May 24, 2024

Horse 3342 - Things Can Only Get Better After 5th July (They Can Not Get Worse)

On the 4th of July 1776, the thirteen American colonies in congress decided to declare their independence from Britain. Lord North's Tory Government would have been livid if it had been informed (but it wasn't). On the 4th of July 2024, the six hundred and forty-nine constituencies (not the Speaker), will go to the polls and probably declare their independence from another Tory Government. 

Sit back and watch as the right-wing establishment media goes into almost openly fascist overdrive as it tries to paint Keir Starmer as a communist, a soviet, an anarchist, a globalist, a European, and as actually being the entire of Hamas. The first casualty of war is truth and in a propaganda war, the killing of truth is in fact the very first action. Keir Starmer might very well be all sorts of things including a giant berk and a blithering eejit and under most circumstances that might be enough to swing the tide (it was enough to tell simple lies about Jeremy Corbyn being an anti-Semite five years ago) but when you have actual rivers full of feces, merely spraying the stuff is not enough any more.

Herein lies the problem for the right-wing media, in the six weeks of this 2024 General Election campaign, not even the usual propaganda war of lies will be enough to return the tories to government when the truth is just so very very very terrible. In the now 14 years of tory governments, they have smashed the universities, severed any kind of sensible ties and relations with the EU, successfully defunded and degraded the NHS, somehow made Britain's railways and roads worse, and done so little maintenance of things like water and sewerage that in many parts of Britain the water coming out of the taps is actually worse than before the Broad Street cholera outbreak of 1851.

In short, this Tory Government which is basically led by caretaker Prime Minister Rishi Sunak before he escapes to his fortune which is even more massive than that of the Royal Family (probably to Cote d'Azure), will be ejected faster than you can say Tommy Robinson (is not helping).

As I am something of a data nerd, I ran the latest YouGov polls through my uniform swing calculator. As at time of writing (23rd May), I end up with the following results:

477 - Labour

62 - Conservative

56 - SNP

31 - All Others

24 - (Northern Ireland)

326 of 650 seats are needed in the House of Commons to form government. This particular General Election will not be a case of whether or not Labour can form government or whether they can get to 400 seats but if the tories are so far on the nose that Labour actually makes it to 500 seats. Any pieces talking of a hung parliament, like I saw in both The Telegraph and The Times, are the equivalent of rearranging dining chairs in the Steerage Dining Hall on the Titanic. Forget deck chairs on the outside decks. The ship is sinking. The ship is sinking. There's a leak in the boiler room; the poor, the lame, the blind. Who are the ones we left in charge? Killers, thieves, and lawyers.

This General Election campaign, even before it has begun, does not feel like it will be accompanied with the same kind of optimism as the 1997 Election did. Tony Blair's "Cool Britannia" was substanceless but at least it came with jelly and ice cream. In 1997 there was at least some kind of hope that the tory cake could be unbaked. A generation later, there is no hope for that. Yes, there will be dancing in the streets of Total Network Solutions that night but on 5th July 2024, there will remain the awful truth that not only will the cake have to be unbaked but it will have to be chiselled as it was baked with cement and not flour.

The weird thing is that the date for the election, was leaked before it had been announced at Number 10. Procedurally in a Westminster Parliament, the head of Government visits the executive for the Crown, which in this case is the Prime Minister visiting the King. The Crown then issues a writ for dissolution and the announcement of the election is gazetted. This time around though, everyone found out that the election is going to happen in 4th July because former Prime Minister Liz Truss released a pamphlet canvassing for support for the election on July 4th. Now the only way that she could have known about that is if the 1922 Committee had already made its decision and instructed the Prime Minister to visit the King. However, the fact that Liz Truss produced this pamphlet before the writs had been issued, very much indicates that the Conservative Party is currently in some kind of pre-election breakdown if the whips can't control their MPs. This might be the tip of the iceberg.

This then is the state of play. Over the next six weeks Rishi Sunak will bravely be the face of an election campaign which he knows is bound to lose. Whether or not he retains his own seat remains to be seen but if in the event that he does, I do not see him remaining in the new parliament any longer than about a fortnight. More than likely he'd announce his resignation as an MP and take up the ceremonial position as Sheriff for the Chiltern Hundreds before disappearing to his lovely life of luxury living off of the interest of the interest of the interest. Meanwhile Keir Starmer will spend six weeks ignoring bad faith questioning from the right-wing trashmedia and trying not to say anything spicier than milquetoast. He has already perfected the art of not having a personality, which I suspect wasn't too difficult to him. 

Provided Keir Starmer doesn't say anything barbaric and provided that some major calamitous war doesn't break out (such as a nuclear bomb going off in Tel Aviv), then Labour will not so much win the 2024 General Election as the tories have spent all of the 20s trying to lose it. 

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