go jump in a lake. So what did they do? They killed their masters, took their land, burned their manors. I'm not defending Communism or anything -- I'm simply pointing out an analog to what could happen if we continue on our current path.
It's not just this year, it's everything they've done over the 14 years they've been in government that is finally unravelling. This really could be the end of the party, at least as a party with ambitions of winning office. Assuming they get decimated at this election then I can't see them bouncing back quickly so you can immediately right off the next election unless Labour make an absolute pigs ear of it. So you're looking at maybe 10 years, by which time millions of their current voters will be dead, the print media industry will be dead or on it's last breath. And for what? So they could stop people voting Ukip?
I agree with you and I actually have no idea how they've managed to cock it up so badly. They've seemingly pissed off virtually all their voters (including me, my entire family and most of my social circle).
We entered 2010 a bit battered after the global financial crisis but in general the NHS was performing well (to the point where in some places you couldn’t book days in advance because there were appointments today) and schools weren’t underfunded. Councils were collecting bins and providing services as you’d expect. The trains were shit though. Fast forward 14 years and nothing works, all the services are shaved to the bone and in some places councils are so bust basic shit doesn’t even work. We have pissing rain all winter and then droughts in the summer because all the reservoirs have been sold and there’s shit in the rivers. Our mortgages are through the roof and they even took us out of Europe. The trains still don’t even work. It’s not just this year, this is just the worst year, the culmination of 14 years of wankpottery.
The constant lying I think has caught up with them and completely destroyed trust in them. It started under Cameron who campaigned hugging huskies and then reduced many green measures but from the Brexit vote onwards it has gone into overdrive. Eventually you have to produce something and I genuinely struggle to think of one area that is better under the Torries. Why would you trust them when even their main attack point of the £2k Labour tax rise is another obvious lie.
They killed themselves, ironically, by trying to protect themselves from UKIP & Farage. Had Cameron not held the referendum, or at least had held the referendum with a super majority, funny how they like that phrase now, then I think there is little chances that Farage could have got a foot hold with their core voters c
Corbyn. Seriously; as a party they were spent by 2016. Cameron's gamble to heal the split and unite the party with the Brexit referendum fails massively and they were a spent force that desperately needed a few years in opposition to sort itself out; eject the weirdos and come back sensible and able to govern. But Corbyn was so unelectable they didn't get that chance; they kept winning when they shouldn't have done and marginalising the sensible wing of the party even further. Now its so devoid of talent its no surprise the tories are where they are now; when you see Farage or Cameron speaking and realise they are several cuts above the current tory politicians you suddenly realise that no one who is left has any talent or skills. It's funny really. Corbyn might just end the dominance of right wing politics in the country but not through any way he envisaged.
If Corbyn had won in 2017, I am convinced we would be 2 years into a massive, massive Tory majority right now.
Right wing politics hasn’t ended just because the Tories have imploded
Anyone competent left after Brexit. Anyone wanting a career wouldn't work for them as the pounding they are about to get would look bad on the C.V. It's why no one said D-day was a bad idea, announcing the election in the soaking rain looking like a slug and betting on the election while being in the election. The absolute dregs are left at every level either that or opportunists and they simply cannot function anymore.
The country has been left to rot for a decade and a half. In 2015 they had the fear of the SNP to aide them into power. In 2017 they did badly but still just about beat a divisive far left (by UK standards) candidate. In 2019 they had Johnson and Brexit and faced a historically unpopular Corbyn. Now they have... nothing. The economy is broken, we have more crises than we can name (NHS crisis, Housing crisis, Infrastructure crisis, COL crisis). We have new banks as well... plenty of foodbanks, but now also bed banks, clothing banks, and warm banks.
The writing was on the wall when Truss was elected and ejected and Rishi crowned, against the will of the Tory members. That made the members mad and a laughing stock to the rest of the country.
It's been 14 years of poor (or no) decision making, infighting, and purging of factions that has led to this. This was coming regardless of leader in my opinion.
In my opinion the current Conservative Party reflects the low interest rate environment we had up until Covid. Loose money, easy financing… appealing to scammers and grifters. In a high interest rate, tight financing environment they just fall apart.
Broader theory: the impacts of the pandemic - inflation, attitudes to authority, the role of the state, etc - on politics worldwide has yet to hit. Think about it: in the coming months and weeks, voters in UK, France, and US will decide the first fully post-pandemic set of lawmakers. Ok, the pandemic was essentially "over" in 2022 as a daily part of life, but the status quo was different. What's crazy to think is that the current UK government was elected in 2019 - which feels like a lifetime ago.
I think the conservatives have been complacent because Labour have just looked so crazy and unelectable for so long. I also think in general, the quality of people entering politics is low now.
Same way they’ve screwed up so badly every year since 2010.
Governments world wide are taking a hammering because of the cost of living crisis. This has been exacerbated for the Tories by a massive slump in the polling during Truss' administration, which Sunak hasn't recovered from due to a chronic lack of ideas.
Running right ward in lust for power, they ran out of politicians, only incompetent swivel eyed loons remain.
They ran out of other people to blame. Can't blame the last Labour government (much as Truss tried to blame *the next Labour government* for her financial crash), can't blame the EU, can't find anyone else who could conceivably be blamed, so they can't hide the fact it's all their fault anymore.
Arrogance, complacency and just general apathy, they've all made their money especially during COVID so they don't really need to care...
All the talented Tories retired or defected to other parties once Boris Johnson became PM. So all they have left are a bunch of clowns and non entities.
I suspect immigration isn't being fixed as it's a nice littler earner for G4S and Serco, with the hotels, security, asylum centres and if it ever gets off the ground, Rwanda deportation, just like the orison industrial complex in America provides a incentive for crime to continue. It has to be the case that the bosses of the two companies donate to the Tories in return for contacts, but that sounds a bit conspiracy theory.
I want to say it goes back to the Maastricht Treaty... The better question is why didn't they screw everything up before? There is nothing new about the current Conservatives, they've been pushing the same ideology, the same general policy ideas, with the same levels of corruption and incompetence since at least the 90s. In 2010 they were able to sell themselves as reformed; David Cameron was the young, hip, new guy, who would be different. And people were tired of New Labour - Gordon Brown being far less photogenic. But even then, they didn't win a majority. 2015 they won a surprise majority, in part due to the collapse in support for the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems had helped the Conservatives appear sane, reasonable and competent throughout the 2010-2015 Parliament, and got punished for it from both sides. They kept the worst excesses of the Conservatives in check. From 2015-2016 politics was dominated by the EU Referendum, which was a colossal screw-up by the Conservatives. Cameron resigned, and we got May, who couldn't run the Home Office competently, never mind the whole Government. She made several major mistakes, screwed up many things, and only scraped through the 2017 General Election in part due to the lack of opposition on the hard-to-far right, and due to the Lib Dems still being unpopular. She didn't last, of course. Then we get 2019 - Boris Johnson messed up his first few months in office, broke a few laws, lost all his first major votes in the Commons (so should have resigned, but didn't), but lied and cheated his way into a majority in the 2019 election against a historically unpopular (and generally useless) Labour leader, and again, with the full support of the hard-to-far right (particularly with Farage doing everything he could to ensure Johnson won). And then Johnson kept to his record of screwing everything up - leaving the EU, covid; everything he tried to manage he failed at. The question isn't "how did they manage to screw up so badly this year", the question is why anyone is surprised? Perhaps the difference is that their friends, family, and colleagues in the press aren't as invested in covering for them any more. They also don't have any competent-but-evil political strategists left. Partly because they cannot afford them, partly because no one wants to run a losing campaign, and partly because most of them have been kicked out (due to the many internal party struggles over the last 8 years).
Absolutely talentless bunch of rich losers basically. Boris Johnson pushed out the last of the normal conservatives. Now to be a Tory MP the only thing on your CV is which oxbridge college you went to
Hmm, good question. I'm beginning to have doubts about their claim to be the natural party of government, the party of personal responsibility, the party of economic competence etc. It's starting to feel like they might be a shambolic mess of chancers, grifters, conmen, over-zealous ideologues and actual crooks. But who am I to judge? I'm just some pleb without a single million quid to my name.
There’s a school of thought that they know they’ve fucked it and are actively trying to lose so they can stick Labour with all the mess, then start blaming them for it all
Promising to reduce immigration at every election, only to give us record-breaking immigration
This election was decided even before this year.
Imagine a political party promised for X, Y, Z policies and they did the exact opposite. I am not talking about doing nothing, they did the exact opposite in an extreme way for 14 years. Now think about Tory Party and choose their top manifesto promises as X, Y, Z.
Because, ideologically, they've completely sold themselves out to the right, it's thinktanks and rich donors. They're (as a group) bought-and-paid-for charlatans who exist simply to make the rich richer.
I sense they can see the damage they've done n how the collapse is months away, n need to guarantee labour are in charge when the shit hits the fan.
Looking at the answers below reinforced my gut feel the real problem in Britain is Britons. Almost all have a sense of entitlement and an expectation that government has to sort out low rates of innovation, low productivity, overspending on software projects that go disastrously wrong, high annual fiscal deficits, cancelled rail projects, and on and on. Those flaws in our society can’t be solved by government, we already spend 200 billion a year on loan interest and suggesting there is no ceiling is dangerously wrong. The world is watching and Liz Truss made it clear global markets have paper thin confidence in the UK. Those markets know we are unable to keep our best and brightest and that they mostly leave for a better life. That combined with age demographics has justified the globalist view that open borders and the dissolution of the nation state is the future. The snag is we know nothing has changed and open borders are a huge net cost to Western Democracies both economically and politically
Conservatives don't care about governing. Their only interest is in gain power. See the Republican Party in the U.S.
In part they've just run out of steam, in part it's a "chickens coming home to roost thing" and in part it's because over the last 14 years they've just burned up any goodwill they had. Looking at the state of the country it's clear that it's been mismanaged, and all the determination to "cut costs" has just meant that nobody can get a dentist appointment and schools have crumbling roofs and noone is fixing the potholes etc On top of that the actual party is literally being run by the dregs at the bottom of the barrel. They've had so many changes of leadership, so many reshuffles, so many scandals that it's actually difficult for them to find competent people for the top jobs, which is why James Cleverly of all people is Home Secretary and Hunt is chancellor, jobs neither of whom are really qualified for. And frankly the country is just sick of them, maybe if they had a leader who was a bit more savvy and a bit more charming or charasmatic they might be polling higher, but you can't just blame Rishi for this
When you give the leadership of a party to an incompetent, narcissistic liar, who then fashions it in his own image, this is what happens..
Brexit has destroyed the party over the past 8 years. Most of the competent politicians left or were fired by Johnson who promoted a lot of deeply inadequate people based on loyalty. They've had no plans or purpose beyond self enrichment for many years.
My theory is that it began with Brexit and Johnson. They ejected all the actual boring governing talent and replaced it with populism - flashy announcements, tight messaging, messy hair and headlines from the client press. It worked great for a while, they got 2019 off the back of simple answers to complex questions and kept with that pattern of making announcements for the Daily Mail or Telegraph to fawn over and didn't ever really bother with following through and fixing things. Rwanda is emblematic of this, it's nonsense, even it's supporters accept that it's not going to work but it's all they have focused on for years. The problem is that the populism works great for a short period, but if you're constantly promising new great things and chasing the next Tory press headline about how you're a genius for cancelling HS2 to spend the money on potholes in north London, after a few years people are going to start tuning your headlines out. After all they've been seeing this stuff for years and _there's still potholes_. You lose the faith of the electorate, and at that point you are _fucked_ because it doesn't matter what you promise, nobody is listening.
The politics of the press release. And both Johnson and Gove were journalists rather than serious people.
I'm pretty certain that it started with Brexit, then when that claimed May, along comes Johnson with his immense popularity catapulting him in. But when it became clear that Johnson responded to Covid and almost any other problem very, very badly (i.e. short term personal benefit, instead of the country) it was too late, and only so many scandals can happen before the party realises he's gotta go. I feel Sunak could perhaps have steadied things a bit more had he (a) actually been any good at being PM, and (b) not kept up the pretence that the Rwanda plan was actually a real, workable policy. It's been painful listening to Cleverly being wheeled out to defend it. Also feels like the Conversative brand involves never admitting a policy has failed, and constant propaganda (almost always lies now) that actually everything is fine. You can't govern like that forever - eventually enough stuff goes wrong where you can't talk about, or act on, the true causes because you can never admit they exist.
The post Brexit Tory brain drain has finally reached its end point. The EU referendum forced the Conservatives into an impossible position. Their supporters and the press demanded they see Brexit through, yet any Tory MP with half a brain could see it wasn't going to work. Theresa May tried to find a compromise and it cost her the job. Later, Boris purged the party of the biggest Brexit rebels whilst promoting those who were loyal to Brexit. Unfortunately promoting people based on loyalty to a bad idea over competance is not a good way to run a country.
This is what is was like after Labour had been in charge for a long while. The party, country and voters just get sick and tired of the ruling party and swings the other way
Not to this extent. Their vote in 2010 put them in contention for a rainbow coalition, and there was still some message discipline and enough talent knocking around the front bench to put together a decent shadow cabinet. Tories are on for double digits with a shadow cabinet made up of The Addams Family and an old Nazi guard that had been hiding in Argentina.
Not really. Even after labour, the tories couldn’t even win a majority . The tories from 2019-2024 screwed themselves so badly.
Labour's last loss was to a Conservative party that had to get a coalition partner to form a government. The situations are not remotely comparable
Yeah, it's never good when any party is in power for too long. Just look at the SNP in Scotland
So that we carry on sheepling. We will be so happy when Labour come in, and will forget all about this in 4-8 years time and think that we have some sort of say in it all again.
If you want a substantial answer, see [this link](https://wandering.shop/@cstross/112625513982403069) and [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_H_1Akaip0) and [book](https://www.lse.ac.uk/european-institute/events/2023-24/Late-Soviet-Britain-why-materialist-utopias-fail). And the Mastodon thread from C Stross concludes: "Which is why Starmerism will fail: he's like Gorbachev—too little, too late."
So does that mean we get a failed military coup followed by the British version of Boris Yeltsin?
I'm starting to think the only possible answer to the question is that they are all so sick of it, and have cushy "consultancy" jobs or public speaking gigs lined up already, that they have just deliberately sabotaged their own campaign.
You have Boris. He was doing well in the polls and even destroyed labour at the 2021 local elections. What happens after? Partygate biting Boris at the back. Boris and that the conservative party broke their own lockdown rules they established. As a result, Boris starts dropping at the polls significantly but is still quite ahead of labour. He does lose the 2022 local elections. Partygate was the centre of the news headlines. His own cabinet kept pressuring him to resign. Some of his cabinet resigned because they lost faith in Boris and wanted to oust him. Boris then resigns. Fast forward to September 2022, Liz Truss wins the conservative leadership election and becomes prime minister. Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng crash the economy with their kamikaze budget. Bank of England intervenes to stop further damage. Inflation continues to rises. Mortgages became significantly more expensive as a result causing further struggle. She resigns a month later and is known as the shortest serving prime minister. Labour then overtook the conservatives at the polls at a significant rate. Then here comes Rishi Sunak and people simply lost faith in the conservative party. They wanted a general election. Ever since then the labour party has been ahead at the polls.
By carrying on as before and reaping the rewards of compound fuckupery.
They lost this election 2 years ago. The Downing Street lockdown parties were truly despicable, then there was Boris clinging to power for additional weeks over the summer of 2022 without doing his job (and having a jolly good time flying in jets while the rest of us struggled), Liz Truss came, saw, broke the economy and fucked off, and even before that things were going downhill for them since May 2020 when Dominic Cummings broke the lockdown rules and the Tory Party closed ranks around him. Keir Starmer as early as June 2020 had become the most popular opposition leader since Tony Blair in the mid 90s, it just took a bit longer to convince the electorate to extend that favorability to the rest of the Labour party. The only person who was actually good enough to be a Tory Leader in the last 20 years has been David Cameron, and he ran away after burning down the barn. Then we had May who by all accounts was an excellent MP for Maidenhead, but wasn't a leader. Then we had Boris who was one of the few Tories who wanted the job and got over the line with the banter vote. Then we ended up with Truss who had made promises to a select group of powerful and wealthy people, but who even the rest of the wealthy elite were scared of because they knew she would break things. Then we ended up with Sunak because he was truly the last morsel at the bottom of the barrel.
*They're such a shower of shits and I STILL couldn't get a look in* - the expression on Penny Mordaunt's face over the past two years.
They know it's not salvageable so why even try? Anyone smart enough to mitigate the damage is also smart enough not to ruin their career by putting effort into a failed enterprise.
From an outside perspective it looks like they fucked up with Brexit on a massive scale and failed to deliver a lot of promises that they made to you. And the consequences of that are finally coming to fruition, especially as your conservative leader keep playing the same tune but nothing is fundamentally improving.
The fact there’s been so many leadership contests I feel shows the Conservative Party have got a severe leadership issue, perhaps as a result of Boris chasing out all the Remain supporting MPs or anyone not loyal to him.
Their problems go back years. Basically there are two Conservative parties. One is the traditional "one nation" group who are centre right. Think John Major, Rory Stewart etc. In the other camp are the populist, Brexit, radical free marketeer, right wingers. Pre Cameron they maintained discipline and rarely let their mutual hatred for each other show in public. Johnson purged a lot of the traditionalists and the likes of the ERG took over.
They may have messed up this year but it all started with the rot of brexit, and then Johnson. Anything Johnson touches turns to shit
I just get a sense that nothing has ever been done in the interests of the country, but only in the interests of the party. Brexit was presented as being in the national interest but in reality it it was just another dimension of Tory internal factionalism
I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m keeping everything crossed that this rotten mob will find themselves locked out of power for a generation (at least), but these shits always seem to find a way.
Tories screw up started back in early 2000s. Downfall started under David Cameron / Osborne. Failure of leadership and appeasing right of the party. Party management failure, delivery and incompetence. Recent screw ups started under Boris due to COVID and party gate. Lizz truss budget was next negative drop in support. Rishi failure of leadership and poor party management is only one tiny part of the story. Delivery and incompetence is often missing from analysis.
https://www.himbonomics.com/p/how-did-the-conservatives-end-up
Partygate. Not just that it happened, but that they honestly expected everyone to forget about it and *got annoyed* when people didn't. They've fucked up in multiple places with multiple people, but I'm pretty sure that people burying relatives with no proper funerals, not being able to see people on deathbeds, seeing THE QUEEN have to sit on her own while Phillp's service was going on, jobs lost, lives upended, etc. - only to then see pictures of drunk tories feeling each other up at their party and for them to respond with 'no we didn't! Okay, some did but it was just a small party and we've been working really hard, shut up about it now'. I think that was their mortal wound and ever since they've been stumbling around and bleeding out. Good fucking riddance.
14 years of bad policies.. with 5 awful prime ministers Also… It’s the first time the media has held them to account and are willing to get rid of them. I think that’s the key difference here
The downfall started with Boris. The corruption just became so obvious, and then the culture wars started the party just seems to have become weaker and worse ever since and seem to be offering absolutely nothing anymore.
2010 - Osborne and Cameron decision was the wrong decision to make cuts. I believe if they borrowed and gambled a little and invested in our public services and infrastructure we would be in a better position . 2015 - Cameron gambling for the public to vote in a referendum just to win a majority is the most idiotic and stupid decision any other government has made and that’s including the lettuce! And now has the title Lord! 2017 - May gambling to get more seats for Brexit and failed miserably which entered the road for Johnson. 2019 - Johnson v Corbyn. Corbyn might well be a good a speaker but his policies and the issues rife in the party allowed a narcissist into number 10 and probably the worst PM ever. The man should be in jail! 2020 - Johnson hiding in a freezer and the over parties. 2022 - Sunak in, and we are all exhausted in a government which has lined their pockets. 2024 - Farage playing on the emotions of the right wing who normally support then Tories. Hopefully Labour can give us hope!
**(Mostly a rant...)** Maybe I'm (American) wrong, but it seems more like a global issue, and one that has been happening for decades. The problems I've read about in the UK are pretty much universal: Neo-liberal capitalism approaching its denouement -- "eating itself", as it were. All over the world, corporations are merging, financial firms are buying-up as many assets as possible, governments are colluding with companies to allow these things to happen. South Korea might as well be called the "Samsung Republic" -- because Samsung represents 22.4% of the total GDP! ([link](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1314374/south-korea-samsung-groups-revenue-as-a-share-of-gdp/#:~:text=Samsung%20Group's%20annual%20revenue%20as,GDP%20South%20Korea%202017%2D2022&text=In%202022%2C%20the%20revenue%20of,gross%20domestic%20product%20(GDP))) When was the last time you used a search service other than Google? ([91% market share](https://searchengineland.com/googles-huge-search-market-share-loss-wasnt-real-data-revised-440191)). South Africa popularized the economic term "State Capture" -- "a type of systemic political corruption in which private interests significantly influence a state's decision-making processes to their own advantage." Look at housing costs across Europe (and the US). It's no coincidence that in almost all countries housing costs have been rising far faster than wages, and that's by design -- policy design. Funnel money upwards to the rich. I know that London housing costs are a nightmare, and that's by design. I grew-up in California and housing costs are insane, and that's by design. In the UK in the 1970s, the housing-cost-to-yearly-income ratio was 4.1 -- now it's 8.8 ([link](https://www.financialreporter.co.uk/income-to-house-price-ratio-more-than-doubles-since-the-70s.html#)). That across the whole UK, not just in the cities. In London it's now 14 ([link](https://www.standard.co.uk/homesandproperty/property-news/average-home-cost-times-typical-income-london-b1097122.html)). These housing costs have risen through both Left- and Right-wing governments. You're lucky you don't live in Beijing (41) or Shanghai (32) ([link](https://www.caixinglobal.com/2021-07-31/weekend-long-read-deciphering-chinas-housing-conundrum-101748985.html#:~:text=If%20calculated%20by%20usable%20area,)). In Canada, housing prices have increased almost 500%, in the big cities, in the past 20 years, and 375% nation-wide ([link](https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadas-unhinged-housing-market-captured-in-one-chart)). These housing costs are all the result of policy decisions by governments that favor the rich. Ireland has the most expensive housing in Europe!! ([link](https://www.irishtimes.com/your-money/2023/03/07/housing-costs-how-does-ireland-compare-to-the-rest-of-europe/)) And it was basically a third-world country 40 years ago. Capitalism is supposed to be all about competition, but the trend has been simply consolidation. Here's a challenge for you: Next time you go to the pub, try to order a beer not owned by InBev. I would list them all here, but it's quite long... [here's the wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AB_InBev_brands). I mean, why compete when you can just [merge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_mergers_and_acquisitions#2020s)? These are all the result of government policies. Governments *allow* these mergers to occur -- seemingly in direct contradiction of fundamental capitalist principles. You asked, "*How have the Conservatives managed to screw up so badly this year?*" It's a good question, but I would humbly expand it's scope to something more like, "*How have both Left and Right governments managed to screw up so badly in the past 40 years?*" Continued in part 2...
After 14 years they have spent their talent. They actually have very few good political operators left. Imagine a leadership contest, who would stand? Whose left. It's the dregs. I imagine it's the same for Cchq and the spads. The talent pool is now so slim that David Cameron was wheeled back into government.
If Pharaoh had been a Libertarian Tory, he would have sold all the excess grain and all the granaries to pay for a ‘Trireme’ for his wives
They have brilliantly timed the General Election whilst students are home for the summer, meaning that [35 Tory seats are likely to be changing hands](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jun/16/students-summer-holidays-voting-uk-general-election-conservative-seats). (not a Tory voter by any stretch)
The quality of the average conservative MP seems to be becoming more and more underwhelming in terms of intelligence and capability, whilst their opinions as to their own abilities seems to be soaring. I just hope that is limited to the Tories and not to Labour, but then I realise that Diane Abbott is still about and I worry. Before anyone tries to stone me, have you actually heard her talk? It’s eerily similar to Liz Truss!
You missed the most important one in your list!
The Conservatives are not conservative. The rot started under Woody and then the course towards mindless adoption of US fiscal, race and gender policy started. How else and frankly what other country would be taking the knee to race activists promoting a saint who had fentanyl up his bootay?
Shouldnt have got rod of boris. They never would have had such a big majority last time if it wasnt for bj