Talk:2017 United Kingdom general election/Archive1

Section title added later so it would archive properly
What would happen if there was a voters' strike/people marked their papers 'present but not voting'/everybody voted for the 'fun' party candidates? 31.51.114.96 (talk) 12:24, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I sense an underlying dissatisfaction with having an early election. Same here, and I love elections, I follow them like other people follow sports or TV series. this is the first unnecessary election since probably 1951. Anyway: if everybody voted for the joke candidates, then the joke candidates would win - a candidate is a candidate. This has in fact happened in the past, when Boris Johnson became mayor of London a football mascot was elected mayor of Hartlepool. Voting "present but not voting"? Hmm well, there's no such option on the ballot paper, and writing it in would simply make it a spoilt paper and not counted. So I guess the only votes would be from party activists etc - a tiny number. Bicycle  wheel Toxic mowse.gif 13:56, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
 * 'Present but not voting' - a passing reference to the story about Jeremy Bentham at University College London official meetings.
 * A House of Commons with 'several hundred' parties would be interesting: especially if turnout was very low. 31.51.114.96 (talk) 21:45, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
 * low voter turn outonly helps the tories.AMassiveGay (talk) 22:45, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
 * In my experience, Labour has the unfortunate distinction of being the party of people who don't bother going to the polling station.-- Forerunner (talk) 23:48, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Basically, the more money people have, the more likely they are to vote. More to lose, you see. Bicycle  wheel Toxic mowse.gif 11:43, 26 April 2017 (UTC)
 * it doesnt help that corbyn has all the charisma of a sponge. AMassiveGay (talk) 21:21, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Candidates and UK citizenship test
If candidates were made to sit the citizenship test the results might be 'interesting.' 86.146.100.79 (talk) 12:55, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

See Life in the United Kingdom test 82.44.143.26 (talk) 18:23, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

What should worry everyone most about May...
... is probably her seemingly endless opportunism and mendacity, the level of which is rather astounding, even by the standard of professional politicians.

May ostensibly supported her former boss, Just-Call-Me-Dave in his Remain campaign, but did it in such a low-key, under the radar, ostrich tactical way that she could morph into first a "healer" between Tory Brexiteers and Remainers, then subsequently exchanged that guise for one that had little problem with the hardest of hard Brexits.

May held a much commented-on accession speech that was full of pre-Thatcher One Nation Toryism (parts of it would not have seemed amiss in a Corbyn speech...), but then did a 180 to become more Thatcherist than the late Iron Lady herself.

May and the Brexiteers cheered about "taking back control" from Brussels to Westminster, then tried to shut Parliament out of the process entirely and were less than courteous in their reactions when the courts struck down this approach.

May scolded the opposition and the SNP for calling, respectively, for Westminster elections and another independence referendum, citing the need for country to pull together through the uncertainties of Brexit and (correctly) pointing out that the scheduled 2020 elections would allow for Brexit to be finalised by the current Parliament. Then, when her shambolic "negotiation" "strategy" became ever more obviously ludicrous and could no longer be drowned out by her jingoistic pandering to the tabloids and she saw an opportunity to clobber Labour, May suddenly called a snap June election, Brexit negotiations and stability be damned.

It seems to me that May has had a curious way to the top that can best be called "the carrion tactic": Lie in waiting, counting on your opponents to fuck up, then arrive at the scene of battle in time to shoot the wounded and feast on the corpses. The only problem is that this is a poor preparation for the day when you actually have to lead the army.

Witness the tragicomedy of how her cabinet has flailed around for a Brexit negotiation strategy, first trying to get the (other) EU states to set the scene, then waffling on about the cabinet's own "secret plan", which should not be revealed lest the cabinet "tips its hand", only for leaks (probably from civil servants deeply frustrated and offended by the complete lack of leadership and willingness to set a clear course for a nation adrift) to reveal that there essentially was no strategy. Then May tried to threaten and browbeat the (other) EU (member states) into letting her cabinet cherry pick the bits and parts of the "EU package" they liked and subsequently acted outraged when rejected, making a scene of being put upon by those nasty foreigners in the (other) EU (member states) who were unfairly ganging up and picking on poor, lonesome Britain.

May seems to have few obvious principles apart from some vague conservative, moralistic authoritarianism that conveniently dovetails with her opportunistic pursuit of power by centering state powers in her cabinet. She similarly has a worrying tendency to pander to tabloids by bombastic "Rule Britannia'esque" jingoistic grandstanding, rather than actually dealing with the issues at hand. Given her record of extreme flipflopping and vague sloganeering, it is rather unclear what, at heart, May stands for and in which direction (if any...) she wants to lead the UK. Her dislike of actually confronting her political opponents (chiefly Corbyn, Farron, Nuttall Sturgeon) head to head during the campaign and her habit of trying to answer clear, obvious, apt and direct questions by waffling and weaselling, essentially saying as little as possible, augers even less well for a likely May cabinet after the election. ScepticWombat (talk) 20:41, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
 * I don't think she wants to lead the Party, jor can she. She can't even have an election without fucking it up. And the British thought their hand for Brexit was bad then...RoninMacbeth (talk) 22:58, 10 July 2017 (UTC)