Thread: Wake up Dave - time for a Tory policy shift?

With the gradual shift of both main parties to the center over the last two decades, the remaining vacuum on the right and left wing is being filled by others.
My morning coffee has just been spoiled by the Telegraph YouGov poll:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/news...oting-BNP.html
and to confirm:
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-...ime_Appearance
Seems to me a couple of policy shifts in the Tory manifesto would net a sizeable chunk of voters, most of whom just seem fed up with socialist policies.
The immigration policy revelations are a disgrace to Labour - but their coffin needs no further nails, time for Dave to start fighting an election rather than just fight the Labour party methinks.......
I don't think the Tories need to go that far either, but how far to go before losing the center ground voters?

Dithering Dave is starting to annoy me
As I posted on another thread he seems on a path of self destruction and dosen't want to win
Perhaps he has found out what state the country is in and thought "fukc this"
I know 5 minutes after he says something the Prime Minister announces it as his new policy but he needs to stand up be hard and start addressing these issues

The Goverment are relying on the BNP and other fringe parties nicking Tory votes it's the only hope they have to cling to power

[quote="Alsacien"]With the gradual shift of both main parties to the center over the last two decades, the remaining vacuum on the right and left wing is being filled by others.
My morning coffee has just been spoiled by the Telegraph YouGov poll:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/news...oting-BNP.html


Maybe its something they are putting in the water these days! They say history is a great techer, seems to me people have learnt nothing. A vote for the BNP is a vote for the knock at the door in the dead of night. Sadly, that might have to happen in order for some to get the message.

Sorry about your coffee btw

Both parties are not addressing why people are voting BNP.. they can do all they want trying to hammer down the BNP... they will keep coming back in till they start addressing why people turn to them. That is how they willbe defeated..

Just glad Nick Griffin is not a charismatic character like Le Penn was in France. Otherwise he may gain more supporters...

Originally Posted by Applehead

Just glad Nick Griffin is not a charismatic character like Le Penn was in France. Otherwise he may gain more supporters...

I should imagine steps will be taken shortly at BNP to rectify that
A bit of softening on policy here and there start capturing the vote

As an aside my mother had the BNP lad knock on the door at the last General Election and he explained who he was (Ex RAF)
She told him I don't agree with your policies
He just said thats fine Ma'am may I leave you a leaflet and left it that

She said he was far better than the Labour bloke who wouldn't shut up even though she answered the door on the phone and despite her libving in an ex council house tried to convince her how better of she was under Gordon and Tony than she had been under Thatcher despite them wrecking her pension and her being worse of than the couple next door who despite her being on the dole for 30 years managed to lift 18k out of Northern Rock when it went under

If the BNP had a bit better policies I can see where some votes would come from

Originally Posted by the_boy_syrup

Dithering Dave is starting to annoy me
As I posted on another thread he seems on a path of self destruction and dosen't want to win
Perhaps he has found out what state the country is in and thought "fukc this"
I know 5 minutes after he says something the Prime Minister announces it as his new policy but he needs to stand up be hard and start addressing these issues

The Goverment are relying on the BNP and other fringe parties nicking Tory votes it's the only hope they have to cling to power

The thought did cross my mind, but I don't buy it looking at the alternatives from Camerons perspective.
I sense more a fear of the rather fickle center ground voters. How do you gauge how much support there really is for rights over justice, tolerance over tradition, etc etc?

Isn't it interesting that the idea of the all women short lists have gone down a real wow, from Blairs Babes to Daves posh totty, watch a U turn on this bit of lunacy.

Originally Posted by the_boy_syrup

Originally Posted by Applehead

Just glad Nick Griffin is not a charismatic character like Le Penn was in France. Otherwise he may gain more supporters...

I should imagine steps will be taken shortly at BNP to rectify that
A bit of softening on policy here and there start capturing the vote

As an aside my mother had the BNP lad knock on the door at the last General Election and he explained who he was (Ex RAF)
She told him I don't agree with your policies
He just said thats fine Ma'am may I leave you a leaflet and left it that

She said he was far better than the Labour bloke who wouldn't shut up even though she answered the door on the phone and despite her libving in an ex council house tried to convince her how better of she was under Gordon and Tony than she had been under Thatcher despite them wrecking her pension and her being worse of than the couple next door who despite her being on the dole for 30 years managed to lift 18k out of Northern Rock when it went under

If the BNP had a bit better policies I can see where some votes would come from

The BNP are being attacked internally etc by the security services. Been happening for quite a while...

Proper debate CANT happen because they'v got lots of enemies attacking them endlessly while the likes of you think they need to change when they are in a defensive position. Understand?.

Originally Posted by Alsacien

Originally Posted by the_boy_syrup

Dithering Dave is starting to annoy me
As I posted on another thread he seems on a path of self destruction and dosen't want to win
Perhaps he has found out what state the country is in and thought "fukc this"
I know 5 minutes after he says something the Prime Minister announces it as his new policy but he needs to stand up be hard and start addressing these issues

The Goverment are relying on the BNP and other fringe parties nicking Tory votes it's the only hope they have to cling to power

The thought did cross my mind, but I don't buy it looking at the alternatives from Camerons perspective.
I sense more a fear of the rather fickle center ground voters. How do you gauge how much support there really is for rights over justice, tolerance over tradition, etc etc?

Principles, otherwise everyone in this land is in deeply dangerous doo doo. We're all in deep shit.

The last time a Labour canvasser came to my door I told him to get his filthy Bolshevik feet off my nice clean garden path. I now realise that was very wrong of me, and I should have engaged him in discussion - for a very, very long time so that I wasted the max amount of his time and bggered up the rest of his evening's work.

Originally Posted by Alsacien

With the gradual shift of both main parties to the center over the last two decades, the remaining vacuum on the right and left wing is being filled by others.
...
I don't think the Tories need to go that far either, but how far to go before losing the center ground voters?

There's certainly a risk to slippery Dave's New Tories from the Right folk like UKIP and the BNP splitting the hard core Tory base's vote but its in the center that the next election will be won or lost.

Dave will be seeking to peel voters away from Labor. Not hard you'd think but if he slides into sensitive areas they may simply get flash backs to the awfulness of the last Tory regime and stay at home. His swift reaction to the recent "Death Panel" kerfuffle was telling.

There's a surprisingly large section of voters that still has a hard on for Tony Blair. Blairistas are in mourning for their lost leader, they could easily embrace a Tory version of Blairism, hardly an ideological stretch for Dave as was it Thatcherism with better spin doctors. If former PR man Cameron can maintain his impersonation, offer lots of market forces blather, tad more fiscal responsibility and promises to start rather fewer wars the lad will sail into power. The real question is will he have a decent majority and be able to do much?

Recent Yougov polling suggests the Tories would not get an overall majority. A Tory success could hinge on just how badly the recovery proceeds. Fortunately for them the UK's systemic weaknesses, particularly its over reliance on a bloated finance sector, do not offer a promising future.

Are the Tories still a shoo-in? by Peter Kellner

Posted on: 19 October 2009

YouGov’s latest survey for the Sunday Times shows that Labour seems to be gaining very gradually as the economy improves. The rate of recovery in both is very slow; but YouGov's first poll to be conducted free from the short-term effects of the conference season shows Labour at its highest level since the immediate aftermath of the London G20 summit. Post-conference polls by other companies confirm the underlying trend. This is not a sudden thing, but the culmination of a trend that has been underway since the late spring.

The significance of this is that, if these trends continue, then the Tories would fall short of an overall majority. On normal assumptions of a uniform swing, the Tories need an 11% lead in the popular vote to reach the 326 seats they need for an overall majority - exactly the lead in the current YouGov poll. In reality, I expect the swing in the Lab-Con marginals to be slightly higher than that in Britain as a whole; so the actual target for a bare overall majority may be a lead of 8-9%; but, if current trends continue, achieving that is now in doubt.

Of course, the economy may not be the cause of Labour's gradual recovery; and/or the economy may go sour in the next six months; and/or other things may happen to end or reverse the current trend - and, anyway, Labour still has a long way to go before it stands a chance of being the largest party after the next election (it needs the Tory lead to fall below around 5% to have a real chance of achieving this objective) ... but the coming election could be more exciting that seemed likely a few months ago. Among other things, a Tory minority government might have difficulty securing parliamentary approval for its full programme, especially on Europe, and possibly tax and spending.

The voting trends are borne out by the tracker questions on the party leaders, the best team for standard of living, state of the economy and, above all, house price expectations. All are grim for Labour - but not as grim as they were a few months ago.

In some ways this is good news for Gordon Brown. There was some talk before Labour's conference that if Labour was trailing as badly in the polls around now as it had been before the summer holidays, then there might be a renewed attempt to depose him. In fact, Labour's support is fractionally up. However, we should note that as many as 30% of Labour voters think the party would do better if it replaced Brown. Normally, supporters of each party are more loyal to their leader than that.

So Dave must hammer Brown on his fiscal failings, chant the the boom to bust mantra and grin like a Baboon in homage to Blair. He can't afford to pander to the margins of his base just yet, that will have to wait until he's in No 10 and then the mask can drop.

I don't think Dave is the man for the job, I'd prefer the other 'Dave' (Davis), but Camerons the man in the job. He must make a big issue of the nulab immigration revelations, it is the issue of the day. Then civil liberties, dismantling the snooping surveillence, nanny state should be a top priority. And then there's the state of the fcuking economy

There's enough there to bury, to destroy the Labour party for good. I'm just not all that sure that Daves the man for the job unfortunately.

The Torygraph has a magnificently wounding headline UK economy overtaken by Italy

...
But most embarrassing of all will be the news that as a result the UK has now fallen beneath Italy for the first time since the mid-1990s to become the world’s seventh biggest economy. In the third quarter of the year, Britain’s economy generated around £347.5 billion in cash terms. Italy’s economic output in the same period, based on conservative forecasts calculated by Citigroup, was some £350 billion.

It will be acutely humiliating for the Prime Minister, who in 2001 told Parliament: “When [the Conservatives] left power, we were behind France and Italy, the sixth largest economy in the world, and we are now ahead of them, and the fourth largest economy in the world.�

The fall in Britain’s comparative size since then has been due partly to the devaluation of the pound by almost a third and partly to the severity of the recession. The UK dropped behind France last year largely thanks to the weakness of the pound.

In 1987, the first time Italy overtook Britain’s economy, the landmark moment was dubbed “Il Sorpasso� and prompted wild celebrations in the streets of Rome. The UK then regained its prominence in the mid-1990s, and by 2000 its economy was some 35 per cent bigger than Italy’s.
...

Ah yes 1987, the year of the final Thatcher government, Jeffrey Archer in his pomp and many noses deep in their troughs.

Il sorpasso economics sounds rather like the British model today:

Il sorpasso (Italian for "surpass") is a nickname for the 1987 Italian economy surpass of the British one (in absolute GDP terms), turning Italy into the 5th World's Economy, after the United States, Japan, Germany, and France. The surpass was the result of the Italian government recalibrating its methods of statistical analysis and also the peak of the vacuous policy of public indebtment fostered by the 1980s Italian Governments (led by Bettino Craxi and his Democrazia Cristiana allies) who favoured large-scale loans of public money both to complacent businessmen and to the general public (via the issuing of unheard amounts of treasury bonds); due to the commonplace practice of tax evasion the money, which should have helped propping up the economy after the dire straits of the 70s, was lost for good, never to return via taxes (as was hoped it would do). Italy doubled its public debt in the eighties. This later threw the Italian economy in disarray during the early nineties (peaking in 1993).

Originally Posted by doc80905

There's enough there to bury, to destroy the Labour party for good. I'm just not all that sure that Daves the man for the job unfortunately.

Labour's death warrant would be legislation limiting political donations to £50,000. That would effectively cut off the funding from the unions which would spell the end of the Labour party.

It would also spell the end of the political careers of Gordon, Harriet Harman, Kieth Vaz and a host of other Arrse favourites who, as NEC members, would become personally liable for Labour's debt if the party went under. With no prospect of coming up with millions of pounds each, they'd become personally bankrupt and barred from sitting in Parliament.

The next Tory government has a golden opportunity to destroy the Labour party, a cancer that has infected this country for a century, rather than just drive it from government for a generation. Like you, I doubt that Dave has the balls to drive the stake through their heart.

I say again - 'Dave is well 'ard' but he does have an election to win - and win well. Those who take him for a 'Tory softee' will be roundly disabused in due course.

Meanwhile, he has to box cleverly. He must take care not to provide Labour with sticks with which to beat him.