Actually it's probably a bit higher. That works out at £130bn when it's around £150bn.

Not one for bumping my own posts but this is proving to be prescient

Slightly surprising YouGov poll on Westminster voting intention, with Lib Dems top on 24%, just ahead of Farage, and Labour and Conservative down at 19%. Strange days.

We all know that when it comes to an actual election the drones will revert to ConLab in enough numbers that the duopoly continues

Not necessarily. Consider the collapse of the Liberals in the 1920s (after a period relying on confidence-and-supply from Labour and the Irish Parliamentary Party before the Great War) and the National Governments that staggered on up to the Second World War. In the end, things change. They don't stay the same. Conservative voters are dying off and Labour voters are losing tribal loyalty and are largely repelled by the leadership clique. Remember Labour have just scored their worst election result since December 1910.

Almost the entirety of the North will auto click red and almost the entirety of anywhere that's generally considered a safe Tory seat will auto click blue, it really is that simple, if anyone thinks that Labour and the Tories would lose in Sunderland and Buckingham respectively, even if they ran Fred West and Harold Shipman against Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela, they're very much mistaken

Labour leader in Scotland, Richard Leonard, admits it was a mistake having Corbyn's picture on the the EU election leaflet. For context, Leonard is very much part of the pro Corbyn clique.

It is nice to see DB's preferred Tory leader refusing to rule out proroguing parliament. There are two things that are good about it:
1) He won't be able to as the speaker rightly won't allow it.
2) This is the sort of thing that tinpot dictators do. We are meant to be a democracy and this is the sort of thing the potential next PM thinks is acceptable.

gje

Raab is so bad that it's just about destroyed the 'Anybody but Boris' movement. That's just within Tory MPs!

Boris is going to have to throw this away now or he will be PM. So about 50:50

Was a little depressed about this byelection result cos chain of events:

Gives Tory remain cretins some hope, which means they more likely to stop hard brexiter being PM, which will mean they get decimated at general election, which will mean labour/snp put in driving seat.

Worst possible result. Far far worse than wto brexit imo.


However, the upside is it gives Corbyn more prevarication excuses, so that's an upside and gives decent causal chain that builds a path to hard brexit... I just hope the tories come to senses soon and realize only route to keeping power now is probably Boris + hard brexit.

Swings and roundabouts...

Johnson court case has been unsurprisingly slung out.

And pray tell, how does Boris deliver said hard Brexit with a parliament that is overwhelmingly against it?

"I just hope the tories come to senses soon and realise only route to keeping power now is probably Boris + hard brexit."

I thought I was pretty clear.

Don't hold your breath.

Yeah, democracy will continue to be mugged off by the cretins in parliament, so it's a long shot, I suspect.

If you think that a no deal Brexit is the only democratic outcome then you really must have a short memory.

Leaving the EU is the only correct democratic outcome, and the choice is deal or no deal. But it seems no one wants the only deal the EU are offering, that only leaves....

That is not the only deal the EU is offering, it is the one they are offering given the red lines may chose. I am pretty sure that if we soften our red lines they will offer something different.

Nobody was talking about leaving without a deal pre-referendum. Farage was in favour of a Norway-type deal. Boris assured us we were going to get a great deal.

pfft more years of not really leaving is what you're saying.

I am under the impression 'no deal' is the default if the next PM just does nothing till Oct 31st. EU does not want the UK still in the EU without a deal when the next budget talks start so more extensions are unlikely. Also how does parliament force the PM to negotiate that extension?

It can't but I believe it can force revoking it.

Not having an EU membership is leaving the EU. That it doesn't conform to the vision that you and other fools share for it doesn't matter.

I think that depends on the determination of the PM and the timing.

Afaik the government has to revoke and the house can only instruct the government to do so. If the government doesn't comply then all the house can do is go down the no confidence route and somehow form a new government. By then it would probably be too late to revoke and the demands for a GE (presumably by the resisting PM) would be becoming irresistible.

In practice I don't think this would happen. Only a total nutter of a PM (surely even well beyond Raab) would allow this without asking for an extension while we have a GE. If remain (or a 2nd ref) is a clear possibility as an outcome of that election then the EU will probably allow it.

Hadn't realised how scary esther mcvey was. She's competing with raab.

Couldn't care less about gove doing cocaine. This was unforgivable though:

McVey is absolutely horrid. Massively ambitious and lacking in intellectual capability. She reminds me of Priti Patel.