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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

> It's time for an early General Election. Every trace of the Tories must be obliterated.

Sounds like completely unbiased opinion. /s

More seriously, I'm only interested in hearing the arguments for a general election from nominal conservative (Tory) supporters. All arguments from leftists are just "we want to win" in disguise so are completely untrustworthy.

From what I understand of UK politics, Johnson won the last election on policy (he was already PM) and lost his seat because of COVID shenanigans so presumably the Tories still have public mandate to continue the same policies (maybe not the Lizz agenda though).

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> All arguments from leftists are just "we want to win"

The argument is that the party is being eviscerated in opinion polling, they’ve lost the support of the public and that since they're effectively doomed they're free to do what we know they love to do - attempt to secure themselves a role in the private sector for after the election. Given that this it the Conservative party, it's not exactly a secret that they'll try their best to gut the state in order to do so.

And the idea that Labour in 2022 is “leftist” is laughable. The party threw an election and enacted a campaign to remove members it considered left-wing (“trot hunting”). They’re not the left, they’re just probably not going to actively fuck up the country quite as severely as the Conservatives seem hellbent on doing

The idea of "election every 4/5 years" is that in the meantime, politicians can do momentarily unpopular things.

They are far beyond momentarily unpopular right now. A policy blip that would lose the Tories a few dozen seats - VAT or income tax hike - is one thing. What they’re facing is an extraordinary collapse. They’re polling as if they’d just enacted prohibition and banned football

They're not doing "momentarily unpopular things", they are deliberately destroying the country to make themselves a bit of cash.

Conservatives are all - without exception - junkies. Addicts. Criminal junkie addicts, who will steal all they can to sell off for a bit of cash for their fix, although in this case the fix is the cash.

> All arguments from leftists are just "we want to win" in disguise so are completely untrustworthy.

I don't understand how you can argue for an unbiased situation and then disregard the entire left side of the political spectrum. How can election results represent anything other than the will of the public?

I 100% support direct democracy but don't really see the point of having general election (i.e. electing representatives that then vote instead of you) ahead of schedule.

Do you feel the same about when the conservative government called for an election in 2017 ahead of schedule?

Yes, and fortunately they were punished for it.

Election timing shouldn’t be gameable.

It's an extremely biased opinion, and I make no apologies.

I think every single living member of every Tory cabinet present and past should be strung up in Parliament Square. I'm not in any sense unclear about my views on them.

We have had twelve years of disastrous Tory austerity that has comprehensively destroyed the UK's economy. What's the plan? Let them keep trying until they get something right? How long is it supposed to take for their austerity policies to work, to get the economy back to a sensible state?

This viewpoint is both evil (literally wanting to kill people... like the "best" politicians of the 20th century! /s) and delusional (UK had approximately 0 GDP growth since 2010, like other main European countries - so I doubt it was Brexit or Tories)

https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPDPC@WEO/DEU/FRA/...

So I should be tolerant of the people that have killed a couple of million people and destroyed the country?

At what point is it okay to no longer be tolerant of them?

How many people did the government led by Tony Blair kill, by the way? Or do we only care about British lives?

Being anti-Tory does not imply you're pro-Blair. I'd happily send Tony Blair to the Hague to answer for his crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

You seem to conveniently forget that Tories in parliament won him that vote. All the usual Tory rags (the Sun, Dailies Mail and Express and the Times) were all extremely hawkish, as we’re the leading Tories.

Tony Blair needs a brief visit to The Hague followed by an even shorter visit to a firing squad.

Gordon Brown selling off our gold reserves wasn't the smartest move. But as you mention, the UK hasn't seen growth in our GDP since 2010. Which Party has been in power since May of 2010?

@dang, here's a member calling for the execution of members of a political party.

No - he’s expressing an opinion; “I think…”.

Let’s pretend he meant “strung up and tickled”.

This is the unintentionally-funniest comment I've seen on here for a while. Thank you.

> All arguments from leftists…

Clearly unbiased opinion. /s

It's important to note that in the UK we do not vote for a PM we vote for an MP in the seat we live in.

I'm not a labour supporter, but I'd like to see a general election as it's obvious that the conservatives can't agree internally on a policy platform or candidate to lead. They are split between an authoritarian group and a libertarian group who don't want the same things at all.

Johnson lost due to repeatedly lying to parliament, plus a large number of unforced errors where he ended up having to perform U-Turns after choosing badly and then being forced to change by events. Covid was part of that, but far from the only part of that.

Ideally the UK should have a system of proportional representation, so that the bits of the different parties that actually agree on policies could form their own parties (Labour has similar split problems to the conservatives, but along different axis)

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