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Notes -
Any discussion of the UK Conservative's dismal polling that talks about ideology first and competence second is bogus.
The Tories are polling 20% because they f***ed up the technical implementation of Brexit (notice that not even the people who negotiated Johnson's deal are willing to defend it), f***ed up the COVID-19 response (the US was probably worse, but compared to the universe of rich countries the UK had an above-average death toll AND an above-average level of disruption caused by lockdowns etc.), f***ed up Trussonomics, and are also presiding over a slow-motion collapse in the NHS and the criminal justice system, and the final working out of the consequences of the UK's 70-year old system of housing communism (all of which they have done nothing to stop).
The very online debate is about whether the Tories can mitigate the damage by moving to the right to engage the post-2019 base of insane pensioners or by moving to the centre to appeal to the pre-2016 base of well-off people with jobs and families, but in the real world that is about mitigating damage caused by incompetence.
Keir Starmer's message in 2024 is going to be a variant on "Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?", and whichever way he tacks on ideology, Rishi Sunak won't have a good answer.
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