Matt N
CF Legend
I wouldn’t be sure of anything at this point. While I wouldn’t be overly sure of a landslide Labour victory as the polls currently predict, I also wouldn’t be sure that the Conservatives will get back in either.I expect this government will limp along and recover substantially on opinion polls before the next election.
I think it will take even more shambles in the lead up to the election for the conservatives to be ousted, if we aren’t having an election now. The noise of life will keep people from remembering how bad they have been this year.
I was at the pub recently and chatting with a bunch of people who were very vocally opposed to the conservatives. I expressed that I had become incapable of supporting the party since their super-ominous ‘proroguing of parliament’…. and despite how anti-conservative they were, not one of them could remember the details of what happened. I’ve never heavily aligned myself for or against any political party, but I remain offended by that to this day. It was the death of UK politics - even worse than the mini-budget fiasco.
More details here - be warned it may make you feel ill.
2019 British prorogation controversy - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
Edit: sorry, I had a similar rant on this forum earlier in the year. Seems that I have a short memory too.
History suggests that governments who preside over fiscal crises, whether self-inflicted or not, do not tend to win the next election afterwards. James Callaghan’s Labour Party failed to recover from the Winter of Discontent and the associated financial crisis involving an IMF bailout, as Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party thrashed them at the 1979 election. John Major’s Conservative Party failed to recover from Black Wednesday, even though it happened in 1992 and the election was not until 1997, and they sustained the worst Conservative election result since 1906 at the 1997 election. Gordon Brown’s Labour Party, even though they did not cause it and Brown’s response was generally considered very good from what I can tell, never recovered from the 2008 financial crisis and were booted out in favour of the Conservative/LibDem coalition at the 2010 election.
One difference here, admittedly, is that the PM has changed, but the various unpopular events and policies that have happened since 2019 have certainly given Labour a plethora of potential attack lines to use against the Conservatives, and their recent publicity has focused on how “switching the Tory at the top changes nothing”.