Lobby wrote: Sun May 05, 2024 8:47 am
I see the Tory loons are out in force this morning demanding that Sunak 'change course', move even further to the right and emulate the party that secured a grand total of 2 councillors across the UK, rather than consider why it is that the election saw large swathes of former Tory voters switch to Labour or the Lib Dems (who beat the Tories into 3rd place) or even the Greens.
An obliteration at the GE is now a lock in. But their problems are larger.
Brexit and the 2019 GE has cooked their brains. They've purged a lot of the people who could change direction. Many (most?) of those left think UK elections are won from the far right rather than from the centre. Even if a party isn't in the centre, it has to at least look like that. Tory policies are now a BNP cut and paste. Focusing on immigration has been a terrible electoral mistake, the people that care about that are impossible to please, and really changing the numbers in a sustainable way means changing the structure of the UK economy (which would take two terms, create losers as well as winners, and may fail).
Brexit has been a disaster. Half the 2016 voters are never going to vote for them whilst they remain committed to Brexit. That's what the polling shows, Remain voters only support Remain leaning parties and definitely not the Tories, Leave voters have broken and will back Remain leaning parties (often because they've changed their mind). To regain trust the Tories will have to do a lot more than what we're seeing, because they're the instigators they will have to row back a lot furtherer than otherwise would've been the case, because this is about trust. Truss is another economic problem they've failed to put maximum distance from. They don't realise it yet but this is an electoral problem for them, every other party will say "Brexit and Truss" until the end of time, if the Tory response is "aren't they brilliant!" then that's at least half the electorate opposing them.
They're not winning the next GE, looking at what they're coming up with the one after that is doubtful too. Sunak could've minimised the damage and made the rebuild easier, like quickly acting when someone has a stroke, but his inexperience has led him into doing things which obviously weren't vote winners. Sunak should've disavowed austerity, Brexit, and Truss as much as possible, because that's what the Tories will have to do eventually anyway.