#249

Frankly put, it’s why the Lib Dems should have held their noses on Brown staying in office and taken Labour seriously in those few days. It seriously hampered their ability to win the big prizes.

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#250

I think had the 2010 Conservative Manifesto included their re-organisation/breaking up of the NHS as well as things like the bedroom tax and their austerity being targeted at those in the lower income percentiles, you’d not have seen them emerge as the largest party.

Re GE2015:

Short answer is FPTP: the collapse of the LibDems’ anti-Tory tactical-votes handed the Conservatives seats, plus the anti-Tory (and anti-scottish Labour) surge for the SNP wiped out 50 Labour seats in Scotland.

Despite the media treatment of him and their framing of the debate around austerity, Miliband won a larger share of the vote than Brown, increased Labour’s share of the vote by a greater amount than Cameron did the Conservatives’, but ended up seeing a swing of fifty seats from his party to the Tories.

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#251

It’s a very strange to hear everyone going on about how Putin is a master of deception and distraction while they focus exclusively on Corbyn and ignore the dirty money in the Tory party, the briefings May deliberately withheld from Labour, and the fact that the tories are milking this for all its worth. Dude getting poisoned is the best thing that could have happened to them.

#252

Take this chronic moron, for instance:

We can tell he’s an idiot cos bad hacks always write stuff like this without embarrassment. They think it makes them look worldly:

Today’s wars are hybridised: a vicious brew of targeted assassinations, cyber-attacks, political disruption and other aktivnye meropriyatiya (“active measures”).

#253

To be fair I’d be shocked if d’Ancona had a nuanced take on this.

#254

Nuansky Takova

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#255

I was pretty shocked by this mind:

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#256

Ol’ Ma Bugduv met all three main party candidates before the 2010 election and of the three was absolutely adamant that Cameron was the Greatest BoL and Clegg was…somewhat of a good BoL/definitely a bit of a shagger…and Brown was a fucking dreadful human being.

Just passing it on.

#258

I only got interested in politics because I thought Nick Clegg was an absolute DILF.

~Couldn’t vote for him in 2010 because I was 10 days too young to vote, just to make everyone feel really old~

#259

Will everyone stop going on about Matthew dancona all the time. Who gives a fuck what he says it makes no difference.

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#260

She was that ‘bigoted woman’ as brown put it?

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#261

How bloody dare you, Smee, if that’s even your real name…

#262

D’Ancona reads Eric Garland tweets and nods solemnly.

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#263

really interesting interview with Clegg so cheers @Ruffers for posting it

ultimately, Clegg fucked it didn’t he

after getting 23% of the vote but 8.8% of the seats, they should’ve made PR their absolute red line and should’ve banged on about it endlessly

look at how powerful a force UKIP managed to become by having a single issue that eventually pushed the tories to include a referendum in their manifesto

the other thing was tuition fees. the fact that the threshold to repay was raised by a large amount means that actually, it’s nowhere near as bad on a practical level as the “increase to £9k a year” headlines made it seem. problem was, they’d literally campaigned on an advert of broken promises floating in the wind

but perception is everything - and this applies to everything else they did. if you ask a random person on the street today what the lib dems actually fucking did what would people say? tuition fees is the number 1 thing i’d expect people to mention… and i have no idea what else they’d say next.

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#264

120,000 people dead due to austerity?

#265

Important, but doubt it’s an issue with high salience.

#266

still have no idea how they got/are getting away with that. i mean…is it alright to kill 120000 of your own citizens as long as you don’t use russia’s airforce or chemical weapons to do it? did we miss that meeting?

#267

^this and a half

Would have been worth it if they’d managed this: working with the Tories in the first place, burning their own base to the ground, breaking promises, getting all the blame for Tory policies etc

Hell, they should just become the PR Party and campaign on that single issue, they’ve nothing left to lose

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#268

They’ve already become a single-issue party (anti-Brexit) and that’s not doing them any good.

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#269

the lib dems don’t get no attention cos they remind everyone of that nice enough but dead inside mid-thirties admin guy at work. on nights out he convinces you to stay in your job instead of leaving to travel around thailand, and he wants to mansplain the importance of PIN number security to the secretaries and tell us about how once he could have been a contender but “life just got in the way” or something.

1 Like