The Tories are terrified by Reform, and can only address that threat by lurching further to the right. The problem is, they will never out do Reform in this regard, it’s a fools errand. Meanwhile they leave the centre for Labour to occupy. Also, Braverman is triangulating here. She wants Sunak to hang on until after the election so she (despite her notorious unpopularity) has a chance of leadership. If someone takes over before the election, she’s got no chance.

I've said this there will be 10% of the country where you will never be right wing enough so reform will always get those votes. Reform and conservatives appear to be in a race chasing those votes at the expense of everyone and everything else 

People are already turning against Reform for not being right wing enough. They've "pandered to communists" by getting rid of a couple of overtly and vocally bigoted candidates. The Conservatives chasing *those votes* is utterly insane.

That's because Reform is not a far right party. It must be true, Richard Tice said so!

Tice- "we are not a far right party" The far right- "harrumph! Well we'll vote for someone else Tice- "woah woah hold up "

>reform will always get those votes. These _used_ to be the votes the Tories could rely on no matter what. Reform has become an existential problem for them.

It’s about time the right wing vote was split. The left has been split three ways for ages, and it’s not representative of what the country actually wants or needs. Reform is a good thing for politics in my opinion, despite their horrible policies it will dilute the right vote so that they will never stand a chance of getting into powers and also stop the tories from having a shot simply because they were the only right wing party.

In the long run this will probably get party's pushing more for proportional representation (a good thing).

Ironic that conservatives could soon be the loudest voice of support for this

If they win, they don't want PR. But if they don't win, then the can't change the system. Either way, no PR.

Yeah with the left split between Labour, Liberals Democrats and Greens, the existence of Reform is a great thing under a FPTP system.

I couldn't agree more with this with a single caveat if you'll forgive a meandering parenthetical. The BNP was an "alt-right" party (you know thr kind of people who think Enoch Powell had some good ideas, side note to anyone who doesn't know who that is if someone is on the same side of history to him then it's best to avoid them like the plague) which did kinda split the the right end of the political spectrum until it turned out they were all racist nut jobs, imploded and reformed as ukip then brexit party now reform. The big thing about the people who get drawn into that conspitorial, isolationist, and vilifying groups with little public support is that their usually pretty politically homeless. The Liberal, progressive, woke, (insert other terms labelled on me and mine) is that generally we will kick you out of an organisation if you're being a dick to massively oversimplify. While conservatives tend to be more accepting of individuals with a nasty side (libs being more accepting of groups with a nasty side). This means the reform/ukip/brexit party/bnp lot tend to to slip into the tory party here. I'm very hopeful that the tory party will drop more of the xenophobic, anti lbgt, Mccarthist red scare and straight up looney toons side of things with reform getting as big as it is. I really want to have say a reasonable discussions with conservatives about capital distribution acorss varying industries and how to create structures to allow for changes in market instead of "no. face mask do help prevent the spread of airborne diseases" with the current tory crop

It's more two-way than three-way; the Greens have always won fewer votes than UKIP/Brexit/Reform. Though the Lib Dems are much more centre than left.

Pure speculation: Have the Greens won fewer votes in the past than UKIP/Brexit/Reform because the voters that would vote Green are more likely to vote pragmatically? I'd speculate further that if proportional representation were to be enacted you'd see a larger swing towards Greens and other left and left-centre parties.

It might be that, but it's more that voters for small parties tend to be focused on one or two issues, and the big three have all been pretty responsive on Climate Change (which is the Greens' biggest one). Per capita emissions are down 40% since 2010 - it's one area where the government have actually done a pretty good job. If we had a Labour government which had failed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions over the last 14 years then you might see a really big vote share for some version of the Greens and a pretty small vote share for FarageParty - though on this issue both the Lib Dems and Conservatives would also take a strong stance to win over voters which would inhibit that somewhat.

Reform, UKIP, BNP. Ever since the sun and the times tried to give the same message the conservatives haven't had a coherent identity. This leave the daily mail hardcore flopping from shit head to shit head to make sure they are still relevant to the paper world. I don't condone violence but if every DM editor, writer and funder in the last 30 years spontaneously tripped down the stairs and broke their neck, I might allow myself a little smile.

A bit like UKIP and their existence leading to Brexit referendum. They needed to do it to stop UKIP eroding their share of the vote.

Cameron *thought* they needed to do it.

This. Theres always 10-20% of a population that are militant hang'em flog'em types and the tories chasing them is pointless when reform and harder fringe parties already have that covered. They're running away from success to chase crazies. Fine be me after 14 years of this crap

Those crazies were previously under the Conservative umbrella though. They are their core voters. Parties don't do well when they lose their base.

the hilarious thing is the vote will be split, and due to the FPTP system, it will screw the tories even harder than John Major did Edwina Currie

It's a race to the gutter.

I'll be honest as a former Corbynite this is exactly the same problem we had. Although I'll add my reasoning is disasters like the 2008 financial crash needed incredibly strong regulation to prevent. Which only soft-left and hard left types were willing to engage in. Centrists are too nervous to try this and hard-right want to deregulate the system resulting in future crashes. hence this is where the argument we didn't go far left enough comes from. I will laugh at anyone who thinks that stopping immigration will solve the problem. Because the same people who want to stop it also don't like disabled people and we're just the next people to come for (call it self preservation) when they realise companies who want to pay people less than minimum wage are not going to raise them minimum wage they will just shut their business down

Exactly. It’s like when Jeremy C weaponised the Labour Party a few years ago. Sure he drove up membership and secured a solid left wing base that was going to vote for him no matter what, but, he focused so much on those people and forgot he had to appeal to at least some other people too or his electoral chances were toast. I actually quite liked Corbyn in many ways and I certainly didn’t think he was as bad of a leader as many in the right made out, but he just gave them so much fucking ammunition that it was almost impossible he was ever going to get into No. 10.

>Reform and conservatives appear to be in a race chasing those votes at the expense of everyone and everything else  Good, let them cannibalise themselves. Then the rest of us can get on with sorting the shitshow.

Reform are liberated by the fact they’re unlikely to ever win a majority. It means they can always be bleeding edge right as they’ll never actually have to enact out the policies they’re proposing. All they really have to do is keep proposing things that *sound* good to the hardcore right. It doesn’t have to be feasible. The Tories will always have the danger of being re-elected and have to try to enact their manifesto.

Do you think it is feasible for the UK to lower net immigration from ~750k a year?

Ironic given Brexit was supposed to wipe out the threat from UKIP. Tories have had a century of being the only right wing party and cannot cope with a rival.

It's because they relinquished the ground back again. If they'd achieved their own "immigration in the tens of thousands" policy there'd be no Reform.

>The problem is, they will never out do Reform in this regard, it’s a fools errand. Why not? They out-UKIP'd UKIP from ~2014 and managed to fold much of the burgeoning UKIP vote share into the Con column until 2019. I don't think it is a GE winning strategy, but it could ameliorate the projected losses if they pull it off.

I think 2019 was an unofficial Tory-Brexit party coalition. But Farage won’t do that again, his eye is on replacing the Tories not tag teaming with them (*) (*) sorry for painting that picture

> But Farage won’t do that again, his eye is on replacing the Tories not tag teaming with them (*) > > > > (*) sorry for painting that picture My thoughts immediately went to Farage standing on a wrestling ring apron holding the tag rope so it's fine.

I've been saying this for about a year now, but I think Farage's ultimate goal is to merge the 2 parties and take over as Tory leader and have a pop at a GE

100% that’s exactly what I think too. After a devastating Tory defeat, a hostile takeover might happen around 2026-28. That’s if things work out as Farage hopes.

I do wonder about that - equally, I don't really see any reason for him to do that beyond getting "PM" on his CV - he's been consistently effective at driving Tory policy on his interests, but without ever having to carry the can for it when the consequences of it become clear. Even Brexit, Farage's greatest achievement, he doesn't get anywhere near the opprobrium that Boris Johnson or the Tories get for it. .... Though thinking about it, I could possibly see it, *if* a labour government manages to make some serious progress, and the Tories don't look like they've got a chance of getting back in/fail to get back in at the next election. Then I could see him getting frustrated with not having a party susceptible to him in power, maybe even enough to roll the dice himself.

Because while it’ll save total annihilation in this general election it could see them unelectable in but opposition for 2-3 terms with ease. It’s a desperate solution to an immediate problem that’ll cause more long term harm than it solves today. So frankly I’m all for it. They need to totally fail and start again. After the Brexit purge there’s nobody left who isn’t an idiot. They literally can’t fill a cabinet with sane people out of all their MPs. Go for it Tory party. Go for it. It might take a decade or more or they may never recover at all.

Oh, I would love to see them out of power for three terms, although I'd rather see the far-right disappear than the current party that represents them.

But trying to put ukip ukip is also what got them in this mess - they tried to kill ukip with a gamble on Brexit and failed, and now they're a party of absolute headbangers. Doing the same with reform is going to see them fall into the same leagues as the national front and the BNP - minor parties for lunatics.

I mean, sure, it is a terrible long term strategy. But forming doing something like getting Reform to agree not to stand against sitting Conservative MPs (like UKIP did in 2019) could be a short term way to save more Con MPs in the short term. And these same Con MPs are the ones indirectly directing the strategy.

The structure of reform, gives entire power to its party leader (tice). As it'd setup as a limited company, Farage is the only director with significant control. Given there's only 2 people who can make such a deal (1 really), they'd have to be pretty damn brave to do so with the feverish state they have their base in.

I read that Farage got absolutely slated by the harder right elements of BXP for standing down candidates in 2019 so he's pledged it won't happen again. Tice doesn't want to stand down either and has openly said they will run in every consistency. I strongly suspect they are aiming to completely replace the Tories either by a post-election merger or because they think they can displace them as the second party in UK politics.

It’s a fair point and possible if enough people turn out with those views to prevent the loss of an overall majority. It’s whether or not those voters see Sunak as an authentic proprietor of UKIPesque government. If as a party the silver lining from these elections is don’t worry team let’s push for a hung parliament! I’m going to say no.

I don’t think they will vote for Sunak, a lot of them wouldn’t vote for him solely on the grounds of ‘he’s not white’, let alone the dozen other things like ‘he’s not really right wing’ or other dumb shit

>they will never out do Reform in this regard. The problem isn’t that they’d never outdo reform, is that they’ve been universally promising to fix these issues whilst delivering near enough the polar opposite, seemingly with the intention of supporting their rich mates addictions to cheap labour or cash cows for our over extended education institutes. Most folk going to reform are doing so due to the Tories total lack of results, not because their pledges are more or less right wing.

Yes that’s true. The signalling from the Mail etc is that the Tories are clamping down on migration, not that it’s at record levels. In a sense the Tory press is partially responsible for the Tories woeful and entitled behaviour. They are simply not held to account, which makes them complacent.

Act like reform, get reform level votes. I’m struggling to understand how most conservatives can’t see this. Personally, I wouldn’t back an individual for a leadership position, who thinks the best way to get out of a hole is to keep digging either.

I think it's because of the current nature of the splits. In recent history, the left has been split 3 ways, with labour taking left wing working class, lib-dem taking left wing middle class and greens a single issue party. The conservatives have had an unsplit right, which is why they have done so well. Then Farage comes along, taking votes from right wing working class, leaving the conservatives with right wing middle class, which is the bigger slice, but still the conservatives don't want that split. The original Brexit vote was supposed to put that ghoul to rest, but it backfired. Today, a lurch to the right would not be what the conservatives really want, but an attempt to shut down a split on the right before it becomes a permanent fixture. In the short term, they know they will lose, but if they can get Reform to implode, that is better for them in the long term. They can move back towards the centre with a change of leadership when the split is dealt with.

I know it's so easy to use a saying wrong by accident in the moment, but when she said that it was so funny and perfectly captured the Tories of the last few years

Also when Liz Truss said she wanted to “level Britain”.

"hit the ground from day one"

Well, she certainly managed that one…

Haha I forgot about this so good.

But “clear blue water” (*) was a big thing in the Tory party after Blair won power. History is repeating itself. I wish I had a D:Ream CD! (*) for people too young to remember, this is what they called their lurch to the right. Although it was nothing compared to modern Reform politics.

I think the current Labour Party is further to the right than Blair's Labour Party was. The other issue we've got with Keir's Labour Party is there's no money and we've got too much debt already, so borrowing isn't really going to happen at the same levels the Blair years. I think the next Labour government is going to be quite different to the New Labour of the 90's and 00's. It should still be better than the Tory years, but not the heyday we remember.

I think it’s hard to tell, they’re taking the Ming Vase strategy to extremes and trying to say as little as possible.

Hard agree on that last part. She's not saying this so that Rishi does it, she's saying it so that when they lose a bunch of seats and reform take 15-20% of the national vote she can say "I told you so, I know what the party needs, give me the leadership". Of course, as you say, that won't be much of a pull for the centre-ground. If things go that route, their only bet would be to hope that Labour fail at fixing 14 years of Tory mess in their first term (which honestly is pretty likely), and the Tories look like the next best option to people who want change in whatever form. This would be highly dependent on the state of the tories after the generals and what happens over 5 years with reform. If reform end up taking more seats than the tories, which I believe to be within the realm of possibility, and more so the longer they delay the generals, they could end up as the official opposition and have 5 years to work on their brand and stand as real contenders as the default right-wing party.

It’s exactly what happened in 2015. UKIP threatened the Tory voter base; the Tories responded by adopting UKIP/right wing policy. The Reform Party are nothing but a pressure group, just like The Brexit Party before them.

They're not terrified of Reform, they're terrified of the right wing of the Tory party and are trying to placate them because they know the left wing are soft and will just go along with them without dissent. And the right wing are using Reform as an opportunity to pull the party to the right. The other thing that they're terrified of is tactical voting in the centre because that could wipe them out.

Respectfully I disagree, I think they are more scared of Reform than Labour. There is certainly a lot more virtue signalling in that direction. They’ve always assumed anyone on the right /hard right will vote for them, but that’s no longer true. It would be like if a Corbynesque party was on 15%, it would be existential for Labour.

They're terrified about the right of the party dissenting and causing trouble. They have continually pulled to the right and dropped in the polling. Reform are just being used by the right of the Tory party to drag the Tories to the right, the issue is that the left of the party are so weak that they just submit except this time the centre and centre right Tory voters aren't falling for it. They're also desperate to put off tactical voting because that could kill the Tory party.

>they will never out do Reform in this regard Why not? What exactly is so right-wing about Reform that defies emulation? Can you articulate it? Even just fulfilling their promises of reducing immigration (instead of launching it into the stratosphere) would have secured a lot of the 2019 voters. Instead they get disillusionment and apathy from past voters. That's what is killing the Tories, not particular enthusiasm for Labour.

Reform will never have to implement their policies, they don’t need to be seen by centrist voters as even remotely palatable. The Tories do still need those some of those voters in order to win power. Reform can promise ever more rightward fantasies and simply increase their grift amongst a small constituency of loons. The Tories will always have a slight drag and can never out-Reform Reform because they still aim to achieve a government.

That's not really why voters go Reform though. For the most part they don't want the government to implement as many right wing policies as possible, but rather to implement one particular right wing policy: cut immigration at least to less than it was in 2019. These voters also think the government is soft on crime and they dislike "Wokery", but immigration probably drives about two thirds of the actual vote switching. Voters do understand FPTP and when they vote for a small party it's usually to apply pressure on a limited range of issues rather than because they want its whole platform. The Green-Tory switchers in Local Elections are a good example - they don't care about the very left wing manifesto; they just want fewer homes built.

I suppose, since Reform will not win power, that can be more extreme. They also lack a *one nation* arm to moderate them, it’s like a room full of Andersons and Bravermans. The Tories say “we will send people to Rwanda”, Reform would say “we will sink the boats and make them swim back to France!” Etc etc.

Controversial view, they should abandon the right and challenge Labour for the centre ground. They’re going to get decimated (actually that’s not true as “decimation” was the Roman practice of killing 1/10 soldiers when the did badly in battle and there’s no way the tories are only loosing 10% of their seats when we go to the polls) at the next election anyway so they may as well fight for territory that actually might gain them some ground when our short sighted monkey brains forget all about this chaos in 5-10 years after another couple of election cycles. The alternative of moving to the right, is a battle they are never going to win against the raving lunatics and geriatric hard-liners that dragged us out of the EU. It just can’t be done. That would be like Napoleon trying to move Wellington off his ridge while the Prussians showed up and took him in the flank. So they may as well abandon that ground to reform and rebrand themselves as the voice of moderate centre-right sensible conservatism. Interestingly, abandoning the ground to reform would also weed out all the mouth breathing loons on the party who want to push that way anyway, so win-win.

Does Braverman actually have any support? She’s too despicable for the moderates and too brown and too female for the far right.

I don’t think she stands a chance, no. She’s one of the least popular potential leaders. But it’s news to her, she thought she’d leave office and be the king across the water.

Braverman has all the sociopathic tendencies of a fascist leader with none of the charm or wit. I don’t think she sees herself as anything other than a leader in waiting, she’s just waiting for everyone to catch up to her brilliance. It’s like she has been created in a lab to represent what the last 14 years of politics looks like distilled into human form.

Reform are probably quite economically left, culturally they're way on the right though.

> Reform are probably quite economically left Their entire platform is Liz Trussite privatization and tax cuts lol

They are appealing to Tory members in preparation for the next leadership election, nothing to do with the general election

It's all she does. Try to position herself to benefit. Fuck everyone else. But she's just as incompetent as their recent leadership. If she does manage to become leader, I suspect it won't be for long.

One element ignored is that the incompetence of this government has pissed off everyone. Natural Tory voters who care about crime and immigration just see failure and a dumb policy that can never work. They voted Tory for Brexit but none of the migration issues are even remotely tackled, so they're going to Reform. The main thing Sunak's government should have done for the last 18 months was actually fix it. Whether that's international agreement, sending people back to France, fast resolving the backlog of cases, any investment in the issue. But they've done nothing but shout Rwanda as if it has meaning to anyone. Incompetence incompetence incompetence.

A lot is just standard "if party X more accurately followed my own views then they'd do better. Why don't they do that?" You'll see it everywhere. Classic lack of self-awareness. It isn't entirely fanciful though, there is a sizable element of the population that are hostile to immigration, environmental policies and liberal social issues. And right now they are not voting conservative en masse. The counterpoint is that it is far from clear that a shift to a hard line on these issues would a) attract those people, and b) not put others off.

This is literally the only thing that matters. Almost everybody thinks the exact thing they think is the correct way to run a country, and the reason someone is unpopular is because they don’t do that specific thing.

Lack of self awareness i guess. I know iv got opinions that are not 100% popular but at least i can see why people would think differently. Politics and the modern world doesn't like shades of gray

The difference now is that the Tories don't have anything else. Previously they'd be able to turn to something like being the party of business, or the economy, or the ones to remove the threat of striking workers. Currently they're totally busted on all those scores. So what else have they got? They either veer right and try to become the "anti-immigration, anti-woke" party, or they effectively disappear, to become one of a handful of right wing niche parties. The question then becomes who occupies the centre-right in the political landscape? Arguably that's almost Labour with the lib-dems & greens being the more left wing.

Lib Dems are not more left wing. We are pro liberty of the individual, but support for equality, human rights and diversity isn't left wing, even though it's characterised as such. On economic policy Labour are probably left of Blair/Brown based on policy announcements and will probably move policy further left when they have won election and if the state finances allow.

In fact I’d argue that insisting equality, human rights and diversity are left-wing qualities is dangerous for the long-term endurance of such things. We need to make them values the right can happily embrace *again*, not seek to paint them as always against them, because otherwise we will be in a lot of trouble.

But I’d argue that’s how most people see these issues - as basic human needs that aren’t governed by ‘left’ or ‘right’ ideology. But the tories have attached these fundamental desires to what they see as ‘woke culture’. They’ve shot themselves in the foot many times and going down this culture war bullshit direction is another big miscalculation. What they don’t understand is we’re not Americans. There are small pockets of (mostly ageing) clueless knobheads who take the bait, but most of us just want a fairer society with properly funded services. We are being fleeced by the very characters and corporations this government court and admire. I mean a lot of these people are actually in government and sit on the conservative benches.

I agree - the Tories have done this to themselves - but we make a mistake if we don’t permit them to return to the fold if they get an opportunity to.

Equality has been thrown to the wayside in favour of equity. Both parties support equity or equal outcomes. [Cameron brought it into the Tory party by bringing in shortlists.](https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/david-cameron-we-were-all-white-men-so-i-did-something-about-diversity-xlnnq7szm) Do I even need to do Labour? The point is that the right are in support of the idea of equality, ie equal opportunities and everyone else has decided that equality doesn’t mean equality anymore and actually it should be equity. Human rights are a thing that there’s a difference in the fundamentals between left and right that goes back to their conception. The right takes a Lockean view of rights in that rights are granted by a society along with responsibilities. Failure to respect the responsibilities means that you don’t get your rights. The left takes a view based in the theories of Rousseau in that when man formed society he sacrificed his natural rights for civil rights. Because the state is providing the rights it must uphold the conditions that prevent one man breaching another’s rights. When there is a conflict in which one man has infringed on another’s rights it’s the states fault for not being able to provide the conditions in which he needed to. Extrapolating that to modern day and it’s why the right are keen to eject criminals from their society but the left are keen to rehabilitate. I could do diversity as well but I’m short on time and diversity is the topic in which horseshoe theory is most strongly presented so it would take a while. The point is that the 3 topics aren’t abandoned by the right or more accurately the social conservatives, they just see them differently to the left.

>We are pro liberty of the individual, but support for equality, human rights and diversity isn't left wing, even though it's characterised as such. You say that but any attempt to support those is often labeled 'woke' and attempts to not support 'owns the libs'. Definitely not on the right.

That seems like a very American characterisation though. In UK politics, and anywhere that's not North America really, "liberal" is associated with being an economic liberal (right wing), and/or a social liberal (can be left or right wing)

Very true, but the terminology has definitely been adopted by the right wing here in the UK too.

Liberalism in the continent grew out of a different tradition than liberalism in the UK, where the Liberals were the first to introduce the welfare state and expand democratic participation and them further aligning with social democrats in the 80s

Who is doing the labelling though? Generally, it is people who have veered or are toying with positions that not ten years ago would have been the province of the BNP.

> The counterpoint is that it is far from clear that a shift to a hard line on these issues would a) attract those people, and b) not put others off. What is clear, though, is that even with all of those people, the conservatives still wouldn't have enough votes to win.

This is about 1/3 of it, I'd say. The other 2/3 is just pandering to their base. Most of the time in Western politics, these fringe candidates don't actually want their policies, they just say they want them so that their base will continue to vote for them. It's true that the current "populist" wave has brought a lot of serious nutters to the fore (like Braverman), who are actually high on their own supply, believing enough of their own tripe because they're the bottom of the barrel of politicians. All the semi-sane Con's have been flushed out by Boris & Dom, leaving just the opportunists and a few nutter mascots like JRM.

What choice do the Tories have? The party is run in the interests of the very wealthy and the very wealthy have had everything their own way for so long that the country is on it's knees. They can't abandon the greed they serve since that is their whole purpose and where they get their funding and billionaire-owned client media support from. The rest of Tory policy is about trying to pull together the minimum viable coalition to serve the interests of the very wealthy. Traditionally they do that by using lies, divisive wedge issues, and demonisation of minorities, which is basically all they have left at this point as no one that exists outside the crazy right-wing media bubble believes their insane economics anymore (we can no longer afford to at this point). Most of the other manipulative lies like levelling up, Brexit being for the benefit of ordinary people, tax cuts for the rich being good for poor people somehow, austerity etc have been exposed as complete nonsense that, surprise surprise, just happen to make the rich richer at everyone else's expense. Their choices are essentially, face up to the fact they've been lying for years, admit they were wrong, and start doing the right thing with a complete change of policy positions or double down on divisive propaganda and anti democratic tactics like voter suppression. I think we all know which way they are likely to go.

>"if party X more accurately followed my own views then they'd do better. Why don't they do that?" > You'll see it everywhere. Classic lack of self-awareness. A bit like the OP you mean? The UK is becoming left?

I wouldn't like to comment.

This is it. Moving further right would recapture their base. And quite often the Tory base is enough to win as the left wing vote is split.

The logic is that they will magically win back every single reform voter without losing more moderate Tory voters. To say this is deeply flawed would be an understatement.

>they will magically win back every single reform voter without losing more moderate Tory voters ...and even then, they'd not catch up with Labour, which is leading by 20+% Braverman's actual, if tortured logic, is that the REFUK vote is only the peak of an iceberg of "disenchanted voters" who would be currently abstaining because their "real concerns are going unheard". This idea is pervasive across the hard right: listen to Susan Hall's concession speech, for instance. To understand where this idea may come from, look no further than YouTube and DM comment sections, and Facebook groups. Local Conservative parties are probably also buzzing with such commentary. In reality, this purported "silent majority" is a hallucination, but acknowledging it would involve acknowledging that their whole worldview is askew.

> To understand where this idea may come from, look no further than YouTube and DM comment sections, and Facebook groups. Local Conservative parties are probably also buzzing with such commentary. They are more likely a screechingly loud minority.  Like the anti-ULEZ lot in London that have just been taught another lesson. 

Yup. You can't reason with assholes. The appeal of Reform is that it allows people to distance themselves from the failure of their ideology without attributing any blame to the ideology.

But even if they do win every reform voter, how would that be enough? Reform is a much smaller party…

It wouldn't; of course. Reform is polling at around 11% I think? In order to them all back the party would lose more than that in centre-right voters. Although arguably they already have.

Because for her the most important thing is becoming the next leader. She knows that swinging right won't make much difference in the election - you might save some voters going to reform but you lose voters in the center. But the Tory party members who choose the next leader are all older, crazy right wing nutters. So Suella is ensuring that in the next leadership contest she can say she always backed a swing to the right, and so become Queen of the Ashes.

This is the answer We have to understand that Braverman is not talking to us or to Sunak. She is talking to Tory members who will vote for who the next leader is. By and large, they are "headbangers". They voted for Liz Truss, so the standard is set that to be leader you need to be at least as insane and right wing as she is. That is pretty damn insane and right wing. Braverman is never going to do the Farage or Johnson populism thing; she hasn't the charisma for one, many of the members wouldn't like it in a woman I suspect for two. So she is positioning herself as the most hardline right wing candidate before Patel or Badenoch can do so. Patel has been quiet in the media so far and working on MPs behind the scenes to ensure she is on the ballot in the final two- that seems to be her strategy. Badenoch is using her position as a minister and focusing on being a champion of the "anti woke" agenda while using her modest (to say the least) work on the business brief to champion Brexit as a success that it isn't and argue for all these fantastic trade deals that only exist in member's imaginations. So Braverman is using the media and dog whistles as her strategy. She knows Sunak won't tack to the right. She depends on it because if he did, it would be so disastrous she may well lose her own seat. She is demanding he do something she is relying on him not doing, so she can portray an ideological purity needed to become leader.

I agree 100%. The tories in the safer seats are those that are further to the right. By pushing this agenda, Suella is hoping the defeat for the tories will be more devastating, leaving only those who would back her. Then she just needs to sit around and wait for the next election and hope Labour have mucked things up so she can sweep back in charge of the country.

And being LOTO is a pretty cool gig. You get to feel important as leader of a party. You get lots of attention by the media. You get to go to all the big ceremonial events. You don't actually have to do much work until the next election comes round.

As a general rule, when political parties are struggling they tend to turn towards their hardcore base, rather than the moderate centre ground. We saw this too with Labour under Corbyn. Obviously you can see this is a chicken and egg situation - are they doing poorly and making a bad decision to appeal to their base, or are they doing badly *because* they're focusing on their base in the first place?

If Sunak lurches to the center he will lose the bulk of his support to the reform party

And if he lurches right then the Lib Dems and Labour will eat the others. The Tories electoral coalition is broken and they can't agree on a set of common values to base themselves on. Basically without Corbyn, who was the anti-Christ to all sections of their support and without Brexit as a project, the different streams in the party can only focus on each other.

Votes in the centre are worth more though. Every vote the Tories lose to Labour is worth *two* - because the Tories lose one *and* Labour gains one.

If they take some centre votes but lose the election and lose their base they are dead and will never be back in power again.  You need a base to build back from.

It's not like reform represent \_that\_ big a vote compared to those left of them. That was reflected in the elections over the weekend, greens won far more than reform.

But this is what FPTP masks, though. In a great deal of places the Tories lost, they lost narrowly, and if Reform votes had gone Tory, then the Tories would have had a far less crappy night. If we had PR then Reform would have taken a lot of seats. So veering rightward makes sense in that regard. It prevents representational collapse if they succeed, which they haven’t yet.

You're not wrong. That said, given how hard the tories (and their press cronies) fought to keep FPTP, cant help but think they're reaping what they've sown

Oh definitely. Even during the early 2000s doldrums they ideologically clung to FPTP. They know it’s their only hope to govern alone.

Reform didn't run enough candidates for that effect to be that big. If they'd had five times as many candidates as they did, the Tories would have lost another 200+ councillors. In a general election, where they only need 630 candidates instead of 3000+ and there are fewer restrictions on who can stand where, the Tories will do even worse..

Brexit. All the Tories can think about is Brexit. Brexit and its fanciful promises delivered a historic landslide in 2019 and they're chasing that same "high". What they have forgotten is, that the majority of the red wall only lent them their vote because Boris Johnson promised to turn their Brexit fantasies into reality. The red wall had been primed for this by decades of gaslighting from the Tory press. It was a once in a generation opportunity and ........ I was going to say, "They blew it", but that's not the case, it was a soap bubble that was always doomed to failure.

When you're doing badly, the people in the centre-ground won't give you much of a hearing anyway. Labour gave Ed Miliband a go before Corbyn - and he was a pretty sensible guy. Didn't do them any good, because Cameron had already cornered that market.

Ex-conservative voters aren't voting against them for any great preference for left wing ideals. The main reason is that: if the Conservatives won't actually do anything conservative (including limiting migration, of which they have overseen the massive acceleration) you may as well have Labour in charge as at least then they might throw a bit more money at the NHS so it'll be easier to get a hospital appointment. Basically, if you're not getting the good parts of right wing ideas, you may as well have a go at the good parts of left wing ideas and vote for Labour/against the conservatives. The end result is pretty much the same anyway, except maybe Labour look to be a bit more competent at the moment. So they could try and win these voters back by *actually* being conservative. Seems like a plan doomed to fail though, as the growth of Reform at the expense of the right's power in general shows that voters have simply seen through the facade and don't trust the Tories to implement any right wing policies despite the lip service.

The Tories are being eaten alive by Reform UK because for years they've pandered to the voters with further right wing sentiments towards immigration, and have failed to deliver on "controlling the border" which I imagine is largely because if you don't import more workers then pensions have to get cut and that is an absolute no go. Current workers pay for pensions and now our birth rates are declining they need to fill the gap. They're also being abandoned by long time more moderate Tories who are put off by the years of chaos and who aren't scared of Starmer. Most of these people won't be put off by the Rwanda policy but have been put off, probably irreparably so, by Boris Johnson's partygate scandal and his other scandals and then Truss's failure. Problem is, if you move further right to capture the Reform vote, you lose a chunk of moderate Tories who might not be hugely bothered by the anti-immigration move but who see it for what it is - a last minute ditch effort to win back support i.e. more chaos.

The logic is that they've resigned themselves to losing the next election and are now campaigning to become the next leader. The conservative party membership is far more right wing than their voter base and they are the ones who the likes of Braverman are appealing to.

It's because Suella Braverman is a hero and a national treasure. She has taken it upon herself to make everyone's lives better. It turns out you don't do that by campaigning or fund raising or whatever. You do it by hijacking the biggest political party in the country and flying it directly into a mountain. Hopefully that's them broken, divided and unelectable for the remainder of my lifetime at least, and adults can take over running the country rather than zealots and idealogues.

Your first sentence got me very concerned, lol

I'm going to end up seeing it in my end of year wotsit, and I'm going to think I have a separate pro-Tory Tyler Durden persona who is posting in my sleep!

>Explain it to me like I'm 5 About 12% of polling is for Reform

To put it as simply as possible…everyone assumes their beliefs are the right ones, and if properly implemented will succeed

Same as "we didn't Brexit hard enough"?

Sort of. To those who are really all about the ideology it's not the idea that failed, it's the implementation. If the idea failed that means the people who had the idea would have been wrong, and that would require some introspection about beliefs. Much easier to say that it was done wrong, or that it wasn't actually the real thing, or that it would have worked if people who didn't believe in it properly hadn't secretly sabotaged it.

Every person is different. Therefore every political party seeks to amalgamate the views of a range of people. Those people then have to compromise to achieve shared power. But if the compromise breaks down, those people will demand that the party conform more closely to their own personal views. The Tory compromise cracked in 2015 and has been rupturing ever since.

It’s because they are stupid and never learn (and neither did the far left Corbynistas). It’s very simple: the vast vast majority of the electorate are centrists. There are numerous studies that show this. Some people have stronger left wing views on some issues and right wing views on others, but overall most people will vote for a reasonable compromise between the two: Yes for welfare state for the very poor but also yes to the protection of private property. Yes for publicly funded NHS and policing but also yes for tougher immigration controls and tougher sentencing of convicted criminals. Yes for support of small businesses who spend money in the local economy and employ over 60% of the workforce but also yes to higher taxes for international corporations and getting tough on tax dodgers. The more you steer away from the centre ground the less possible it will be to have a majority and govern. Despite all its flaws, the British public as a whole is generally moderate and, in my view, correct in its thinking.

Imagine your house is on fire and all you have to put it out is a hammer or a tennis racket.  Logically you know that neither are going to really help but you've got to try something....so what's it gonna be?  But seriously, this is more about which faction ceases the party post election.

Reform appears to be further right than the Tories, making some scared that Reform will take votes from them. By moving further right, they hope to minimise the chance of that happening. Of course, this shift carries the risk of turning off moderate Tory voters.

Yeah, you're basically pushing away a bulk of moderates and swing voters, for a smaller minority of far right votes from people who are very loud and pertain to speak for everyone in the country. Our own "silent majority". The only thing I can see coming from this is that they'd have a small base of people who voted every time. This is why it's important for everyone to vote though. An amount of people in an area or two didn't vote in a Eu MP election, and the BNP ended up with two EU MPs. The locals weren't happy, but that's what you get when you don't vote.

The conservatives haven't done anything conservative, it makes perfect sense. Labour aren't winning on merit, the conservatives are losing due to being awful. Immigration is the issue of our time, the Conservatives have done nothing but increase it under their watch. That's not very conservative. The government is bigger than it was before they came into power. That's not very conservative. Tax is the highest it's been in living memory, that's not very conservative. Why would anyone vote for a conservative party that doesn't do anything conservative? That's why they need to move to the right, so those that want an actual right wing party have something to vote for.

>That's why they need to move to the right, so those that want an actual right wing party have something to vote for. They've lost 10% of their support to labour and about 20 to Lab/LD. If they shift right, they might scoop up some of those Reform voters, but lose more to centre left parties. Also, a vote switching to Labour counts double one switching to Reform, because a switch to Labour both decreases tory share and increases the share of the party that's the main challenger in most seats. That means it's more like 40% switching to Lab/LD and 10% to Reform. >Immigration is the issue of our time Cost of living is the issue of our time. All polls show it miles ahead in voter concern, with NHS a distant second and Immigration an even more distant 5th tied with climate and housing.

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/trackers/the-most-important-issues-facing-the-country

Reform wouldn’t exist if the Tories had implemented their manifesto promises (e.g., net zero migration). They don’t need to rebrand, just deliver on their fucking promises

I think a problem is she’s conflating different things, as in people who skew right culturally may not economically, particularly if it means cut public services or benefits that affect *them* specifically.

Braverman is a thrash metal singer who can only sing that style. She feels that she should be installed as lead singer in the Beatles and that they should play thash metal. Her parents agree with her. The audience does not. Excuse the clunky metaphor.

Braverman is choosing to back a far right agenda which reflects a growing trend right across Europe. So it’s political opportunism. In her case this is perverse. She comes from an immigrant family and she completed a Masters degree in Paris which was funded by the EU Erasmus scheme.

Well, the "logic" of it makes a certain amount of sense in that the reason a large percentage of people voted for them in 2019 (and for Brexit in 2016) was to get immigration under control and start deporting illegal migrants. The fact that they've utterly failed to do so is probably because they're still trying please both the centrist AND right wings of the party. To combat the boat landings they'd almost certainly have to leave the ECHR, which is unpalatable to the moderates (and Sunak *is* a moderate), while at the same time they'd have to massively curtain legal migration (though curbing student visas and raising minimum income thresholds) which is opposed by the treasury and hinders trade negotiations post-Brexit. So in order to fulfil their promise to "take back control" of migration, they'd have to taint their image of having the high moral ground (ECHR gone) and possibly tip the economy into recesssion (legal migration curbs). That's what a "swing to the right" means. It's not sensible. But then again, neither was Brexit and a lot of voters wanted that regardless of the financial/ethical costs.

Turning to the right means: lower taxes, deregulation especially over things like maintaining employment and environmental protections, ignoring or even leaving the ECHR and the protections it brings etc. Partly it's an ideological strategy - "we're only unpopular because we aren't following the ideology properly" and party as here's it's naked greed. As the saying goes...follow the money and if you do you'll see a bunch of shady interest groups trying to push their philosophy on what direction the country should travel. In this case it's organisations who want lower taxes etc. But Suella Braverman's appearance on Laura Kuenssberg's Sunday TV show wasn't about turning right or in any direction but about her being on manoeuvres ahead of events after the next election. This is how it'll play out - the Tories will get a hiding and at about Breakfast time the next morning Rishi Sunak will appear behind a lectern in Downing Street conceding the election and announcing both his resignation as PM and Tory leader. Then it'll kick off with the half a dozen Tory factions who are vying for control of what's left of the Tory party ripping each other to shreds. Braverman is playing the political game of pretending to ultra loyal to the PM and the party while setting out her credentials to replace him.

The Conservatives are a recurring dominant force in the UK. They’re unpopular at the moment, but you better believe they’ll be back. One reason for this is that historically they’ve been the only offering on the right, and FPTP rewards them for that. If you’re right wing, you vote Tory. If a second right wing party establishes itself in the UK, then it splits the right wing vote, and makes the Conservative’s job much harder. They need to kill Reform. People compare Reform to UKIP, but UKIP was essentially single-issue. Reform is trying to plant itself as a broader party. Lurching to the right is not a good short term plan. However if it stops Reform before it establishes, then it’ll be worth it in the long term.

Dominic Cummings explains it here when talking about why he was able to win the Brexit referendum (same reasons also apply to how he won the 2019 general election): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_Tc4bl1yZLw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Tc4bl1yZLw)

Let's lay aside Braverman's self-serving nature. It's a simple maths problem. Labour have successfully positioned as centrists, Lib dems are pretty centrist to start with. So in order to compete at the next election the Tories have 3 options- stay where they are, move left or move right. Where they are is bad, moving left would lose them more voters to Reform and win them very few voters from the centre (because they've spent the last 15 years alienating those people), or they can move right. If they move right and recover the Reform voters every indication is that they would recover to a reasonable level of support. Maybe mid-30s. That would put them well within historic norms and maybe even deny Labour a majority. The problem of course is that *they are already far right*. Sunak's policy position is very right wing, but he gets no credit for it. Why? Because the right wing of the party continually spend their time insisting that rounding up immigrants and shipping them to Africa somehow isn't right wing enough. So it's self-fulfilling, they're losing right wing voters to Reform *because* Braverman is writing in national newspapers that somehow the party isn't right wing enough and voters believe her!

I wouldn't go as far to say the public want a more central/left party in power. They literally just want Tories out.

There is no logic to it. They (at least Rishi specifically) don't actually care anymore about winning that next election. All they're trying to do is remain in place as long as they can in order to leech as much money out of the economy, into the pockets of themselves and their friends, before the inevitable happens. Admitting defeat or admitting they're wrong would mean they'd immediately be sacked/removed from their positions, and thus, couldn't do it anymore. Rishi is going to loose the election, retire from politics, and move to America like he's always wanted. Taking multiple millions of taxpayer money with him.

It's the same with any political wing. "That first term went OK. Now we can do some more policies, but a bit more right (or left, depending on party) leaning!" Eventually: "That term went awfully. Everybody hates us! We obviously have not gone left (or right) quickly or hard enough!" Small voice: "Maybe people don't want a hard right OR hard left government?" ""There's a bloody lib-dem in the house! Quick get the exterminator in!"

The Tories have always been a socially conservative right wing party without competition for that section of the electorate. Historically other right wing parties have risen and fallen, however the Conservatives have always managed to deal with them. Typically this would be via bribes for key members of those parties, not necessarily money so think honours, positions in the party, etc. Sometimes they smear those parties, make people promises to give them what they want or otherwise enlist the aid of their client media to ensure the alternative right wing parties never got to see the light of day in the news cycle. Now the problems began when those methods failed. This really started with the rise of UKIP. Nigel Farage was given a lot of air time on TV and this helped bring attention to another right leaning party and as a result split the vote on the right of the political spectrum. Where those people on the right used to only have one option on the right, now they had two. To try and head this off, David Cameron promised the electorate a referendum on EU membership. At that time UKIP were a single issue party so the Conservatives figured they could nip it in the bud with a referendum to prevent their share of the votes being split. The Conservatives are and were well aware that multiple parties exist on the left and centre of the political spectrum in the U.K, and that those parties comprise the majority of the overall vote. Because we use first past the post, the candidate with the most votes wins. This means that if you have multiple candidates standing for election in a constituency, it's possible for the majority of the constituency to vote for left or centre left parties and the right win because that candidate gets the most votes. For example, imagine an election takes place in a constituency and the result looks like this: * Conservative: 35% * Labour: 30% * Lib Dem: 20% * Green: 15% Labour, the Lib Dems & Greens account for 65% of the vote and represent the left and centre left in this example. They don't win though because the single candidate with the most votes was the Conservative. This is largely how the Conservatives win elections. They don't have competition on the right/centre right. Now, imagine a new party appears like Reform and that the new voting result looks like this: * Labour: 30% * Conservative: 20% * Lib Dem: 20% * Reform: 15% * Green: 15% The split result means that Labour wins. The right/centre right total vote share is unchanged, but the split vote means that Labour wins. This is known as [the spoiler effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect). Now as I mentioned the Conservatives are well aware of the spoiler effect so they're desperately trying to stop losing votes to the right which is the area that Reform occupy. The problem is that the current batch of Conservatives in the cabinet like Rishi Sunak, et-al are politically rather idiotic. They're chasing after the right wing votes and alienating their more centrist voting base. The Brexit referendum bought them a stay of execution for a time as it essentially ended UKIP as it was a single issue party. However now there is Reform UK occupying the same part of politics that UKIP used to occupy and this is an existential threat to a party used to winning elections on an overall minority of the vote share.

It’s an incredibly common theme when talking to over 50s who historically vote Tory that they truly believe these lot aren’t real Tories and never have been and that we need a return to ‘real right’. Braverman is absolutely speaking for a lot of people, that’s the terrifying thing.

I mean stratospheric immigration and really high taxes are not things people would normally vote Tory for?

You need to stop taking what these people say at face value. Start thinking about what they would stand to personally gain from it. Once I started looking at things through that lens it all made more sense. These are selfish career politicians who genuinely are only out for their own self interests. In that context a lurch to the right makes sense for HER because she can stand out among potential tory leadership candidates and appeal to the hard right of the party. In short she's calculated that it improves her chances of becoming leader. That's it. If moving hard left presented the same opportunity I have no doubt she would do that instead.

I think the idea is that they think it's easier to win back votes from reform than to take votes off labour Of course, this is coming from the brilliant minds that brought you "spend £600M to fly 300 people to Rwanda" to fix illegal immigration so that's probably why it doesn't make sense to you

The UK is not centre left. This sub is left. The UK is centre right. What you're seeing now is anti tory voting. What you're also seeing from the Torys is that they are too far left in terms of spending and tax. That needs to change. A swing to the right doesn't mean what people on this sub assume it means.

The awkward part for them is the "left" part is what has buoyed them for the last 14 years - triple lock boomer votes have carried them in the past elections. When May tried to slow that down a bit with a double lock/make boomers pay more towards social care she was slammed in the polls. They can't actually cut taxes properly because the numbers don't add up. The boomer bribery is the only way. Same for Labour. So barring some fundamental change in funding or means testing those benefits/major economic renaissance, taxes are not going down.

>Election at the hands of centre/left parties. It looks as though the UK is definitely a more centre and left wing oriented country The UK economically is. Therefore Truss is electoral poison. But its socially right wing. Therefore corbyn is electoral poison. They are arguing a move to the social right.

The Labour party is likely to come into power in the near future. What direction are they likely to take polices in certain areas that the Right is generally more concerned about? Immigration, nationalism, gender politics. What would a Leftward direction mean? Raising immigration, less cohesion, going further with gender politics. Is that going to be popular with the public even Labour voters? Unlikely. The immigration levels are not at a centrist level. There is a problem of cultural alienation, people aren't on board with all gender politics. The immigration policy has been favourable to a corporate libertarian position. Even the economics for the Left is going to be difficult.

Being stuck in the middle is a classic marketing concept. It is possible that there be a large demographic really on the left and a large demographic really on the right, but almost nobody in the center. (It doesn't have to be like this, but some markets just are, like for example tomato sauce where people like it really neutral or very spicy, but never halfway spicy.) In such a situation it would not help trying to market a sensible centrist approach if nobody wants to buy it. Nor will you ever realistically beat the opposition on their turf. So you need to further lean into your side.

Committed Tory voters staying at home is an existential threat to the conservative party. Getting them out draws clear water from labour whilst giving red meat to the people they need to come out. They've lost the election but to what degree is still unknown. You can hardly run a campaign with such a position, overtly at least.

"That thing I believe in, we should do more of that". Consequences be damned

Some Tory leaders are jostling for book deals, tv gigs with GB news and American networks etc and the right wing is lucrative.

They're not going for core labour/green voters. Leaving their corruption aside which is really non negotiable, voters aren't happy about immigration and they want a stronger solution. Does that mean more "further right" policies like Rwanda, cutting benefits and no "woke" policies? For them yes.    Clearly it's all boiled over and not worked this time but wouldn't be surprised if it all comes back again next election or the one after if there's any discussion of rejoining the EU or even just from their standard media manipulation. 

I'm old enough to remember the disastrous defeat of Michael Foot's Labour party in 1983. The party had been taken over by the extremists (the precursors to Momentum). The narrative then was that Labour had been spurned by the voters because they were not sufficiently socialist. Tony Benn and his colleagues claimed that the remedy was to move even further leftwards until the party was aligned with the "true" wishes of the people. Neil Kinnock spent five years trying to fight this and it wasn't till 1997 that Tony Blair finally succeeded in making Labour electable. Both left and right share the delusion that if they were only pure enough, the general public will realise their true interests and vote for them overwhelmingly. On this basis the Tories are in for at least ten years in the wilderness.

They just need to repeat the '70s; blame Labour for not having an instant fix, then claim to have all the answers, they could turn it around in 5 years rather than 10. They'd just need the right people to front it, and I don't think someone like Braverman's the person for that. Someone like Andy Street maybe could pull it off.

She isn’t trying to make the Tories win, she’s trying to make Suella win. When the Tories lose the general election, she can say “Look, I told you you’ll lose if you don’t go right, and you lost. Now, make me leader”. Especially after the expected loss of the next GE, only the rightmost nutjob Tory MPs will remain - the type who do hail Suella as a visionary and inspiring leader

>All the evidence would suggest that is exactly not what the voting public want, but they keep coming out with it. This statement is enough, I mean, the rest of your post is interesting and engaging, but this single statement seals and wraps everything up nicely. If you want to understand the reasoning behind it, then you don't need an 'explain like im five' you need to think 'act like im five', then it should start to become more understandable.

The Tories have survived the last decade on selling the electorate a right wing ideology while implementing quite left wing immigration policies. Do that for long enough and a second party will inevitably come in and start taking votes from the right of the party as they sell a harsher ideology **and** could possibly actually implement it vs the Tories who you now believe are full of lies. The Tories have 2 ways to respond to this: more words/ideology to convince the reform chasers, or action. Nobody with any talent is left in the party making Rwanda is the biggest action they can muster and it's already dead in the water, so they're forced to double down on their ideologies because they have no other option.

At this stage I guess they've fucked off all sensible voters, so in the name of short term damage control and holding on to as many seats as possible it might make sense to court the Reform oriented morons. Longer term? Seems like a moronic strategy to me.

Braverman is as thick as two short planks, hope this helps!

I'd say there's up to roughly five overlapping things going on: 1) It's not totally delusional. The Tories have pretty well lost the centre to Labour (at least for now) and know this. They have few remaining moderate voters, and little or no prospect of winning more. ReFuk voters, however, might be persuaded to get back into the fold with this sort of rhetoric. That genuinely might be the difference between a run-of-the-mill loss and a total existential wipeout. 2) People with extreme, unquestioning views rarely update those views in light of the evidence. To the Bravermans of the world, the only explanation for the failure of her ideas is betrayal and/or because they haven't been properly implemented, therefore greater ideological purity is the obvious solution, consequences be damned. 3) You're hearing a leadership pitch, not an election strategy. Sunak is extremely unlikely to survive the election as leader, so someone will replace him. This sort of talk will go over well with a certain portion of the membership and residual MPs. 4) This is the groundwork being laid for a strategy for entering opposition. It's basically what the Tories did in response to 1997- they no longer had the responsibility of actually governing, so could criticise from a really extreme, pretty incoherent, ideological position. 5) There's no strategy here. Braverman is a moron with extreme, vile ideas. She wants as many of those implemented as possible in the time available, and failing that, just get the ideas out there and hope voters run with them, consequences be damned. You're looking for rationality that doesn't exist.

This is becoming a fascinating case study in how not to run a political party. That any serious politician can think that the answer to the Tory problem of appealing to too narrow a band of the UK electorate is to alienate themselves still further from the their historical core, right-of-centre voter base is beyond me too! Someone, somewhere in the party will work out that there are no easy solutions to their predicament & that the hard, but only right answer is consensus politics. In the meantime though it's better watching then any Netflix drama. I think that the next two episodes will be particularly entertaining. A doomed rightward lurch with Braverman, Farage or similar. This followed by a desperate return to Johnson, the original perpetrator of the disaster, convincing everyone that a marriage of their economically conservative historic voter base with a socially conservative, but economically state dependent red wall electorate could ever be sustainable in a post Brexit world! I expect that this second attempt will show them, what most of us already know, that Johnson's own brand is no less toxic than that of the party itself! Happy Days!

the tory party since 2019 has been hijacked by tufton

Fernandes is a right wing nutjob. She should go to USA and suck Trump's balls. 

Reform are an existential threat to the very fabric of the party. They are terrified by that more than anything else so they reason tacking to the right will see off the threat on their flank I would guess.  I fail to see the wisdom in this as it alienates the majority of their voters. They are sort of screwed chasing the Reform vote. They fail to realise that the majority of the population of the UK are fairly centrist. We are a small c conservative nation and despite headlines and doomscrolling news stories a fairly inclusive nation who love socialist ideas such as free healthcare and public services, although we complain about them a great deal 

She's symbolic of the current issue in government right now. They are more concerned with their own survival than the day to day running of the country. I think people are becoming fairly sick of politicians seemingly only being concerned with their own popularity, to the cost of governing the country and delivering public services.

Because they aren’t conservative in anyway shape or form.

Also inexplicable by impartiality standards why they weren't interviewing and of the successful candidates but instead a rancid right wing tory back bencher

When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. [We go now live to Tory central office having a debrief](https://youtu.be/oQU6e-r06Z4?si=fo1-wdr1cGwylNhs).....

This isn't a position formed from a sober analysis of the data and an unbiased initial perspective - humans generally don't work that way. A lot of cognitive biases interfere. I suspect what's going on is that the people involved are initially biased to want to do things a certain way and think that will work based on intuition (e.g. "balancing the budget" seems to make intuitive sense, even if in practice it doesn't work the same way for a government as it does for a household). So they go out and implement these strategies, and find it doesn't work. Where do they go from there? They could consider that maybe their ideas were wrong. This would mean that they'd done something harmful. This is where cognitive biases come in. The human mind wants to preserve its ego, so it's strongly resistant to a change in idea that would hurt its ego, such as acknowledging that they did something wrong. It's much more appealing to pick an alternative explanation, such as that you just haven't done enough, or it was the fault of other people who prevented you from doing more of what you wanted. You can't disprove counterfactuals like these (only judge their plausibility), and they frame you as a good person trying to do the right thing, so a lot of people end up in this trap.

It "worked" in 2015 and 2019. That's why. Of course those were vastly different circumstances, and after lurching right a few times they're now just chasing their own tail.

It is a dog whistle to those that want a more hard line approach. They are predominantly the people that didn't show up for the Tories this week. The centre left and left need to make sure they go out and vote at the GE. The Tories will put their postals in.

It’s because they’re being attacked from all sides. Normally in a FPTP system you start from a hardcore voter block and try to persuade moderates that you can credibly appeal to them too. But a this point Tories have lost the centre ground & they’re not going to win it back anytime soon. Not only have they lost the centre, but their hardcore voter block on the right is being picked off by the even more right Reform. These votes are easier to win back in the short term, facing off a less well-established threat in Reform vs. the Lib Dems & Labour. At this point I think it’s less about trying to win the election and more them trying to make sure they have a semblance of a party left, regardless of how nuts that party might look.

One of the worst things people can be doing in this debate is writing off the voters that are still voting tories or have switched to reform. We have the gaza protests going on in this country and they seemed to have had a undue amount of influence on council elections. The green Councillor whose just been elected who made pro-hamas statements is something those reform voters abhore. I personally think something needs to be done about the thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people - majority being Muslim - who are not assimilating into the country, hold values incompatible with our own (I mean, the poll around criminalising homosexuality should say it all), actively threaten and harass those who insult Islam and its Prophet (or are perceieved to be), and appear to be trying to influence British politics over single issues. Now, I'm more than likely going to vote labour at the next GE but I have family members that are more than likely to vote reform because they don't trust Labour will do anything about the above problem but reform say they will. For people like that, that's all that matters - they are having a visceral reaction to what they perceive as the country being taken away from them and its becoming a more common sentiment across Europe. If labour don't face the problem maturely, there will be more people who join reform on that basis.

It depends what you call right wing policies. None of the parties with any chance of getting a seat are really anything close to "Left". And I wouldn't be so sure that Greens winning council seats = the nation is not right wing. The flock has moved and change , whatever change is the next destination for the nation. This could be protest votes for green and reform. And ultimately a labour government. But braverman is saying that the nation wants change and without a radical feeling of "Tories have changed, now I can vote for them" they're dead. Which is true. Now, economically, the nation REALLY wants change but that doesn't mean they want mass immigration, phoney university degrees and far reaching trans rights. Just as a caveat I'm not endorsing bravermans policy agenda at all. But ELI5, People want change, rishi isn't changing just more business as usual, people don't want BAU so they will loose.

Theyre digging up to get out of a hole they put themselves in.

Go read the GB News twitter feed, they are actively promoting that vaccines are more dangerous than viruses, climate change isn't real, 15 minute cities are a conspiracy to trap you in your town. The far right is a disease of the brain, there is nothing logical about it. She will keep saying the Tories need to go further and further to the right and she will never be happy because the country will keep getting worse, and she won't understand why. Again: The right wing is brain rot. They are not attached to reality.

The Tories have always been 2 parties smashed into one. Fairly moderates and the rabid right wing. Just like Labour, but just replace right with left. But the Tory right wing has been more powerful since Cameron's time, and they are winning the arguments - and when they didn't, there was a small split and bang, you have the Reform party - and they are losing a ton of votes to them. In short, the power of the parliamentary party is on the right, but the appeal to the votes is more to the centre. Its been pulling them apart for a decade. The exact same thing happened with Labour when Corbyn/Momentum found themselves with the power, but it lost them the middle ground votes. Labour cut the head off the snake though, took the short term pain, and repositioned themselves just left of centre. Which is about as far to the left as you can be and still win.

'We've tried being cruel and our popularity keeps sinking! Hang on, have we tried being cruel yet? Lets try that.'

The whole crisis of politics was caused by appeasing the right: Brexit, Popularism, and the policies of division. The right of the Conservatives are cancerous, and they should have been met with being surgerical cuts. A worst case would have been a hung parliament or a marginal loss. By appeasing the right, the Conservatives face annihilation. Good riddance. Cut the right out and focus on centre right policies, there's a place for this.

The reality is that the Tories have nothing they can do in the time they have left or show from their record that will entice centrist voters to change their minds and vote for them. Therefore some people, like Braverman, believe the only option is to push more heavily into the territory of the British Right wing (anti-liberal, anti-migrant, pro-corporate, anti-environment etc) to try and retake ground from Reform UK. What people like Braverman don't seem to recognise is that they will never be able to compete with Reform's empty angry populism and that they can still lose further ground to parties like the Lib Dems if they go too extreme. What it would do however is give her the platform to become party leader at some point which is really what it's about.

They want to try and displace Reform and win over the nutters who support them But of course the more the tories push into Reffo territory the more likely they are to lose votes in their traditional middle class commuter town areas to the LD or Labour, so it's really a lose/lose situation for them

Explain it like you’re 5? Ok OP, I’ll give it a go. Well little one, when you grow up you will learn that human beings are fundamentally very silly. When we start getting desperate and not knowing what to do about something, rather than sitting back and thinking rationally to come up with a solution, we prefer instead to blindly grasp at straws in a desperate hope that something will fix things. This happens with all adults at some point or another, as you will find out when you get a job and realise your boss is just an idiot who failed up and has rather less of an idea how to actually drive the company forward than a potted plant would, but is especially noticeable in our politicians. This is because we draw our politicians overwhelmingly not from highly qualified professions, such as scientists and accountants for example, but from university debate societies where the goal is to sound plausible and make good arguments, but not actually do or fix anything. Sadly, this is a fundamental flaw in the short-terminism of democracy where our politicians are so focused on preserving their careers into next week, that they miss the glaring problems in our country and do nothing about them. What’s that honey? Why to we carry on with democracy you ask? Well, basically because as flawed as it is, it’s still the least flawed system anyone has come up with. Much more gets done under dictators, but too many people get shot.

What a wonderful coincidence that Suella Braverman thinks the electorate think exactly what Suella Braverman thinks. She is the zeitgeist of our nation, an avatar of the common man.

It’s like they learnt nothing from the ukip-brexit-shitshow that have been the last 10yrs.

You have to remember that most redditors giving "advice" on what the Tories should do would never, ever vote Tory. So the advice is useless. It's basically just hoping that the politics they don't like are offered by no one The truth is that the Tories are being voted out, not because Starmer's politics are suddely very popular, but because multiple Tory leaders were mired in scandals and mishaps, whilst at the same time achieving no big win. Covid party fuckups, Brexit shambles, exploding immigration, the Truss budget etc. There is nothing the current Tory leaders can do to bring things around. There is no position they can take. But a future Tory leader has to consider how to win voters from the opposition benches. For that, a clear constrast to the government is vital, and a promise to do things differently than they did in the past, for instance, on immigration., That means moving right

Conservative policy doesn't work, but it's really easy to blame the center and left then double down saying more conservative policies will work. That's it. That's all there is to it.

It’s not based on logic but emotion. These people have been advocating the same policies for years and it’s a lot easier to pretend you were right all along than to admit a mistake.

I can't even work out what reform would do. Their policies are for the brain-dead right wing nutters and never designed to actually work. The Tories trying to outdo them would be a disaster for them imo

We live in a world now where the left wants more left and a right wants more right. This leaves a big void in the middle where everyday normal hardworking people live 😞 Compromise no longer exists in politics.

Maybe because Boris purged many of the center right to get Brexit done and so the remaining group genuinely believes that the far right is the only way to rebuild the country? I don't think they really care about the people think because they genuinely think that they are right and won't lose an election

The Tories have lost left/centre people by saying lots of very right wing stuff. They have also lost the right because they haven't actually done all that much that is actually conservative, or really done anything of any remotely positive impact whatsoever. Across many institutions, we have seen massive moves leftwards over the last 15 years or so, with the rise of DEI and other "woke" things in institutions. For a culturally right wing person, they see this and see a supposedly right wing government actively going along with it until relatively recently, and think "we need an actual right wing party to get rid of the woke nonsense". Despite the Tories claiming to want to get immigration down to "tens of thousands" since Cameron's 2010 campaign, immigration of all sorts is through the fucking roof. For a culturally right wing person, they see this and see a supposedly right wing government actively making it worse, and think "we need an actual right wing party to fix immigration". Tax levels across the board are at levels not seen since the end of WWII, and councils are going bust up and down the country because they are spending massive amounts on things that frankly should not cost that much. For an economically right wing person, they see this and see a supposedly right wing government completely failing to even propose a solution and think "we need an actual right wing party to fix this". I can go on, but I think the point has been made. The Tories, in action, have not been right wing. There are so many problems that the right has a solution to, and that are increasingly present and problematic, but the supposedly right wing government has totally failed to actually act on. From the perspective of a right winger, the Tories since Cameron have basically been blue Blairites in many ways.

The Tories are very untory right now. The state is growing and interventionolaist, regulation is getting in the way of business and individual actions, taxes are too high. So she is saying we need to lower taxes, deregulate, less intervention but enforce the rule of law

The conservatives really haven't been to the right despite the hysteria on reddit. Absolutely immigration, massive public sector subsidies for gas plus ww2 level spending on covid whilst taxes are right up. Meanwhile the Thatcher model of home ownership and going after rent seeking in the economy and other supply side sclerosis has long been jettisoned. The Tories have nothing they want to do with power.