When Will It All Go Wrong For The Tories/ Johnson?

[Crossover]

News Flash - Boris Johnson has just been selected to join the UK Rock Climbing team, due to his extraordinary ability to cling on to absolutely nothing

Another being that he is a Teflon coated leader - nothing sticks!

 

[GusB]

Speaking of Gove, his fake English accent is utterly loathesome.

Yes, that's the example I was going to post before I got distracted. Wasn't exactly a thick Aberdeen accent even back in 1991.

I meant to pick up on this earlier.

It's not really a fake English accent that Gove has, rather than an Anglicised Scottish accent which is fairly common (!) among Scottish Tories. Michael Forsyth, Ian Lang and Malcolm Rifkind are other examples that spring to mind.

Gove was educated at Robert Gordon's College in Aberdeen and, having known a few people who attended, I can attest to the fact that there are others who have a similar affliction.

They dinna a' spik the Doric in Aiberdeen, ye ken!

 

[Busaholic]

I meant to pick up on this earlier.

It's not really a fake English accent that Gove has, rather than an Anglicised Scottish accent which is fairly common (!) among Scottish Tories. Michael Forsyth, Ian Lang and Malcolm Rifkind are other examples that spring to mind.

Gove was educated at Robert Gordon's College in Aberdeen and, having known a few people who attended, I can attest to the fact that there are others who have a similar affliction.

They dinna a' spik the Doric in Aiberdeen, ye ken!

Speaking of Gove, is anyone sure that he wouldn't put his name forward again when the inevitable happens? After all, he and Hunt were neck and neck in the last contest, until chicanery ensured Hunt got second place.

 

[Mag_seven]

I've split off some off topic posts about Colonialism to this thread:

Legacy of Colonialism on Developing Countries

Moderator Note : split from https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/when-will-it-all-go-wrong-for-the-tories-johnson.219414/ These people are in the country of France, a country that had aims of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity in its revolution at the end of the 18th century. Do these now no...

www.railforums.co.uk

Now once again can I appeal to everyone to stick to the topic of this thread which is "When Will It All Go Wrong For The Tories/ Johnson"

thanks

 

[Cloud Strife]

Gove was educated at Robert Gordon's College in Aberdeen and, having known a few people who attended, I can attest to the fact that there are others who have a similar affliction.

But not to such a degree! I've got friends who went to Gordon's too, and none of them speak with such an obnoxiously English accent.

Maybe this is why he irritates me so much

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

There's enough people who'll blindly vote for them regardless of how inept or corrupt they are that Boris will just solder on and and on.

To draw a sport comparison, it was said such was the unwavering devotion of Manchester United supporters in the days of Alex Ferguson at the helm that they would turn up in their tens of thousands at Old Trafford just to watch the grass grow.

 

[Gloster]

To draw a sport comparison, it was said such was the unwavering devotion of Manchester United supporters in the days of Alex Ferguson at the helm that they would turn up in their tens of thousands at Old Trafford just to watch the grass grow.

I am no football fan and would probably find watching the grass grow more exciting than the match.

 

[Yew]

I see that in an attempt to regain popularity, boris has decided to go for policies that create yet more inflationary pressure on the housing market.

 

[ainsworth74]

I see that in an attempt to regain popularity, boris has decided to go for policies that create yet more inflationary pressure on the housing market.

Indeed I was amused to see that the former Permanent Secretary of the Treasury (head civil service honcho) between 2005 and 2016 said on Twitter:

One day many years hence HMG will accept that the way to make housing affordable is to ensure supply outstrips demand: that would be leadership. Until then, expect numerous initiatives to pump up demand to support those who own property at the expense of those who don't.

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

I see that in an attempt to regain popularity, boris has decided to go for policies that create yet more inflationary pressure on the housing market.

So you see this as a popular measure with the electorate...or do I misread the gist of your posting?

 

[najaB]

So you see this as a popular measure with the electorate...or do I misread the gist of your posting?

It will initially be popular, until people get into the details. For example, allowing housing benefit/universal credit to to towards mortgage payments sounds good until you consider that the only a tiny minority of people in receipt of those benefits will have enough savings to pay a deposit.

Same with extending Right to Buy to housing associations - initially it will be popular, but what happens when most/all of the existing stock gets sold off?

Edit: The BBC News article has this rather interesting statement attributed to Michael Gove:

When challenged on the success of the pilot schemes, Levelling-Up Secretary Michael Gove insisted they had shown how the policy can be rolled out nationwide.

And he claimed new social housing would be produced "instantly" to replace homes bought by low-earners.

Link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-61739816

One wonders if the government has the ability to "instantly" produce houses why they've not used this skill over the last few decades?!

 

[jon0844]

Indeed I was amused to see that the former Permanent Secretary of the Treasury (head civil service honcho) between 2005 and 2016 said on Twitter:

Developers have permission to build plenty of homes, but purposely drag their heels to maintain demand. Would any Government be able to force construction if it wanted to? Clearly a Tory Government wouldn't want to do this, so pretty much nothing said will actually help people in the long run.

Encouraging more people on low incomes to buy and own their own property serves the Tories well, and banks, and if people fall behind in payments then - great. With property prices always on the up, the banks can't lose when they repossess. It's almost like some people want homeowners to get into debt.

 

[ainsworth74]

For example, allowing housing benefit/universal credit to to towards mortgage payments sounds good until you consider that the only a tiny minority of people in receipt of those benefits will have enough savings to pay a deposit.

Devil will be in the detail! Right now one of the gaping holes in our present social security system is actually the support available to people in mortgaged properties.

By way of illustration let's say your a single person in your late 30s with a mortgage and a well paying job. Sadly our individual has an accident and can no longer work. They claim Universal Credit which will give them some money to live on but for help with their housing costs? Well for the first nine months of your claim you will recieve no support whatsoever paying your mortgage. After that you will get help towards the interest on a mortgage of up to £200,000 and at a maximum rate of 2.09%. If your mortgage or interest rate is higher than those figures then what you get will be capped at those levels (so if your mortgage was say £300,000 you'd be paid as if it was £200,000). Oh, it's also a loan that will be repaid when you either sell or transfer ownership of your home.

If this were to do something to address that then it would be long overdue.

Developers have permission to build plenty of homes, but purposely drag their heels to maintain demand. Would any Government be able to force construction if it wanted to? Clearly a Tory Government wouldn't want to do this, so pretty much nothing said will actually help people in the long run.

Indeed. If I was Prime Minister for a day I'd be tempted to go out and set up a government owned and operated house building company to go directly into competition with such developers. Don't want to build any homes? That's fine, we'll build them instead...

Encouraging more people on low incomes to buy and own their own property serves the Tories well, and banks, and if people fall behind in payments then - great. With property prices always on the up, the banks can't lose when they repossess. It's almost like some people want homeowners to get into debt.

Indeed. The commodification of housing I think is something of a blight on a society. These are homes. We all need somewhere to live.

 

[Meole]

The mortgage rate needs to be kept low for the foreseeable future for this to be a success, and perhaps those on housing benefits could be given deposit grants as an incentive ?

 

[ABB125]

Indeed. If I was Prime Minister for a day I'd be tempted to go out and set up a government owned and operated house building company to go directly into competition with such developers. Don't want to build any homes? That's fine, we'll build them instead.

That's my preferred option. However, it'll never happen...

 

[Typhoon]

Indeed. If I was Prime Minister for a day I'd be tempted to go out and set up a government owned and operated house building company to go directly into competition with such developers. Don't want to build any homes? That's fine, we'll build them instead...

Concentrate on (really) affordable housing. Not the 'luxury' housing with integrated appliances that they may not want that means buyers are mortgaged to the hilt from the off.
And stop Gove (and before him Jenrick) overruling councils which reject developers' plans because they don't include the required amount of affordable housing because they claim they won't make a profit if they do.

 

[simonw]

Concentrate on (really) affordable housing. Not the 'luxury' housing with integrated appliances that they may not want that means buyers are mortgaged to the hilt from the off.
And stop Gove (and before him Jenrick) overruling councils which reject developers' plans because they don't include the required amount of affordable housing because they claim they won't make a profit if they do.

I doubt the cost of a few inbuilt appliances makes a material difference to the price of a property.

 

[The Ham]

It will initially be popular, until people get into the details. For example, allowing housing benefit/universal credit to to towards mortgage payments sounds good until you consider that the only a tiny minority of people in receipt of those benefits will have enough savings to pay a deposit.

Same with extending Right to Buy to housing associations - initially it will be popular, but what happens when most/all of the existing stock gets sold off?

Edit: The BBC News article has this rather interesting statement attributed to Michael Gove:

Link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-61739816

One wonders if the government has the ability to "instantly" produce houses why they've not used this skill over the last few decades?!

The details are going to be important.

However currently if the government were to pay for housing benefits for someone to live in our house compared to pay our Mortgage (if we needed government support) it would cost the government about £5,000 more a year.

As such I can see that it could be useful in saving the government money.

Especially if the government then owned a proportion of your house (say 50% of the value of the payments made), so that you had to repay that when the house was sold. For many with long term support, chances are that would be upon their death or going into care - so would make little difference to them. Likewise it'll be an incentive for those on the scheme to get off it quickly, so there'll be many who would only have a fairly small payment to make.

 

[THC]

Concentrate on (really) affordable housing. Not the 'luxury' housing with integrated appliances that they may not want that means buyers are mortgaged to the hilt from the off.
And stop Gove (and before him Jenrick) overruling councils which reject developers' plans because they don't include the required amount of affordable housing because they claim they won't make a profit if they do.

I am leading a Levelling Up Fund round 2 bid at the moment to address the funding gap in an affordable housing development in one of my borough's town centres. That we should have to rely on a patchwork of funding sources, some of them competitive pots, makes it very difficult to take either a strategic approach to providing genuinely affordable housing even at our level, or make more than a cursory dent in the shortfall of such provision.

THC

 

[brad465]

Sunak being "fiscally responsible" again:

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Rishi Sunak has been accused of squandering £11bn of taxpayers money by paying too much interest servicing the government’s debt.

 

[Shrop]

Okay, so Boris has already proved that it's possible to retain the position of PM whilst presiding over a number of things that upset a lot of people including being a lawbreaker. A lot of this has been during the Pandemic, during which countless NHS staff worked themselves raw and were thanked with a derisory pay settlement.

Irrespective of how badly NHS staff were treated by this Boris & co despite saving his life, the world is now waking up from the Pandemic and other things are happening. Like spending £half a million on a flight for asylum seekers to go to Rwanda, and then the flight doesn't even go. Like the forthcoming rail strikes which will be highly damaging to all sorts of people. Like the chaos at airports. Like the ever diminishing HS2 project. Can Boris really keep presiding over more and more shambolic situations and keep going? It's not as if these things weren't foreseen, but rather than addressing them and staving them off, Boris & co kept their heads in the sand. Can he really keep going?

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

Like the forthcoming rail strikes which will be highly damaging to all sorts of people

Had Boris got a spare-time job helping Mick Lynch planning the RMT fun and games next week. I never expected anyone to accuse Boris of being a closet Socialist.

 

[najaB]

Had Boris got a spare-time job helping Mick Lynch planning the RMT fun and games next week. I never expected anyone to accuse Boris of being a closet Socialist.

It takes two to tango. I've never known a union to call a strike when they're negotiating with collaborative management offering fair terms and pay.

 

[Nicholas Lewis]

It takes two to tango. I've never known a union to call a strike when they're negotiating with collaborative management offering fair terms and pay.

Precisely the DfT have screwed up right royally here they've known inflation was on an upward trajectory for months so should have been down a half decent offer back in February which with a bit of wrangling probably would have got acceptance. Now they are in the thick of inflation on an upward curve and I wouldn't be surprised to see RPI over 12% next week although I know the govt measure is now CPI bit that will also be near to 9%. It won't being going down anytime soon with fuel costs pushing ever higher being doubly compounded by the incompetence at the BoE not to raise rates we now have the £/$ rate falling which with commodities priced in dollars is going to hurt us twice. All we can hope for is the govt has a habit changing its mind and spinning its way out of it which is fine with me. So they need to straight away table the offer out to ScotRail staff probably won't be enough but we need people back at the table and surely the DfT have worked out in whatever they save on not paying RMT is not going to cover in what they lose on fair income and having to pay the rest of the industry to largely sit on its backside.

 

[brad465]

Had Boris got a spare-time job helping Mick Lynch planning the RMT fun and games next week. I never expected anyone to accuse Boris of being a closet Socialist.

If certain socialist policies are apparently popular, Johnson will adopt them, like with many covid handouts, a windfall tax on oil and gas firms and increasing NI to (apparently) pay more social care costs. He doesn't have a true ideology, just whatever keeps him in power for another day/week.

 

[Nicholas Lewis]

If certain socialist policies are apparently popular, Johnson will adopt them, like with many covid handouts, a windfall tax on oil and gas firms and increasing NI to (apparently) pay more social care costs. He doesn't have a true ideology, just whatever keeps him in power for another day/week.

That is absolutely spot on and perhaps counter intuitively to some the opposition are actually doing ok by pushing on individual points until they force the govt to change tack. Yes the Tories spin there way out of it as they would if they were in power but the underlying point is that policy was changed for the greater good.

 

[jfollows]

Lord Geidt has now resigned: https://www.theguardian.com/politic...r-lord-geidt-resigns-after-partygate-grilling

Boris Johnson’s ethics adviser, Lord Geidt, has dramatically resigned after being grilled by MPs earlier this week about whether the prime minister broke the ministerial code when he was fined over Partygate.

In a statement, Geidt said: “With regret, I feel that it is right that I am resigning from my post as independent adviser on ministers’ interests.”

He is the second independent adviser Johnson has lost. Alex Allan quit after the prime minister ignored his finding that Priti Patel had bullied civil servants.

So the drip, drip, drip of things going wrong for the Conservatives continues.

Yesterday, Christopher Geidt was quizzed by MPs whom he told that it was "reasonable" to suggest that Boris Johnson may have breached the ministerial code, and also suggested that he did not have the power to investigate Johnson's potential breach linked to lockdown parties because he himself reported directly to Boris Johnson. He called this a "small limitation" on the capacity of the independent adviser to be truly independent.

I think that when the role was set up it was assumed that the Prime Minister would be above the fray, would never break the rules, would set an example and would rule fairly. It all came unstuck because this simply wasn't true, and therefore no independent scrutiny could properly be applied, and therefore Geidt decided that his job was more important in title than in reality. Unfortunately Boris Johnson did set an example, but it was the wrong one.

 

[Nicholas Lewis]

Lord Geidt has now resigned: https://www.theguardian.com/politic...r-lord-geidt-resigns-after-partygate-grilling

So the drip, drip, drip of things going wrong for the Conservatives continues.

Yesterday, Christopher Geidt was quizzed by MPs whom he told that it was "reasonable" to suggest that Boris Johnson may have breached the ministerial code, and also suggested that he did not have the power to investigate Johnson's potential breach linked to lockdown parties because he himself reported directly to Boris Johnson. He called this a "small limitation" on the capacity of the independent adviser to be truly independent.

I think that when the role was set up it was assumed that the Prime Minister would be above the fray, would never break the rules, would set an example and would rule fairly. It all came unstuck because this simply wasn't true, and therefore no independent scrutiny could properly be applied, and therefore Geidt decided that his job was more important in title than in reality. Unfortunately Boris Johnson did set an example, but it was the wrong one.

won't bother him and they will find plenty of ministers who will just say Geidt was a waste of time

 

[Busaholic]

won't bother him and they will find plenty of ministers who will just say Geidt was a waste of time

They'll find plenty of ministers who'd sell their mothers into slavery if they could keep their own noses in the trough. I hope few, of any, of them survive in post once Johnson is surgically removed from office, which won't be too long after the by-elections.

 

[Nicholas Lewis]

They'll find plenty of ministers who'd sell their mothers into slavery if they could keep their own noses in the trough. I hope few, of any, of them survive in post once Johnson is surgically removed from office, which won't be too long after the by-elections.

Have to say looking forward to seeing the likes Mad Nads twitter storm when she is consigned to the back benches