Rishi Sunak announces UK general election for Thursday 4 July
Rishi Sunak announces UK general election for Thursday 4 July
The PM calls an early summer poll - having been widely expected to wait until the autumn to do so.
I can't get over how insane it is that the sitting party gets to look at their polling numbers and decide if it's a good time to have an election or not. I get why they are so insistent on keeping the monarchy because the rest of the system is kept together by tape and random bits of string
It's a corrupt convention but it wasn't always the case. An important reform by the 2010-15 coalition government was the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, which took this incredibly important decision out of the prime minister's partisan hands and have elections on a predictable 5 year cycle (barring the government falling or a supermajority for early elections).
After Boris Johnson won the 2019 election though, he set about dismantling checks and balances such as this. He also changed the electoral system for mayoral elections to First Past the Post (with no consultation or referendum - which the Tories have always insisted was needed to change the electoral system away from FPTP...) because FPTP tends to favour Tories.
on the anniversary of the day they got their asses handed to them by some bluecoats????
My tin hat is they they will try and use the us election as some sort of smokescreen.
The one in November?
'Murica... well, Mercia, at least.
Polling looks good for Labour. Kinda crazy the prime minister basically torpedoed his own party because it was so bad.
They got to announce that inflation is more or less back down to normal levels, so this is about as good as the polling is likely to be. A there was one a few months back that actually showed the Conservatives getting fewer seats than the SNP. To be clear it was only one poll and I do not think it will happen, but for readers that don't already know this, the SNP only even contest less than 10% of the total seats. The fact that that was ever even close to the bounds of possibility is wild.
i'd walk around with a smug grin for weeks if the tories didn't even win "official opposition"
Yeah I could see it being a strategy to keep as many seats as possible. After looking at the polling, the Conservative party has been declining in popularity since 2020. The best timing for them is ASAP because it's only getting worse. They are just about as unpopular as they were when Liz Truss was in office.
Interesting date.
UK elections are always on Thursdays for some unfathomable reason.
It's so the votes can be counted overnight and the announcement made on the Friday. Then the incoming government sorts things out over the weekend and we can have a new functioning government on Monday.
If they did the election on say a Monday then the announcement would be made on Tuesday, then the country would just be in limbo for 2 days while everyone tried to work out what was going to happen. This way, the limbo happens over the weekend where not much business needs to be done anyway.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Rishi Sunak has vowed to "fight for every vote" as he called an early UK general election for Thursday 4 July.In a surprise announcement, the PM said he would go to the polls this summer as he bids to win a fifth term in office for the Conservatives.It overturned expectations of an autumn election, which might have given his party a better chance of closing the gap with Labour.Sir Keir Starmer said it was "time for change" away from "Tory chaos".
There was confusion in at least some parts of the Conservative Party about why Mr Sunak decided to call the general election sooner than was widely expected, the BBC's political correspondent Henry Zeffman reported.
In a TV statement shortly afterwards, Sir Keir argued Tory "chaos" had damaged the economy, and a vote for his party represented a chance to bring political stability.Adding it was "time for change", he criticised the Conservatives' management of public services, the NHS and record on tackling crime.
SNP leader John Swinney, who took over as Scotland's first minister earlier this month, said the election was a chance to "remove the Tory government and put Scotland first".Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey said it would be a chance to "kick Rishi Sunak's appalling Conservative government out of office", whilst Greens co-leader Carla Denyer said her party was aiming to elect "at least four" new MPs.And Reform UK leader Richard Tice said the Tories had "broken Britain" but Labour would "bankrupt Britain," and only his party would offer "common sense policies that can now save Britain".
Mr Sunak's statement is the start of weeks of general election campaigning for the 650 seats in Parliament.It will be fought on the first set of new constituency boundaries since 2010, redrawn to reflect population changes since then, and will be the first where voters have to show ID.The Royal Family has postponed engagements "which may appear to divert attention or distract from the election campaign", Buckingham Palace said, adding that the King and Queen sent their "sincere apologies" to those affected.
At the last election in 2019, Boris Johnson won an 80-seat majority after calling a snap poll as he fought to get his Brexit withdrawal deal through Parliament.It was followed by an extraordinarily volatile period in British politics, as the country was hit by the Covid pandemic and Mr Johnson was forced to resign, amid a cabinet revolt over a series of scandals.His successor Liz Truss lasted 49 days in the job before she quit, after a market backlash to her tax and spending plans announced at a hastily-arranged "mini Budget" in September 2022.This is the first general election since 2015 that has not required a vote in Parliament to approve the date, since legislation fixing the time between polls was reversed two years ago.
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