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Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss; who do you want to be Britain’s next prime minister?

Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss; who would you like to be Britain’s next Prime Minister?

  • Rishi Sunak

    Votes: 9 22.5%

  • Liz Truss

    Votes: 3 7.5%

  • Undecided

    Votes: 8 20.0%

  • They’re both awful

    Votes: 20 50.0%
  • Total voters
    40
Nitefly said:
I expect this government will limp along and recover substantially on opinion polls before the next election.

I think it will take even more shambles in the lead up to the election for the conservatives to be ousted, if we aren’t having an election now. The noise of life will keep people from remembering how bad they have been this year.

I was at the pub recently and chatting with a bunch of people who were very vocally opposed to the conservatives. I expressed that I had become incapable of supporting the party since their super-ominous ‘proroguing of parliament’…. and despite how anti-conservative they were, not one of them could remember the details of what happened. I’ve never heavily aligned myself for or against any political party, but I remain offended by that to this day. It was the death of UK politics - even worse than the mini-budget fiasco.

More details here - be warned it may make you feel ill.

2019 United Kingdom prorogation controversy - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org en.m.wikipedia.org

Edit: sorry, I had a similar rant on this forum earlier in the year. Seems that I have a short memory too.
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I wouldn’t be sure of anything at this point. While I wouldn’t be overly sure of a landslide Labour victory as the polls currently predict, I also wouldn’t be sure that the Conservatives will get back in either.

History suggests that governments who preside over fiscal crises, whether self-inflicted or not, do not tend to win the next election afterwards. James Callaghan’s Labour Party failed to recover from the Winter of Discontent and the associated financial crisis involving an IMF bailout, as Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party thrashed them at the 1979 election. John Major’s Conservative Party failed to recover from Black Wednesday, even though it happened in 1992 and the election was not until 1997, and they sustained the worst Conservative election result since 1906 at the 1997 election. Gordon Brown’s Labour Party, even though they did not cause it and Brown’s response was generally considered very good from what I can tell, never recovered from the 2008 financial crisis and were booted out in favour of the Conservative/LibDem coalition at the 2010 election.

One difference here, admittedly, is that the PM has changed, but the various unpopular events and policies that have happened since 2019 have certainly given Labour a plethora of potential attack lines to use against the Conservatives, and their recent publicity has focused on how “switching the Tory at the top changes nothing”.
 
Matt N said:
I wouldn’t be sure of anything at this point. While I wouldn’t be overly sure of a landslide Labour victory as the polls currently predict, I also wouldn’t be sure that the Conservatives will get back in either.

History suggests that governments who preside over fiscal crises, whether self-inflicted or not, do not tend to win the next election afterwards. James Callaghan’s Labour Party failed to recover from the Winter of Discontent and the associated financial crisis involving an IMF bailout, as Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party thrashed them at the 1979 election. John Major’s Conservative Party failed to recover from Black Wednesday, even though it happened in 1992 and the election was not until 1997, and they sustained the worst Conservative election result since 1906 at the 1997 election. Gordon Brown’s Labour Party, even though they did not cause it and Brown’s response was generally considered very good from what I can tell, never recovered from the 2008 financial crisis and were booted out in favour of the Conservative/LibDem coalition at the 2010 election.

One difference here, admittedly, is that the PM has changed, but the various unpopular events and policies that have happened since 2019 have certainly given Labour a plethora of potential attack lines to use against the Conservatives, and their recent publicity has focused on how “switching the Tory at the top changes nothing”.
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I hadn't connected those dots thanks... Gives us some hope of change in the next 2 years...

I'm not too sure how much of 1997's result was down to Black Wednesday though. Remembering it quite vividly, considering I was only 15, I cannot remember once any reference to Black Wednesday during the campaigns. The focus was more on the New 'centrist' Labour Party, and the charismatic young leader they offered up in comparison to John Major. Cracking down on crime, ending privatisation, banning fox hunting were all issues central to Labour's campaign, all of which resonated with the public mood at the time. There were also huge 'red top' campaigns of support for Labour in the run up, of the kind not seen since. That's not to say Black Wednesday wasn't a central issue, just that if it was, it passed me by, during the very first election I ever took any interest in. :)
 
Matt N said:
History suggests that governments who preside over fiscal crises, whether self-inflicted or not, do not tend to win the next election afterwards. James Callaghan’s Labour Party failed to recover from the Winter of Discontent and the associated financial crisis involving an IMF bailout, as Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party thrashed them at the 1979 election. John Major’s Conservative Party failed to recover from Black Wednesday, even though it happened in 1992 and the election was not until 1997, and they sustained the worst Conservative election result since 1906 at the 1997 election. Gordon Brown’s Labour Party, even though they did not cause it and Brown’s response was generally considered very good from what I can tell, never recovered from the 2008 financial crisis and were booted out in favour of the Conservative/LibDem coalition at the 2010 election.
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Thatcher also clung on to power despite the early 1980s recession. I wish great leaders like her still existed today. Totally different to today's buffoons.

Honestly, changing this many PMs with so vastly different agendas without calling a GA is completely against the principles of democracy. We also had an intra-party PM change last year but she carried on the same agenda as her predecessor. Now, 10 months later, she lost the election and is replaced by the opposition.
 
Of course, none of it really matters, neither the government, nor the prime minister, really run this country... The markets do.

It was the response of the markets that led to Liz Truss becoming the shortest serving PM in history, and it's the markets that will be used a gauge for measuring Rishi's success.

Are democracy and capitalism really compatible?

This makes for an interesting read... https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/fil...-_is_capitalism_compatible_with_democracy.pdf
 
Christian said:
Thatcher also clung on to power despite the early 1980s recession. I wish great leaders like her still existed today. Totally different to today's buffoons.

Honestly, changing this many PMs with so vastly different agendas without calling a GA is completely against the principles of democracy. We also had an intra-party PM change last year but she carried on the same agenda as her predecessor. Now, 10 months later, she lost the election and is replaced by the opposition.
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I lived under Thatcher, she was no great leader.
Starting off in education by stealing the milk from the mouths of primary kids...
Starved and stole from the poor, promoted the rich, and instructed the following two generations that "greed is good, and there is no need to share".
She was a monster against a civilised society in my mind.
Sunak is a better rich fool than the others recently, at least he didn't go to Eton.
 
rob666 said:
I lived under Thatcher, she was no great leader.
Starting off in education by stealing the milk from the mouths of primary kids...
Starved and stole from the poor, promoted the rich, and instructed the following two generations that "greed is good, and there is no need to share".
She was a monster against a civilised society in my mind.
Sunak is a better rich fool than the others recently, at least he didn't go to Eton.
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I didn't live under her but I have to admire her fight against communism, the greatest evil this world has ever known. Together with other world leaders such as Reagan and the Pope, she brought freedom to half of Europe. Freedom without which I wouldn't have existed.

Regarding domestic policies, she greatly strengthened the economy, bringing the UK out of perpetual decline. That's the same economy that today's lunatics are destroying.
 
Christian said:
I didn't live under her but I have to admire her fight against communism, the greatest evil this world has ever known. Together with other world leaders such as Reagan and the Pope, she brought freedom to half of Europe. Freedom without which I wouldn't have existed.

Regarding domestic policies, she greatly strengthened the economy, bringing the UK out of perpetual decline. That's the same economy that today's lunatics are destroying.
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Reagan was another racist greed monster, the dimmer partner in Bedtime for Bonzo.
Every opinion counts my friend, but I will never, ever consider those two great world leaders.
 
rob666 said:
Reagan was another racist greed monster, the dimmer partner in Bedtime for Bonzo.
Every opinion counts my friend, but I will never, ever consider those two great world leaders.
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Bedtime for Bonzo. A classic 🤣

Personally, I consider Thatcher and Reagan among the greatest leaders of the 20th century. Together with Pope John Paul II, Churchill, both Roosevelts, Ataturk, Adenauer, Lee Kuan Yew, etc. These are true legends.
 
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Christian said:
Personally, I consider Thatcher and Reagan among the greatest leaders of the 20th century. Together with Pope John Paul II, Churchill
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I respectfully disagree.
Many would never come out alive, for that "great democratic statesman," Winston Churchill--in collusion with that other "great democratic statesman," Franklin Delano Roosevelt--had decided that the city of Dresden was to be obliterated by saturation bombing.

What where Churchill's motives? They appear to have been political, rather than military. Historians unanimously agree that Dresden had no military value. What industry it did have produced only cigarettes and china.

But the Yalta Conference was coming up, in which the Soviets and their Western allies would sit down like ghouls to carve up the shattered corpse of Europe. Churchill wanted a trump card--a devastating "thunderclap of Anglo-American annihilation"--with which to "impress" Stalin.

That card, however, was never played at Yalta, because bad weather delayed the originally scheduled raid. Yet Churchill insisted that the raid be carried out--to "disrupt and confuse" the German civilian population behind the lines.

Dresden's citizens barely had time to reach their shelters. The first bomb fell at 10:09 p.m. The attack lasted 24 minutes, leaving the inner city a raging sea of fire. "Precision saturation bombing" had created the desired firestorm.
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In one ironic note, Dresden's only conceivable military target -- its railroad yards -- was ignored by Allied bombers. They were too busy concentrating on helpless old men, women and children.

If ever there was a war crime, then certainly the Dresden Holocaust ranks as the most sordid one of all time. Yet there are no movies made today condemning this fiendish slaughter; nor did any Allied airman--or Sir Winston--sit in the dock at Nuremberg. In fact, the Dresden airmen were actually awarded medals for their role in this mass murder. But, of course, they could not have been tried, because there were "only following orders."

This is not to say that the mountains of corpses left in Dresden were ignored by the Nuremberg Tribunal. In one final irony, the prosecution presented photographs of the Dresden dead as "evidence" of alleged National Socialist atrocities against Jewish concentration-camp inmates!

Churchill, the monster who ordered the Dresden slaughter, was knighted, and the rest is history. The cold-blooded sadism of the massacre, however, is brushed aside by his biographers, who still cannot bring themselves to tell how the desire of one madman to "impress" another one let to the mass murder of up to a half million men, women and children.
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Yes, the victims in question were under the Nazis, but still they ignored Dresden's only military target and basically concentrated entirely on the civvies. Or let's go to the Wikipedia article:
Several researchers assert that not all of the communications infrastructure, such as the bridges, were targeted, nor were the extensive industrial areas which were located outside the city centre.
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Nicky Borrill said:
Don't think he'd have the guts to make the difficult decisions... I heard he's a bit of a pu......
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The only good thing Thatcher did for Britain was speeding up punk's mainstream appeal.

The sooner an election is called the better; we need a government with an actual mandate after all this to'ing and fro'ing. And ideally on the side of the people at the bottom of the ladder. Every conservative I know always prattles off the same line: "if you want more money, get a better paying job". Like most tory catchphrases, it looks good on paper but doesn't really stand up to much scrutiny. E.g. Cleaners are a notoriously underpaid group, and one usually told to get a better job. But there will always need to be cleaners, so why should those people be paid less than their worth? "it should be a transitional job, or someone looking for a bit of pocket money" - why should it? What if someone just likes cleaning and needs a job during school hours? A single parent could fit a basically full-time job into school hours (at a push, maybe 80% FTE), and they should be able to support themselves and their family on that wage. And yes, "supporting" includes luxuries and holidays, otherwise it's just surviving.

(Plus I need the pound to go back up so our pay-on-arrival hotel next month gets a little cheaper)
 
^Yeah agree.

Like people say these jobs are only for school kids. Ok cool then I guess you are happy not being served alcohol or being able to buy stuff in school hours or late at night. Can't have it both ways!
 
Honestly at this point i think if Rishi gets booted out it would be terrible for everyone- he is a horrible PM, but another change of hands within the tories would just be pointless. I honestly hope Rishi just gives in and calls a GE soon, honestly i doubt he would, it would more than likely out his party from power for a while..
 
Did anyone expect when this thread opened that the answer might end up as "why not both?".

I look forward to the next round of strikes alongside the best interest rate rise.
 
Tonkso said:
Did anyone expect when this thread opened that the answer might end up as "why not both?".

I look forward to the next round of strikes alongside the best interest rate rise.
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Well I'm most looking forward to being dragged out of the ECHR... That should be a hoot 🙄

You've already taken away my European citizenship against my will, why not take my f**king human rights too hey?
 
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