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Let us all talk about our first time – politicalbetting.com
Let us all talk about our first time – politicalbetting.com
With the likelihood of having an election this year my mind went to think about the first general election I followed, which was 1992.
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The BNP had won a slew of councillors in the area a few years prior (though lost them all in 2009) and Nick Griffin was standing for the party against Margaret Hodge. I had £100 on him not winning the seat (4/9, if memory serves).
As per the usual, the returning officer read out the results in alphabetical order of candidate's surname. So Griffin came ahead of Hodge. "Griffin, Nick, Six thousand, six hundred and twenty". Nowhere near enough! I cheer triumphantly!
A pint of beer is thrown over my head. "Fascist!".
Ah yes, I hadn't considered how my reaction may look to others...
My mum had to explain that the day off school the following year was for not quite so interesting local elections.
In 1997, we used to have French lessons in the staff room at my junior school. There was a Lib Dem poster on the notice board which said “New Labour, same old (s)Tory.”
I was 22
79 83 and 87. All super predictable really.
I was living in Atlanta.
1983 was my first here, and I voted SDP.
https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1761759921752670534?t=VEKc9qJVHOgNOoc6VObQMg&s=19
A reminder of why the 2024 election looks nothing like 1992. newstatesman.com/politics/uk-po…
First proper following was 1992, which was a pleasant shock for the blue team at the time.
But I'd been involved in a council by election on 22 November 1990. If only she had resigned 48 hours earlier, it would have been winnable. The Lib Dem Good Morning leaflet ("all this, and they still expect you to vote for them...") was pretty unanswerable.
...and the film is about to start. Laters, alligators.
'83 working in Leicester East, met Peter Brunivalls in a pub along the A47. First vote, in Leominster, I lost.
'87 voted in Camden. Sir Geoffrey Finsberg won, lost again and bigly.
'92 in Cardiff voted for Julie Morgan (I think) Gwillym Jones won . A big shock.
'97 my first Conservative loss since Wilson's win in 1974. Voted Julie Morgan as MP for Cardiff North. Everyone in my orbit at home and at work was elated including Tories.
Can't remember any more.
"Who do you think you are kidding Mister Major,
If you think the election's won
We are the boys who will stop your little game.
We are the boys who will make you think again.
Then:
Who do you think you are kidding Mister Kinnock,
If you think the election's won
We are the boys who will stop your little game.
We are the boys who will make you think again.
Then:
Who do you think you are kidding Mister ...
Hang on! who's the leader of the other party?
I dunno! who cares! They don't stand a chance!
And as we passed Churchill's statue, we sung the original.
A very happy memory.
(Although looking back, I've no idea why the nearest polling station from South Woodford was in Woodford? Also, we must have been the only one to pay the poll tax.)
The first one I really remember was 1951 when the prospective Young Conservatives in Southend West teased those of their classmates, including me, who weren’t of the same mind unmercifully!
The plan is to have a team of real experts on warships, making sure that the Type 26 and Type 31 do warshippy things right. Like float the right way up (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Captain_(1869)) and not spontaneously explode (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Vanguard_(1909))
At the same time, journalists like Krugman avoid unpleasant questions, like the way housing costs have soared in many areas, especially where leftists have controlled policies for years. These increases have hit young families especially hard. You might not think the economy is great if, for example, you earn 20 dollars an hour (before taxes) -- and the median house in your city sells for 750K.
(Also, Krugman and company avoid serious US problems, like those described in Eberstadt's "Men Without Work". For those unfamiliar with the book, here is brief summary: "In early 2022, more than 7 million prime-age men were neither working nor looking for work -- more than 11 percent of the prime-age manpower pool and more than three times the fraction in 1965." (p. 11, Post-Pandemic Edition)
(Copied from previous thread.)
1997 I followed. Started up with my mother to watch the results. How we cheered when Portillo lost. Brexit did mean that my mum had a few good words to say about Blair again, but there'd been a bit of a gap in between.
2001 I went to the count and listened to the wider results on an FM radio. The candidate I had delivered leaflets for received 571 votes, or thereabouts.
2005 was the first UKGE I followed with PB.com for company.
2017 I decided I didn't want to stay up for the results, but then I heard the surprising exit poll and I was hooked.
2019 was the first GE I didn't stay up to watch the results come in. We decided that we couldn't bear it, so we drove off to the middle of nowhere, turned our phones off, went for walks, avoided the news. We managed to avoid the results until arriving home on the Sunday afternoon, and we had a much better weekend for not knowing.
Not sure about this next one. We currently can't watch the BBC, so that would lessen the entertainment aspect considerably.
1987: Spitting Image ending with Tomorrow Belongs To Me
1997: Have I Got News For You with Richard Wilson getting steadily less smug as he realised that Labour would now be the butt of all the jokes.
'97 I was at the count when he lost the seat.
But he won't.
I still remember -- or think I do --hearing the surprise in the announcer's voices as they realized that Truman was doing better than predicted.
(BTW, there is one reason Gallup got it wrong in 1948 that has always amused me: Corner houses.
At that time, Gallup interviewed voters in person, and their interviewers would be sent out and told to interview a family on a particular block. The interviewers often started at corner houses -- which, in the US tend to be owned by wealthier families.)
It's plainly obvious Dowden thinks it's unacceptable.
I was still happy to finish up at 9.30pm though and head down to the count.
I remember GE1992 and GE1997 well, but I didn't properly campaign until GE2001.
The first and only time I’ve felt inclined to the Conservatives, and also (perhaps not coincidentally) the only time I’m aware my father has voted Tory in a general election. Liberals and their successors for him every time otherwise.
My mother was routinely a conservative voter (possibly even in 1997) until 2017, when she first put her cross in the Lib Dem box and hasn’t looked back. That’s the journey of many on the Europhile centre-right in the last decade.
1992 was at its most exciting when it looked like a hung parliament and lost a bit of oomph when the Tory majority became clear. One big anachronism: the champagne party outside Conservative central office in the early hours. Imagine the howls of social media outrage these days if any party, particularly the Tories, were cracking open champagne during an election with the country only just emerging from recession.
https://search.electoralcommission.org.uk/English/Registrations/PP12671
And now 1.1% of the votes. Green splitters!
Last night's Jedburgh and District (Scottish Borders) council by-election result:
CON: 58.5% (+8.2)
SNP: 17.4% (-5.7)
LAB: 10.2% (+10.2)
LDEM: 7.1% (+7.1)
GRN: 5.7% (-1.4)
EFED: 1.1% (+1.1)
EFED: Eco Federalists
Valid votes cast: 2,354
Seat change:
Conservative GAIN from SNP.
The first general election in which I could vote was 1979 but I remember taking a real interest in February 1974. We had enjoyed or endured the novelty of power cuts and a three day week - I remember doing my homework by candlelight and having to watch Midlands Today rather than London South East on Nationwide because the latter's studio was without power.
Even then I thought the Conservative Government and the NUM two sides of the same coin or two cheeks of the same arse if you prefer. I remember getting up early on the Friday morning and watching the election programme with my Dad who was a strong Heath suporter before going to school.
I remember because we were in Year 6 at primary school, we were rostered into "prefect duty" looking after the younger pupils going up and down the stairs at break-time. One rule to be enforced was that they had to go up or down on the left-hand side of the stairs, so prefects had to call out periodically "keep to the left". So, I had the splendid idea of calling out "Keep to the Left - vote Labour" at the time of the 1987 election.
Unfortunately, a teacher overheard me, and he scolded me: "No political slogans on the stairs, please!", albeit in a jokey kind of way; I think he was probably pro-Labour in any case!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/golf/68397781
A heartwarming first (well, joint-second) from the golf.
The Tories won.
I learned my lesson.
Moldovan separatists to ask Putin to annexe their region
Rebel government to submit its request to Kremlin during a special congress on Wednesday
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPGepgWupTw
Do You Remember The First Time
"Canada-based University of Waterloo is racing to remove M&M-branded smart vending machines from campus after outraged students discovered the machines were covertly collecting face recognition data without their consent."
https://www.wired.com/story/facial-recognition-vending-machine-error-investigation/
It appears MS still haven't done this with their sources:
https://twitter.com/endermanch/status/1761483144958492836
The best one we had a debate over was a file called arsencode. Which reads like 'Arse 'n code', but was actually Acorn Replay Sound Encode. we let that one stand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt-class_destroyer#Design
Thoroughly deserved and a great show by the youngsters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)
Belay that: I had forgotten this one. went turtle and sank with zero minutes.
https://www.dalmadan.com/?p=8329
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/02/25/britain-faces-destitution-hunt-no-tax-cuts-arthur-laffer/
Thanks Dismal Decline Manager, you useless pillock.
Good to see that Klopp's final season is ending with at least one more major trophy, and who'd put it past them winning more? Come on!
It more or less coincided with our city (Liverpool) suddenly grabbing unprecedented global attention ("centre of consciousness of the human universe": Alan Ginsberg, though it's not clear just what substances he'd been misusing that day), and my getting a Saturday job with the Epstein family, whose most famous scion was introducing his groups to the USA. The night before the election, I'd gone to hear Harold Wilson make his pre-election address at the St George's Hall: the night of the election, I stood outside the Adelphi Hotel (then unbelievably swish) to hear his balcony victory address. The day after, it became clear that Labour's majority of 4 equalled precisely the number of Liverpool seats Labour (Kirkdale, Toxteth, Walton and West Derby) had taken from the Tories: the rarely-told psephological explanation of Labour's 1964 victory was the destruction of Merseyside's pseudo-Tory Protestant Party.
Then, catching up on what the papers were telling us about what was going on outside these islands on the way to work on Oct 17, discovering that Khrushchev had been fired. And we were still scarcely recovered from the amazement at a Catholic being elected US President four years earlier.
There've been three PMs elected in the UK spending much of election night within a mile or two of our house. To this observer, neither Blair nor Cameron's election carried anything like the excitement of Wilson's. I'm still unsure whether that's because the media are just more oriented to what happens in Westminster, or whether in 1964 so much of the razzmatazz came from the Leader of the Opposition addressing physical meetings.
But it's certainly the case that all the election nights of that decade were covered far less dramatically by TV than they are now
Given that we aren’t stupid enough (and can’t cut) to taxes by too much what planet is he on?