Sampson

This was the best answer of the night for me

Agreed. But he was also the only one who was prepared to address the massive elephant that’s trumpeting in the room that is Brexit while all the other parties continue to pretend it’s the just the buzzing of the (empty) fridge in the kitchen.

What about in grebland?

This debate chair is infinitely better than the last one at least. Not constantly talking over them

You can tell he just doesn’t care anymore. It’s clear he just wants to lose and get it done with so he can **** off to California and do bullingdon shit with his mega finance mates and the billions he married into. Reminds me of that spell where Rodgers started slating the fans and it felt like he was trying to get sacked so he could get his payout.

Nope, they’re in favour of much more brutal immigration laws than that. They made it very clear in their interview on itv the other day - they are in favour of immigration freezes for several years for all types of immigration with only exceptions for health and care workers and they are also in favour net zero immigration, which requires you to control everyone moving to the country including British and Irish citizens who currently always have the right to move back or move for the first time to the UK and many people who are non British or Irish citizens who have the right to move back to the uk either indefinitely or several years after moving away depending on the law/treaty, many of these as well are based on laws under international treaties with for example other eu and commonwealth countries. This can only be achieved in practice by creation a North Korea style pariah state, scrapping the CTA,l and the Good Friday Agreement, revoking British citizenships of any British citizen who moves abroad and ignoring international treaties with the eu and commonwealth countries as well as decades old British law like windrush.

Tory advisors this morning when the news of Sunak’s gaffe was breaking:

He’s not wrong

How dumb can the Tories be? Has anyone checked for irregular betting patterns for Tories to get under 20 seats? I’d swear they were trying to throw this election.

He’s like a broken ai chatbot that doesn’t understand your query so feeds out unrelated off-programmed gibberish over and over

Yeh that’s true, but as you said, it cuts deep into his own voter base which I think is a key thing here.

Bizarre. Given Biden is also in the lead up a general election and Macron is the middle of EU elections and neither had any problems turning up. Embarrassing himself and deserting his duties of statehood in front of 2 of our closest allies and 2 of 3 world leaders he has to work closest with along with the chancellor of Germany. It’s just not understanding the duties of being a prime minister, simple as that. You can’t make “mistakes” like that as prime minister, it’s something you get out your system as a junior minister, but sacking off an event commemorating the 80th anniversary of D-day with both the French and US presidents is just wow. And for what? An ITV interview that doesn’t even air for days and could easily have just been done today instead. Genuinely struggling to think of a worse gaffe in an election campaign from a standing pm.

I can’t think of a gaffe that plays into Reform’s hands more than ditching D-day commemorations. It’s like the ultimate red flag for the Right. Don’t think opposing parties could’ve come up with a better gaffe if they wrote it. No idea who is advising Rishi at this election.

Sunak getting slaughtered by the right wing commentators who usually are Tory mouthpieces over leaving d-day commemorations early to do an itv interview. Genuinely can’t believe how incompetent the team running his campaign are. He’s doing everything in his power possible to lose even the staunchest of flag waving Tories.

After Reform UK announced Farage as leader, I hear behind the scenes they’ve thought of new policies for the country including: 1. Nigel Farage needs to be louder, angrier and have access to a Time Machine. 2. Whenever Nigel Farage is not on our tv screens, all the other people should be asking “where’s Nigel?”

The one thing I’ll give them is they did fully introduce same sex marriage, instead of that “separate but equal” civil partnership crap beforehand. But that was way back in 2013 when they were in coalition with the more socially liberal LibDems who were the ones campaigning for it in the lead up to the 2010 election. After that I’m struggling.

Yep, they’re the ones. The leader guy who Farage just replaced was on ITV after the debate last night as well blaming the sun and volcanoes for climate change and saying humans contribute next to nothing to co2 and that he disagrees with 99.99% of scientists on the issue. Then claiming he’d save the country billions by scrapping the green energy costs and any green technology, when the presenter said “yeah but all the data shows the opportunity costs of not making these green changes are far higher so they need to done”, he just ignored her and started claiming Labour and Conservatives were both just socialists and Reform UK were “businessmen “ who offer the real libertarian utopia or something. Of course he definitely doesn’t have any alleged ties to oil or fossil fuel companies or anything. No sireeeey bob.

. Tories definitely going full on Sideshow Bob in his run for mayor with these dystopian videos. I fully expect the next video is going to be showing Sunak behind a campaign lecture while Laura Kuenssberg on voice over announces “and just look how happy he is”

When even the biggest Tory magazine going is starting to question the odious tactics of inventing statistics and lying about how they were independently created you know they’re screwed.

Why is anyone surprised? It’s what the Tories have been doing since 2016, although this goes beyond even the red bus fiasco. Completely fabricate figures from thin air then repeat the same 2-3 word slogan over and over again. “Clear plan” and “bold action” are just the new “get Brexit done /hands face space /strong and stable / coalition of chaos / taking back control / project fear /etc. etc.” It should be electoral fraud to just invent figures and claim they were independently collated by civil servants and then making it one of your key driving points of a campaign. There’s bending statistics to look a certain way, but straight up lying about the independence of statistics and that the civil service created them when they didn’t is fundamentally bringing into disrepute the independence of the civil service that is needed as a pillar of the checks and balances that make democracy viable, it’s also allegedly knowingly lying to British authorities which should be a crime. You only have to read the likes of Tommy G’s posts in the past few pages to see this shit still works.

It’s more of both parties endless march to the right. Labour’s current economic plans would be considered quite a way to the right of Edward Heath’s Tory government. Both Labour and the Tories are both the furthest to the right they’ve been in anyone’s lifetime (with the exception of Truss’ genuine brief attempt at full libertarianism). We essentially have the choice of a centre-right party in Labour and a hard right Tory party.

I would call certain Tories evil and certain Tories I wouldn’t call evil. Sunak definitely belongs on the evil side however. This isn’t some rich guy who made a great innovation and created countless jobs and made people easier or worked hard to contribute to society to become a great engineer or doctor or judge. It’s some rich guy who made his money *because of* and as a cause of the crippling 2007-08 financial crisis that lead to unnecessary suffering and death of thousands. He made his money by taking from the poorest in society not adding to it. I have no problem in any leader who ignores their country’s responsibility to reach net zero for populist policies being called evil too as they’re knowingly adding to a problem and culture that was cause unnecessary death and suffering to tens of millions of people. Understandably we factor in physical acts of violence over social or economic acts of violence when discussing evil as to extent there’s a lot of debate as to the right and wrongs of that. But I’m not sure there should be a lot of debate on Sunak making millions off the collapse of RBS or the ignoring of the responsibility with regards to climate change being inherent evils. Regardless of how strong you want to make the language though, there’s no multiverse in which Sunak is “well meaning”.

To continue the discussion, as sdp says it’s frightening how normalised straight up openly and knowingly lying about the independence of figures you’ve made up and quote over and over is. If this happened in Russia or China we’d be going nuts. The ease at which Sunak continuously lied about fabricated numbers and more importantly lied how they were independendly produced by the civil service over and over again is indeed frightening, especially now it’s come out that MPs were well aware of this, in a normal democratic country it should be considered electoral fraud.