This will be the fourth unelected PM in six years (okay, Boris Johnson did actually win a GE after being foisted upon us, if you think that counts).
It's time for an early General Election. This lot need to go. Every trace of the Tories must be obliterated.
The hilarious part is, the way that polling stands right now, a General Election would result in a strong Labour majority with the Scottish National Party in opposition, the Lib Dems third, and the Conservatives a distant fourth :-D
To say they have not been elected is a complete falsification of our parliamentary system. The UK general populace has never voted for a PM. Party members do, and every single prime minister (bar some few exceptions) have been elected by their Party in some way, shape, or form. The four PMs you mention were voted into power by Conservative voters. Conservative members decide who to lead their party, not the anyone else. This is why you don't get situations like you do in the US, where the President can be of a different party to most of those in government (and little ever gets done because legislation gets caught in either house or senate as a result).
We vote for MPs, not Parties. The PM could lose their seat if their local constituency votes them out, even if every other person in the country voted for them. An example of that is the 1906 election [1], where Balfour lost his local vote and the Conservatives had to scramble to come up with a new leader. This is why top MPs are given safe seats by their respective parties. Of course, in practice, the vast majority of people vote for their Party not their local MP when they go to the polls during a general election. That isn't how the system is designed to function though. Most people couldn't even name their local MP - the one who is actually meant to represent their personal interests - which is an utter travesty and the source of most of this countries political woes.
Ah come on, when someone says this everyone knows what is meant and that when it happens there's a risk you could end up with a prime minister who is popular within the party but disliked by the electorate (Gordon Brown or Liz Truss).
So yeah you don't vote for a PM ... but there's a clear, well-understood difference between being the leader and the very visible face of your party when it wins the general election, and winning in one constituency then charming enough party members to become PM a couple of years after the General Election.
> It's time for an early General Election. Every trace of the Tories must be obliterated.
Sounds like completely unbiased opinion. /s
More seriously, I'm only interested in hearing the arguments for a general election from nominal conservative (Tory) supporters. All arguments from leftists are just "we want to win" in disguise so are completely untrustworthy.
From what I understand of UK politics, Johnson won the last election on policy (he was already PM) and lost his seat because of COVID shenanigans so presumably the Tories still have public mandate to continue the same policies (maybe not the Lizz agenda though).
> All arguments from leftists are just "we want to win"
The argument is that the party is being eviscerated in opinion polling, they’ve lost the support of the public and that since they're effectively doomed they're free to do what we know they love to do - attempt to secure themselves a role in the private sector for after the election. Given that this it the Conservative party, it's not exactly a secret that they'll try their best to gut the state in order to do so.
And the idea that Labour in 2022 is “leftist” is laughable. The party threw an election and enacted a campaign to remove members it considered left-wing (“trot hunting”). They’re not the left, they’re just probably not going to actively fuck up the country quite as severely as the Conservatives seem hellbent on doing
They are far beyond momentarily unpopular right now. A policy blip that would lose the Tories a few dozen seats - VAT or income tax hike - is one thing. What they’re facing is an extraordinary collapse. They’re polling as if they’d just enacted prohibition and banned football
They're not doing "momentarily unpopular things", they are deliberately destroying the country to make themselves a bit of cash.
Conservatives are all - without exception - junkies. Addicts. Criminal junkie addicts, who will steal all they can to sell off for a bit of cash for their fix, although in this case the fix is the cash.
> All arguments from leftists are just "we want to win" in disguise so are completely untrustworthy.
I don't understand how you can argue for an unbiased situation and then disregard the entire left side of the political spectrum. How can election results represent anything other than the will of the public?
I 100% support direct democracy but don't really see the point of having general election (i.e. electing representatives that then vote instead of you) ahead of schedule.
It's an extremely biased opinion, and I make no apologies.
I think every single living member of every Tory cabinet present and past should be strung up in Parliament Square. I'm not in any sense unclear about my views on them.
We have had twelve years of disastrous Tory austerity that has comprehensively destroyed the UK's economy. What's the plan? Let them keep trying until they get something right? How long is it supposed to take for their austerity policies to work, to get the economy back to a sensible state?
This viewpoint is both evil (literally wanting to kill people... like the "best" politicians of the 20th century! /s) and delusional (UK had approximately 0 GDP growth since 2010, like other main European countries - so I doubt it was Brexit or Tories)
Gordon Brown selling off our gold reserves wasn't the smartest move. But as you mention, the UK hasn't seen growth in our GDP since 2010. Which Party has been in power since May of 2010?
You seem to conveniently forget that Tories in parliament won him that vote. All the usual Tory rags (the Sun, Dailies Mail and Express and the Times) were all extremely hawkish, as we’re the leading Tories.
It's important to note that in the UK we do not vote for a PM we vote for an MP in the seat we live in.
I'm not a labour supporter, but I'd like to see a general election as it's obvious that the conservatives can't agree internally on a policy platform or candidate to lead. They are split between an authoritarian group and a libertarian group who don't want the same things at all.
Johnson lost due to repeatedly lying to parliament, plus a large number of unforced errors where he ended up having to perform U-Turns after choosing badly and then being forced to change by events. Covid was part of that, but far from the only part of that.
Ideally the UK should have a system of proportional representation, so that the bits of the different parties that actually agree on policies could form their own parties (Labour has similar split problems to the conservatives, but along different axis)
It's time for an early General Election. This lot need to go. Every trace of the Tories must be obliterated.
The hilarious part is, the way that polling stands right now, a General Election would result in a strong Labour majority with the Scottish National Party in opposition, the Lib Dems third, and the Conservatives a distant fourth :-D