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To a certain extent I understand courting the fringes of your party every now and then. But for the life of me I don't understand making that cohort the main goal of your increasingly nuttier and nuttier rhetoric.
What is this electoral calculus?
It's actually rather brilliant.
In an (d)effective 2 party system like ours, running to your extremes has few costs, since the electorate tend to vote parties out rather than vote them in. When the public tires of the ruling party (it helps if you own most of the media) and you do get elected, it's by:
- your base that votes for you regardless
- new voters from the fringe you've been courting
- people who've convinced themselves that you're just pretending to be crazy to court that fringe.
Now you can do whatever you like and if people complain they get shouted down by both sides: "What did you expect? They literally told you they were going to do this."
In short, it's how you drag the Overton Window toward that extreme. If only the Left in this country had figured this out years ago, we wouldn't be saddled with Sir Red Tory.
Maybe those views constitute more than the fringes when it comes to the Tory party.
He's got to appeal to the Tory base who are mostly racist boomers who were never taught about colonialism outside of how the British showed up and tried to civilize the savages.
Maybe within the Tory party, for sure. I can believe that. But does he not want the Conservatives to be electable in a general election scenario.
I'm not trying to be funny, but isn't this exactly what Labour did with the Corbyn years? Appealed to what looked like a large majority of their membership that turned out to be spectacularly unpopular at a general election level.
I cannot believe the Tories want to repeat this lesson. I mean, if they want to be out of office for a decade then that's cool with me.
Maybe Jenrick could do what Starmer did - make some radical statements to win over the party and become leader, then soften your stance to become more electable to the general public later on.
I'd hope he sends the Tories further down in parliament such that the strong opposition is the Lib Dems. The Tories can language in Green or SNP territory.
Sounds just the sort of thing a tory leader would say.
This guy is on fire today: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8dmq88j6rro
Sort of deploying the Royal Navy to sink every small boat they can find in the channel, I’m struggling to see how he would stop the boats (tm) in weeks.