Art, Writing, and Learning: The Clerisy Quarter > Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza

UK Politics 2022

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Jubal:
New year, time for a change of thread!

And we have a bit of political excitement for the New Year, too: Boris Johnson is finally severely tanking in the polls, and everyone (everyone who's an enormous nerd anyway) is watching avidly to see when enough letters to the Conservative 1922 committee get sent in expressing no confidence in him, such that there's an actual confidence vote among Conservative MPs. There will also be one fewer of those MPs, as the member for Bury South today crossed the floor and joined the Labour benches about ten minutes before Prime Minister's Questions.

Johnson may yet see off a confidence vote if his potential replacements - including my MP Liz "Pork Markets" Truss, Matt "I've got an app" Hancock, Jeremy "don't mispronounce the surname" Hunt, and chancellor and probable front-runner Rishi Sunak - don't feel ready to jump into a contest. But he's looking more and more damaged by the day, honestly.

Jubal:
William Wragg, the Conservative chair of the public accounts committee, has all but explicitly said on camera that Johnson's government is committing criminal blackmail of its MPs by threatening to push embarrassing stories into the press, and breaches of the ministerial code by threatening to rewrite parliamentary boundary changes and withdraw government funded projects from MPs constituencies, in order to pressure Conservative MPs not to vote No Confidence in Johnson. Story here.

I mean, I don't think "Johnson prepared to do a bit of crime to hold his office" is hugely surprising, but the point at which his own MPs are surfacing to point that out is rather more eye-opening.

dubsartur:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that its not the crime that gets you, its the cover-up (see also: never break two laws at the same time).

Jubal:
So it's Lib Dem conference weekend. The biggest internal party news is probably a major set of reforms to the Federal Board and its structures: we will not have a much smaller federal board with a scrutiny council, which I'm sceptical will prove effective.

My main pushes on policy issues both passed. First, I helped push through a revised version of a paper on Public Debate which I'd referred back to committee with a vote at the previous conference. The new version may not be perfect but I think it's fairly good and I was pleased that the working group were very willing to work on the improvements that were needed. Here's a thing about it that I wrote:
https://www.libdemvoice.org/the-nature-of-public-debate-a-win-for-conference-70100.html

And this evening, with help from the Young Liberals' policy officer Janey Little, I also got an amendment through on restorative justice which advanced our policy somewhat. Explanation on blog here:
https://thoughtsofprogress.wordpress.com/2022/03/10/restorative-justice-time-to-talk-it-over/

Jubal:
Local elections coming up shortly! All the Welsh and Scottish locals, a lot of English councils (this year's round is probably the most urban-heavy one in England, including all the London boroughs). There's also the Northern Ireland Assembly coming up.

Things likely to be of interest below. Note that if I'm a bit waffly about flipping vs "doing well in" councils, that's on purpose and because I've not had time to check the 2018 results everywhere to see exactly what can or can't actually flip in places with 1/3 of councillors up for election.

* How badly do the Tories do, and where are they losing seats? More losses in affluent areas to the Lib Dems will spook the party in a different way to if they have a lot of losses to Labour in the north. The polls have been horrible for them for some time, and though the government's well-recieved response to the Ukraine crisis may have steadied the ship anger over partygate, a massive cost of living crisis, and botched handling of other policy areas seems to be taking its toll. Overall people are talking about maybe 500 seat losses for the Tories, so we'll see how true that is.
* Does Starmer actually work for regaining the north? Labour is defending more ground than it's attacking this year due to the urban nature of what's up, but if Starmer's fairly centrist strategy is working then Labour should make a good repository for current dissatisfaction with the government. Flipping Wandsworth in London is on the cards, which would be a bit totemic as a longstanding Tory bastion but on the other hand much of that sort of urban turf has been trending away from the Tories anyway. More interesting to watch will be Starmerite performance in more working-class areas like Dudley (Tory controlled since 2018). If the Conservatives are really trending into 1990s scales of loss, places to watch should include Amber Valley, northern London boroughs like Hillingdon, and also southern councils where Labour now has more presence like Adur.
* The Lib Dems' strategy under Ed Davey has been very focused on councils and ground campaigns, but this might not be the best year for that: there isn't that much of the suburban and rural affluent southern English turf that Davey-ites prefer to campaign on, and where that is up we're largely defending it (South Cambs and St Albans are big all-up defences, with places like Mole Valley, Eastleigh, and Cheltenham also with LD majorities to defend). That said, if Ed's strategy is really making inroads there are councils that ought to be vulnerable: if the LDs do well and make inroads in or flip Gosport, Maidstone, West Oxfordshire, Woking, Fareham and Tunbridge Wells those are the sorts of places the party needs to start racking up more council majorities to make the Davey strategy work.
* I know much less about Scots and Welsh council elections - in Scotland I'm largely going to be watching to see how heavily the SNP are running up the score: Scottish councils are proportionally elected, but the SNP polling over forty percent on first preferences might indicate they're going to get some majorities in places like e.g. Dundee. That said, there are a lot of independents in most Scottish council elections, which makes any calculus pretty hard.
* Wales also has a lot of independents, but Labour are the party of power there: they'll be aiming to recapture some councils, though in a number of their obvious targets they're already running minority administrations.
* Northern Ireland could be really, really interesting: chaos in the Democratic Unionist Party (hard right-wing social conservative Unionists) has led to them slipping behind somewhat in Northern Irish politics since the last election, they've typically been the top running party in recent years. Sinn Fein, the largest nationalist (that is, left/Catholic/unite Ireland) party, have gone for quite a bread-and-butter campaign and stayed steady, meaning they're very likely to come first. The big winners from all this have not been the moderate unionist and republican forces of the Ulster Unionist and Social Democratic & Labour parties, but the liberal non-sectarian Alliance, who look likely to be very clearly the third largest party and have even run neck and neck with the DUP in some polls: APNI overtaking the DUP would massively change the face of NI politics in ways I'm not sure I could predict very easily, given how heavily the system is predicated on the top Unionist and top Nationalist party being presumed to be forced to share power.

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