Ah, a measured response... the general nastiness of public discourse around many topics in recent years, especially politics, is quite appalling.
Although, if any of the rebels stand as independent Tories in their current seats, which I’m sure they will, they will make a big hole in the official Tory vote. The high-profile ones like Rudd, Grieve, Letwin etc., could even win. I can envisage a breakaway party coming together like the SDP did when the Gang of Four broke away from the Labour Party in the 80’s, and they helped to keep Thatcher in power for a decade by splitting the Labour vote. Maybe the mirror-image will happen this time!
You’re more optimistic than me. I think they’ll just parachute in more staunch Brexit-at-all-costs Brexiteers to contest those seats and people who want Brexit will feel like they’ve no option but to vote for them, or lose Brexit altogether. Rudd’s lead in Hastings is only that of around 350 so I fully expect to see her go.
I get your point of view, but do you think we help by continually sticking Farage and his cronies into Brussels? That hardly helps and is a total embarrassment to us. If I was French I wouldn’t want to work things out with him. Ikon your point about compromise between the two lines of people in the UK, I just can’t see how that will work. Some want in. Some want out. Difficult to compromise there.
Although he had previously made the electoral pact conditional on Johnson delivering a no-deal Brexit. Has he backed down, or is he privy to some dirty trick Johnson might pull to wriggle out of the new law?
In all honesty there isn't a single person in parliament I would trust to end this misery of any party!! I may have voted out but I really cannot understand why we cannot reach an agreement between ourselves. Surely there is a happy medium between the stayers and the leavers why is it so hard........? I've put my immigration papers in...........
Great piece by Matthew Parris on the death of the Conservative Party: The Tory Party is Dying The prime minister’s turbulent leadership is a symptom, not the cause, of a disease that infected my party years ago The Conservative Party is dying. What happened this week cannot be erased. A substantial and senior group of Conservative members of parliament joined forces with a hard-left Labour Party and almost all the other opposition parties to wrest control from their own leadership: a government they believe is intent on wrecking their country. This is incendiary and necessary. Things have been said that cannot be unsaid, friendships broken that cannot be healed, loyalties ruptured beyond reconstruction; and all this in plain sight of an electorate that never loved the Conservative Party but trusted its competence and solidity. A once-respectful audience is in shock. They say that trust arrives on foot but leaves on horseback; the sound of hoofs fills the air. This party’s most precious asset is shattered. Who killed the Conservative Party? Boris Johnson? Your columnist, a long-standing critic, feels the temptation to join the claque of his political and media supporters who this week discovered his uselessness as suddenly as last week they discovered his powers of decisive leadership. They frown at his feeble and tetchy dispatch box performances. They forget that Mr Johnson has never made an effective parliamentary speech in his life. So blame comes easy. And it’s true that Johnson is a bag of wind and a sordid opportunist: he always was, but there will always be such individuals — Nigel Farage is another — hovering in predatory fashion around the fringes of trouble in politics. They do not, however, make the trouble; they feed on it. It would be wrong to blame Johnson for the Tory misfortune. His plumage may be exotic but this bird is a scavenger. No, the blame should rest on the shoulders of the Conservative Party, the whole Conservative Party and only the Conservative Party. They alone brought this Brexit trouble upon us. Our age rightly disapproves of the careless use of mental disorder as a metaphor for wrongheadedness but I am serious. Something mad has taken root in our party, and our internal defences — our immune system — seem to have been too feeble to identify this new jihadism, stand up to it and repel it. Almost in tears, a friend said to me this week: “All those years we argued about withdrawing the whip and throwing these madcaps out of the party and draining the poison but we murmured ‘broad church’ and ‘tolerance’ and ‘due process’. We were wrong.” Still, there are brave souls like the 21 Tory MPs who joined Tuesday’s move to take control of government business but they are just representatives of a larger, as yet silent group on the government benches who preferred — keep preferring — to stay their hand and fight another day, always another day. Why are these 21 called rebels? Stalwarts (some of them) of Thatcherite policy, centrists, most of them, towers of strength in the Conservative Party as it used to be before it was taken over. Rebels? That anyone could dream of calling them rebels shows just how far the old party has been pushed towards the extremes. The real rebellion has been by what was at first a minority in the parliamentary party: the hardline, Brexit-at-all-costs insurgency that is the European Research Group of Tory MPs. This is where the madness started. This is where the project to relocate the party on the populist right began. This is what Theresa May proved cannot be tamed by a blank stare, and Boris Johnson is now proving cannot be managed by strut and bluster. It is these elements that have brought my party to the edge. This week has also shown something else: that, even though we are on the precipice, it is still possible for parliament and the country to draw back from a no-deal Brexit. But for the Conservative Party? I fear it is too late for retreat. There remain too few of what was once the party’s core to pull the whole Tory enterprise back to sanity, though it is true that the size of the rebellion on Tuesday understates the potential resistance. As Johnson flails and national derision mounts, numbers may grow: he has only fairweather friends in politics. Even his brother Jo, a thoughtful moderate, found he could not support him any more and quit the government and parliament. More backbenchers may find their voice and even some of Johnson’s cabinet colleagues may rediscover their spines. But so many of the sensible people are not standing for election again, while others may be deselected, and those centrists who do make it back to dry land after the coming election will have to ask themselves whether the brand “Tory” even remains an asset in a newly fragmented politics. Some, such as the former international development secretary Rory Stewart, have already made that decision. I am writing this in northern Pakistan, a distant place from which to observe these remarkable days in our politics. From a country where questions of constitutional propriety remain hotly disputed, it’s dismaying to see the certainties we British took for granted being revisited so easily by opportunist politicians. How thin is that civilised veneer, even in a country like ours that prides itself on being governed by conventions and precedent to the extent that we do not need a written constitution! I have been horrified to hear from Conservative politicians a jokey disregard for other voices anxious about a slipping-away from constitutionality. “What a fuss about nothing!” they jeer, echoing that oh-so-public-school “bor-ing, bor-ing” ducking of the actual question that some tedious little grammar-school squit has got his knickers in a twist about. They should remember that the rotting of politics does not always start with armed coups but with small, sneaky steps; with the normalisation of cheating and with sneers at people who are worried by it, dismissed with giggles about “alarmism”, “overreaction” and “hyperbole”. We are closer to the edge than we may think. My own Conservative Party is lost to the pragmatism and precaution for which it was once noted. After a general election we must see where the pieces fall. A parting with former comrades is already happening. We may need to find new ones.
Sorry to spoil your Sunday morning with long-winded stuff but this video from 2017 is worth watching. Dominic Cummings explains in detail how he manipulated floating voters to switch to Leave by sending them, literally, billions of personalised Facebook and Twitter messages in the days leading up to the referendum. The only part he leaves out is the illegal data-mining by Cambridge Analytica to find out who the floating voters actually were. Once this bit of the story is exposed in December in court the referendum will have to be declared null and void and we can all get on with our lives.
This is set to get a lot worse, before it gets better. That's the only certainty now. Politics will never be the same again. The damage is inconceivable.
Yes, I agree. Politics is damaged beyond repair I think. I can also see whatever outcome to this riots and civil unrest. These current times seem to normalise anarchy and taking matters into your own hands. People have lost respect for politics and lost respect for each other.
Which is exactly what the far right want to happen, to allow a “strong” leader to emerge to save us from ourselves. I’ve no idea why the BBC chose this moment to screen the miniseries “The Rise of the Nazis” on prime time BBC2, but the similarities between what’s happening now in Britain, and the seizure of political power by Hitler by outsmarting people who thought they were manipulating him, is chilling in the extreme. I’m sure I’m not the only person whose insides churn on hearing the contemptible and contemptuous Rees-Mogg addressed as “the Leader” in the House of Commons.
Is there a better one on offer other than stay...........?........Remember we are trying to get all camps to agree on a compromise.....??
Are you sure we could get the same then?? So why do we need an agreement to do that which we could do outside of the union...........Do you really think we cannot achieve those things on the outside? As for medicines there are shortages already so what's going to be new oh the cost........Have you checked Canada's prices they are currently cheaper than ours on most........Oh I agree we would have to get an agreement but it isn't imposible!!
