UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both [email protected] and [email protected] .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
[email protected] appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
view the rest of the comments
Same here, although I grew up in Cheshire & now live in London... Even within the cities, Labours local policies seem very copy paste when what people want in (eg.) Westminster is going to be different to what they want in Hounslow, which will be different to what people want in Dagenham.
Lib Dems seem to have a far better understanding of their constituencies/local areas than either of the major two parties (there are some good Labour MPs and slightly fewer good Tory MPs, but as a percentage they're way lower), eg what Tim Farron is up to now in parliament, every speech is standing up for his constituency rather than hiding away in a large party letting the frontbenchers do the talking.
I think this is why the Lib Dems do so well in by-elections but struggle at general elections. When they're only fighting one election, they can put all that local knowledge to good use and make a really tailored campaign that resonates with the electorate in that constituency. But in a general election, it's much harder to put across a broad, national-level campaign, but that's what general election campaigning has to be, because you have to speak to the whole country not just a small subset of it.
It's a shame, because I actually think they're a very under-appreciated option. They've struggled with their branding after the coalition, and I think to an extent it was unfair given that they were very much the junior partner in the coalition and didn't have as much power as people think they did.