Best Of

Good luck to the new PM on increasing health, welfare, and defence spending to keep the MPs happy, without any cuts.

Oh, and whilst reopening the assusted suicide debate.

Vibes theory of governing being more important may be proven.

People here constantly emphasise the challenges.

However its worth noting the upside.

The new PM is going to have 2.5 years in Downing Street with a landslide majority.

If you can't make it work with a landslide majority, you don't deserve another term.

Fair point. The Starmer government seemed bereft of ideas and tentative from the start.

The MPs want to be led, and they will take chances if they have confidence in who leads them. Andy should go bold and tell them they trusted him to save the party, they need to trust him even if a proposal might sound unpopular. Go big.

What though? There's no money left, for real this time.

He could do worse than shamelessly stealing some oft quoted ideas from here.

Like merging income tax and national insurance for starters.

It’s perfectly possible to come up with left and left adjacent policies that deal with various issues.

The requirement is to have a leader. A leader takes on policies, find subordinates to manage them and backs those subordinates to get them done.

Starmer has repeatedly failed at the last two.

One of the experts on R4 made the point that, actually, Labour doesn't have that bad a story to tell - with some legislative achievements and with the economy starting to surprise on the upside - and it is possible that maybe they just simply need a better storyteller to get back to a 'normal' government midterm and be in contention again next time around.

As for Makerfield, I said at the start that Burnham would walk it and he did. Surprised at the majority but even so, this is a by election we will be talking about for decades.

Two big takeaways:

Reform are over. They can’t win by-elections, when they win council elections they shed councillors because they are racists or mad or even the ones they keep are in capable of the basics. And they virtue signal like crazy having said they would scrap all the one virtue signalling.
In essence, most voters aren’t racist fuck morons as Farage hopes they are. They’ve seen through him, they care not for cockwomble ex-Tory grifters like Jenrick, and the slide to Restore will gather pace as what is the point of Farage now?

Burnham will not face a contest. Not after this. A 6k majority over Reform and Restore combined is hope for all the 24 intake that they can win in 29. By delivering change as they were elected to do. The first change? Taxi for Starmer.

A for what Burnham will do, well there’s a big challenge there. But he’s already shown the way in GM so expect a lot of that to copy across. Invest in place - streets, communities, facilities. Scrap daft targets and let the police police. Pride in yourself and your town and your country. That worker bee ethos is desperately needed.

As Thatcha once said, Rejoice

Why do you spoil good analysis with hyberbole?

(1) This by-election won't be talked about "for decades", and Burnham probably won't even be PM in 3 years time, and;
(2) Reform are not "over"

The tea leaves might be starting to tell us some quite interesting things, but don't overdo it.

Point (2) is quite obviously correct but they’ve been on a plateau for a while and at some point really needed to kick past it. That they didn’t last night feels significant - but maybe that’s just recency bias.

As for Makerfield, I said at the start that Burnham would walk it and he did. Surprised at the majority but even so, this is a by election we will be talking about for decades.

Two big takeaways:

Reform are over. They can’t win by-elections, when they win council elections they shed councillors because they are racists or mad or even the ones they keep are in capable of the basics. And they virtue signal like crazy having said they would scrap all the one virtue signalling.
In essence, most voters aren’t racist fuck morons as Farage hopes they are. They’ve seen through him, they care not for cockwomble ex-Tory grifters like Jenrick, and the slide to Restore will gather pace as what is the point of Farage now?

Burnham will not face a contest. Not after this. A 6k majority over Reform and Restore combined is hope for all the 24 intake that they can win in 29. By delivering change as they were elected to do. The first change? Taxi for Starmer.

A for what Burnham will do, well there’s a big challenge there. But he’s already shown the way in GM so expect a lot of that to copy across. Invest in place - streets, communities, facilities. Scrap daft targets and let the police police. Pride in yourself and your town and your country. That worker bee ethos is desperately needed.

As Thatcha once said, Rejoice

Why do you spoil good analysis with hyberbole?

(1) This by-election won't be talked about "for decades", and Burnham probably won't even be PM in 3 years time, and;
(2) Reform are not "over"

The tea leaves might be starting to tell us some quite interesting things, but don't overdo it.

Morning all! Let’s talk Aberdeen South first. SNP absolutely scunnered by the usual collapse in SNP vote combined with all other party voters going tactical to oust them. Exactly what I was discussing with Tory activists at the Aberdeen count for the Holyrood election a few weeks.

People like me voting Tory - or them voting Labour or LibDem - is how we stop the nationalist menace. Can I also gently remind our Tory friends on here who rightly want to talk bout how their oil and gas policies won this that their previous policies were the same as SNP and Labour policies…

Congratulations to James Adams who gets elected to Holyrood in Lumsden’s place.

I think that over egging it in Aberdeen South. The SNP vote was down 4%, and SLAB down 19% but the turnout was down a massive 28% at 31%.

So tactical voting, but also voters in Scotland much less interested in Westminster politics than Holyrood, particularly SNP voters.

I am not convinced this good result for the Tories is generalisable even to other parts of Scotland, let alone the rest of the UK.

Whilst I don’t disagree, nowhere did I make a suggestion about the rest of the UK or predicted a renaissance of Scottish Toryism. I love the idea of sane parties joining forces to oust the divisive SNP and Reform people, but in Scotland at least that’s easy to say and hard to do.

Tories won Aberdeen South because they won votes from all non-SNP voters. That’s self evident.

No, it’s not. You can’t make any conclusions about how voters switched without detailed polling, particularly when turnout is only 38%.

Possible that Labour voters just stayed at home - and the inverse happened in Makerfield.

Good luck to the new PM on increasing health, welfare, and defence spending to keep the MPs happy, without any cuts.

Oh, and whilst reopening the assusted suicide debate.

Vibes theory of governing being more important may be proven.

People here constantly emphasise the challenges.

However its worth noting the upside.

The new PM is going to have 2.5 years in Downing Street with a landslide majority.

If you can't make it work with a landslide majority, you don't deserve another term.

Fair point. The Starmer government seemed bereft of ideas and tentative from the start.

The MPs want to be led, and they will take chances if they have confidence in who leads them. Andy should go bold and tell them they trusted him to save the party, they need to trust him even if a proposal might sound unpopular. Go big.

What though? There's no money left, for real this time.

Not entirely true. Starmer's in love with digital ID and ruinous, technologically deficient authoritarianism,

Those should be popular with the public tendency, making his unpopularity more notable.

It'd help if we had a media that wasn't either thick as pigshit or complicit in a desire by the Government to track the proletariat scum and force them to take on digital ID or upload personal documents to do almost anything on the internet.

A reminder that the ban on Social Media for the young is massively popular:

https://bsky.app/profile/luketryl.bsky.social/post/3mod7vtcxl22t

Even 77% of Gen Z agree on how harmful SM is:

https://bsky.app/profile/luketryl.bsky.social/post/3mod7vvnajk2t

As for Makerfield, I said at the start that Burnham would walk it and he did. Surprised at the majority but even so, this is a by election we will be talking about for decades.

Two big takeaways:

Reform are over. They can’t win by-elections, when they win council elections they shed councillors because they are racists or mad or even the ones they keep are in capable of the basics. And they virtue signal like crazy having said they would scrap all the one virtue signalling.
In essence, most voters aren’t racist fuck morons as Farage hopes they are. They’ve seen through him, they care not for cockwomble ex-Tory grifters like Jenrick, and the slide to Restore will gather pace as what is the point of Farage now?

Burnham will not face a contest. Not after this. A 6k majority over Reform and Restore combined is hope for all the 24 intake that they can win in 29. By delivering change as they were elected to do. The first change? Taxi for Starmer.

A for what Burnham will do, well there’s a big challenge there. But he’s already shown the way in GM so expect a lot of that to copy across. Invest in place - streets, communities, facilities. Scrap daft targets and let the police police. Pride in yourself and your town and your country. That worker bee ethos is desperately needed.

As Thatcha once said, Rejoice

Morning all! Let’s talk Aberdeen South first. SNP absolutely scunnered by the usual collapse in SNP vote combined with all other party voters going tactical to oust them. Exactly what I was discussing with Tory activists at the Aberdeen count for the Holyrood election a few weeks.

People like me voting Tory - or them voting Labour or LibDem - is how we stop the nationalist menace. Can I also gently remind our Tory friends on here who rightly want to talk bout how their oil and gas policies won this that their previous policies were the same as SNP and Labour policies…

Congratulations to James Adams who gets elected to Holyrood in Lumsden’s place.

I think that over egging it in Aberdeen South. The SNP vote was down 4%, and SLAB down 19% but the turnout was down a massive 28% at 31%.

So tactical voting, but also voters in Scotland much less interested in Westminster politics than Holyrood, particularly SNP voters.

I am not convinced this good result for the Tories is generalisable even to other parts of Scotland, let alone the rest of the UK.

Whilst I don’t disagree, nowhere did I make a suggestion about the rest of the UK or predicted a renaissance of Scottish Toryism. I love the idea of sane parties joining forces to oust the divisive SNP and Reform people, but in Scotland at least that’s easy to say and hard to do.

Tories won Aberdeen South because they won votes from all non-SNP voters. That’s self evident.

The Tories won because they fought on a policy that resonated with the voters. A lesson there...

Plus I suspect that the SNP's mismanagement shenanigans didn't exactly help enthuse their vote to come out.