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Braverman out for having said that the police is way harder on right-wing groups than on pro-palestinians David Cameron in as a Foreign Minister
I really would like to understand how leftists can think that the tories are a right-wing party. I think it is clear which direction they are taking. The point is, do they have any strategy or it is a reflection of what the upper-cadrè of the tories think?
leftists think Democrats are right-wing! To them, anybody who accepts market capitalism is right-wing. They live in such bubbles they think the center should be Eugene Debs.
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The Tories are "right wing" in the sense that some of their prominent members make statements countering the current humanist consensus. Any policy that is remotely right wing, such as the Rwanda programme, is either neutered on implementation by the Civil Service or withdrawn beforehand by government members on the left of the party, fearing negative comments in the press. Speech is valued by the public far above action: Boris put the UK under three separate lockdowns and was about to do a fourth, stopping only due to innate weakness and a rebellious backbench. However, this is not remembered: what is remembered are his flippant comments about letting the bodies pile high. This is how the perception of a supposedly right wing government comes to be.
Amusingly, the newly returned Cameron is entirely to blame for having actual Conservatives in his Conservative party, rather than Lib Dems wearing blue coloured ties. He made a point of freshing up his party's image during his premiership so it was no longer perceived to be "Pale, Stale and Male." He was in such a rush to do this that he failed to vet many of his new entries to ensure they were Blairites and so you end up the party of today where ethnic minority women, such as Badenoch, Patel and Braverman have the strongest opinions.
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Not in the UK and my knowledge is only some podcasts I've listened to, but what I've heard from the UK left is that it's mostly about policies of austerity and privatization that decimate state capacity and services.
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Well, they’re obviously flailing. Sunak is cursed like Major, if he was PM during Covid it’s unlikely partygate (which directly and unambiguously led to the polling collapse) would have happened, he even quite deliberately ensured he stayed away from most of the parties in question, but now he’s going to lose because Boris and aides made a bunch of stupid decisions.
The Conservative Party doesn’t really have any ideology beyond the preservation and/or return to power of the people who are currently in charge of the Conservative Party. Margaret Thatcher famously declared that “we ought to have an ideology” because her opponents on the left did, and it was this that allowed her to graft from Hayek the policy program with which she governed. But over the last 350 the one constant of the party is its supreme adaptability to whatever is necessary to win.
This is also why certain defeat at the next election is so dizzying. If your only purpose and intention is to win, then knowing you’re going to lose turns the whole thing into a press tour for a movie the cast all know is going to bomb. The only thing for it is for all the top people to make sure they seem appropriately serious and normal enough to get good jobs after office. This is far from an irrelevant consideration - one of the reasons Trump struggled to recruit good staff who knew the system in DC is that they were worried they’d find it hard to get good patronage jobs in finance, lobbying, corporate America and so on afterwards.
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I think the strategy is "Try not to lose any more skin on unnecessary fights and hope to god the Boris/Truss stink wears off by the election."
I'm not expecting it to work, mind.
Then they should make efforts to do something different to Boris/Truss, i.e. not CONSTANTLY punching rightwards.
The left has their "no enemies to the left" policy, and so apparently do the designated pretend-right-wing controlled opposition party.
In the British context, this is "Black is White" level wrong. Keir Starmer has attracted more press attention for purging Corbynites from the Labour party (including kicking out Jeremy Corbyn himself) than for his work opposing the Tories. Re. the current thing, he has made the milquetoast pro-Israel mouth noises you would expect from someone on the pro-establishment left, and doubled down when attacked for it by pro-Palestine voices in Labour.
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Can't stop thinking about the guy who used to periodically tell us how the UK Multicultural Tories will show us the way to fight wokism.
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