Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Barclay and arrogance, in reply to Dennis Frank,
My concern is the extent to which the public interest is being served by our governmental structure, and if it isn’t (which appears proven in this case), then what law change or constitutional reform do we need to fix the problem.
Quite often a simple change of government will do the job.
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Hard News: Barclay and arrogance, in reply to Sacha,
Cripes. Newsroom has really played this out nicely.
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I'm sure the legal advice that English got before making his statement knew whether it was likely to be legal. I'm frankly surprised that English is making such an obvious hash of this, compounding lie upon lie. He'll get in more trouble over that than the original offense and even the cover up deserve.
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Speaker: Britain: the crisis isn't…, in reply to linger,
The other quite-reasonable assumption in the original post, unquestioned by anybody else at the time, is that May would run a competent campaign.
My feeling was that this failure was at least as responsible, if not more, for the outcome as any genuine improvement in Labour's outreach and messaging. Put together, we got an unusual event happening at what is a very unusual time. That the whole point of the election was never publicly discussed was a huge tactical fail on the part of the Tories, but then that boils down to the snap election itself being a fail. If they wanted to get their mandate straight, another referendum would have done the job much more straightforwardly, without screwing the Tories out of their ability to now actually manage the country. Preferably before they invoked Article 50. But this is all spilled milk, both for them and for the country (more so for the country, really - the Tories will always recover at some point, but I can't see rejoining the EU as an kind of certainty).
Yeah, it's different here in every way. Thank the stars. I'm definitely not looking at Britain and wishing we could import their politics on the strength of that election. The only glimmer of hope is that it crumbles even harder and flips leadership. Awesome. Good times.
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Hard News: Barclay and arrogance, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I decided not to call them Tories for a bit of variation.
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Hard News: Barclay and arrogance, in reply to Tom Semmens,
The oddest bit about this whole scandal is how unnecessary it is.
Not sure about that. It seems that the evaluations of GOP invulnerability are inflated, and they still have to do all the message managing etc, that every other party must. They could clearly see damage from it. But yes, it was a bad gamble, that’s for sure, now that it’s blown up in their faces. It’s particularly unlucky in that it was covered up before English was actually calling the shots, so he’s a victim of decisions predicated on him being a humble functionary, a mere Minister of Finance, his link to it accidental through the holding of the seat beforehand. But now that he is the chap calling the shots, the buck stops with him.
Admirably unctuous though Bridges’ attempts were, to derail every single question on this directed at English in the House on the “hats” defense that served the previous PM and is currently serving his buddy Uber, the Speaker would not take it, and it ended up meaning that Little got to ask the same question about 4 times. It doesn’t matter “in what capacity” someone answers a fucking question about what they did. It’s still what they did, and everyone knows. Especially when quite a lot of it happened the day before on multiple cameras.
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I'm curious: In what world is "I'm not contesting the next election" the same as standing down?
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Hard News: Barclay and arrogance, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
A Soper piece which ends with
Hah, you suffered so that I didn't have to! I read it on Twitter.
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Hard News: Barclay and arrogance, in reply to Katharine Moody,
Tadpole dispensed with – now for the lying toad who masterminded the cover-up…
They're gone too. Oh, hang on...who are we talking about?
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Hard News: Barclay and arrogance, in reply to linger,
National supporters (however wavering) will be all too ready to believe that, because their chosen party members have been caught lying, that means all politicians lie, therefore they may as well continue voting National.
Most will, yes. But some small number may feel that they don't like this National party, this time, with this leadership. You're always going for incremental gains in politics. Also, there may be people who would have possibly not voted that feel inclined to punish open dishonesty, particularly in the mouth of the actual PM.
I doubt many people change their votes on something like this, to a diametrically opposed option. More likely is that those firmly supporting move to wavering. Those wavering opt not to vote. Those who opted not to vote against National last time (and just didn't bother) move to voting against. People who are strident fans of National in conversations around the nation will find it a little harder to wax lyrical when this incident is raised, will feel they need to apologize or equivocate, and will fall silent quicker. That's what a "swing" in numbers really means (IMHO). It's much more gradual, and via intermediate positions. But we can only capture detail like that from longitudinal studies and we don't get anywhere near as many of those in politics as we do simple polls.