There’s less than a month to go before the General Election, and the Conservatives are polling more than 20 points behind Labour. Some forecasters expect them to win less than 100 seats. But losing the election – which they almost certainly will – isn’t their biggest problem. Their biggest problem is they might cease to be the largest right-of-centre party in the country or, indeed, a major political force at all.
With Nigel Farage having assumed leadership of Reform and announced his intention to stand for parliament, the Tories now face an existential crisis. Could they be supplanted by another party on the right?
Reform are hot on the Conservatives’ heels in the national polls, where the blue and turquoise lines appear to be converging. In some seats, they’re now polling even higher, leading irreverent pro-Reform commentators to say things like “a vote for the Conservatives is a vote for Labour!” and “the Conservatives are splitting the Reform vote!”
By one measure, Reform’s leader is the most popular politician in the country. This is even true among 2019 Conservative voters, who hold a more favourable opinion of him than they do of Rishi Sunak – to the tune of 10 percentage points. In fact, a recent poll found that Farage was respondents’ top pick to replace Sunak as Tory leader, ahead of Penny Mordaunt, James Cleverly and Kemi Badenoch. In the same poll, more respondents agreed that Reform should become the official opposition than disagreed.
Some Conservatives, such as Home Secretary Suella Braverman, have gone as far as saying that Farage “should be welcomed” by the party. (Others, no doubt, disagree.)
Perusing Twitter, where much of the political debate goes on nowadays, reveals further evidence of Conservative unpopularity. A frequently-seen hashtag is #ZeroSeats, referring to the Conservatives’ dim electoral prospects. What’s noteworthy, however, is that the hashtag isn’t used by Labour or Lib Dem accounts but rather by former Conservatives. This may be the first election where both the left and the right are hoping that the Conservatives lose.
If you navigate to Sunak’s Twitter account, you find that practically every tweet has been heavily ratioed. And among the overwhelmingly negative comments, there are plenty of right-wing avatars: the Prime Minister is getting ratioed by his own former voters. If you look at Farage’s account, by contrast, you see few ratios and largely positive comments.
Twitter isn’t real life, of course. Users are small and selected sample of the population. But they’re selected in an important way: for being much more engaged in politics. Which means that the most politically engaged conservatives in the Twitter-using part of the population (roughly, under 40s) are overwhelmingly anti-Conservative and pro-Reform.
One such individual, who was recently mentioned in UnHerd, is 23-year-old Jack Anderton. On June 8th, he posted a video of himself endorsing Reform, which went viral and got over 12K likes. “The Conservatives will lose and lose big,” Anderton notes. “The real fight is what happens after the election”. He then rattles off a list of Tory failures before getting to the nub of the issue: the Tory Party “has no credibility left”.
And he’s right. The Conservatives have been promising to bring immigration down to the “tens of thousands” since they first got into power in 2010. And when Boris won a landslide in 2019, voters assumed they would finally get round to doing it. Instead, net migration doubled. Where’s your credibility after that? If Sunak pledged tomorrow to adopt the strictest migration policy in British history, it wouldn’t matter; no one would believe him.
Meanwhile, the Tories have barely confronted the ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ racket. Do a keyword search on the main government jobs website, and you will find dozens of listings for jobs like ‘Diversity & Inclusion Lead’. Why do these jobs exist when public finances are under such strain? They are basically just sinecures for Labour-supporting bureaucrat-activists. Why do the Conservatives let this happen? (The phrase “utterly useless” comes to mind.)
So is this the end of the Conservative Party is a major political force? In truth, it’s still too early to say. But the trends don’t look favourable.
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More cognitive dissonance from both of them.
Plus a bit of CYA, certainly on Prof. Bell’s part….
Bingham knows it’s futile anyway in her case.
we all know what happened to the less fortunate citizens of not so wealthy countries which couldn’t pay Pfizer price for the ‘unbelievably effective’ vaxxes. They all dead now… how sad
Yep. Especially Brazilia, India and South Africa — all depopulated wastelands now. So tragic.
So Dame Kate says we need more, more, more jabs.
Good luck with that, you fraud. People are waking up – well, except for those people who sadly are not waking up, but that is helping many others to wake up, even those who for obvious reasons do not want to think about how bad these pokes really are.
I wonder how many people are going to be willing to play unpaid lab rat for these frauds again?
We’re still getting some deaths but they’re largely in elderly people and people who often have Covid infections alongside other medical problems.
So, everything’s just as it was in 2020 before the jabberwocky was let lose in the UK, before we all got locked up at home 23 hours per day (save essential workers like government advisors who were partying in the workplace at that time), before the country was billions (if not trillions) of pounds poorer and before all the deaths due to neglect and loss of access to medical care, due to suicide out of desparation – of course – of those who were sacrificed to the jabberwocky itself.
It’s unfortunate that we don’t have gods anymore. If we still had, we could at least pray for a bolt out of the blue striking these lying hyenas down in the name of divine justice.
Words fail me.
Where oh where has this immunological genius – and from Oxford nonetheless – been for the last 3 years.
The point is, he should have known this from day one.
Does he actually know the first basic thing about immunology?
The man is an idiot.
May I respectively suggest that he, and everyone in power, read books and articles by probably the greatest immunologist there has ever been, Sir Macfarlane Burnett.
None of them are fit to lace his boots.
He certainly did know this from day one. He is – after all – only switching back to what was considered conventional wisdom until March 2020. After it’s now reasonably certain that this pandemic bandwagon has really been halted, the experts now lightly jump from the coach-box, bow graciously, smile at the awestruck population with their spotless teeth and say something like It was us who have stopped! With the miracle vaccines, we shot the extremely deadly killer of man! Thanks to us (and the miracle vaccines) you all got your lifes back safely! ([in extremly small print] Until next time folks, we’re not done with you yet!)
Repeat-vaxxing all of the country in circles while maintaining mask mandates, indoor contact bans and outdoor social distancing forever, what the one Jenny Harries (among others) was still calling for in Feburary this year, never really happened. No, no, no, you must remember this wrongly. And by the way, are you perhaps generally into conspiracy theories?
Bell is trying to cover his arse – badly. He’s also a damned lying firker.
No argument with that.
From being about 100% wrong the great Professor has. moved back about 10% in the right direction. Pardon me if I don’t cheer much.
And as for Ms Bingham: ‘the current Covid jabs are “not good enough”.’
Well I guess it’s for profound insights like that they get paid the big bucks. I wonder how long it took her to work that one out.
What on earth would we do without the likes of Bell and Bingham???
Seriously though, these people make me sick.
“these people make me sick.”
They are the bloody infection.
These people have made a lot of people sick one way and another. It’s definitely arse covering season as excess death signals are increasingly difficult to brush under the carpet, even under the aegis of the renamed Helen Keller Office of National Statistics. (Be great if they had the imagination/gumption to compare and contrast outcomes for vaxxed and unvaxxed – what a stroke of statistical genius that would be!!?!)
What a shower of sh***!
Especially now they have a better idea as to the number of unvaccinated. They should re-work all their vaccine effectiveness calculations and then get Professor Fenton to check their work.
Well put and great name by the way.
“And as for Ms Bingham: ‘the current Covid jabs are “not good enough”.’”
They are certainly much worse than useless. The question that springs to mind is whether universal vaccination with a super-effective and super-safe covid vaccine would be a good use of public money, or whether that money would bring more benefits being spent on other things. I know where my bet would be.
Covid was not an emergency and no general vaccine for the whole population was required. Money would have been better spent establishing more precise treatment protocols for acute cases using the drugs that seem to have worked in India and other places.
In NSW week after week, state Health Department figures show unjabbed don’t get sick enough to go to hospital, or die “with” Covid.
The highest rate is in 4* jabbed, then 3*, etc.
Conclusion- more jabs equals more risk of being hospitalised with or dying with Covid.
Not even mentioning deaths from the jabs.
Seems pretty clear, though we have been saying this for 2 years now.
https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/Infectious/covid-19/Documents/weekly-covid-overview-20221119.pdf
I see they still haven’t changed the text to match the facts revealed by the numbers. Good news about the lockdown fines being rescinded.
Small steps, but better than nothing.
Bill Clinton who has Covid-19 says ” I did NOT have sex with that booster”
“All three of the original vaccines – the AstraZeneca vaccine and the two mRNA vaccines – have been unbelievably effective at eliminating that really dreadful disease that caused so many deaths early on.”
Yeah right. Pull the other one it’s got bells on it.
Yep – I was with him until he came out with that. I guess it’s compelled speech these days, though.
Another authoritarian taking tiny steps away from the policy he endorsed.
He and his fellow authoritarians need to understand: We will never forget and never forgive.
Natural immunity is best unfortunately far too many people now have damaged immune systems thanks to the ‘experts’.