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Well well well..

Snap general election on the 8th of June.

Time for May to go.

We can only hope.

Time to renew my Labour membership and get campaigning.

Holly crap, she wants to be Empress May.
Still bitter that she wasn't allowed to trigger article 50 without a parliament vote. Everything was about me, me, me, my, my, my. Wants a general election because she's getting pissy about MPs telling her that as a member of parliament she doesn't have the authority to be god-empress.
What a horrible wretch she is.

So trigger Article 50 and then GTFO and let someone else clean up the mess?

Remember how I've constantly been saying that the problems of the UK primarily are down to your own politicians rather than the EU? Yeah, that.

Trick here is to get traditional non-voters voting.

Not a lot of time to do that either....though one does wonder if Parliament will approve the motion, but force the date back?

Well I guess at least it's going to settle the Labour question of whether the not really left wing MP group or the much more left wing Corbynites are right about who the country will vote for

Big conservative win = goodbye Corbyn

status quo = probably solidifies his position, but the rumbles will continue

Big labour win = maybe the party will finally knuckle down and cooperate with him

but it doesn't seem a smart move with regards to the brexit timetable as I see exactly zero productive negotiation going on while we're faffing around with our general election

Tories have a strong lead today. The EU vote had a good turnout of voters. Article 50 has been triggered - leaving the EU is a done deal, there's no going back. Will voter turnout drop to more normal levels and if they do who of those remaining are going to be motivated to turn out?
Or will the Tories run on a platform that makes it appear as though the people are having to vote again? - vote for us or those scary liberal types might stop that thing you all voted for!

Lib Dems will be campaigning on a platform of withdrawing Article 50, or whatever one does to withdraw from a withdrawal from the EU.

This is our chance to organise.

May is confident of a clean victory here due to the other parties currently polling so badly. So the spin, if she gets it, will be that there is a clear mandate for a hard Brexit. Plus of course we get 5 more years of the Tories driving us off a fething cliff.

However. The last couple of years have shown us that massive upsets are possible. That politicians, and everyone else, cannot predict the outcomes of votes any more.

How do you organise, if you oppose Brexit?

Think locally. Find the politician who will commit to voting for the softest imaginable Brexit, or for cancelling Article 50 if possible. Support them. Campaign for them. Get people to vote tactically. Yes that probably means handing a lot of power to the Lib Dems. I'm not happy about the prospect either but it's way, way better than the alternative.

But no! A second referendum in Scotland would be far too much of a distraction from the serious business of Brexit!

That's going to be an interesting line to spin out now.

Oddly, it's that second referendum which might hand Labour a shock win.

As a Scot who's lived in England since 1991 and has no plans whatsoever to return (career, friends etc) I'm neither for nor against - I've very deliberately not formed an opinion as I'm distant from life and politics up there.

But looking at my FB feed, it seems Sturgeon isn't particularly popular at all - so we may see the SNP lose ground to Labour, on account there's precious few Tories in Scotland!

It depends where you're getting information from - the howling lunatics in the BBC SpeakYourBranes comments sections obviously loathe Sturgeon. But for Labour in Scotland we have the mighty Kezia Dugdale as leader, a woman who permanently looks as if she's about to burst into tears and start beating her fists against the ground that it's All So Unfair. The Tories have Ruth, who hasn't made herself popular recently with her support for the Child Benefit cap and is actually going to have to come out of hiding soon, but seems to be doing well otherwise. The Lib Dems are... there? But if you're going to vote against Brexit, you'll vote SNP as they actually have a chance.

I think Scotland will be a sideshow in this. The SNP might not get quite as many MPs as they have now, but they're likely to be far in advance of anyone else. This one's down to what the Lib Dems manage to pull off in England.

Well, seeing as Westminster would have to approve a second referendum (as they do any referendum), people who want to remain part of the UK may see Labour as the best way to oust the SNP, and reduce the chances of that actually happening.

My views on the Conservative party are well known on these boards, and it goes without saying that I've had little good to say about May over the years. First as Home Secretary, and now as PM.

None the less, I always saw her as reliable. Reliably dull and predictable, but reliable none the less.

Today's announcement is something I thought I'd never see: May going kamikaze! WTF!

What does she gain from this?

When and it is when, Labour get defeated, Corbyn is out the door. I thought the Tory plan was to keep him Labour leader as long as possible.

Weasel Farron and the fib dems will try and re-run June 23rd and probably pick up a few more seats. So we have 5 years of fib dem pontification to look forward too from those useless

Labour are already rock bottom, so there's little gains to be made there.

The boundary changes don't kick in til 2020, and seeing as they favour the Tories anyway, she could have waited until 2020.

The SNP will run this GE as a de facto Scottish independence referendum

And for all the talk of a mandate for Brexit, the HoC voted overwhelmingly in favour of passing Article 50...

All in all, it's a strange decision...


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Oddly, it's that second referendum which might hand Labour a shock win.

As a Scot who's lived in England since 1991 and has no plans whatsoever to return (career, friends etc) I'm neither for nor against - I've very deliberately not formed an opinion as I'm distant from life and politics up there.

But looking at my FB feed, it seems Sturgeon isn't particularly popular at all - so we may see the SNP lose ground to Labour, on account there's precious few Tories in Scotland!

As somebody who lives in Scotland, I can assure you that Sturgeon is still popular, helped in part by the fact that the opposition is poor.

Sturgeon is polarising, because of her tunnel vision for an independence agenda. Some will love it, others will be hardened against her.

However the SNP has made many critical mistakes over the last few years, and are hoping that the Indyref focus will be enough of a smokescreen to cover them. That might backfire on them dependent on on how much of devolutions failing can be shifted on to the Tories. There is a solid core of nationalistic zealots who will buy that, and sell it on. However the combination of mismanagement and indyref tunnel vision will polarise opposition also. However unless a lot of tactical voting takes place those numbers might not materiialise in a meaningful way.

However the SNP has made many critical mistakes over the last few years

After the Gibraltar debacle, the NI U-turn from Hammond, and now May's massive U-turn on a GE,

how can anybody criticise the SNP for their mistakes? And that's before we even mention Corbyn?

I'm struggling to contain my laughter here.

These snap electiosn should be interesting. The outcome will either solidify Brexit or put it into some doubt again.

Interesting times,

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

However the SNP has made many critical mistakes over the last few years

After the Gibraltar debacle, the NI U-turn from Hammond, and now May's massive U-turn on a GE,

how can anybody criticise the SNP for their mistakes? And that's before we even mention Corbyn?

I'm struggling to contain my laughter here.

If anything it would seem the SNP has positioned itself rather well to push for its agenda of independence, or at least as well as it could realistically hope for. I don't think going independent would be terribly productive in the big picture, but it is a golden second chance that they'd be stupid to not try and seize if that's what they're aiming for.

 Easy E wrote:
These snap electiosn should be interesting. The outcome will either solidify Brexit or put it into some doubt again.

Interesting times,

Not really IMO.

I don't know how closely you or any other American dakka member follows British politics, but the opposition Labour party are bad. really bad. Gak poor bad. They make Trump look like FDR.

Theresa May will win. No question of that. What majority she will have is another story.

In the USA, you guys have Florida and Ohio deciding elections. In Britain, our version is Middle England. The people who live there tend to turn up for elections and most importantly, vote Conservative.

For them to vote for Labour under its leader Jeremy Corbyn would be like Texas voting 80% for Hilary Clinton.






Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

However the SNP has made many critical mistakes over the last few years

After the Gibraltar debacle, the NI U-turn from Hammond, and now May's massive U-turn on a GE,

how can anybody criticise the SNP for their mistakes? And that's before we even mention Corbyn?

I'm struggling to contain my laughter here.

If anything it would seem the SNP has positioned itself rather well to push for its agenda of independence, or at least as well as it could realistically hope for. I don't think going independent would be terribly productive in the big picture, but it is a golden second chance that they'd be stupid to not try and seize if that's what they're aiming for.

I'll declare my bias by saying that I'm a SNP supporter and voter. Last election we won 56 out of 59 seats in Scotland. Most of our seats have bomb proof majorities i.e more than 5000 votes, in some cases 10,000 vote majorities. We have a large activist base, lots of people ready to volunteer and put in the hard yards of a election campaign, and we have generous backers, so the money situation is good.

The opposition parties are on the run up here, and one of their MPs was declared a liar by high court judges, which is obviously a serious thing. Our vote will hold up, no question.

On another note, I see the US politics thread is closed, so if any American dakka members are visiting, and you're more than welcome, and if you don't know the nuts and bolts of British politics, I'll be happy to answer any questions.

Its a do or die for Brexit.

If they lose its in serious doubt. If they win they passed a general election and a referendum + parliament vote.

That's a very solid mandate to push on.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
My views on the Conservative party are well known on these boards, and it goes without saying that I've had little good to say about May over the years. First as Home Secretary, and now as PM.

None the less, I always saw her as reliable. Reliably dull and predictable, but reliable none the less.

Today's announcement is something I thought I'd never see: May going kamikaze! WTF!

What does she gain from this?

When and it is when, Labour get defeated, Corbyn is out the door. I thought the Tory plan was to keep him Labour leader as long as possible.

Weasel Farron and the fib dems will try and re-run June 23rd and probably pick up a few more seats. So we have 5 years of fib dem pontification to look forward too from those useless

Labour are already rock bottom, so there's little gains to be made there.

The boundary changes don't kick in til 2020, and seeing as they favour the Tories anyway, she could have waited until 2020.

The SNP will run this GE as a de facto Scottish independence referendum

And for all the talk of a mandate for Brexit, the HoC voted overwhelmingly in favour of passing Article 50...

All in all, it's a strange decision...

I agree. It's a very strange decision. May's statement:-

"So I have a simple challenge to the opposition parties, you have criticised the government's vision for Brexit, you have challenged our objectives, you have threatened to block the legislation we put before Parliament.

"This is your moment to show you mean it, to show you are not opposing the government for the sake of it, to show that you do not treat politics as a game.

"Let us tomorrow vote for an election, let us put forward our plans for Brexit and our alternative programmes for government and then let the people decide.

"And the decision facing the country will be all about leadership. It will be a choice between strong and stable leadership in the national interest, with me as your prime minister, or weak and unstable coalition government, led by Jeremy Corbyn, propped up by the Liberal Democrats, who want to reopen the divisions of the referendum, and Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP.

She told ITV:-

Before Easter I spent a few days walking in Wales with my husband, thought about this long and hard and came to the decision that to provide that stability and certainty for the future that this was the way to do it, to have an election.

Weird as it stands, I kind of read this as a crisis of confidence on her part. She's been taking such a slugging for pushing through with the results of a referendum she didn't call, I think it may well have gotten through to her. Despite all the derogatory comments about 'Empress May', it would appear that she doesn't actually want to push the country in a direction it hasn't shown itself to be firmly behind. So she's calling for an endorsement of both her, and the policy of Brexit as a way of deciding this democratically and ending it once and for all.

Which is, bizarely enough, what the Lib Dems and a lot of remainers have been calling for, because it'll be their chance to try and turn it around. But if they lose here, then they more or less have to concede that they're done. Fair's fair. Let the games commence.

But then the question is: Why couldn't she have done this before triggering Article 50?

Really, the only plausible reason that she has picked now is because she thinks the conservatives can win. It isn't at all about ensuring that the british people get a say, it's about ensuring that the Tories get more time in power. If Brexit turns out to be a complete clusterfeth and nobody gets what they hoped for (and looking at who we've got in charge, I think this is likely) then the Tories would be demolished in 2020. This way they could hold on until 2022, by which point things may be starting to get better after the crash of Brexit in 2019.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
But then the question is: Why couldn't she have done this before triggering Article 50?

Note the chronology. She decided to hold the election after that. Which reinforces the idea that this is a snap decision of hers that's been bubbling around in her head and troubling her for a while now.

Weird as it stands, I kind of read this as a crisis of confidence on her part. She's been taking such a slugging for pushing through with the results of a referendum she didn't call, I think it may well have gotten through to her. Despite all the derogatory comments about 'Empress May', it would appear that she doesn't actually want to push the country in a direction it hasn't shown itself to be firmly behind. So she's calling for an endorsement of both her, and the policy of Brexit as a way of deciding this democratically and ending it once and for all.

Which is, bizarely enough, what the Lib Dems and a lot of remainers have been calling for, because it'll be their chance to try and turn it around. But if they lose here, then they more or less have to concede that they're done. Fair's fair. Let the games commence.

As I've said many a time, Middle England, which actually turns out and votes, will never pick Corbyn over May. Never. So the Tory victory is not in doubt. The problem is the Remainders rallying behind Farron, and of course, if the SNP stand fast in Scotland, that's another cast iron mandate for them to push on with indy referendum 2.0.

Scotland's only Tory MP has a slim majority of 798 votes. 2000 odd people voted Green party last time in that constituency. The Greens support Scottish independence. Can you see where this is going?

Also, as other people have pointed out, there are two more problems:

1. The council elections are overshadowed.

2.What the feth happens to the electoral fraud investigations from 2 years ago? The CPs will not want to be seen to interfere in the democratic process, so candidates under investigation will essentially, get off scot-free.

Strange days ahead.

How well do you think the lib dems will do? They'll probably position themselves as the party of undoing Brexit. There could be a lot of votes to be had there.

 Future War Cultist wrote:
How well do you think the lib dems will do? They'll probably position themselves as the party of undoing Brexit. There could be a lot of votes to be had there.

Personally, I think they'll pick up a few seats here and there. Seeing as they're rock bottom, I suppose the only way is up. I think they'll lose their only seat in Scotland because of the Frenchagte scandal, and the fact that the MP concerned was branded a liar by high court judges, and tried to ruin 4 of his constituents who brought the case to court. So local factors will count against him IMO.

At any rate, I think the country has accepted article 50, wants to get on with it, and the Lib Dem comeback based on the Remain vote might be a damp squib.

The GE turnout won't match the referendum, so the committed voters who turn out are likely to be a majority of old people, who usually vote Conservative.

 Future War Cultist wrote:
How well do you think the lib dems will do? They'll probably position themselves as the party of undoing Brexit. There could be a lot of votes to be had there.

I hope they do well and pull enough pro-EU conservatives away to remove (or at least lessen) the Conservative majority. If the conservatives lose their majority it would be very interesting. They couldn't go into coalition with the LIbDems again considering their polar opposite stances on Brexit, same with the Greens and SNP. But then Labour have also shut themselves off from those coalitions with their official backing of Brexit, so we could see the Tories trying to carry on with a non-majority government, which would hugely weaken their ability to pass legislation in parliament and have the complete opposite effect of what they hoped this election would have when it comes to unifying Parliament behind Brexit.

Also, apparently it has been announced that there will be no television debates this election.

https://www.channel4.com/news/by/gary-gibbon/blogs/election-2017-no-tv-debates-this-time

Hardly surprising considering she isn't even capable of putting a good performance in PMQs. TV channels should organise debates anyway. Invite the Tories and then it is up to them if they turn up. If they don't they can just have an understudy read out relevant sections of their manifesto in response to questions.

I thought ya'll argued that post-article 50 triggering, the reasonable thing would be to have a snap election.

So that ya'll have a chance to get your "peeps" in to negotiate the Brexit?

Or, is this some ploy for May's party to increase their majority?

At any rate, I look forward to being stuck in front of a TV at 3am on June 9th, high on diet coca cola, and surrounded by empty bags of Walkers' crisps

And John Curtice will be getting a haircut soon for his general election night TV appearance. He gets a haircut every 5 years


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 whembly wrote:
I thought ya'll argued that post-article 50 triggering, the reasonable thing would be to have a snap election.

So that ya'll have a chance to get your "peeps" in to negotiate the Brexit?

Or, is this some ploy for May's party to increase their majority?

This is British elections whembly. A SIX WEEK campaign and not that 2 year circus you guys go for.

Plus, our parties only spend £100,000. Not the billions of dollars you guys throw at an election. Get with the system.

To answer your questions, this is the Conservative party putting party interest before the nation. Again!

Parliament overwhelmingly voted for article 50. She doesn't need a majority.

 whembly wrote:
I thought ya'll argued that post-article 50 triggering, the reasonable thing would be to have a snap election.

So that ya'll have a chance to get your "peeps" in to negotiate the Brexit?

Or, is this some ploy for May's party to increase their majority?

I wanted an election prior to enacting A50 as, even if a pro-EU government were elected, there is no guarantee we can cancel A50.

As for this being a ploy, basically nothing has changed since May was emphatically saying that there should be no election until 2020 except for the Tories gaining a big lead over Labour in polls. Do the maths

Yeah it seems like the classic Tory approach -- ignore promises and pledges and principles, if there is a tactical opportunity available.