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Theresa May
- Thread starter Raees
- Start date
Though it should be clear now the reasons Tories did so badly was the awful campaign, social care, triple lock changes and fuel allowance cut.
Nigel Evans said it best when he said the Tory policies scared off their core elderly voting base.
The Tories ran the worst campaign possible and they still increased their vote share by 5%. They're not going to run an awful campaign like this next election.
It shouldn't have been negotiable before. The Leave campaign repeatedly dismissed concerns that Brexit would mean a hard border. Theresa Villiers and James Brokenshire as NI Secretaries have spoken about the importance of avoiding a hard border. It's just about the only thing that every party in NI has ever been in agreement on. The Republic of Ireland do not want a hard border. It's brought the issue to the attention of the public in England, Scotland and Wales but surely it was already on the negotiators' agenda.
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There's also now a very definite feeling that the public is done with austerity to a large extent, Corbyn pushed this relentlessly to his great credit and the public responded. If the Tories don't recognise that and adjust they'll suffer. Their leader can't tell nurses on live TV again that they don't need payrises. They were very vulnerable to similar sentiment on police cuts after the terror attacks.
But your last line sums it up well - people have spoken about Corbyn having won a higher vote share than Blair in 05 and this is true, but it's also true that May just won about the same vote share as Thatcher did in '83 and '87. Labour got some amazing swings towards it on Thursday, but also plenty of large ones against it - I'd thought that the Tories targeting Skinner was a bit OTT pre-election, but they managed an 8% swing against him and reduced his majority to 5k. Still large, but doesn't compare favourably to the 14k majority he had even in 1983. Similar story across a lot of the post-industrial north outside of the cities.
There is no lack of big Ego's in the Tory party who will belive they can do better
Yeah, the only person to win an election for Labour in 43 years (and counting) destroyed the party.He won by impersonating the tories and in doing so dragged labour too far to the centre and gave birth to the lie that the leftist, old labour had become unelectable. He was in the wrong place at the wrong moment in history with 911 and the subsequent clusterfecks in Afghanistan and Iraq and whilst I'm fairly sure in his shoes May, Cameron, Brown, Major or Thatcher would have all similarly followed Dubya, history will always have him down as the liar that led Britain into the mess we now find the world in.
I'd say Michael Foot and previous Labour election campaigns did that.
Have you seen the Tony Blair documentary on Netflix?
Had John Smith not died old labour would have been back in power instead of Blair, Michael Foot and Kinnock before him were honest decent politicians who suffered the same mauling by the right wing press that saw off Miliband and looked to have given Corbyn an impossible task ahead of this week. Maybe people have started to look beyond the lies.
Not actually got Netflix although I think I can access it on my daughter's account if I could find the time.
Blair's a wierd one for me, I never really trusted him after hearing the stories of his run in with Dave Nellist on his first days in Westminster as Dave was the MP for Coventry when I was at Uni there and like Corbyn was an honest, genuine Labour guy who clearly cared for his constituents. I did get swept along with the election though and believed the D:ream that things were getting better for a while only to feel bitterly let down by the mess he left. I do think he's a decent diplomat though and that he is genuinely haunted by the disastrous decisions he took.
According to Osborne she's a dead woman walking and the only question is how long she'll be on death row. There's been a pretty spectacular change.
Blunder after blunder. After running the worst campaign in living memory she's now being given the run around by the DUP. Deal sorted....not sorted. If she can't negotiate a deal with 10 MPS how the hell does she expect us to believe she can negotiate a brexit deal! Time to go.
I read yesterday that 70%of the Conservative party want her out.
I wonder if there's anybody in the UK can seriously say that the EU is the problem and not these pack of amateurs they call themselves the Tory Party
I don't think 'Worst British PM Ever' is over the top. She can't speak properly, she hides from confrontation until someone tells her how bad it's looking, she seems a bit dim as well to make it worse.
She hasn't once presented herself as a 'leader'. She's fecking awful. The Tories have some shocking politicians at their disposal.
She hasn't once presented herself as a 'leader'. She's fecking awful. The Tories have some shocking politicians at their disposal.
Rueters said:
Utterly shocking; this is coming from a Conservative (and T May) fan!
Yes the numbers are deceptive, maybe the most important numbers are Tory v Labour:
2017 : 2.4% Vote Share difference, 56 seat difference
2015: 6.5% Vote Share difference, 99 seat difference
2010: 7.1% Vote Share difference, 49 seat difference
So were Labour unlucky to not win more seats with such a low difference in voter share? Where did the extra votes come from? Or is it more a case of energising voters who don't usually vote.
The Tories have picked up votes in Scotland and UKIP but it looks like Labour must have picked up some UKIP votes aswell as Lib dem votes too, with a smaller amount of SNP voters.
So if Labour actually unite and get some more competant people in place behind Corbyn and the economy crashes as it probably will they are in a very strong position. Although The Tories surely can't run a campaign as bad again? Unless May keeps up her current performance levels.
EDIT: IT'D BE INTERESTING TO SEE HOW MANY CLOSE SEATS THERE WERE THIS TIME. ONE OF MY LOCALS THE TORIES WON IN ONLY THE 000s
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The Tories as bickering disunited party who talked about 'family values' while being caught with their trousers down lost that one and subsequent ones as much as Labour and Blair won them if we're honest.
So haunted in fact that he's doing consultancy work for brutal dictators as his choice of employment post PM. He's a self serving sociopath and the more you read and learn about the man backs that up.
Still Cameron will be the one remembered for having 2 referendums the divided the country. Thatcher ruined the industrial communities. Blair took us into wars the de-stabilised the world while increasing the cost of everything via stealth taxes.
No without looking to set a rating system to 'Worst PM', May is more comparable to Brown.
And that's all in my 80s plus lifetime. We had parts of the country on a '3 day week' because of lack of power pre-Thatcher. 70s Labour was in cahoots with the Unions generally. There was Edward Heaths supposed links to a murderous paedophile ring.
Chamberlain was wrongly discredited for his apeasement strategy and died before he could see the end of the war. But his father intimidated and beat up fellow MPs in mass brawls.
But I'm not rightly versed enough in the rest of the 20th century PM's nevermind the ones before that.
What do you think of the job he did as PM after winning the election? Even if you ignore his achievement in ousting the conservatives for the first time in decades (which seems harsh tbh) then what about the fact he stayed in power for a decade of almost unparalleled growth and prosperity? Do we delete that from his cv too?
His record is rightfully tarred by WMD and being led down the garden path by Dubya but the resultant backlash has got massively out of proportion. Insane that you could imply he's been as bad for Britain as the likes of May or Cameron.
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Bit confused by the references to Blair. Wilson won the 1974 election and Blair in 1997, correct ? That's 23 years.
Blair often comes high up the list of 'best' prime minister's.
I don't think we've had a good Prime Minister in my lifetime.
Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May
All awful for different reasons. Thatcher and Blair do stand out as being the most interesting
I don't think we've had a good Prime Minister in my lifetime.
Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May
All awful for different reasons. Thatcher and Blair do stand out as being the most interesting
Objectively she's awful, but I think history will be more damning to Cameron who triggered this clusterfeck to begin with.
Depends how badly she fecks up Brexit.
She might feck up the negotiations so bad we don't go ahead with Brexit, so she's retrospectively deemed an unlikely hero
She might feck up the negotiations so bad we don't go ahead with Brexit, so she's retrospectively deemed an unlikely hero
That's my little dream.
Wish she and her party would feck off already.
Blair did a fairly good job until he totally balled things up with Iraq.
Can you imagine if a conservative PM had brought in ASBOs though?
I dont think any Tory wants to step into May's shoes at the moment tbh.
Theresa May sounds like a pornstar
That's why they're backing her for now. The office is toxic at the moment.
Yeah, poisoned chalice.
Maybe the real reason is that it is an extremely difficult job and expectations for what they can achieve are unrealistic? So much is down to luck as well - I'd rate Blair fairly well on domestic issues but he did benefit from a long global economic boom while Major, Brown and Cameron had to deal with much tougher environments.
As for May, she inherited a mess from Cameron's disastrous referendum punt and was shown to be inadequate for public leadership. However, I doubt she'll be around long enough to inflict real damage. It will be up to her successor to deal with the poisoned chalice of Brexit, which, given the inplausibility of negotiating a bespoke deal in less than 2 years from a weak negotiating position, at this stage looks like either walking away with the potential for trashing the economy or accept a pre-existing model like EEA and face down the inevitable howls of outrage over free movement.
I'm sure a lot of it is down to luck (Brown essentially had no chance as PM, but he was chancellor for Blair so a lot of it was his own doing, indirectly).
But equally, a lot of the reasons why Prime Minister's failed or were deeply unpopular were direct results of their own actions.
Blair should never have created ASBOs (pure populism). Should never have gone into Iraq without knowing what he was getting into (pure arrogance). Should never have given away one third of our rebate for seven years (pure ego). And shouldn't have overspent (lack of caring).
Cameron shouldn't have campaigned on reducing immigration, failed to reduce immigration, and then expect to win a referendum on not reducing immigration. On literally everything else he had a free pass (Scotland could also have killed his Premiership, but he survived that one). Or if he did actually want to cut immigration, he should have used the tools at his disposal, (can go into further detail if necessary).
Thatcher. God knows about thatcher. She's hated for good reasons. She's loved, I think, for less good reasons. On Europe, wrong and right (ERM and Single Market). I don't know where to start there.
But since Major, they've all made stupid mistakes.
She's loved (or at least respected) because of quite how utterly fecked Britain was before she came into office. A lot of people got hurt during her time in office, and she went off the rails spectacularly towards the end, but the state of the country pre-Thatcher was absolutely abysmal.