Bye Bye Rachel Reeves

[Mito Man]

Yes I reckon the prophecy of the tread title will be fulfilled!

[240PP]

Looks like she wasn’t entirely honest about the size of her gaping black hole

I've not read about this fully yet, but it looks like the 'black hole' was either greatly exaggerated, or, completely invented by Reeves so she could justify breaking their manifesto commitments to not raise tax (which they've done twice in a row and inevitably more to come).. WTF

Seems like it was more to do with raising benefits, as directed by her party. She’s shafted millions of working people for the sake of her own political survival. Nice.

[Rich B]

OBR fucks up and publishes budget early - OH MY GOD RACHEL REEVES MUST GO!

OBR decide black hole isn’t as bad as feared - OH MY GOD RACHEL REEVES MUST GO!

Tory scams £120m from the public and gets rewarded with peerage - OH MY GOD RACHEL REEVES MUST GO!

Mr Blobby back at the top of the charts for xmas No1 - OH MY GOD RACHEL REEVES MUST GO!

It’s getting a bit dull now, we get it, the editors of every Tory newspaper have the same thing on a postit note above their screen:

Any story - OH MY GOD RACHEL REEVES MUST GO!

[Alex88]

Who was calling for her resignation due to the OBR releasing the budget early?

[Beany]

Who was calling for her resignation due to the OBR releasing the budget early?

Until the OBR admitted it was their fault, I saw plenty of that on social media. And still after they admitted it was their fault. I was off sick so I had the time to doomscroll that morning.

[Alex88]

I'm just looking at published articles from the day of the budget and not finding anything that calls for her resignation. All the fury appears to be directed at the OBR itself.

[integrale_evo]

“ThE ToRy pReSs”

[Alex88]

The point of the 'black hole not being as bad as feared' is a massive misrepresentation of the situation. She's being accused of falsifying it entirely and actually had a surplus.

Is that Tory propaganda (despite being reported by all outlets) or burying your head in the sand making excuses?

[MikeHunt]

This hole thing doesnt make sense, surely the tories would have pushed back on this last year with receipts.

[Mito Man]

Did you miss all of the events surrounding the first budget? Everyone knew the black hole figure was grossly exaggerated but Labour had planned a bunch of new policies which came with additional expenditure. The budget is planning for the future so you can’t just show an old receipt.

[GG.]

Yes ultimately this just highlights that the tax raise was another political decision to tax and spend more, not a financial necessity as they were presenting it. The OBR have effectively confirmed that she could have said "I'd love to raise the two child benefit cap but I can't because last year I said we wouldn't come back for more taxes and spending more on welfare would leave me with insufficient headroom".

That would have gone down worse with her backbenchers than breaching their promises to the public on taxes (again) and so they chose to go down the route to save her and Keir's position. In some ways Rich is correct that the criticism of her is sustained and doesn't look to change with each revelation that comes out - but that's just down to the fact that people never believed the rhetoric that all these decision have been forced upon them by circumstance in the first place.

The OBR timeline also highlights that she was misleading the public in her early morning address a couple of weeks ago - she already knew at that point (in reality 4 days before she gave the speech) that it was not necessary.

[unzippy]

It’s getting a bit dull now, we get it, the editors of every Tory newspaper have the same thing on a postit note above their screen:

Any story - OH MY GOD RACHEL REEVES MUST GO!

Makes it which posters are in the ThE ToRy pReSs echo chamber

[Rich B]

It’s getting a bit dull now, we get it, the editors of every Tory newspaper have the same thing on a postit note above their screen:

Any story - OH MY GOD RACHEL REEVES MUST GO!

Makes it which posters are in the ThE ToRy pReSs echo chamber

eh!?

[GG.]

He's missing a "clear" or "obvious" between "it" and "which".

As someone mentioned though - the issue is being covered across the spectrum and the BBC's political editor takes the view that facts were omitted in order to deliberately mislead.

Obviously you can call the BBC the "ToRy PrESs" but that usually tells you more about the person levelling that accusation

[ZedLeg]

The overton window has moved so far this last couple of years that what we consider the centre now would’ve been deep into tory territory 20 years ago.

[GG.]

I think that's a massive generalisation and impossible to make that statement across a broad spectrum of different issues. The debate has moved left on some points and right on others.

The interesting thing is really that given the polarisation of society, the very idea of an overton window has really lost its resonance. A lot of what right leaning voters think is condemned as abhorrent by the left and the right think the left have absolutely lost their minds on a range of social and economic issues.

The fracturing of right leaning parties and labour haemorrhaging voters to the greens is increasingly showing how little alignment there is around the centre. It also oddly reduces the validity of the argument that FPTP is the best system as increasingly a smaller and smaller percentage of voters are putting their cross in the box of the party that wins with a landslide.

The perilous state of Starmer & Reeves is really down to the fact that a minority of the public ever supported him/labour (and what they did vote for is not being honoured as the PLP never were on board with it and know that their seats owe very little to the personal authority of the PM). The idea that FPTP leads to stable governments is ebbing away.

[Rich B]

The perilous state of Starmer & Reeves is really down to the fact that a minority of the public ever supported him/labour

Thats pretty much always the case with the popular vote though?

2010 - 10.7m vote Tory (45m registered)
2014 - 9.7m vote labour (48m registered)

it’s less, but it’s not a staggeringly different number to the sort of ratios that normally win.

Even the years when there are more votes, the winners never really got more than 20% of the population voting for them.

[ZedLeg]

I think that's a massive generalisation and impossible to make that statement across a broad spectrum of different issues. The debate has moved left on some points and right on others.

The interesting thing is really that given the polarisation of society, the very idea of an overton window has really lost its resonance. A lot of what right leaning voters think is condemned as abhorrent by the left and the right think the left have absolutely lost their minds on a range of social and economic issues.

The fracturing of right leaning parties and labour haemorrhaging voters to the greens is increasingly showing how little alignment there is around the centre. It also oddly reduces the validity of the argument that FPTP is the best system as increasingly a smaller and smaller percentage of voters are putting their cross in the box of the party that wins with a landslide.

The perilous state of Starmer & Reeves is really down to the fact that a minority of the public ever supported him/labour (and what they did vote for is not being honoured as the PLP never were on board with it and know that their seats owe very little to the personal authority of the PM). The idea that FPTP leads to stable governments is ebbing away.

Of course it’s a generalisation, the overton window is a general view.

I personally don’t think you can argue it’s inaccurate when you have a labour government pushing hardline immigration, anti lgbtq policy and using the old, sick and disabled as a scapegoat for their problems.

[GG.]

The perilous state of Starmer & Reeves is really down to the fact that a minority of the public ever supported him/labour

Thats pretty much always the case with the popular vote though?

2010 - 10.7m vote Tory (45m registered)
2014 - 9.7m vote labour (48m registered)

it’s less, but it’s not a staggeringly different number to the sort of ratios that normally win.

Even the years when there are more votes, the winners never really got more than 20% of the population voting for them.

That's not the metric that really counts as you have no idea whether the non voters would vote for or against whichever party got in.

What is more informative is what percentage of the voters got the party they wanted as you have evidence that the remainder were effectively overruled in their choice.

If you look at the graph here (https://www.statista.com/statistics/717 ... C4KE7lEP5l) you can see that Labour have an all time low level of support as a winning party as a percentage of the vote share (and that produced a landslide making it even more of an aberration). Yes it was only c. 1.5% higher in 2005 but that's a Labour government after three terms in power (and you have to disregard 2010 as that was a coalition of the Tories and Lib Dems). Most of the rest of the time the winning party was getting 40%+, not low 30s.

Basically we're plumbing the depths of correlation between voting and getting the party you voted for. The counterpoint to that would be that the Tories got higher percentages to implement Brexit and with Boris but that really is a distortion and not likely to happen next time.

[Rich B]

Voters or not, the “public” are included in a statement about the “minority of the public”. Which party has won with a majority of the public?