Theresa May's vanity election has left the Tory party in a desperate lose-lose situation. They can either call another election and give the public the chance to elect the kind of strong majority government they insisted was necessary in order for the Breixt negotiations to succeed, or they can try to cling onto power for as long as possible against the national interest.
Neither choice is looking good for them.
Another election would almost certainly result in a strong Labour majority because if Labour managed to cause a hung parliament with the mainstream media set against them and from a starting point of 11 points behind (according to the most accurate polling company Survation, 24/25 points behind according to others), just imagine what another Labour surge from a starting position of +5 and a more balanced representation by the media could result in.
The other option for the catastrophically weak and discredited Tories is to put their own short-term self-interest above the national interest and try to cling onto power for as long as possible.
The problem with squatting in power for as long as they can get away with it is that they're going to turn the public mood further and further against them with every passing day that they're seen to be putting their own interests above the interests of the nation.
The Tory position is like a guy hanging from a rope beneath a runaway balloon. He can either let go at 30ft and risk breaking both of his legs in the fall, or he can hang on for as long as possible before plummeting to his inevitable death.
Demographics
it hardly seems like a coincidence that the generations who are least likely to have access to social media are the most likely to have voted in the way the mainstream media instructed them to vote.
Mainstream media
The Tories will have a very serious media problem at the next election (whenever it is held), because not only will many more people have tuned out of mainstream media in favour of social media and independent journalism, but significant numbers of mainstream media hacks will also be very much more likely to give Labour a fair hearing the next time around.
The mainstream media hacks won't change tune because they suddenly give a damn, after all their complicity allowed the Tories to get away with the needless vandalism of their depraved austerity dogma for seven ruinous years.
Well paid journos didn't feel the austerity pain so they didn't complain. In fact they did pretty much everything in their power to defend the status quo (churnalising Tory press releases, ridiculing the opposition, treating austerity dogma as an unquestionable axiom rather than the bonkers ahistorical hard-right pseudo-economic gibberish it always was, glossing over all the suffering ...).
Mainstream media hacks will change tune for reasons of ego. They'll change tune because they won't want to look like out-of-touch fools when Labour trounce the Tories (whenever the next election is held).
Ideological austerity
In any sane society Theresa May's admission that the last seven years of merciless Tory austerity was inflicted entirely by choice would be seen as the absolute death knell of the Tory party.
They told us that they had to trash our public services, crush our wages, impoverish our children, and chronically underinvest in infrastructure and innovation because there was no other choice, but as soon as this depraved austerity agenda looks like costing them their grip on power they can't sling it out of the window quickly enough.
The fact that austerity can be so quickly dropped when it suits Tory self-interest to do so just goes to show what a compassionless bunch they are. No amount of human suffering was enough to make them reconsider their ruinous agenda, but as soon as their own jobs are on the line, they ditch it in an instant.
This austerity U-turn makes it absolutely clear that the Tories inflicted 7 years of socially and economically ruinous austerity dogma because they wanted to, not because they needed to.
Tory rhetoric
Of all of Theresa May's empty rhetoric during her vanity election, the stuff about needing a strong majority government for "the national interest" is the most damaging from a Tory perspective.
There's no way that clinging on with a weak directionless minority government can be seen as anything but abject hypocrisy, and the longer they try to keep it up, the harder they're going to have to fall when they finally give the public the opportunity to punish them for their selfishness.
Letting go of the rope
If we add these main factors together then the Tories are facing an impossible lose-lose situation.
They can either call an election soon and take the crash landing as quickly as possible in order to minimise the damage, or they can try to cling onto power against the national interest until the public backlash against their selfishness wipes them out as a political force.
My advice would be for them to take the hit as soon as possible, but then I worked myself into the ground for the last election, so I wouldn't mind relaxing a while through the summer and autumn and seeing them destroying themselves for generations to come by trying to cling onto power against the national interest until the public pressure on them to go becomes completely unstoppable (sometime around spring 2018 I would guess).
the Tories will have to let go of the rope sometime, and the damage they suffer will depend heavily on how long they leave it until they do.
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