I lived through the Blair government. Some left wing people were upset because he was on the right of the Labour Party, but things did indeed get a lot better in those ten years. Not everything by any stretch of the imagination. But no one expected him to make things better for gay people but not only did the legal situation change but the mood music affected the nation’s morals for the better for a while. It became socially far less acceptable to hate on gay folk. Could happen again, but I get why you might be cynical.

It’s altogether the wrong question.

Imagine a class who are excited to have a new teacher because the old one was a git and the new one seemed to be not a git, and one of the kids says “I’ll get bullied either way.” If one of the other kids says “What classroom rules do I have that you don’t?” that kid is starting an irrelevant discussion and either doesn’t understand, doesn’t care about, or supports the bullying that the first kid experiences and no adult would be particularly surprised if it turns out that the kid counting rules was in the same friend group as the bullies.

You see, if there’s a rule saying don’t pick on kids who have red hair and you start a conversation about how many rules there are about brown haired kids vs red haired kids, you either don’t understand why that rule exists at all, or you get it perfectly well and want to abolish it.

If you’re complaining that you have fewer rights than someone who has the right to not be discriminated against because they have a protected characteristic under the human rights act, you’re being self absorbed and insensitive at best, and no adult will be surprised if you turn out to have said a lot of very unkind things about trans people in the past.

Well, the shit of foxes, but yeah, bit unfair that.

With fox shit, you can put it in the bin and never see it again, but Farage is more of a stinky, greasy, smearing, permanently unflushable turd that’s been hanging about in the loo for decades. Every so often you think he’s gone away, but it turns out he was just lurking the other side of the u bend and pops back again.

Don’t you wish we’d chosen chaos with Ed Milliband instead of the Conservative’s Long Term Economic Plan?

If Rory Stewart were standing in my constituency, I would be very tempted to vote for him. In his work he’s now an advocate of alleviating many of the problems in the poorest communities globally by giving no-conditions cash. Who knew that the problems of poverty could be solved with money?!!!

He’s also a reasonable person and one who I think genuinely wants good things for the country in general rather than just for rich folk. He actually wants Britain to be governed well and in the interests of the population. He has some blind spots of course, he wouldn’t be a Conservative of he didn’t, but he’s decent and there’s hope that he can be persuaded by evidence of benefit.

This is surely right - we really don’t know where the undecided voters will go, and if a week is a long time in politics, five of them is an eternity.

The Conservatives are, and always have been, the Nasty Party.

I need my arsehole, though.

I mean it’s not a lot of fun, but the alternatives are much worse.

If my seat could go Tory or Lib Dem, I’d vote Lib Dem every day and twice on Thursdays.

I nominate you for best written sentence on the Internet today.

The only reason it’s not a tax is to save older, more likely-to-vote generations (who have a higher earnings differential from their degrees than younger folk) from having to pay it too, concentrating the cost on the currently-young.

Awful Awful Awful.

Young people don’t want to give up their weekends doing unpaid “mandatory volunteer” work either, though. There’s no actually good option here for young people.

Let them get a good education, let them build a career, let them use spare hours for extra earning or relaxation, because their property costs are astronomical. Don’t sacrifice them further just for political gain.

It’s true to form for the Conservatives, though. You were sacrificed for political gain if you were low paid, if you needed healthcare or social care, if you were disabled, if you were trans, and pretty much if you weren’t a wealthy outright property-owner.

And they so very badly need to learn that lesson, yes. Hopefully this nonsense motivates a new generation of young people forming a habit of voting, and of voting against the Conservative Party.

The Conservative Party is notoriously unforgiving of leaders who lose general elections, and currently pathologically addicted to leadership elections. I’d be very surprised if he’s not gone by the end of the year even if he does exceptionally well in the general election.

Very much so, yes.

Well in that sense, they’ve been remarkably successful. Literally billions of public money gone through the VIP lane and unrepaid business loans during covid. Nearly every tax cut giving more money to the already well off and less to below average earners. Wealth inequality soaring to help them feel superior.

OK, but he did claim he was going to stay on as an MP. Come to think of it, that’s a bit of an admission that he’s going to lose the election and then be replaced as leader of the Conservative Party.

It’s only a story because it’s so incredibly rare that members of the public get the chance to criticise his crazy policies to his face, in terms ordinary folk can relate to.

Ah yes, because another five years of the Conservative Party is just what the country needs. Spoken like a true leftist.

It’s not just Brexit, it’s also austerity and stealth austerity, massive and chronic cuts to public services, stagnation of minimum wage, underfunded NHS and health and social care, underinvestment, Trussonimics, waste of government money on contracts for cronies (aka the VIP lane) and of course don’t forget systematic, sustained and deliberate suppression of wages in the public sector alongside deregulation and lack of regulation in the private sector in the face of the growth of the gig economy, which is just tech companies circumventing almost all laws about workers rights. But yes, definitely Brexit too.