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What do the Tories do now the LDs have got their mojo back? – politicalbetting.com
What do the Tories do now the LDs have got their mojo back? – politicalbetting.com
One of the big political developments of 2021 has been the re-emergence of the LDs as an electoral force. Winning Chesham and Amersham in June always looked like an easier task given the party started in second place, C&A voted Remain and it was in striking distance of party strongholds on the M25 making it easier for them to flood the seat with activists during the campaign.
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https://www.thetablet.co.uk/news/2075/catholics-desert-labour-in-scotland-tablet-poll-reveals-
Do that and I could back them again. Fail to do so and I'll probably vote for the Lib Dems in 2024.
Invective can be very useful and appropriate, but if civility and bonhomie can be simulated presumably so can coarseness, particularly if attempting to 'rebel' against 'simulated civility'.
I suspect howling would be more likely.
What should frighten you most at the moment is the fact that no 5 in the singles chart is BORIS JOHNSON IS STILL A F**KING C**T by the K**ts. Sooo reminiscent of the damage inflicted on May by cassette boy
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/interactive-map/cases
However. This links back to the discussion FPT. Folk aren't in a good place. The PM's schtick has therefore worn off. He does many things well. Empathy and a serious air aren't two of them.
Presumably there is a variation between Manningham and Ilkley in terms of market dynamics.
PS. Austen wrote no bodicerippers. Nor was much of a fan of landed inheritance. As far as anyone can discern.
There is no shortageLATEST Covid tests likely to be rationed in coming days to cope with 'huge demand' https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/12/30/covid-tests-likely-rationed-coming-days-cope-huge-demand/
Gove's replacement to the CAP and Truss's uniquely one-sided Australian trade deal has seen to that.
I was thinking of the films made from her work - complete with six-packs - and hopelessly compromised in muy memory with that comedy sketch by, was it Emma Thompson?
Johnson campaigned on Brexit. If his message had been 'vote for me and get yourself a boatload of small state and social liberalism' there'd have been no majority.
That said, what will be interesting is looking at where the case rates are by around the end of the first week in January, once the most recently imposed sets of restrictions outside of England have had a chance to work, and we're through the New Year hiatus in reporting. If they are much of a muchness across the home nations by that point then it'll be a reasonable indication that the extra rules haven't been of much use against Omicron.
(As an aside, impressive that the new user @BartholomewRoberts has, in one week, trebled the number of posts I have made in 3 years. I will console myself with the thought that Less is More and go back to lurking - and work
G Maxwell did attend Balliol, having completed her studies at Marlborough College (a school). Wikipedia says she got her degree in 1985. Perhaps someone can confirm the precise dates... [Edit - Google reckons 82 to 85]
That would mean she was there at the same time as BoJo (83-86), although not necessarily in the same year.
@disclosetv
JUST IN - Netherlands plans to inject people with "up to six doses" of COVID vaccine - Health Minister (Newsweek)
Presumably people who object to "populism" will be praising this? Or is that another of Yes, Minister's irregular verbs?
33.5 million booster/third doses have now been delivered in the UK, with 1.8 million in the past seven days.
Around 63% of all adults in the UK have now received a booster or third dose.
https://twitter.com/ian_a_jones/status/1476563827470831621?s=20
Do we do that for Moderna?
For example they would need to be annihilated like the Canadian Tories were in 1993 when they lost rural areas in the West to the Refom party as well as suburban and commuter belt areas to the Liberals.
Shropshire North is like Christchurch, a LD by election win in 1993 on an even bigger swing than North Shropshire that went Tory again in 1997
But she was briefly (24 hours I think) engaged to her neighbour - who lived in the house I grew up in
This article puts it very well: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/its-not-too-late-for-boris-johnson
The illiberal actions post 2019 election are precisely why I've stopped supporting him.
Stop being illiberal, get back to what was being said and start putting actions behind the words and I'll happily support him again despite this midterm wobble.
Continue down this path of illiberalism and I'll hold my nose and vote for Ed Davey's party.
I would refer you to Tim Farron who sits in what should by any criteria you use be a very safe Tory - even more so than say Richmond (Yorks).
Another desperately quiet day at work and I come on here to find a nice thread about the Liberal Democrats which is always welcome.
North Shropshire has undeniably given both the party and Ed Davey a real boost. Davey now has two by-election gains to his credit and let's not forget he's a fighter having lost Kingston & Surbiton in the 2015 catastrophe, he went and won it back in 2017 and now has a healthy 10,000 majority. He's the only LD MP who lost his seat in 2015, regained it in 2017 and held on in 2019 (both Jo Swinson and Stephen Lloyd regained seats lost in 2015 at the next GE but lost at the last GE).
All isn't sweetness and light - the poll ratings remain modest at this time and I suspect there are islands of activity between vast oceans of constituencies where there is no meaningful LD presence.
As an example, the LDs hold 152 council seats in London but 109 of those are in Sutton, Kingston and Richmond which means only 43 seats in the remaining Boroughs and large numbers with no LD presence at all. I'm all for targeting resources but the party needs to start getting into new areas and building strength and winning seats.
Take a borough like Bromley - in 1998, the Liberal Democrats won 25 seats and for a short while ran the council with Labour - in 2014, the last councillors were defeated. That's the scale of the rebuilding that still needs to start seven years after the end of the Coalition.
There will be those who ask for what the Liberal Democrats stand - actually, that's not very important now - it's enough to be a home for disillusioned Conservatives (of whom there seem to be many currently) but there will come a point when the party will need to articulate its USP in a crowded market. They've made a good start opposing some of the proposed restrictions and no one talks about re-joining the EU or any of that nonsense.
In the same way, talking about the relationship with Starmer's Labour isn't all that important either. Both parties are fishing in different ponds for the same fish and it doesn't much matter on whose hook they end up.
It's interest looking at Farron's seat - I was wondering if it is a Nonconformist area (to an extent), but it took the LDs years of work pre-Farron to win it, and is a a LD-Tory marginal much of the time recently.
Current majority 1934.
He needs a swing in the current direction to make it safe.
It was never in doubt in my mind 👍🏻 Like who’d vote Boris ever again? All the everyday people, most brainy people, and idiot anti vaxxers all say he’s a liar. So that’s everyone then.
Interesting day all part of things I listed out to do this week. Went up on moor to show my other half the spot where I posed naked on a cross for an art class. Couldn’t be sure of exact spot, I remembered it felt like the highest spot on ganderhill but couldn’t decide what it was today. It’s Christmas drizzly and windy but totally maffin now than Sunday in May few years ago when I did it, very grey and sleet on the ground that day, I was freezing even before taking my duffel coat and jeans off.
I explained I couldn’t hold my arms up long they were really hurting, the heather not good to dance through in bare foot. And like grouse humming in laughing way at me on wind. we listened for some and couldn’t hear them. I don’t know why, I thought she’d be more interested in my wacky money making past adventures. She said that was mad, and you are still just as mad, in her poshest private girls school accent. Then we came back down to car and got some groceries. 🤷♀️
£10 of Moderna not £20 for a full dose?
Multiplied by 50 million that's quite a lot, if that is how the pricing work.
That is twice what we have invested in the UK National Vaccine Centre, which is now being flogged off by Boris and Rishi.
Hasn't France had tough regulations for a while? Still got 200k cases. Just brought in outdoor masks. That'll crack it.
As a left wing Corbynite I'm not sure how plausible your argument is...
There was no 'radical purge' of party members. There was a three line whip on a confidence vote over Europe exactly as John Major did with the Maastricht vote in 1993. Just as Major did in 1993 and following precedent of decades, anyone who failed to vote with the Party on that confidence motion lost the whip and they were informed in advance that was going to happen too. "The bastards" all-but-one got in line in 1993 and the only one that didn't lost the whip, the same happened to 2019's "bastards" who brought the loss of the whip upon themselves.
According to the English High Court at the time there was no "illegal prorogation of Parliament", the English High Court ruled the prorogation was entirely legal and it again followed precedent. The Supreme Court invented new case law that rendered it void so Parliament was immediately recalled as a result. Nothing illiberal or shocking about that.
I don't recall any "threats" against the media or the judicial system either so can't respond to those. It seems to me we have a vigorous media and the judicial systems independence clearly still exists which is why the Supreme Court was able to invent new rules to render the prorogation void.
Suggest this issue is worth a thread on its won.
Most of the (many) Tories I meet here in North Dorset are centre-right, often appalled by the current incumbent of No 10, would probably never vote Labour or Reform but might well be minded to vote LD or abstain if Johnson is still PM come the next GE.
Indeed so.
Tim Farron was virtually the only non Tory MP in rural England in 2019, using him as an example is about as useful as saying the Tories won Cities of London and Westminster and Chelsea and Fulham in 2019 and therefore could sweep inner London next time!
It seems we've run even in the third world into an issue of whether people can be convinced to get the vaccine (or logistical issues in distributing it) rather than whether they can be manufactured fast enough.
https://twitter.com/UKHSA/status/1476566682076434434?s=20
https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1476401463215730688?s=20
China is sending over a hundred #Military personnel to the city of #Xian. The northern Chinese city is currently under what’s being called the strictest lockdown since Wuhan.
It definitely just a few hundred cases,
https://twitter.com/WilliamsonRonw/status/1476541972068241408?s=20
Con 40 (-13), Lab 23 (+15), LD 29 (-10), Green 3, Others 5
Is this a huge swing to Labour? Not really, I think. Rather, it's a reflection of the willingness of over half the Labour vote to support the LibDem candidate as the perceived main challenger in a Tory seat when it comes to it. In between elections, they support Labour, and they often vote Labour at local level where Labour can win, but at GEs many choose to go tactical. So long as that's acknowledged fairly as the NS winner did (thanking Labour voters for "lending" their support rather than gloating over the low Labour score), I see the logic.
The Lib Dems have a record of success in the past even in rural seats, in 2010 the Lib Dems won many rural seats yet there has never been a Reform MP elected. Its beyond a joke to hold them up as serious.
https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1476572832406687749?s=20
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copped_Hall
Yes we do have an independent Supreme Court and its ruling was followed. It wasn't like Johnson responded like Andrew Jackson “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”
"Bitching about it" is what people who lose an argument tend to do, its venting and its free speech and that's just as protected so long as it remains low level like that. If actions were done to render the Court's decision moot (besides passing a law which is legal) then that'd be illiberal, having some nobodies bitching is not.
Remember in the 2019 European elections when you voted Brexit Party and I voted Tory, most rural constituencies voted for the Brexit Party. Even in 1997 or 2005 or 2010 most rural constituencies still voted Tory not LD however
UKIP are fielding a candidate FWIW.
Sunday Sport. @thesundaysport
Replying to @BBCNewsPR
That's putting it mildly. It didn't even meet OUR editorial standards.
https://twitter.com/thesundaysport/status/1476574541346394114?s=20