UK Politics Thread

yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/how-is-the-uk-government-handling-climate-change

There is a not insignificant minority (~25%) that feel the government is doing and spending too much on climate change.

However, if you break it down by party voting behaviour, it's really a almost irrelevantly small proportion for each of the parties, other than the conservatives (~35%).

It looks like their doing the same with climate change as they did with euro-scepticism. Picking a wedge issue within the Tories and using it as using it to pick off votes by attrition.

At least now the clothes issue is sorted so i can sleep at night

So smoooth...

I do find it weird that the clothes is the thing most people and the media are hung up on. It is effectively just a party donation to help them get into power and £20k is fairly small fry. I'm sure if Labour had said to Lord Alli that they wanted to spend the money on leaflets they could have and it would have gone completely unnoticed. Buying the clothes equally has an actual purpose towards getting elected though.

Personally, I find the hospitality Arsenal tickets more egregious (more so, but still not enough for me to care that much), as there is no purpose to that other than for Starmer to enjoy the football. Even that has more nuance than is allowed though, as he is paying for the season ticket and is given the box for security reasons. I'm sure he would rather be in the stands with the other fans.

Also worth noting that the numbers of freebies Labour in opposition have received might seem high by comparison to what the government received, but that is because government ministers don't need to declare freebies if they are part of the responsibilities. So, those tickets to the latest West End show that get given to Minister of Culture don't have to be declared, but the shadow minister would have to.

In the grand scheme of things though, none of this really matters. Handled correctly, this should have gone away after a day or two and we shouldn't still be speaking about it for however long this has been going on.

The fundamental problem is that if you’re going to campaign on change, people expect fucking change.

They needed to be whiter than white and it didn’t take mystic meg so see that they were going to immediately get hammered for hiring their families into fake jobs and taking ‘gifts’, declared or not, from millionaire donors.

People *do* expect them to be better than the tories. They have a weight of expectation that they won’t act like money grabbing cunts and I don’t think that’s actually unfair.

I'm genuinely amazed they didn't realise that. I'm just as disappointed they didn't realise how bad it would look as I am by them acting like they're just the same as any other bunch of MPs (mainly because I always believed the latter anyway)

This is the head-smacking thing. I have had a ‘herp derp Labour can’t fix everything in a month’ from someone about this but this is exactly the kind of thing that’s in their gift to fix *immediately*.

It was bent when the tories did it, it’s bent when Labour do it.

We complained about everyone wetting their beaks for years and these should have been day one, hour one, minute one rule changes.

Bent in the way that there is no such thing as a free lunch. There is a gulf between ‘it was properly declared’ and it being morally acceptable for a public servant to accept goods and services from millionaire businessmen.

I think a few pages back here or somewhere else people were sharing stories of how they can't accept anything from anybody in their work in case shock horror they give one supplier slightly preferential treatment or some bollocks. Quite right too. The PM of the country tho? Someone who can change the law or get people sent to die in foreign lands. Yeah, whatever, anybody can give whatever they want, as long a they tell us?

Fuck off. If people are giving significant chunks of money, they're expecting *something* in return. They're not idiots. And they're doing that to one of if not the most powerful people in the country? Come on.

I just take any gift that comes my way. At least I would if anyone would bother to...

Ultimately, it's about the optics. If we get down into the morality of donations to political parties, we're going to have to construct an entire new system, because the Conservative party is literally funded by donations from rich individuals and companies.

At what point does "I'm going to donate to this party because these are the types of policies I believe will work."; become "I scratch your back, now you scratch mine."?

Issue is this is the sort of thing they have been calling others out for over the years. The press was always going to start going for them as soon as they got in power.

I didn't think labour would start turning on one another this quickly though.

You just know that the the right wing press are digging away trying to find something that allows them to link Starmer’s time at the CPS to the Fayed rapeyness.

It's pretty easy to make a distinction between making a donation to a party generally, and making specific donations to individuals in power and influencing their decision making. So I'd start there. Ofc large donors are also having an influence but that I think is a harder nut to crack.