A disastrous result for the Tories in the Chester by-election – politicalbetting.com
A disastrous result for the Tories in the Chester by-election – politicalbetting.com
The result of the first Westminster by-election since Sunak became prime minister came in the early hours and the result is above.
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8.4% LD
2.8% Green
2.7 REFUK
Pretty much in line with national polling.
So is 22% Con also in line?
Also... Rejoin EU...
The public mood is that they have been government for too long, reinforced by errors and a lack of judgement.
So while not a great result for the Tories and good for Labour it was actually not as disastrous for Sunak as some of the latest polls would suggest
You can't read much into it, but it looks in line with what the polls are telling us.
Back to the cricket.
How much worse for the Tories can it get?
It is however comfortably their worst result since there 1867.
A lot of very pissed off people out there wanting to send a giant FU to the government, perhaps?
Another leadership election? Third time a charm? Hunt/$unak isn’t getting the blue tribe excited.
Bring back Boris, lower taxes and say to hell with the markets.
Try to sell glimmers of economic good news as massive achievements, whilst ignoring the rest.
Dog whistle all the nasty stuff as if your life depended on it.
Er, that’s it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Dudley_West_by-election
That's true of Mantel's trilogy, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Rotherham_by-election
Ydoethur, please note who the Tory candidate was.
But not as impressive as Barking.
Note the Tory candidate here, anyone know what happened to her?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Barking_by-election
No comfort for the Tories there I’m afraid. The only comfort they have is that this might have been worse under peak Truss,
Pretending is All You Need (to get ChatGPT to be evil). A thread.
https://mobile.twitter.com/zswitten/status/1598088267789787136
It seems all you need for a robopocalypse is to code for irony ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_Islwyn_by-election
The Tory candidate here is a bit of a roaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_Islwyn_by-election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Hemsworth_by-election
The sexy sleaze under Major was often strange (who was the MP with the anti-snoring device?) but consensual. Now, we're getting allegations of rape (not just on the government benches, to be fair).
The government, despite virtually no
majority, did have some real achievements. Today's MPs seem to have more loyalty to their town/personal ideals than their party. Some will see this as a good thing, but it's a recipe for not getting difficult stuff done.
And by 1995 Britain was Booming. Even the optimist takes don't see that as the immediate future.
Of course events, it's not the case that the only way is down (baby). But it's the most obvious path for the Conservatives. And for all that Starmer is no Blair, Sunak is no Major either.
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/usercode.py?scotcontrol=Y&CON=30&LAB=47&LIB=11&Reform=2&Green=2&UKIP=&TVCON=&TVLAB=&TVLIB=&TVReform=&TVGreen=&TVUKIP=&SCOTCON=14.3&SCOTLAB=30.7&SCOTLIB=6.7&SCOTReform=0.6&SCOTGreen=1.7&SCOTUKIP=&SCOTNAT=43.7&display=AllChanged&regorseat=(none)&boundary=2019nbbase
At the moment the real ballpark figure we should all be looking at is tory seats 100-150 with the lower end of that plausible.
Anyone thinking the tories can pull this out of the bag is living in cloud cuckoo land.
I was encouraged by the small Lib Dem vote increase. Bearing in mind 2019 was the Brexit and Corbyn election with the LDs doing pointlessly well in uncompetitive seats like this. Suggests the opportunity is still there for big gains further South.
So either you are overstating the case, or Labour would have done even better under different circumstances.
Newham NE 1994 would be a closer starting position to Stretford & Urmston, 60/30 vs 61/27, and that saw a 16% swing to Labour.
Has to be said, Labour's by- election record in 1994 wasn't an unalloyed bed of roses, with strong nationalist challenges in Islwyn and Monklands East producing swings against Labour.
Yet by 2010 Brown got a hung parliament even if only 29% voteshare
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Crewe_and_Nantwich_by-election
Starmer is hardly inspiring, but there's absolutely zero incentive for anyone who's not now planning to vote Conservative to do so at the next general election, and that's unlikely to change.
Would even a sudden capitulation by Putin help them much ?
For a start, Black Wednesday looked really bad but didn't impact people in the same was as this cost of living crisis. And as you say, the real difference is that Britain was booming by 1995. You are spot on. This time it's near-catastrophic.
Plus on top of the commensurate sleaze you throw in the hideous last 3 years that everyone will want to put behind them and it's curtains for the tories at the next election.
They will be out of power for 10-15 years. Which is why the bright young things are standing down. Who would want to be left on the decaying rump of the tory parliamentary party having to sit alongside cockahoop Labour MPs because they can't all fit on the Government side?
This isn't hubris. It's the reality.
I guess it's trained on vast quantities of materials from the internet and it has insufficient discrimination to identify better and worse sources of information. If school kids start using it to do their homework they may be disappointed by their results.
Gabble!
It was only economic competence which helped New Labour avoid the fate of previous Labour governments
Crewe was held by the governing party, wasn't it ?
By elections in seats held by the opposition are, as Sir John Curtice forcefully pointed out this morning, a completely separate category for psephological purposes.
She can write very well. Some of her descriptive passages are beautiful. She also researches thoroughly and knows her history. In Wolf Hall she was writing about a particularly interesting peiod of history, one I know quite well and enjoy reading about, whether its a contrarian view or not.
So why did I give up on it after 150 pages (and like Cyclefree I rarely fail to finish a book)?
It is written in the 'past in the present'. Cockneys use this mode a lot - 'So I goes in the pub and I sees this geezer....' - and it does have a certain dramatic effect, but only if used sparingly. A whole book written in it is simply tedious.
She uses personal pronouns in the most peculiar way which means that at certain points she has to clarify who she is referring to - e.g. 'He, Moore, came in....' Such stylistic quirks are so common throughout the text that you finish up paying more attention to them than the narrative.
You have to wonder what the point of all this weirdness is. I suspect her readers - and she is enormously popular - mistake it for Art. Or maybe the aim is to stand out from all the other writers of this type of novel. I think if she didn't do it, she would be a perfectly readable but ordinary writer of historic fiction. As it is she is deeply irrating, not least for the reason that this highly artificial and contrived rubbish sells like hot cakes, whilst equally capable writers with less of a penchant for self-publicity are ignored.
She is the Agatha Christie of historical novels - a mediocrity who got herself promoted way above her merit.
Equally I don't think this is the Tory's worst result - there are still whole sets of bad news (NHS, tax, inflation, strikes) where voters won't have grasped the impact yet.
The swing was a relatively modest 13.6%.
Somehow the Tories managed to turn out more than six thousand votes.
Labour turned out fewer votes than the losing Tories received at the last GE.
Far-right parties were moribund.
It could have been a lot worse.
Nothing to do with female writers or characters. Love a lot of my sorority authors. But I've never got beyond a few chapters of Mantel before grinding to a turgid bored halt.
Lib Dems not in play in Chester.
It will be 10-15 years before they return to the Centrism that can win back seats.
I don’t see any of the meticulously triangulated plan for government of eg Blair and Brown, only definitely no EU and immigration bad so as not to scare the the red wall horsies.
She tried to cheer him by up saying that the defeat might be “a blessing in disguise.”
“At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised," he said.
I don't think any of the young MPs who have announced they are leaving are in safe Southern seats they are in traditional Labour ones.
Focus on this question would be a good political discipline, and not just for Labour.
Unless a serious plan is developed to retain staff those backlogs will not dissappear.
It's not Agatha Christie, that's for sure.
In a perhaps similar manner, some found large parts of Iain M Bank's Feersum Endjinn unreadable. Others enjoyed it.
They will probably make the wealthier pay a bit more tax than would be the case under the Tories but basically you will have centreist government, rather like you are getting now.
On the whole that will be ok, and certainly a damn site better than we have had for a long while before Sunak/Hunt but it will be a tough gig, and Labour can hardly expect to be loved for doing it.
Don't start with Pickwick or Hard Times. More or less unreadable for modern readers.
It could be worse.
Given what happened with Truss, it deserves to be worse.
Obama: Mr. Walker has been talking about issues that are of great importance to the people of Georgia like if it’s better to be a vampire or a werewolf.. This is a debate that I must confess I once had myself.. when I was 7
https://mobile.twitter.com/Acyn/status/1598471626638913537
"We all know some folks in our lives who — we don’t wish them ill will. They say crazy stuff & we’re all like, ‘Well, you know, Uncle Joe, you know what happened to him.’ They're part of the family but you don't give them serious responsibilities."
It could be Philippa Gregory...
You would have thought even the MAGA fundamentalists would have seen he was as mad as a box of frogs.
Abolishing leasehold, for example, wouldn't cost the government a penny, but it would make life better for a lot of people. I'm confident there is lots of potential for similar reforms.
Reminds me of being hauled along to a garden party at Holyroodhouse when my dad got an invite with the rations. I've never recovered from seeing the way supposedly douce and sensible middle-aged matrons behaved in the presence of royalty - like teenage rock fans in slow motion.
Though oin recogniseable writing styles/tones, Peter Conrad (erstwhile of the Sunday Times) gets my vote. I can dip into some magazine, find myself in the middle of some review, and guess instantly who is the reviewer.
It is obvious to most everyone the mood in the nation has changed not least to your little Englander views, and as far as I am concerned Starmer's likely success in Scotland is a real plus as he strengthens support for the Union and my main regret is that Starmer seems to have decided to become more of a Brexiteer than the ERG, when in reality he has a golden opportunity for improving relationship with the EU and trade including the single market
Sunak stopped the worst of the immediate bleeding, which is as much as anyone could realistically hope for.
An Oxford student union official has apologised for her supposedly trans- exclusionary stance after objecting to the abolition of the women’s officer role.
Ellie Greaves, the vice-president for women at Oxford’s student union, put out a statement after a backlash against her comments in The Times.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/oxford-union-official-ellie-greaves-sorry-for-hurting-trans-people-5v6zg6k5d