Tories Leap Into the Unpopularity Abyss 249


The official Conservative party spokesman, Laura Kuenssberg, has just announced that Theresa May will remain as Prime Minister, supported by the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland. Now the DUP are probably the most unpleasant bunch of individuals in organised politics in the UK. The “No Surrender” arch protestant bigot party founded by Ian Paisley.

It is fascinating that, after an election in which the Tories and their mainstream media acolytes attacked Jeremy Corbyn at every opportunity for his alleged sympathies with the IRA, the Tories have come to an arrangement with a party that was from its inception and still is the political wing of the loyalist terrorism. The mainstream media never even mentioned the existence of Loyalist terrorism during its sustained attack on Jeremy Corbyn.

The loyalist terrorists murdered 1,016 people in the period 1969-2001. They shot someone dead in a supermarket car park in an internecine dispute actually during the election campaign. In all the media attacks on Corbyn about the IRA, there was no acknowledgement that Loyalist terrorism even existed. I think we can be pretty certain that the media are not going to start digging into the terrorist links of the Tories’ allies now. But social media is going to discredit them.

The DUP are corrupt, homophobic, racist and above all religious bigots of the worst kind. The nastiest people in politics. The utterly discredited Theresa May refuses to resign and intends to continue to rule over us with the support of this ugly faction. Popular support for the Tory government is going to plunge to unprecedented levels. This gruesome malformation of a bigots’ alliance between Brexiteers is not going to last long as a government, and the popular retribution will be massive.

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249 thoughts on “Tories Leap Into the Unpopularity Abyss

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    • Frank Kemp

      This election result is good news indeed for the SNP and Scottish Independence.

      The last one was a disaster for three reasons: 1.No hung parliament
      2.SNP humiliate Better Together with one seat each. 3.Tory government.

      This time we have a hung parliament but, more importantly, we have allies.

      Labour, LibDem, and DUP all support SNP demands for a soft Brexit with full
      market access.

      If this means full membership or EFTA is not so important. What is important
      is a discussion with our new allies of which option would be best.

      Suddenly we can have a discussion at Holyrood on the same topic with LibDem
      and Labour.

      SNP can’t win independence alone. We need allies.

    • JOML

      35 seats out of 59. They will be disappointed as I suspect they expected 40 seats. Remain the third largest party at Westminster.

      • JOML

        Ishmael, yer arithmetic is pish pal. Up until 2 years ago, the SNP had never had more than 11 seats. 35 is good, could have been better, but they were never going to get 50+ again. They have more seats in Scotland than all the other parties put together, so I’m not even sure why I’m responding to your post. You are obviously ignorant of the political scene and political history here in Scotland.

        • defo

          If it doesn’t have ‘Muslim’ on the tin, it’s outside his sphere of competence.

  • JOML

    This will suit Murdo ‘Queen’s 11’ Fraser and his leader Ruth, given who she was socialising with during the GE campaign.
    But, joking aside, bloody hell!

  • AdrianD

    I’m very much delighted by the result from here in Hove, but am concerned by the Tories manufacturing another election in conditions designed to nullify as much as possible the Labour surge in young voters (Uni holidays etc) or to attempt to force through something on registration.

    If Labour can clear the stables in the meantime though (Dugdale has to be expelled) that would be good.

  • Ishmael

    It’s all like .

    Too few have come. We cannot defeat the armies of Mordor.?… No, we cannot……But we will meet them in battle none the less…

    …Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter! Spears shall be shaken, shield be splintered, a sword-day, a RED day, ere the sun rises!

    What a victory.

  • john Gerard

    The DUP are involved in the cover up of the “Ash for Cash” scandal. Subsidies were paid to companies and not capped and the more heat a business generated, the higher the subsidy it received. Arlene Foster head of the DUP ignored repeated calls for her to step aside while an investigation was carried out into the scheme – which could cost taxpayers in the North in the region of £400 million (about €460 million), possibly more. Sinn Féin withdrew from the NI Assembly and it will be interesting to see if direct rule from London comes about, implications about the Good Friday Agreement also arise.

  • el Deco

    don’t forget their climate change stance as well (and their corruption)

    “Despite being climate change deniers, they used their role in government in Northern Ireland to set up a subsidy scheme for biofuels, which gave those who bought into it more money than they had to pay out. The Northern Irish exchequer ended up paying out around half a billion pounds to those who knew about the scheme, leading to a scandal known as ‘cash for ash’, and a major investigation into whether DUP staff and supporters personally benefited. ”

    https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/adam-ramsay/so-who-are-dup

  • Paul Hale

    Do not forget that when Troops went into Ulster to help in the troubles they were first fired upon by loyalist gunmen. That was in 1969 I believe.

  • Macky

    Talking of bigots, what nobody seems to have noticed,, especially our dear Host, is that the shift of UKIP votes to Labour shows that many BREXITERS are NOT simply Right Wing racists.

    • Notrandl

      Hear Hear. I’m very pro-remain, but have many Brexit supporting friends who are anything but right wing. I should have taken a photo of a news stand I saw the day before the referendum. Mail, Express, Sun and Telegraph, all calling to leave… alongside the Morning Star

    • Aim Here

      Are you sure there was a significant shift from UKIP to Labour? When I was checking out the seats last night, in terms of raw vote numbers, the Tory increase generally matched the UKIP decrease; if you’re looking at vote percentages, it looks more like UKIP votes were split both ways, but that doesn’t factor in increased turnout, which likely benefitted Labour.

      Basically, UKIP would lose 4000 votes, Tories would gain 4000 votes (maybe from UKIP), and Labour would gain 4000 votes (maybe mostly from first-time voters), and the percentage shift would look like ‘UKIP -10%, Lab +5% Con +5%’. If you only look at percentages, you might be misled and think the UKIP transfer was more diverse than it was.

        • Aim Here

          The FT is severely paywalled; you’ll need to link me to something I CAN read before I’ll consider changing my mind.

          • Ba'al Zevul

            It was perfectly possible to be a Labour voter and vote Leave (as I am and did). The numbers voting Leave were far in excess of those voting UKIP at its peak. Hence the shift from Labour to UKIP and back (real enough at least in the northeast) is something of a distraction.

          • Aim Here

            Oh, I’m not denying that there are leavers in left-wing areas; I’m sure there was some transfer from UKIP to Labour; but most of the ‘UKIP voters switched to Labour’ comments I’ve seen are making the mistake of not taking increased turnout into account.

            As a rough guide, in very broad strokes, when third parties didn’t change much, last night’s pattern was something like (decrease in UKIP votes + increase in Turnout = increase in Labour votes + increase in Tory votes), and my observations, mostly in the earliest declared seats, i.e NE England, which is Labour + UKIP territory, was that the four numbers were roughly even. I’d expect the turnout increase to be mostly younger or previously disaffected, Labour-supporting voters, and so the UKIP decrease would have had to offset that by going mostly Tory.

            I’d be surprised if post-election polls show the UKIP voters, even in the North East, to have mostly transferred to Labour – at best, it’ll be a significant minority.

    • Ishmael

      Well noted.

      tbf I have had similar feeling about nationalism = racism (in practice). But these are terms that can’t be used in such general and fixed defined ways.

      Most politicians love to of course so they can make swell sounding pronouncements. “rape is rape”, “brexit is brexit” or racist is racist.

    • Rob Royston

      Could it not have been that the UKIP votes returned to the Tories and many Tories changed to Labour?

  • reel guid

    How does Ruth Davidson keep winning elections in Scotland? She led the Tories to victory in the 2016 Holyrood election with 22% of the vote. She won the council elections last month with 155 fewer seats than the SNP. Now she’s won the Westminster vote in Scotland with 13 MPs.

    What’s her secret?

    • el Deco

      dark money

      https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/brexitinc/adam-ramsay-peter-geoghegan/dark-money-driving-scottish-tory-surge

      “Tory election spending in Scotland has more than trebled in five years. In the 2011 Scottish parliament election, the Tories spent nearly £275,000. In the 2016 election, they splashed out £978,921.07: more than three and a half times as much.

      It should be easy to find out where all this money has come from. Thanks to the laws of the United Kingdom, any donation over £7,500 has to be registered and the source of the donation named. So: a search of the Electoral Commission website should easily provide the answer of who has been paying for this unprecedented Tory spending spree. Except that it doesn’t.

      Partly, this seems to be because most of the donations come through the UK-wide office. But partly, it’s because a significant amount of the cash seems to have come through obscure trusts and unincorporated associations.

      Looking only at the year running up to the Holyrood vote last year, here are some examples of what we found.
      The Irvine Unionist Club

      In April 2016, a group called the Irvine Unionist Club gave the North Ayrshire Conservative and Unionist Association £100,000. In order for a group like the Irvine Unionist Club – an Unincorporated Association – to give a donation of more than £25,000, it has to be legally registered with the Electoral Commission, and declare any donations to it of more than £7,500. The Irvine Unionist Club doesn’t seem to appear on the list of registered donors, and Googling it reveals almost nothing, meaning that we don’t know where their money came from.”

    • Leonard

      “How does Ruth Davidson keep winning elections in Scotland?”

      Because Scotland still remembers the Nu Labour campaign run by Jim Murphy and his execrable thug amanuensis John Mcternan – which finished Labour off. It will take a while yet for the Corbyn effect to overturn all the damage Murphy did.

      • reel guid

        The essential thing about my comment has been missed. Ruth Davidson and the Tories don’t win elections in Scotland. Not by a long way. Yet the unionist defending media keep presenting the narrative that they have won.

        • JOML

          But, Reel guid, the BBC news has just said it was a “great” night for the Tories, with the swing from the SNP to the Tories was the “story of the night”! ?
          Ruth on right now saying “we must listen to the people of the UK”, but presumably this doesn’t include those who voted in 35 SNP MPs.

          • reel guid

            JOML

            I wonder if there’s some obscure medical condition where those afflicted keep thinking lower numbers are higher and higher numbers lower. If there is such a condition then Ruth Davidson surely has it. And so have quite a few folk at the BBC.

        • Leonard

          “Yet the unionist defending media keep presenting the narrative that they have won.”

          I agree with you there. But would you expect any different from the Beeb? Anyone but the SNP or Corbyn is their default position, and their preferred choice of Blairites spectacularly backfired on them when they colluded with Murphy to create bogus “thugs” and “intimidation” that simply did not exist in the previous election. Their shameful coverage continues even this afternoon with their Vox pop interviews in York, where not a single Corbyn voter was included in the discussion.

          Meanwhile Jo Coburn carries on as usual, with her poisonous, biased, bitchy coverage along with the neo-con BBC panellists “analysing” the election, as if Dimbleby wasn’t already enough to stomach last night.

  • Ian M

    If only the SNP could have held on, we could have had a Labour/SNP coalition. What a pity the shameless cynic Davidson turned the Scottish vote into a referendum issue which never was. Oh, and thanks Sonn Fein for being utterly useless with your pointless posturing and allowing the Neanderthal DUP to hold the reins.
    And lastly, could the horrible representative for no-one, Farage, get off the airwaves with his egotistical braying and threatening.

    • Geoge

      Imagine if Kez hadn’t told Labour supporters to vote Tory to keep the SNP out – Corbyn could be in Downing Street now.

        • Suhayl Saadi

          Scotland had very many Tories – working class and middle class – until Thatcher came along and devasted the country durin the 1980s. The Tories had most seats in Scotland in the 1950s and still had loads of seats until the 1980s. Glasgow Cathcart was Teddy Taylor’s seat. East Renfrewshire was Betty Harvey-Anderson’;s seat for many years.

          I’m glad I – and the bookies! – were wrong, btw, about ther being a Tory majority at Westminster! Just wish they had been booted out.

  • defo

    Away Craig. Have you seen who Ruthless D is mates with? DUP/ScotCon. Twa cheeks, of the same erse.

  • Uzbek in the UK

    “The official Conservative party spokesman, Laura Kuenssberg”

    Completely agree. BUT why is she paid from our (public) TV licence fees? What kind of society we live in?

      • Ishmael

        You post that kind of convoluted……stuff.

        Like those refugees children’s lives don’t matter.

        Sick blind nationalism that the USA (more than anyone) uses to destroy lives in the counties they don’t belong in… Just for money, Then bitch about the consequences like they don’t belong to them.

        • Loony

          No mate. My question is why do you think that it is a good idea to commemorate the violent death of children, including prepubescent children, by singing songs about hands covered with male ejaculate and girls having sex so hard that they cannot walk in a straight line.

          This has nothing to do with refugees, US nationalism, Islam, Western foreign policy or any other diversion that you can think of in order to evade responsibility for your own grotesque immorality. The very fact that you would even attempt to deploy such patently bogus arguments in order to distract from this hideous perversion tells people all they need to know.

          The UK should lobby the Pope to beatify Jimmy Savile and have done with it.

      • Ishmael

        Let me just translate this for people.

        Islam, Islam, It ISALM that’s the problem. Islam Islam Islam.

        (defiantly NOT US foreign policy)

  • Uzbek in the UK

    It was probably good election for Corbyn to loose. Let Brexit dust to settle. Since hard Brexit is almost certainly not an option now, let Tories deal with this mess they plunged us into.

    I am hopeful that Corbyn will lead Labour to the victory in next election and (less hopeful but still hopeful) that we will have fairer society after that.

    • Ba'al Zevul

      It was a good election for anyone to lose, agreed. Corbyn would be well advised to avoid forming a government, even if circumstances ( like a Tory MP dying of apoplexy) demand it. Should Buck House object, “No, Ma’am, they broke it, they can fix it.” should be the mantra.

      • Habbabkuk

        I tend to agree. It would be fun if Mr Jeremy Corbyn were to form a government and it would be even greater fun to see him implement all his election bribes (sorry, promises)…or not.

    • philw

      It will be hard Brexit or no Brexit.

      I agree with Varoufakis that the EU will exact the maximum amount of pain, even if it hurts the EU (most of the pain there will probably shifted to Greece anyway).

      I expect them to leave a way open for us not to leave, (probably being negotiated right now in utmost secrecy) and there to be a second referendum to see if the public can come up with the right answer.

      I think the reason for this election was to kill off UKIP and Corbyn, buy off the crazies (blood sports/grammar schools/etc) and get in a load of malleable new MPs.

      Given how it actually turned out, I think the Blairite neoliberals will split from Labour, and go into Government with the Tory neoliberals (under Hammond ? Fox?) to see through Brexref2

  • nevermind

    Thanks for this clear post of what is to come. If the Tory’s haven’t realised it yet, The EU will want to face a more concerted team, i.e. a representative from Scotland Wales and NI, on the team.
    faced with a knuckle dragging DUP man across the table, one can envisage what negotiators might make of such right wing poser in front of them.

    did you say cooperate with the Tories or did you mean disassortitive mating?

  • Gulliver

    If the DUP tail is to wag the Tory Dog I guess we’ll learn pretty soon of the DUP are going to put the economic interests of the people of NI above their own bigotry.

    I am not hopeful.

  • David Holbrook

    Too true – Gerry Adams should take up SF seats in support of Corbyn’s record as sincere and consistent peace-with-honour-maker in N Ireland

    • nevermind

      Exactly, they can always cross their fingers and toes when they have tea with the queen.

  • nevermind

    Its not just Amber Rud who slithered back in. Norwich North candidate Chloe Smith, who had done such a great job having a baby, had to rely on the Lib Dem, Green candidates to get herself re elected. What a farce that was, Dr. Jones, 516 extra votes would have changed a lot, we would have had a dedicated NHS supporter in the House of Commons.

    Chloe Smith (CON) 21,900, Chris Jones (LAB) 21,393, Hugh Lanham (LIB DEM)1,480, Adrian Holmes (GREEN) 782, Liam Matthews (PIRATE) 340

    • Sharp Ears

      By rights, without establishment interference including the BBC blanking, Craig should have had that seat.

  • Gavin MacMillan

    13 Tory seats – less than 25% of Scottish seats. so how this is Tory Scotland forcing a Tory government onto England, I completely fail to see. Now back under your rock like the good little xenophobic troll you are…

    • fred

      Even with the DUP the Conservatives will only have a majority of three. Without those twelve Scottish MPs they couldn’t form a government.

      We seem to have a lot of very grumpy nasty name calling Nationalists this morning, they may claim they won but they certainly don’t act like it.

  • J

    They still don’t have a majority against the rest of the parties, who with enough will,can block everything the Tories attempt to do until the next election, or form an alliance. There would be a great deal of support for that I would have thought.

      • Ultraviolet

        That would depend on the Tories being united.

        With the likes of David Davis and some of his colleagues being staunchly pro civil liberties, Theresa’s chances of getting her terror agenda through are minimal. Ken Clarke, Anna Soubry and others will be a thorn in her side on Brexit. Many others will have their own policy issues where they are keen to extract concessions for their support; and if you have a small contingent of irreconcilables on both sides of an issue, the only way through will be with opposition votes.

        That is why coalitions of chaos like this rarely last more than a few months, and do immense damage to the party leading them.

  • Mike Cooke

    I agree that DUP is awful, but I found it interesting that unlike the hard Brexit Tories, the DUP representative I saw interviewed wanted a soft border with the Republic. The Tories are now so right wing that they are overtaken on the left by the DUP!

    • Kerch'ee Kerch'ee Coup

      It seems the closer to Scotland ,geographically and???, or within closer spitting distance of it like North Antrim, the higher the DUP share of the vote. There should be a Bann on it.

  • Bugger le Panda

    They also have back door channels to the proddy murder gangs run by MI5 and M I., which they displayed in George Sq the day after Indy Ref 1

    That was our warning?

  • Ishmael

    Yep, so we gota keep at it. Better than yesterday.

    I do hope the SNP can get their stuff together. People are really relying, need that.

    We are where we are I guess and need to make the most.

  • David EDWARDS-LOARING

    The leader of the Nasty Party recruiting her bullies in the DUP to prop up her Government. How can the British public now sit comfortable with a leader doing an election deal with Terrorist’s. She has sold her principles for less than 30peices of silver.

  • Trowbridge H. Ford

    The way I see it, May will still not have a working majority with the DUP.

    Why no mention of where the SNP and the LDP stand?

    They should be more willing to work with Corbyn than May.

  • Shirley Moir

    I for one will share this on Facebook and any thing else which will bring this unholy alliance into disrepute

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