As Starmer ended up with a 170 odd majority Truss lost her seat.
The weakness of the result for Labour suggests that that *could* have happened if only she hadn't tried to do anything radical.
But the whole reason she gets pulses racing in certain quarters is because she was going to do something radical. She was, after all, both the continuity 'Boris should not have been ousted' candidate, and the 'everything must be changed' candidate.
I do actually think if she'd just been a little slower in moving she'd still have been PM, and the eventual result might have been a little better, even just because the faultlines from out ouster would not be in play.
Watch this it’s fascinating - I asked James Timpson what he’d do about prisons and sentencing if he was in charge. He believes only a third of prisoners in jail should definitely be there. He’s now in charge of prisons (but not sentencing). [VIDEO]
Good appointment. The starting point might be that once you have sorted out which prisoners (more than the current number, and not all murderers) should never be let out on account of either badness or madness, the rest are coming out sometime and the rest of us are less safe if they come out still deeply immature or bad or mad - or any combination - so the big case against the Daily Mail/Sun 'lock 'em up' line is that it fails to protect us.
According to public opinion, there are also people who shouldn't be in prison because they should be executed.
Then they can vote for a party which supports that, if they can find one. It is somewhat surprising none of the mainstream ones do (I don't think Reform as a whole do).
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Watch this it’s fascinating - I asked James Timpson what he’d do about prisons and sentencing if he was in charge. He believes only a third of prisoners in jail should definitely be there. He’s now in charge of prisons (but not sentencing). [VIDEO]
Thankfully during the next four years or so not every discussion about politics will have to be conducted in the knowledge that the Tories and their supporters will take anything that's said by anyone else, exaggerate it beyond recognition and retail it as fact to a million people through social media.
Unless that's going to be a permanent thing for them now.
You mean it's new? Sudden memories of Section 28 and earlier: admittedly using the friendly newspapers and paid for posters.
Ok Rwanda is gone. What are they going to do to resolve the situation then?
Farage is busy today but will soon enough be on the case again.
1. "The situation" is broadly unresolvable to the satisfaction of the populist right. Rwanda was not a solution to that problem. It was part of the "do nothing real, just play politics" agenda of the last decade.
2. The actual problems are multifacted - and largely go away when people are feeling optimistic about their lot. Jobs, wages, housing are the underlying issues and not fixed by shipping a few immigrants to Rwanda at great expense (or indeed bringing immigrants in to do the jobs we won't for salaries we won't tolerate). 3. There is no quick fix to 2. We need to see what happens over a decade.
Are there any decent explanations yet of why of all the hundreds and hundreds of GE polls not one of them was anywhere close to the basic figure of the gap between Tory and Labour (10%).
ANME clearly shows the importance of candidate selection. It was more than anything a vote against Douglas Ross attempting to carpet-bag. Duguid would have won comfortably.
The Conservatives should almost focus on nothing else but high-quality candidate selection.
No way James Arbuthnot would have lost Hampshire North East either.
Can be difficult to get seats back from the Lib Dems once they're in, they (2015 excepted !) normally don't have to deal with the mucky business of government. The seat you really want next time round as a Tory candidate is Truss' old one - that to my mind is the easiest Con Gain of 2029 or whenever right now.
Your old campaigning ground of Derbyshire NE had an almost identical result in 2024 to that in 2015:
The likely Conservative gains in 2029 are going to include some non-standard places.
I wonder when the Conservatives will realise that and what it will do to their strategy and policy ideas.
Darlington, Redcar, Middlesborough South, the Stocktons need to figure in alongside Bolsover, Rother Valley etc and they need a fairly radical NW strategy
One idea would be to give Reform a free run in Sunderland/Durham etc in return for standing down round here and other close seconds.
The Tories need to fight Reform tooth and nail, pointing out the vacuity of their policies and weakness of their leaders. If they cede them any ground, they are consigning themselves to the bin.
They also need to work incredibly hard in the constituencies in which reform have MPs - pointing out how little they do for them, picking up such casework-type slack as they have access to, championing local issues. Knocking out the leadership at the next election will finish Reform off for this cycle.
More well meaning advice to viciously attack other right wingers and become more centrist from *checks notes* non conservatives.
Fair point perhaps, though Reform attacked the Conservatives just as much as anyone else so that was right on right. I think the Tories will try to heal on the right before going for the centre, but it's not a one way street where the Tories cannot also go after Reform, who openly sought to replace them. They are the Tory enemy too, just of a different kind and requiring different strategies.
I think there's a misconception in politicians that they cannot appeal in different directions. Yes you can risk looking schizophrenic, but no one is ideologically consistent 100% of the time, it is possible to not repel centrists whilst still keeping on board people on your left or right.
I agree - the two parties should continue to oppose each other, as Labour and the Lib Dems have done. Otherwise there would be no merit in them seeking different seats and voters.
My slight irritation is that people on a site called 'politicalbetting.com' can continue to peddle psephological fantasy, insisting that the Tories lost because they weren't centrist and managerial enough, as well as insisting that they fight tooth and nail with right-wing parties whose supporters are closely aligned in opinion with theirs. These aren't insights, they are peoples' political hopes dressed up as insights.
We must never, ever, ever join the Euro. It has forced the poor bastards into a 15 year depression.
This election result is so shallow and fractured that it's probably now politically impossible to Rejoin.
Now that Labour are in government it is easier for them to set the terms of debate and the agenda for political debate. But do they really want to spend a decade making the case for Rejoin? I sense that even Starmer would be bored rigid by revisiting the topic.
I would be surprised if European issues took up much government time, and I expect the government to be low-key about the things that are done.
Watch this it’s fascinating - I asked James Timpson what he’d do about prisons and sentencing if he was in charge. He believes only a third of prisoners in jail should definitely be there. He’s now in charge of prisons (but not sentencing). [VIDEO]
Good appointment. The starting point might be that once you have sorted out which prisoners (more than the current number, and not all murderers) should never be let out on account of either badness or madness, the rest are coming out sometime and the rest of us are less safe if they come out still deeply immature or bad or mad - or any combination - so the big case against the Daily Mail/Sun 'lock 'em up' line is that it fails to protect us.
According to public opinion, there are also people who shouldn't be in prison because they should be executed.
This is true but it isn't going to happen so there is not much point in taking account of it. It's rare now even for old style Tory MPs to raise it. Zeitgeists can change of course, but for now it has gone.
And Labour now has so many seats to defend, next time Palmer will be sent somewhere more useful! The LibDems should be left alone.
Next time I'll be pushing 80! I had a stroke a few weeks ago (few physical effects after the first few days but memory affected for a while) so have been taknig it fairly easy (i.e. not more than a few hours a day).
Very wise. One of those ‘diseases’ for which the indicator for having one is having one earlier. And yes I’ve had one and AFAIK completely recovered. Put my recovery from my other problems back a bit, though.
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We must never, ever, ever join the Euro. It has forced the poor bastards into a 15 year depression.
This election result is so shallow and fractured that it's probably now politically impossible to Rejoin.
Now that Labour are in government it is easier for them to set the terms of debate and the agenda for political debate. But do they really want to spend a decade making the case for Rejoin? I sense that even Starmer would be bored rigid by revisiting the topic.
I would be surprised if European issues took up much government time, and I expect the government to be low-key about the things that are done.
I would be working hard on a series of broadly technical "alignment" measures to make it easier to trade and study in the EU and vice-versa.
Watch this it’s fascinating - I asked James Timpson what he’d do about prisons and sentencing if he was in charge. He believes only a third of prisoners in jail should definitely be there. He’s now in charge of prisons (but not sentencing). [VIDEO]
I'd be interested to see what comes of this, as I have a rather loose picture of our prisons at present. I feel like we need to build more prisons, but also we jail plenty of people who don't need to be, and that whilst part of the purpose of prison is punishment it is not an effective means of punishment for many offences.
A logical approach might be to filter out the first timers and those amenable to giving up crime. Put them in separate facilities, look at training etc with early release contingent on meeting milestones.
The career criminals (few in number but prolific) need warehousing. We had a local rum blossom, whose career consists of - get out of prison, find a woman, put her in hospital due to rage, go to court. He’s been round that loop a few times. He needs warehousing - if nothing else, to reduce the load on A&E.
Are there any decent explanations yet of why of all the hundreds and hundreds of GE polls not one of them was anywhere close to the basic figure of the gap between Tory and Labour (10%).
Over the last 15 years, it seems like we have had the same question raised repeatedly. Maybe it is just really hard now to get truly representative samples. People don't have landlines / want to talk on the phone and the online panels are over represented by overly engaged / keen people.
ANME clearly shows the importance of candidate selection. It was more than anything a vote against Douglas Ross attempting to carpet-bag. Duguid would have won comfortably.
The Conservatives should almost focus on nothing else but high-quality candidate selection.
No way James Arbuthnot would have lost Hampshire North East either.
Can be difficult to get seats back from the Lib Dems once they're in, they (2015 excepted !) normally don't have to deal with the mucky business of government. The seat you really want next time round as a Tory candidate is Truss' old one - that to my mind is the easiest Con Gain of 2029 or whenever right now.
When the Lib Dems got their spectacular by-election wins in North Shropshire, Chesham and Amersham, Honiton and Tiverton, Somerton and Frome the conventional wisdom was that they would all lose at the next GE but all 4 by-election victors were returned on Thursday..
And the LDs almost won South Shropshire as well, one of the more remarkable results as the LDs started in third place behind Labour, their 8,000 votes last time up against the Tory's 37,000.
That the LDs came through so strongly past Labour in Home Counties seats like this re-enforces that, despite the merciless mid-campaign spinning from Palmer in his Didcot bunker, the LibDems really are the better placed to take on the Tories in the south away from the larger towns.
No, LD edged Labour to be second in 2019 in South Shropshire by a tiny margin having been a bad third in 2017. That was why it was so galling this time that the TV sites and MRP were advising Labour when anyone politically engaged in the seat knew that Matthew Green was best positioned to take it from the Tories, especially as the circumstances were not that dissimilar to when he took it in 2001.
Labour campaigned in Broseley where they have the council seat, there were lots of stakeboards, and that could have made the difference.
The LIbDem campaign in Didcot was interesting - they deluged the constituency in leaflets - 2 or 3 every week, some allegedly by paid-for deliverers - with almost no canvassing after the first few days. Labour did quite a lot of canvassing - against regional instructions, and ultimately with the regional data base switched off - but ultimately the sheer flood of LibDem leaflets did the trick, because they subliminally pushed the message that the LibDems were the main alternative, and given the non-ideological campaigns of the national parties there weren't many positive reasons to vote Labour rather than LibDem (or vice versa in the seats where Labour was trying and the LibDems weren't).
Would be different if it was a LibDems insurgency vs a Labour government, but worked a treat in the current circs. In retrospect more of us should have obeyed Region and gone to help in a surprisingly close race that Labour won narrowly. But it was sobering that convassing actually doesn't make much difference if the underlying message strikes a chord.
In a GE, the 'find your voters and get them out' classical approach to canvassing' is pretty unimportant. Canvassing is part of the mix to create the impression of an active campaign, and is critical if you intend to do something with the data before polling day, such as targeted messaging. Canvassing certainly doesn't change anyone's mind - the research suggests the main impact is that being canvassed increases the likelihood of someone actually voting. Hence nowadays the 'just go knock on every door' old style canvass is rarely done, since you just make it more likely your opponents will vote.
But I'd say that during an election it's the least productive way of spending your time. I won my London ward six times running, including during the incredibly tough coalition times, and we never managed to knock on more than about 50-60% of the doors during the campaign. And half of those were not in.
Indeed the most useful thing about going door knocking is the leaflet you leave
I think this is a really good post. Yes, I've been skeptical about the value of canvassing, but I like the point that it can create the impression of an active campaign etc, so it has uses and can add value, but the old style image of random door knocking is not the most effective use of time.
The time that canvassing is critical is when there isn't an election on. Not least because the idea that you'd be out pounding the streets not immediately looking for votes makes such an impression. But it's best to have a local reason to be calling, especially in areas where the 'Labour Doorstep' carpet-bombing approach to door knocking has devalued the worth in simply turning up.
The other thing I was renowned for was assiduously recording every bit of personal info; dogs name, partner's occupation, any political or local issues they mention, a big holiday or family event just enjoyed. Noted it all down, into the computer, and all hand written back onto the cards before the next election. As a councillor you only need to impress someone by 'remembering' or connecting over something like that and you have their vote for life.
We must never, ever, ever join the Euro. It has forced the poor bastards into a 15 year depression.
This election result is so shallow and fractured that it's probably now politically impossible to Rejoin.
Now that Labour are in government it is easier for them to set the terms of debate and the agenda for political debate. But do they really want to spend a decade making the case for Rejoin? I sense that even Starmer would be bored rigid by revisiting the topic.
I would be surprised if European issues took up much government time, and I expect the government to be low-key about the things that are done.
I get the impression Starmer, unusually for a prime minister, is not particularly interested in foreign affairs. (Same also for Sunak)
The problem now for Brexit, given it's not going to be reversed, is that it replaced membership of the European Union with a void. That void badly needs filling and it's going to take a lot of government time and political investment. Actually a lot more than continuing membership of the EU where you let the system run with things.
We must never, ever, ever join the Euro. It has forced the poor bastards into a 15 year depression.
This election result is so shallow and fractured that it's probably now politically impossible to Rejoin.
Now that Labour are in government it is easier for them to set the terms of debate and the agenda for political debate. But do they really want to spend a decade making the case for Rejoin? I sense that even Starmer would be bored rigid by revisiting the topic.
I would be surprised if European issues took up much government time, and I expect the government to be low-key about the things that are done.
I get the impression Starmer, unusually for a prime minister, is not particularly interested in foreign affairs. (Same also for Sunak)
He may not be interested but they will be interested in him.
We must never, ever, ever join the Euro. It has forced the poor bastards into a 15 year depression.
This election result is so shallow and fractured that it's probably now politically impossible to Rejoin.
Now that Labour are in government it is easier for them to set the terms of debate and the agenda for political debate. But do they really want to spend a decade making the case for Rejoin? I sense that even Starmer would be bored rigid by revisiting the topic.
I would be surprised if European issues took up much government time, and I expect the government to be low-key about the things that are done.
I get the impression Starmer, unusually for a prime minister, is not particularly interested in foreign affairs. (Same also for Sunak)
Isn't the truism that Prime Ministers only become interested in foreign affairs when they've given up trying to make things better at home?
Blair was an unusual case there as he came in on a deal with his Chancellor that he would not get too involved with the domestic. Look where that got us.
Watch this it’s fascinating - I asked James Timpson what he’d do about prisons and sentencing if he was in charge. He believes only a third of prisoners in jail should definitely be there. He’s now in charge of prisons (but not sentencing). [VIDEO]
Good appointment. The starting point might be that once you have sorted out which prisoners (more than the current number, and not all murderers) should never be let out on account of either badness or madness, the rest are coming out sometime and the rest of us are less safe if they come out still deeply immature or bad or mad - or any combination - so the big case against the Daily Mail/Sun 'lock 'em up' line is that it fails to protect us.
According to public opinion, there are also people who shouldn't be in prison because they should be executed.
We must never, ever, ever join the Euro. It has forced the poor bastards into a 15 year depression.
This election result is so shallow and fractured that it's probably now politically impossible to Rejoin.
Now that Labour are in government it is easier for them to set the terms of debate and the agenda for political debate. But do they really want to spend a decade making the case for Rejoin? I sense that even Starmer would be bored rigid by revisiting the topic.
I would be surprised if European issues took up much government time, and I expect the government to be low-key about the things that are done.
I get the impression Starmer, unusually for a prime minister, is not particularly interested in foreign affairs. (Same also for Sunak)
The problem now for Brexit, given it's not going to be reversed, is that it replaced membership of the European Union with a void. That void badly needs filling and it's going to take a lot of government time and political investment. Actually a lot more than continuing membership of the EU where you let the system run with things.
Also, membership economises on civil servants as the Tories, somewhat to their surprise, discovered.
I don't know where the idea the LDs are a southern party has arisen from. Scotland - 10.5% of MPs NE England - 0% NW England - 4% Yorkshire and the Humber - 2% Wales - 3% E Midlands - 0% W Midlands - 3.5% E England - 11.5% London - 8% SE England - 26% SW England - 38%
The interesting thing is the SW includes places they have essentially abandoned in the last 10 years but which used to be strong second places at least.
So whilst holding the 38% itself will not be easy, there is still room to grow in the region.
It is fun to see the absolute stubs of wikipedia articles for so many new MPs. I guess some of them might feel a bit weird having their aides fill out the details, so we're waiting on enthusiastic amateurs to get round to it.
ANME clearly shows the importance of candidate selection. It was more than anything a vote against Douglas Ross attempting to carpet-bag. Duguid would have won comfortably.
The Conservatives should almost focus on nothing else but high-quality candidate selection.
No way James Arbuthnot would have lost Hampshire North East either.
Can be difficult to get seats back from the Lib Dems once they're in, they (2015 excepted !) normally don't have to deal with the mucky business of government. The seat you really want next time round as a Tory candidate is Truss' old one - that to my mind is the easiest Con Gain of 2029 or whenever right now.
When the Lib Dems got their spectacular by-election wins in North Shropshire, Chesham and Amersham, Honiton and Tiverton, Somerton and Frome the conventional wisdom was that they would all lose at the next GE but all 4 by-election victors were returned on Thursday..
And the LDs almost won South Shropshire as well, one of the more remarkable results as the LDs started in third place behind Labour, their 8,000 votes last time up against the Tory's 37,000.
That the LDs came through so strongly past Labour in Home Counties seats like this re-enforces that, despite the merciless mid-campaign spinning from Palmer in his Didcot bunker, the LibDems really are the better placed to take on the Tories in the south away from the larger towns.
No, LD edged Labour to be second in 2019 in South Shropshire by a tiny margin having been a bad third in 2017. That was why it was so galling this time that the TV sites and MRP were advising Labour when anyone politically engaged in the seat knew that Matthew Green was best positioned to take it from the Tories, especially as the circumstances were not that dissimilar to when he took it in 2001.
Labour campaigned in Broseley where they have the council seat, there were lots of stakeboards, and that could have made the difference.
The LIbDem campaign in Didcot was interesting - they deluged the constituency in leaflets - 2 or 3 every week, some allegedly by paid-for deliverers - with almost no canvassing after the first few days. Labour did quite a lot of canvassing - against regional instructions, and ultimately with the regional data base switched off - but ultimately the sheer flood of LibDem leaflets did the trick, because they subliminally pushed the message that the LibDems were the main alternative, and given the non-ideological campaigns of the national parties there weren't many positive reasons to vote Labour rather than LibDem (or vice versa in the seats where Labour was trying and the LibDems weren't).
Would be different if it was a LibDems insurgency vs a Labour government, but worked a treat in the current circs. In retrospect more of us should have obeyed Region and gone to help in a surprisingly close race that Labour won narrowly. But it was sobering that convassing actually doesn't make much difference if the underlying message strikes a chord.
In a GE, the 'find your voters and get them out' classical approach to canvassing' is pretty unimportant. Canvassing is part of the mix to create the impression of an active campaign, and is critical if you intend to do something with the data before polling day, such as targeted messaging. Canvassing certainly doesn't change anyone's mind - the research suggests the main impact is that being canvassed increases the likelihood of someone actually voting. Hence nowadays the 'just go knock on every door' old style canvass is rarely done, since you just make it more likely your opponents will vote.
But I'd say that during an election it's the least productive way of spending your time. I won my London ward six times running, including during the incredibly tough coalition times, and we never managed to knock on more than about 50-60% of the doors during the campaign. And half of those were not in.
Indeed the most useful thing about going door knocking is the leaflet you leave
I think this is a really good post. Yes, I've been skeptical about the value of canvassing, but I like the point that it can create the impression of an active campaign etc, so it has uses and can add value, but the old style image of random door knocking is not the most effective use of time.
The final point is that, once we'd found a Tory, we'd never door knock them again during an election. Which reduced the number of doors we were after. If we found Tory members, they stopped getting the leaflets as well.
A favourite moment was at one of the counts, when one of the defeated Tories came up to me and said "I don't understand how you keep doing it; we never see anything from you". I just smiled.
Ok Rwanda is gone. What are they going to do to resolve the situation then?
Farage is busy today but will soon enough be on the case again.
1. "The situation" is broadly unresolvable to the satisfaction of the populist right. Rwanda was not a solution to that problem. It was part of the "do nothing real, just play politics" agenda of the last decade.
2. The actual problems are multifacted - and largely go away when people are feeling optimistic about their lot. Jobs, wages, housing are the underlying issues and not fixed by shipping a few immigrants to Rwanda at great expense (or indeed bringing immigrants in to do the jobs we won't for salaries we won't tolerate). 3. There is no quick fix to 2. We need to see what happens over a decade.
The problem is with (2) and (3) is that they have at most half a decade or Farage will be hovering over the red wall like a vulture in 2029.
Putting aside the rights and wrongs, politicially locking up fewer people or letting them out really early is always dicey...you get a few cases where they go on and do something horrendous and it becomes a massive scandal in the media.
Its much easier to go the Tont Blair route of tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.
We must never, ever, ever join the Euro. It has forced the poor bastards into a 15 year depression.
This election result is so shallow and fractured that it's probably now politically impossible to Rejoin.
Now that Labour are in government it is easier for them to set the terms of debate and the agenda for political debate. But do they really want to spend a decade making the case for Rejoin? I sense that even Starmer would be bored rigid by revisiting the topic.
I would be surprised if European issues took up much government time, and I expect the government to be low-key about the things that are done.
I get the impression Starmer, unusually for a prime minister, is not particularly interested in foreign affairs. (Same also for Sunak)
He may not be interested but they will be interested in him.
Absolutely right. I added further to my comment about this. I would say Foreign Affairs is probably the biggest weak spotin the new Labour government. David Lammy is unimpressive as FM and Starmer isn't interested.
We must never, ever, ever join the Euro. It has forced the poor bastards into a 15 year depression.
This election result is so shallow and fractured that it's probably now politically impossible to Rejoin.
Now that Labour are in government it is easier for them to set the terms of debate and the agenda for political debate. But do they really want to spend a decade making the case for Rejoin? I sense that even Starmer would be bored rigid by revisiting the topic.
I would be surprised if European issues took up much government time, and I expect the government to be low-key about the things that are done.
I get the impression Starmer, unusually for a prime minister, is not particularly interested in foreign affairs. (Same also for Sunak)
He may not be interested but they will be interested in him.
Absolutely right. I added further to my comment about this. I would say Foreign Affairs is probably the biggest weak spotin the new Labour government. David Lammy is unimpressive as FM and Starmer isn't interested.
Hurrah. The less interest we take in interfering abroad the better. We are not world policeman any more.
We must never, ever, ever join the Euro. It has forced the poor bastards into a 15 year depression.
This election result is so shallow and fractured that it's probably now politically impossible to Rejoin.
Now that Labour are in government it is easier for them to set the terms of debate and the agenda for political debate. But do they really want to spend a decade making the case for Rejoin? I sense that even Starmer would be bored rigid by revisiting the topic.
I would be surprised if European issues took up much government time, and I expect the government to be low-key about the things that are done.
I would be working hard on a series of broadly technical "alignment" measures to make it easier to trade and study in the EU and vice-versa.
Yes. I think that sort of pragmatic approach could take a lot of sting out of Brexit. As the electorate see that Brexit isn't simply an excuse for Tory ideological and xenophobic posturing then the way would be clear to put the referendum behind Britain. We might see the Leave/Remain breakdown disappear from opinion poll tables.
The case for Rejoin could then be about the future, and not about revenge for the lies on the bus. Or the country might find that it's quite comfortable with a Brexit where Britain is on good terms with the EU, but does its own thing from time to time.
I'd like to think that Britain would one day rejoin the EU in an optimistic way, rather than with an air of Brexit having failed, and being defeated by it. With a sense that Britain could perfectly happily continue outside the EU, but wanted to be part of the EU as well.
Ok Rwanda is gone. What are they going to do to resolve the situation then?
Farage is busy today but will soon enough be on the case again.
1. "The situation" is broadly unresolvable to the satisfaction of the populist right. Rwanda was not a solution to that problem. It was part of the "do nothing real, just play politics" agenda of the last decade.
2. The actual problems are multifacted - and largely go away when people are feeling optimistic about their lot. Jobs, wages, housing are the underlying issues and not fixed by shipping a few immigrants to Rwanda at great expense (or indeed bringing immigrants in to do the jobs we won't for salaries we won't tolerate). 3. There is no quick fix to 2. We need to see what happens over a decade.
The problem is with (2) and (3) is that they have at most half a decade or Farage will be hovering over the red wall like a vulture in 2029.
But if they don't do 2 and 3 they might as well not bother at all.
There is *nothing* they can do that will fix 1 - Farage will be there twisting and turning in the wind and spouting his populist rhetoric.
Instead of trying, they should get on with 2, and promote the crap out of any positive impact they *can* have in the next 5 years.
ANME clearly shows the importance of candidate selection. It was more than anything a vote against Douglas Ross attempting to carpet-bag. Duguid would have won comfortably.
The Conservatives should almost focus on nothing else but high-quality candidate selection.
No way James Arbuthnot would have lost Hampshire North East either.
Can be difficult to get seats back from the Lib Dems once they're in, they (2015 excepted !) normally don't have to deal with the mucky business of government. The seat you really want next time round as a Tory candidate is Truss' old one - that to my mind is the easiest Con Gain of 2029 or whenever right now.
Your old campaigning ground of Derbyshire NE had an almost identical result in 2024 to that in 2015:
The likely Conservative gains in 2029 are going to include some non-standard places.
I wonder when the Conservatives will realise that and what it will do to their strategy and policy ideas.
Darlington, Redcar, Middlesborough South, the Stocktons need to figure in alongside Bolsover, Rother Valley etc and they need a fairly radical NW strategy
One idea would be to give Reform a free run in Sunderland/Durham etc in return for standing down round here and other close seconds.
The Tories need to fight Reform tooth and nail, pointing out the vacuity of their policies and weakness of their leaders. If they cede them any ground, they are consigning themselves to the bin.
They also need to work incredibly hard in the constituencies in which reform have MPs - pointing out how little they do for them, picking up such casework-type slack as they have access to, championing local issues. Knocking out the leadership at the next election will finish Reform off for this cycle.
More well meaning advice to viciously attack other right wingers and become more centrist from *checks notes* non conservatives.
Fair point perhaps, though Reform attacked the Conservatives just as much as anyone else so that was right on right. I think the Tories will try to heal on the right before going for the centre, but it's not a one way street where the Tories cannot also go after Reform, who openly sought to replace them. They are the Tory enemy too, just of a different kind and requiring different strategies.
I think there's a misconception in politicians that they cannot appeal in different directions. Yes you can risk looking schizophrenic, but no one is ideologically consistent 100% of the time, it is possible to not repel centrists whilst still keeping on board people on your left or right.
I agree - the two parties should continue to oppose each other, as Labour and the Lib Dems have done. Otherwise there would be no merit in them seeking different seats and voters.
My slight irritation is that people on a site called 'politicalbetting.com' can continue to peddle psephological fantasy, insisting that the Tories lost because they weren't centrist and managerial enough, as well as insisting that they fight tooth and nail with right-wing parties whose supporters are closely aligned in opinion with theirs. These aren't insights, they are peoples' political hopes dressed up as insights.
The Tories are in a real fix because one way or another they need to sort out the Reform issue in order to rebuild. But that’s easier said than done - they need some of Reform’s voting base, and simply saying “well, be centre-right and competent and the electoral problem will fix itself” might be true (though no guarantee - look what has happened to the right in other countries) but it is also easier said than done in an opposition that has just been in government and roundly discredited for being incompetent. Who are these excellent centre right administrators who are going to pull in the voters and where were they keeping them for the past few years?
In some ways it is less risky and easier for them to go full populist right (which I do not want), eat the Reform vote, lose (assuming they would do so), and tack back to the centre in time when people are willing to give another party a chance. But that requires long term strategic thinking and clear appreciation that the party is at least 2 terms away from power, and political parties do not exist with that kind of long-term leadership. It also causes a problem with a number of MPs (eg Noakes) who are much further to the left of the membership.
Of course this is all still based on the assumption that elections will be won in the centre. We expect that to hold, but it may not.
As Starmer ended up with a 170 odd majority Truss lost her seat.
The weakness of the result for Labour suggests that that *could* have happened if only she hadn't tried to do anything radical.
I think she could have achieved the radical actually, with a lot of political cunning.
She should have focused on response to the energy crisis first - a bill tying the energy support package in with energy supply side reforms, so the 'response to the energy crisis' was tied into one package with fracking. Labour would have probably tried to amend out the fracking, but would have failed I think. Isolating that from a 'budget' could have negated the need for significant OBR involvement and probably prevented a market attack on bonds.
Once that's through, concentrate on a fully-costed minibudget.
A big problem for Truss would still have been immigration - any moves to reduce it significantly will always be leaped upon by the OBR to downgrade their growth forecasts and leave no room for any tax cuts. That's why Truss wanted to shut Suella up. She'd probably have done the same as Sunak - a flashy boat solution but little action on legal migration till the very end of the period in office. I do think she'd have let Rwanda (or her Rwanda) get off the ground before calling the election. And definitely would have ensured it had the legal teeth to work, up to and including putting leaving the ECHR if they proved an issue in the Tory manifesto.
We must never, ever, ever join the Euro. It has forced the poor bastards into a 15 year depression.
This election result is so shallow and fractured that it's probably now politically impossible to Rejoin.
Now that Labour are in government it is easier for them to set the terms of debate and the agenda for political debate. But do they really want to spend a decade making the case for Rejoin? I sense that even Starmer would be bored rigid by revisiting the topic.
I would be surprised if European issues took up much government time, and I expect the government to be low-key about the things that are done.
I get the impression Starmer, unusually for a prime minister, is not particularly interested in foreign affairs. (Same also for Sunak)
He may not be interested but they will be interested in him.
Absolutely right. I added further to my comment about this. I would say Foreign Affairs is probably the biggest weak spotin the new Labour government. David Lammy is unimpressive as FM and Starmer isn't interested.
Hurrah. The less interest we take in interfering abroad the better. We are not world policeman any more.
There are options between doing nothing and being world policeman.
We're not a Great Power but we are still a power, simply by virtue of size, relative wealth, and global connections.
We must never, ever, ever join the Euro. It has forced the poor bastards into a 15 year depression.
This election result is so shallow and fractured that it's probably now politically impossible to Rejoin.
Now that Labour are in government it is easier for them to set the terms of debate and the agenda for political debate. But do they really want to spend a decade making the case for Rejoin? I sense that even Starmer would be bored rigid by revisiting the topic.
I would be surprised if European issues took up much government time, and I expect the government to be low-key about the things that are done.
I get the impression Starmer, unusually for a prime minister, is not particularly interested in foreign affairs. (Same also for Sunak)
He may not be interested but they will be interested in him.
Absolutely right. I added further to my comment about this. I would say Foreign Affairs is probably the biggest weak spotin the new Labour government. David Lammy is unimpressive as FM and Starmer isn't interested.
Hurrah. The less interest we take in interfering abroad the better. We are not world policeman any more.
The USA are now the world’s policeman. Unfortunately, after November they are likely to be the equivalent of the Met.
We must never, ever, ever join the Euro. It has forced the poor bastards into a 15 year depression.
This election result is so shallow and fractured that it's probably now politically impossible to Rejoin.
Now that Labour are in government it is easier for them to set the terms of debate and the agenda for political debate. But do they really want to spend a decade making the case for Rejoin? I sense that even Starmer would be bored rigid by revisiting the topic.
I would be surprised if European issues took up much government time, and I expect the government to be low-key about the things that are done.
I would be working hard on a series of broadly technical "alignment" measures to make it easier to trade and study in the EU and vice-versa.
Yes. I think that sort of pragmatic approach could take a lot of sting out of Brexit. As the electorate see that Brexit isn't simply an excuse for Tory ideological and xenophobic posturing then the way would be clear to put the referendum behind Britain. We might see the Leave/Remain breakdown disappear from opinion poll tables.
The case for Rejoin could then be about the future, and not about revenge for the lies on the bus. Or the country might find that it's quite comfortable with a Brexit where Britain is on good terms with the EU, but does its own thing from time to time.
I'd like to think that Britain would one day rejoin the EU in an optimistic way, rather than with an air of Brexit having failed, and being defeated by it. With a sense that Britain could perfectly happily continue outside the EU, but wanted to be part of the EU as well.
There is no need to rejoin and we can't now we are in CPTTP.
Why bother. We have free trade with the single market.
It would make more sense to join Schenegan if immigration can be sorted. Given the difficulties the issue is causing *within* the EU that is no longer unthinkable.
Well done, RP. May you savour the Cybernats' tears. The downfall of the SNP is some consolation.
Isn't it all part of Starmer's shallow victory though? I don't see any real revival in Britishness north of the border. Without a concerted effort from Westminster the Scot nats will be back.
We must never, ever, ever join the Euro. It has forced the poor bastards into a 15 year depression.
This election result is so shallow and fractured that it's probably now politically impossible to Rejoin.
Now that Labour are in government it is easier for them to set the terms of debate and the agenda for political debate. But do they really want to spend a decade making the case for Rejoin? I sense that even Starmer would be bored rigid by revisiting the topic.
I would be surprised if European issues took up much government time, and I expect the government to be low-key about the things that are done.
I get the impression Starmer, unusually for a prime minister, is not particularly interested in foreign affairs. (Same also for Sunak)
He may not be interested but they will be interested in him.
Absolutely right. I added further to my comment about this. I would say Foreign Affairs is probably the biggest weak spotin the new Labour government. David Lammy is unimpressive as FM and Starmer isn't interested.
Hurrah. The less interest we take in interfering abroad the better. We are not world policeman any more.
The USA are now the world’s policeman. Unfortunately, after November they are likely to be the equivalent of the Met.
I disagree, but oooff. Good one.
The problem is that US can no longer afford to be world policeman. National Debt Interest now exceeds Military spending (*the* end of empire klaxon) and the dollar has lost its monopoly in international trade, so no more printy printy without weimaresque consequences.
ANME clearly shows the importance of candidate selection. It was more than anything a vote against Douglas Ross attempting to carpet-bag. Duguid would have won comfortably.
The Conservatives should almost focus on nothing else but high-quality candidate selection.
No way James Arbuthnot would have lost Hampshire North East either.
Can be difficult to get seats back from the Lib Dems once they're in, they (2015 excepted !) normally don't have to deal with the mucky business of government. The seat you really want next time round as a Tory candidate is Truss' old one - that to my mind is the easiest Con Gain of 2029 or whenever right now.
Your old campaigning ground of Derbyshire NE had an almost identical result in 2024 to that in 2015:
The likely Conservative gains in 2029 are going to include some non-standard places.
I wonder when the Conservatives will realise that and what it will do to their strategy and policy ideas.
Darlington, Redcar, Middlesborough South, the Stocktons need to figure in alongside Bolsover, Rother Valley etc and they need a fairly radical NW strategy
One idea would be to give Reform a free run in Sunderland/Durham etc in return for standing down round here and other close seconds.
The Tories need to fight Reform tooth and nail, pointing out the vacuity of their policies and weakness of their leaders. If they cede them any ground, they are consigning themselves to the bin.
They also need to work incredibly hard in the constituencies in which reform have MPs - pointing out how little they do for them, picking up such casework-type slack as they have access to, championing local issues. Knocking out the leadership at the next election will finish Reform off for this cycle.
More well meaning advice to viciously attack other right wingers and become more centrist from *checks notes* non conservatives.
Fair point perhaps, though Reform attacked the Conservatives just as much as anyone else so that was right on right. I think the Tories will try to heal on the right before going for the centre, but it's not a one way street where the Tories cannot also go after Reform, who openly sought to replace them. They are the Tory enemy too, just of a different kind and requiring different strategies.
I think there's a misconception in politicians that they cannot appeal in different directions. Yes you can risk looking schizophrenic, but no one is ideologically consistent 100% of the time, it is possible to not repel centrists whilst still keeping on board people on your left or right.
I agree - the two parties should continue to oppose each other, as Labour and the Lib Dems have done. Otherwise there would be no merit in them seeking different seats and voters.
My slight irritation is that people on a site called 'politicalbetting.com' can continue to peddle psephological fantasy, insisting that the Tories lost because they weren't centrist and managerial enough, as well as insisting that they fight tooth and nail with right-wing parties whose supporters are closely aligned in opinion with theirs. These aren't insights, they are peoples' political hopes dressed up as insights.
The Tories are in a real fix because one way or another they need to sort out the Reform issue in order to rebuild. But that’s easier said than done - they need some of Reform’s voting base, and simply saying “well, be centre-right and competent and the electoral problem will fix itself” might be true (though no guarantee - look what has happened to the right in other countries) but it is also easier said than done in an opposition that has just been in government and roundly discredited for being incompetent. Who are these excellent centre right administrators who are going to pull in the voters and where were they keeping them for the past few years?
In some ways it is less risky and easier for them to go full populist right (which I do not want), eat the Reform vote, lose (assuming they would do so), and tack back to the centre in time when people are willing to give another party a chance. But that requires long term strategic thinking and clear appreciation that the party is at least 2 terms away from power, and political parties do not exist with that kind of long-term leadership. It also causes a problem with a number of MPs (eg Noakes) who are much further to the left of the membership.
Of course this is all still based on the assumption that elections will be won in the centre. We expect that to hold, but it may not.
And fighting the populist right doesn't mean tacking left.
It means pointing out the fatuity of their populism, and providing Conservative solutions to the underlying problems.
Not co-opting their sloganeering.
Talk to the people the Party has lost to the populist right, and show that you really understand them and have real Conservative solutions to the problems. Like the Conservatives used to do.
It was easier to do that when in Government, of course, when they could *actually* do something and run on their record. But that ship has sailed.
It is fun to see the absolute stubs of wikipedia articles for so many new MPs. I guess some of them might feel a bit weird having their aides fill out the details, so we're waiting on enthusiastic amateurs to get round to it.
"Wot a legend! Let me tell you about that stag do he organised in Budapest..."
Are there any decent explanations yet of why of all the hundreds and hundreds of GE polls not one of them was anywhere close to the basic figure of the gap between Tory and Labour (10%).
Over the last 15 years, it seems like we have had the same question raised repeatedly. Maybe it is just really hard now to get truly representative samples. People don't have landlines / want to talk on the phone and the online panels are over represented by overly engaged / keen people.
Assume all don't know last time Tory voters return at the ballot box, exclude anyone under 25 from your sample and double count pensioners
ANME clearly shows the importance of candidate selection. It was more than anything a vote against Douglas Ross attempting to carpet-bag. Duguid would have won comfortably.
The Conservatives should almost focus on nothing else but high-quality candidate selection.
No way James Arbuthnot would have lost Hampshire North East either.
Can be difficult to get seats back from the Lib Dems once they're in, they (2015 excepted !) normally don't have to deal with the mucky business of government. The seat you really want next time round as a Tory candidate is Truss' old one - that to my mind is the easiest Con Gain of 2029 or whenever right now.
When the Lib Dems got their spectacular by-election wins in North Shropshire, Chesham and Amersham, Honiton and Tiverton, Somerton and Frome the conventional wisdom was that they would all lose at the next GE but all 4 by-election victors were returned on Thursday..
And the LDs almost won South Shropshire as well, one of the more remarkable results as the LDs started in third place behind Labour, their 8,000 votes last time up against the Tory's 37,000.
That the LDs came through so strongly past Labour in Home Counties seats like this re-enforces that, despite the merciless mid-campaign spinning from Palmer in his Didcot bunker, the LibDems really are the better placed to take on the Tories in the south away from the larger towns.
No, LD edged Labour to be second in 2019 in South Shropshire by a tiny margin having been a bad third in 2017. That was why it was so galling this time that the TV sites and MRP were advising Labour when anyone politically engaged in the seat knew that Matthew Green was best positioned to take it from the Tories, especially as the circumstances were not that dissimilar to when he took it in 2001.
Labour campaigned in Broseley where they have the council seat, there were lots of stakeboards, and that could have made the difference.
The LIbDem campaign in Didcot was interesting - they deluged the constituency in leaflets - 2 or 3 every week, some allegedly by paid-for deliverers - with almost no canvassing after the first few days. Labour did quite a lot of canvassing - against regional instructions, and ultimately with the regional data base switched off - but ultimately the sheer flood of LibDem leaflets did the trick, because they subliminally pushed the message that the LibDems were the main alternative, and given the non-ideological campaigns of the national parties there weren't many positive reasons to vote Labour rather than LibDem (or vice versa in the seats where Labour was trying and the LibDems weren't).
Would be different if it was a LibDems insurgency vs a Labour government, but worked a treat in the current circs. In retrospect more of us should have obeyed Region and gone to help in a surprisingly close race that Labour won narrowly. But it was sobering that convassing actually doesn't make much difference if the underlying message strikes a chord.
This may have been Nick's perception, but it's a touch mistaken. Understandably, seeing as we don't exactly swap details of what we're doing in depth!
Firstly, we had no paid-for deliverers. I can understand how Labour may have assumed we had to have them, with the amount of delivery, but we'd assiduously built up our volunteer network over several years. Consider: we had twenty-odd district councillors, all of whom had built up their local networks, and one of the first things Olly did was to find more and more volunteers to complete the networks and add redundancy.
Even so, I personally delivered fifteen rounds in the final five days.
Secondly, we did have plenty of canvassing. It started several years ago as we built up local government support and deepened further after 2019. Many places had several canvasses-worth of good data, and we had teams out every day through the campaign. It can be hard to see other party's canvassing - I personally only noticed Labour canvassers on the penultimate day when I ran into Nick and his team in South Didcot. But I can personally testify to plenty of canvassing teams. After all, you don't get so many stakeboard sites (approaching 400) without having done a LOT of canvassing. And the stakeboards everywhere reinforced that message that Lib Dems were the alternative.
We also had telling and GOTV - I personally carried out a 4-hour shift in south Didcot (Meadowhall). No Labour tellers there (or in Drayton); only Lib Dems, but I was told that there were Labour tellers elsewhere (for the first time in our memory). Very few Tory tellers anywhere, but a handful were present.
Voters noticed our canvassers even if Nick didn't - some brought it up to me unprompted while I was telling (and a couple said it made their minds up for us at the last moment, which I thought usually didn't happen).
I think Nick's campaign was too late in the day - we'd been laying the foundations for a long time by then. As he says, once the underlying message has hit home, it's hard to change, and the lesson here is to get that message out early. Leafleting wasn't just in the campaign - with our network in place, we'd been leafleting many areas once per month for several months before the campaign was called. Olly had major name recognition by the election, which also helped.
Regarding prisons, it will be interesting to see if labour can somehow avoid the same circuit that the conservatives went around twice in the last 14 years. So, first you have someone like Ken Clarke who is a liberal and wants to reduce prisoner numbers to help save money. Then you find that you need to keep sending people to prison, ie after the riots in London. Then you get someone like Grayling as minister who tries to go tough and bans books for prisoners, overseeing overcrowding, etc. Then this becomes untenable. So you have another go at liberal reform with Rory Stuart and then Michael Gove, but then this becomes untenable again due to politics, so you end up back with another version of the Grayling situation, with prisons overcrowded, dangerous and squalid, but with no solution and a plan for 'tougher sentences' due again to public demand, the consequences of which will be your successors problem.
What I would say about this is that labour need to study what happened before, see that it works almost as an algorhythmic circuit, and try to find a way of pre-empting the inevitable consequence of "liberal reform".
Also, if the cost of each prison place is £50k per year, and the prison population is expected to rise by 30,000 inmates (as predicted on the current trajectory), then the annual cost of meeting public demand for the additional incarceration is £1.5 billion per year, this adds little to the economy, and the problems of poor detection of crime continue and are exacerbated by prisons failing to rehabilitate.
ANME clearly shows the importance of candidate selection. It was more than anything a vote against Douglas Ross attempting to carpet-bag. Duguid would have won comfortably.
The Conservatives should almost focus on nothing else but high-quality candidate selection.
No way James Arbuthnot would have lost Hampshire North East either.
Can be difficult to get seats back from the Lib Dems once they're in, they (2015 excepted !) normally don't have to deal with the mucky business of government. The seat you really want next time round as a Tory candidate is Truss' old one - that to my mind is the easiest Con Gain of 2029 or whenever right now.
Your old campaigning ground of Derbyshire NE had an almost identical result in 2024 to that in 2015:
The likely Conservative gains in 2029 are going to include some non-standard places.
I wonder when the Conservatives will realise that and what it will do to their strategy and policy ideas.
Darlington, Redcar, Middlesborough South, the Stocktons need to figure in alongside Bolsover, Rother Valley etc and they need a fairly radical NW strategy
The RedWall is now the BlueWall, albeit with two shades of blue. To win these people over you have to pander to populism and "othering", although Farage is better at that than your Party are. Besides that doesn't return the Lib Dem BlueWall seats to you. I wonder in the same way once safe Labour seats are lost forever whether that might also be true of the LibDem gains in the Home Counties. Johnson's loutish behaviour didn't go down well in genteel Buckinghamshire.
And did anyone see Steve Baker's meltdown on GMB, blaming Ozzie and Balls for his defeat? Nurse, Nurse over here quickly please!
Never mind Red wall or Blue wall, someone appears to have constructed an Orange wall across the south on Thursday night. You can travel from Eastbourne to Barnstaple without leaving LD territory.
Actually Baggy Point ...
Only Geoffrey Cox stopping the OrangeWall reaching to Padstow.
Watch this it’s fascinating - I asked James Timpson what he’d do about prisons and sentencing if he was in charge. He believes only a third of prisoners in jail should definitely be there. He’s now in charge of prisons (but not sentencing). [VIDEO]
Good appointment. The starting point might be that once you have sorted out which prisoners (more than the current number, and not all murderers) should never be let out on account of either badness or madness, the rest are coming out sometime and the rest of us are less safe if they come out still deeply immature or bad or mad - or any combination - so the big case against the Daily Mail/Sun 'lock 'em up' line is that it fails to protect us.
In response, I would say, you have to try very hard to get into gaol. Most people who are inside are there because either they have done really heinous things, or they're recidivists, and judges have already bent over backwards giving them non-custodial sentences. Fortunately, crime is mostly a young person's (especially, a young man's activity), and most criminals grow out of it, eventually.
Gary Plumb, the man who was convicted of soliciting the murder of Holly Willoughby, had already been convicted twice of attempting to kidnap women, and had served a total of 16 months, a sentence so light that it's almost condoning what he did.
Most people who are in gaol very much deserve to be there.
A good night's sleep, hangover all gone. Some random thoughts:
1. I have had several American friends comment on the graceful way in which the Tories accepted the result and moved out of the way without rancour. I was surprised, thinking what else would you expect, until I remembered what they have experienced in the US over recent years. The Tories are not yet captured by the Trumpist world view. That is good for them and good for the country. It is vital this doesn't change. [snip!]
I honestly feel that if a party was making Trumpist overtones like that or behaved like that, then the sheer pig-headed, obstinate nature of your average Brit demanding fair play would come to the fore. A lot of the American problem seems to be driven by the evangelicals treating Trump like a prophet sent by god.
There are also the more racist elements backing him as whites become a minority in the US.
The differences between the UK and the USA are wider than they have been in a long time, possibly wider than ever and it seems we have less and less in common with them as time goes on.
I totally agree. But there seems to be a part of the right in the UK - Reform and the sections of the Conservative party wanting to merge with Reform - that tend to look across the Atlantic and to like what they see.
I think Farage is going to model his REF 'movement' on Trump/MAGA so the thesis that we are nothing like the US is about to get thoroughly tested.
What is MAGA though? If it is a party led by a messiah figure and whose voters prize one single issue above all else, then parts of this United Kingdom have already experienced this.
It is fun to see the absolute stubs of wikipedia articles for so many new MPs. I guess some of them might feel a bit weird having their aides fill out the details, so we're waiting on enthusiastic amateurs to get round to it.
"Wot a legend! Let me tell you about that stag do he organised in Budapest..."
The 22 year old MP profile going to be more than a bit sparse....U11 county chess champion.
A good night's sleep, hangover all gone. Some random thoughts:
1. I have had several American friends comment on the graceful way in which the Tories accepted the result and moved out of the way without rancour. I was surprised, thinking what else would you expect, until I remembered what they have experienced in the US over recent years. The Tories are not yet captured by the Trumpist world view. That is good for them and good for the country. It is vital this doesn't change. [snip!]
I honestly feel that if a party was making Trumpist overtones like that or behaved like that, then the sheer pig-headed, obstinate nature of your average Brit demanding fair play would come to the fore. A lot of the American problem seems to be driven by the evangelicals treating Trump like a prophet sent by god.
There are also the more racist elements backing him as whites become a minority in the US.
The differences between the UK and the USA are wider than they have been in a long time, possibly wider than ever and it seems we have less and less in common with them as time goes on.
I totally agree. But there seems to be a part of the right in the UK - Reform and the sections of the Conservative party wanting to merge with Reform - that tend to look across the Atlantic and to like what they see.
I think Farage is going to model his REF 'movement' on Trump/MAGA so the thesis that we are nothing like the US is about to get thoroughly tested.
What was the point of Cameron's save the Party Referendum? The price was Brexit and almost a decade on and the Conservative Party are still in the shadow of the cancer that is Farage. They should have stuck the f***** in the House of Lords years ago.
TBF, the real cancer was their fear of their own Eurosceptic which they tolerated just the same way Labour tolerated Corbyn.
It was the fear to face down their own extremists that did for both parties, and the lesson is the same - get rid of the nutters or the electorate will do it for you.
You are correct Rochdale, it is only when one experiences what it is like to be a candidate and fight a General Election campaign, one can appreciate what the "permanent professionals" are subjected to. I have no doubt you will stand again and maybe get elected on the list in 2026. For the first time in my life, since my first vote in 1979, I voted for another party at a General Election. I gave my support to my distant cousin Jamie Stone and voted LibDem even though I fundamentally oppose many of your party policies, especially on Europe.
I am glad I will no longer feel obliged to defend the Rwanda scheme and as a Cameroon "one nation" Tory, hope our new leader will not be of the Braverman ilk. If it is, I may just end up voting LibDem once more unless the Scottish party finally does what many of us have been calling for it to do for years, become the Scottish CSU to the English CDU.
In the 1980s I poured scorn on the then SDP-Liberal plan for a Federal UK system but as I have got older, especially after some 25 years of devolution, I increasingly believe it is the model the UK should adopt. Almost everything should be devolved with only key ministries like Defence and Foreign Affairs run from Westminster. A House of Commons with around 150 members, an elected House of Lords of a similar size and 4 sensibly sized parliaments in Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh and London would be my preferred option, all using some form of PR so that we banish politics at the extreme from getting near power in these islands of ours (excluding of course what the Irish Republic does and the separate administrations in the Channel Islands and Isle of Man).
I think there is a case for replacing most counties/unitaries with new bodies, large enough for them to deal with health, education and be self funding for it through levying their own taxes.
Leaving central government to govern not be running corporations providing health and the like.
Prior to 1945 some counties like London County Council had a functioning NHS equivalent and provided utilities such as power, gas and water very efficiently. Others had little or none of it.
Attlee made a fundamental mistake in nationalising instead of forcibly merging local authorities into large enough units to take tbis on viably and then taking over the private companies providing some such services and handing over their assets to said local authorities.
Not the Euroregions. They are mostly too big. But create the Metropolitan Counties like Greater Manchester and for rural counties amalgamation of them in to a viable size that retains viable local identity e.g. merge Derbys, Leices and Notts and merge the three ridings into a County of Yorkshire.
I think a plan for provincial government was actively considered after the War, but evidently it was dropped (whether this was considered too big an upheaval, or an affront to tradition and to vested interests, I don't know.)
One thing we know Starmer has expressed an interest in is local devolution, so it'll be interesting to see how he approaches this. But one thing I'm virtually certain of is that it won't involve federalism and an English Parliament, for several reasons which I shan't bore on about here.
This was the biggest error of the Attlee govt, imho - they chose to provide public services through publicly-owned national corporations modelled on the BBC, rather than going with scaled-up municipal provision along the lines of the LCC model.
Ironically, it was Herbert Morrison - who made his name as leader of the LCC - who was largely responsible for that decision as President of the Board of Trade, though that was largely a matter of political expediency in the face of cabinet in-fighting.
ANME clearly shows the importance of candidate selection. It was more than anything a vote against Douglas Ross attempting to carpet-bag. Duguid would have won comfortably.
The Conservatives should almost focus on nothing else but high-quality candidate selection.
No way James Arbuthnot would have lost Hampshire North East either.
Can be difficult to get seats back from the Lib Dems once they're in, they (2015 excepted !) normally don't have to deal with the mucky business of government. The seat you really want next time round as a Tory candidate is Truss' old one - that to my mind is the easiest Con Gain of 2029 or whenever right now.
Your old campaigning ground of Derbyshire NE had an almost identical result in 2024 to that in 2015:
The likely Conservative gains in 2029 are going to include some non-standard places.
I wonder when the Conservatives will realise that and what it will do to their strategy and policy ideas.
Darlington, Redcar, Middlesborough South, the Stocktons need to figure in alongside Bolsover, Rother Valley etc and they need a fairly radical NW strategy
One idea would be to give Reform a free run in Sunderland/Durham etc in return for standing down round here and other close seconds.
The Tories need to fight Reform tooth and nail, pointing out the vacuity of their policies and weakness of their leaders. If they cede them any ground, they are consigning themselves to the bin.
They also need to work incredibly hard in the constituencies in which reform have MPs - pointing out how little they do for them, picking up such casework-type slack as they have access to, championing local issues. Knocking out the leadership at the next election will finish Reform off for this cycle.
More well meaning advice to viciously attack other right wingers and become more centrist from *checks notes* non conservatives.
Fair point perhaps, though Reform attacked the Conservatives just as much as anyone else so that was right on right. I think the Tories will try to heal on the right before going for the centre, but it's not a one way street where the Tories cannot also go after Reform, who openly sought to replace them. They are the Tory enemy too, just of a different kind and requiring different strategies.
I think there's a misconception in politicians that they cannot appeal in different directions. Yes you can risk looking schizophrenic, but no one is ideologically consistent 100% of the time, it is possible to not repel centrists whilst still keeping on board people on your left or right.
I agree - the two parties should continue to oppose each other, as Labour and the Lib Dems have done. Otherwise there would be no merit in them seeking different seats and voters.
My slight irritation is that people on a site called 'politicalbetting.com' can continue to peddle psephological fantasy, insisting that the Tories lost because they weren't centrist and managerial enough, as well as insisting that they fight tooth and nail with right-wing parties whose supporters are closely aligned in opinion with theirs. These aren't insights, they are peoples' political hopes dressed up as insights.
The Tories are in a real fix because one way or another they need to sort out the Reform issue in order to rebuild. But that’s easier said than done - they need some of Reform’s voting base, and simply saying “well, be centre-right and competent and the electoral problem will fix itself” might be true (though no guarantee - look what has happened to the right in other countries) but it is also easier said than done in an opposition that has just been in government and roundly discredited for being incompetent. Who are these excellent centre right administrators who are going to pull in the voters and where were they keeping them for the past few years?
In some ways it is less risky and easier for them to go full populist right (which I do not want), eat the Reform vote, lose (assuming they would do so), and tack back to the centre in time when people are willing to give another party a chance. But that requires long term strategic thinking and clear appreciation that the party is at least 2 terms away from power, and political parties do not exist with that kind of long-term leadership. It also causes a problem with a number of MPs (eg Noakes) who are much further to the left of the membership.
Of course this is all still based on the assumption that elections will be won in the centre. We expect that to hold, but it may not.
Tories need to totally crush Reform or be totally absorbed by them to stand a chance at the next election. Otherwise they need Lib Dem and Labour voters to switch to them, which isn't easy to do if they are accommodating the far right.
I see Keir Starmer's first job in politics was shadow minister for immigration for Corbyn, and he'd only been an MP for weeks to months at the time. So obviously he'll be able to solve any immigration issues immediately.
Was having a chat with my dad this morning about the road not taken with Boris hanging on, given how weak the Labour vote share was I think we'd be in a hung parliament right now with Boris clinging on as PM. I'm actually not sure whether that would be better than this loveless landslide.
Mrs C, perhaps. Perhaps had Labour honoured their promised referendum on Lisbon it would've been a golden opportunity for the UK political class (and the EU) to see the British electorate were tired of ever closer union.
Ok Rwanda is gone. What are they going to do to resolve the situation then?
Farage is busy today but will soon enough be on the case again.
1. "The situation" is broadly unresolvable to the satisfaction of the populist right. Rwanda was not a solution to that problem. It was part of the "do nothing real, just play politics" agenda of the last decade.
2. The actual problems are multifacted - and largely go away when people are feeling optimistic about their lot. Jobs, wages, housing are the underlying issues and not fixed by shipping a few immigrants to Rwanda at great expense (or indeed bringing immigrants in to do the jobs we won't for salaries we won't tolerate). 3. There is no quick fix to 2. We need to see what happens over a decade.
The problem is with (2) and (3) is that they have at most half a decade or Farage will be hovering over the red wall like a vulture in 2029.
But if they don't do 2 and 3 they might as well not bother at all.
There is *nothing* they can do that will fix 1 - Farage will be there twisting and turning in the wind and spouting his populist rhetoric.
Instead of trying, they should get on with 2, and promote the crap out of any positive impact they *can* have in the next 5 years.
Reform’s future success or failure won’t now just depend on Farage. It will also depend on how Tice, Anderson, Lowe and McMurdock perform in parliament and in the media.
With crime we also have quite a different landscape. A huge amount of online crime, it never gets investigated let alone solved, then we have multi-national organised gang crime with drugs, car thefts, etc.
Then down at the street level, high levels of knife crime and more recently this big rise in what I call shitty crime, nicking phones, bikes, mopeds and the shoplifting, etc that appear to have become basically decriminalised. The BBC did a piece from a rough part of Middlesbrough and said 94% of all crime there goes unsolved.
I see Keir Starmer's first job in politics was shadow minister for immigration for Corbyn, and he'd only been an MP for weeks to months at the time. So obviously he'll be able to solve any immigration issues immediately.
Indeed. It's a wonder we're already at Saturday and it's not yet solved. One suspects it needs to be all done and dusted by Monday morning or it'll be described as a full-blown crisis.
He might get a lucky break, with the shite weather slowing down the little boats over the weekend...
Ok Rwanda is gone. What are they going to do to resolve the situation then?
Farage is busy today but will soon enough be on the case again.
1. "The situation" is broadly unresolvable to the satisfaction of the populist right. Rwanda was not a solution to that problem. It was part of the "do nothing real, just play politics" agenda of the last decade.
2. The actual problems are multifacted - and largely go away when people are feeling optimistic about their lot. Jobs, wages, housing are the underlying issues and not fixed by shipping a few immigrants to Rwanda at great expense (or indeed bringing immigrants in to do the jobs we won't for salaries we won't tolerate). 3. There is no quick fix to 2. We need to see what happens over a decade.
The problem is with (2) and (3) is that they have at most half a decade or Farage will be hovering over the red wall like a vulture in 2029.
But if they don't do 2 and 3 they might as well not bother at all.
There is *nothing* they can do that will fix 1 - Farage will be there twisting and turning in the wind and spouting his populist rhetoric.
Instead of trying, they should get on with 2, and promote the crap out of any positive impact they *can* have in the next 5 years.
Reform’s future success or failure won’t now just depend on Farage. It will also depend on how Tice, Anderson, Lowe and McMurdock perform in parliament and in the media.
Are there any decent explanations yet of why of all the hundreds and hundreds of GE polls not one of them was anywhere close to the basic figure of the gap between Tory and Labour (10%).
Over the last 15 years, it seems like we have had the same question raised repeatedly. Maybe it is just really hard now to get truly representative samples. People don't have landlines / want to talk on the phone and the online panels are over represented by overly engaged / keen people.
Assume all don't know last time Tory voters return at the ballot box, exclude anyone under 25 from your sample and double count pensioners
Thank God the Tories didn't think of that while they were still in office:
'Two votes for every pensioner - don't let Labour steal your second vote!'
Was having a chat with my dad this morning about the road not taken with Boris hanging on, given how weak the Labour vote share was I think we'd be in a hung parliament right now with Boris clinging on as PM. I'm actually not sure whether that would be better than this loveless landslide.
There are quite a few sliding doors moments over the past few years (well even weeks).
Ok Rwanda is gone. What are they going to do to resolve the situation then?
Farage is busy today but will soon enough be on the case again.
1. "The situation" is broadly unresolvable to the satisfaction of the populist right. Rwanda was not a solution to that problem. It was part of the "do nothing real, just play politics" agenda of the last decade.
2. The actual problems are multifacted - and largely go away when people are feeling optimistic about their lot. Jobs, wages, housing are the underlying issues and not fixed by shipping a few immigrants to Rwanda at great expense (or indeed bringing immigrants in to do the jobs we won't for salaries we won't tolerate). 3. There is no quick fix to 2. We need to see what happens over a decade.
The problem is with (2) and (3) is that they have at most half a decade or Farage will be hovering over the red wall like a vulture in 2029.
But if they don't do 2 and 3 they might as well not bother at all.
There is *nothing* they can do that will fix 1 - Farage will be there twisting and turning in the wind and spouting his populist rhetoric.
Instead of trying, they should get on with 2, and promote the crap out of any positive impact they *can* have in the next 5 years.
Reform’s future success or failure won’t now just depend on Farage. It will also depend on how Tice, Anderson, Lowe and McMurdock perform in parliament and in the media.
Ok Rwanda is gone. What are they going to do to resolve the situation then?
Farage is busy today but will soon enough be on the case again.
1. "The situation" is broadly unresolvable to the satisfaction of the populist right. Rwanda was not a solution to that problem. It was part of the "do nothing real, just play politics" agenda of the last decade.
2. The actual problems are multifacted - and largely go away when people are feeling optimistic about their lot. Jobs, wages, housing are the underlying issues and not fixed by shipping a few immigrants to Rwanda at great expense (or indeed bringing immigrants in to do the jobs we won't for salaries we won't tolerate). 3. There is no quick fix to 2. We need to see what happens over a decade.
The problem is with (2) and (3) is that they have at most half a decade or Farage will be hovering over the red wall like a vulture in 2029.
But if they don't do 2 and 3 they might as well not bother at all.
There is *nothing* they can do that will fix 1 - Farage will be there twisting and turning in the wind and spouting his populist rhetoric.
Instead of trying, they should get on with 2, and promote the crap out of any positive impact they *can* have in the next 5 years.
Reform’s future success or failure won’t now just depend on Farage. It will also depend on how Tice, Anderson, Lowe and McMurdock perform in parliament and in the media.
And what gets unearthed about them by the media.
Ditto *in* the social media: something that applies, in fairness, to all the new MPs.
Well, if the 2019 result was a clear mandate for no referendum, which is what Scotland got, then the 2024 result must be the opposite. I look forward to Starmer talking to the Scottish government to arrange a date.
If John Swinney has conceded the mandate for indyref 2 has expired, who are we to disagree with him?
Of course it has. But I'm troubled by the fact that a majority of MPs and a majority of MSPs wasn't enough. What's the peaceful path towards Scottish independence?
I think trying to overturn a referendum result within five years via parliamentary elections when you receive fewer votes than the winning side in the plebiscite can lead to a democratic deficit.
The realpolitik is that for the foreseeable future the only way an indyref is happening is if we have a Lab/SNP coalition at Westminster.
Otherwise we're looking at the mid 2030s before it happens/
But wait, which mandates expire and which don't? The 2014 referendum result persists but the 2015 Westminster, 2016 Holyrood, the 2017 Westminster, the 2019 Westminster results have all expired.
What about the 2021 Holyrood result? Has that expired now too?
"Realpolitik" is what happens in the absence of agreed upon rules. Such situations favour certain powerful interests and those are rarely the interests of the public. I find this approach illiberal and problematic.
The rules aka the law is that granting an independence referendum is solely down to Westminster not Holyrood, this was known well before the referendum.
So the number of MPs is strictly irrelevant and words like "mandate" don't mean a thing. There is no peaceful mechanism to independence other than begging England for a referendum.
There was a referendum only a few years ago. Another would be unstoppable if, say, 60% of Scots wanted independence according to consistent and proper polling. The breakup of countries is a non trivial matter and can't be left to pressure groups.
Only recently the SNP in a childish way wanted this GE to be referendum on independence. Now suddenly they didn't. That is no political state to be in if you want grown ups to take it seriously. This is how Trumpians do politics.
BTW, the SNP got about 30% vote share in Scotland. Unlike the SNP recently, this should not be taken as evidence against independence in the long term.
Ah, so now we're on to "look to the opinion polls".
This is what I mean about Kafkaesque traps. Some people say it's about polling, some people say it's about he amount of time you have to wait. Other think it's MPs and still more say it's MSPs. We've had TSE saying a coalition is the pathway.
You seem to be saying that the SNP have said this result isn't about independence but TSE was pointing out that Swinney was saying the opposite. I think you're wrong and TSE is right.
TSE also raised "realpolitik" which is illuminating. Realpolitik is a dangerous and transactional political mode, a stance borne out of a lack of structure. Such stances are commonplace in international relations where rules are weak and power is king. It would be odd to want to operate within such a risky methodology. That, in fact, is much closer to Trumpian politics than anything else. The fact that it's being done while playing with the language of the opposite, is evidence of a dishonest mindset.
In some respects, Alister Jack is the most honest of all. When he said that no Holyrood result would be a mandate, he's telling the truth. He's saying the answer would still be no. We don't care how many MPs or MSPs you win, the answer is still a polite version of fuck off.
The only reason I've dug into this topic today is because I've absorbed that political reality while others seemingly haven't. Those who say the catastrophic result for the SNP has hurt any mandate for a referendum also seem to try to wriggle away from the implied notion that there was a mandate before. If there was, why wasn't it allowed? And if there wasn't, what would a mandate look like? TSE's given answers which strike me as special pleading, a narrow lawyerly reading of 2011 which delegitimises specifically small pro-indy parties. And yet they're still the most thoughtful answers available. That's problematic.
There is a mandate - SNP elected in 2007 led to a referendum in 2014. Vote was no. Same party is still in government saying giz a referendum - you had it.
It isn't me or others saying the SNP crushing hurts the mandate, it was John Swinney. He put Independence on page 1 and said that a majority of MPs would represent a mandate. They got crushed, so his own argument says there was a rejection of that mandate.
We can't have a referendum every 5 years. If people vote in a new government with a mandate for a new referendum that would be one thing. But the same government that had a mandate for a referendum which it lost saying "we still have a mandate, lets do it again"? No.
Watch this it’s fascinating - I asked James Timpson what he’d do about prisons and sentencing if he was in charge. He believes only a third of prisoners in jail should definitely be there. He’s now in charge of prisons (but not sentencing). [VIDEO]
Good appointment. The starting point might be that once you have sorted out which prisoners (more than the current number, and not all murderers) should never be let out on account of either badness or madness, the rest are coming out sometime and the rest of us are less safe if they come out still deeply immature or bad or mad - or any combination - so the big case against the Daily Mail/Sun 'lock 'em up' line is that it fails to protect us.
In response, I would say, you have to try very hard to get into gaol. Most people who are inside are there because either they have done really heinous things, or they're recidivists, and judges have already bent over backwards giving them non-custodial sentences. Fortunately, crime is mostly a young person's (especially, a young man's activity), and most criminals grow out of it, eventually.
Gary Plumb, the man who was convicted of soliciting the murder of Holly Willoughby, had already been convicted twice of attempting to kidnap women, and had served a total of 16 months, a sentence so light that it's almost condoning what he did.
Most people who are in gaol very much deserve to be there.
A while back, some kids who participated in the murder of another - stabbing near Oxford Street - got a year, IIRC. They held the victim down…
Because of time in custody, early release etc. this was literally Out For Christmas.
Was having a chat with my dad this morning about the road not taken with Boris hanging on, given how weak the Labour vote share was I think we'd be in a hung parliament right now with Boris clinging on as PM. I'm actually not sure whether that would be better than this loveless landslide.
There are quite a few sliding doors moments over the past few years (well even weeks).
I know this comes up a lot but how would Johnson have 'held on'? He had a recall petition looming and a clear majority of the electorate looking to give him an utter kicking.
He'd have had to have been found another safe seat but I am not sure any seat would have been safe enough to get him re-elected.
A good night's sleep, hangover all gone. Some random thoughts:
1. I have had several American friends comment on the graceful way in which the Tories accepted the result and moved out of the way without rancour. I was surprised, thinking what else would you expect, until I remembered what they have experienced in the US over recent years. The Tories are not yet captured by the Trumpist world view. That is good for them and good for the country. It is vital this doesn't change.
2. For the first time in a very long time, the British PM has been able to appoint a Cabinet based solely on an assessment of ability, not on having to appease or shut out a certain faction or ideology. Starmer may have got it wrong, we'll find out, but he has not had to make Braverman-like appointments (or Johnson-like ones if we go back to the May government). That is a good thing.
3. Entirely predictably, the left is now howling about the size of Labour's majority and the party's low vote share. What they seem to have forgotten is that the Greens and Independents very directly and very specifically centred their pitch on the inevitability of Labour winning power and how that made a vote for them safe. Owen Jones made this point daily, as did Jeremy Corbyn.
4. As I said yesterday on here, my two betting tips came in - Corbyn to win in Islington North, the LibDems to win in Honiton and Sidmouth. Needless to say, I put money on neither! I also got the vote share difference between Labour and Tory spot on, though I gave both slightly higher shares than they actually got (36% and 26%).
After years of losing, I have to say it feels good to be on the other side. We're at the stage where things feel possible and change can happen. Undoubtedly it will all get very difficult and very unpleasant very quickly, so I am going to enjoy this bit. I like the team Starmer is putting together. I thought the speech he made outside Downing Street yesterday was pitch perfect.
Delivery is everything, of course. The other side of a low vote share being precarious is that there are a lot of new votes to fight for next time around. If Labour makes a decent fist of the next few years - a big if, I know - then that could well happen. If you can't be optimistic at the outset, when can you be?
There was no graceful attempt to accept the result of Brexit. It tore parliament apart as people tried to invalidate and undo the result.
that's because the leavers ran away and left people who voted remain have to work out how to deal with the mess
Was having a chat with my dad this morning about the road not taken with Boris hanging on, given how weak the Labour vote share was I think we'd be in a hung parliament right now with Boris clinging on as PM. I'm actually not sure whether that would be better than this loveless landslide.
To give them their due I don't think most of the 2019 Tory MPs went to parliament to spend their time lying on the Prime minister's behalf. I don't blame them for getting rid of him.
ANME clearly shows the importance of candidate selection. It was more than anything a vote against Douglas Ross attempting to carpet-bag. Duguid would have won comfortably.
The Conservatives should almost focus on nothing else but high-quality candidate selection.
No way James Arbuthnot would have lost Hampshire North East either.
Can be difficult to get seats back from the Lib Dems once they're in, they (2015 excepted !) normally don't have to deal with the mucky business of government. The seat you really want next time round as a Tory candidate is Truss' old one - that to my mind is the easiest Con Gain of 2029 or whenever right now.
Your old campaigning ground of Derbyshire NE had an almost identical result in 2024 to that in 2015:
The likely Conservative gains in 2029 are going to include some non-standard places.
I wonder when the Conservatives will realise that and what it will do to their strategy and policy ideas.
Darlington, Redcar, Middlesborough South, the Stocktons need to figure in alongside Bolsover, Rother Valley etc and they need a fairly radical NW strategy
One idea would be to give Reform a free run in Sunderland/Durham etc in return for standing down round here and other close seconds.
The Tories need to fight Reform tooth and nail, pointing out the vacuity of their policies and weakness of their leaders. If they cede them any ground, they are consigning themselves to the bin.
They also need to work incredibly hard in the constituencies in which reform have MPs - pointing out how little they do for them, picking up such casework-type slack as they have access to, championing local issues. Knocking out the leadership at the next election will finish Reform off for this cycle.
More well meaning advice to viciously attack other right wingers and become more centrist from *checks notes* non conservatives.
Fair point perhaps, though Reform attacked the Conservatives just as much as anyone else so that was right on right. I think the Tories will try to heal on the right before going for the centre, but it's not a one way street where the Tories cannot also go after Reform, who openly sought to replace them. They are the Tory enemy too, just of a different kind and requiring different strategies.
I think there's a misconception in politicians that they cannot appeal in different directions. Yes you can risk looking schizophrenic, but no one is ideologically consistent 100% of the time, it is possible to not repel centrists whilst still keeping on board people on your left or right.
I agree - the two parties should continue to oppose each other, as Labour and the Lib Dems have done. Otherwise there would be no merit in them seeking different seats and voters.
My slight irritation is that people on a site called 'politicalbetting.com' can continue to peddle psephological fantasy, insisting that the Tories lost because they weren't centrist and managerial enough, as well as insisting that they fight tooth and nail with right-wing parties whose supporters are closely aligned in opinion with theirs. These aren't insights, they are peoples' political hopes dressed up as insights.
The Tories are in a real fix because one way or another they need to sort out the Reform issue in order to rebuild. But that’s easier said than done - they need some of Reform’s voting base, and simply saying “well, be centre-right and competent and the electoral problem will fix itself” might be true (though no guarantee - look what has happened to the right in other countries) but it is also easier said than done in an opposition that has just been in government and roundly discredited for being incompetent. Who are these excellent centre right administrators who are going to pull in the voters and where were they keeping them for the past few years?
In some ways it is less risky and easier for them to go full populist right (which I do not want), eat the Reform vote, lose (assuming they would do so), and tack back to the centre in time when people are willing to give another party a chance. But that requires long term strategic thinking and clear appreciation that the party is at least 2 terms away from power, and political parties do not exist with that kind of long-term leadership. It also causes a problem with a number of MPs (eg Noakes) who are much further to the left of the membership.
Of course this is all still based on the assumption that elections will be won in the centre. We expect that to hold, but it may not.
Tories need to totally crush Reform or be totally absorbed by them to stand a chance at the next election. Otherwise they need Lib Dem and Labour voters to switch to them, which isn't easy to do if they are accommodating the far right.
WRT Reform, they need to wait for a bit, to see what happens. They might easily just implode.
ANME clearly shows the importance of candidate selection. It was more than anything a vote against Douglas Ross attempting to carpet-bag. Duguid would have won comfortably.
The Conservatives should almost focus on nothing else but high-quality candidate selection.
No way James Arbuthnot would have lost Hampshire North East either.
Can be difficult to get seats back from the Lib Dems once they're in, they (2015 excepted !) normally don't have to deal with the mucky business of government. The seat you really want next time round as a Tory candidate is Truss' old one - that to my mind is the easiest Con Gain of 2029 or whenever right now.
Your old campaigning ground of Derbyshire NE had an almost identical result in 2024 to that in 2015:
The likely Conservative gains in 2029 are going to include some non-standard places.
I wonder when the Conservatives will realise that and what it will do to their strategy and policy ideas.
Darlington, Redcar, Middlesborough South, the Stocktons need to figure in alongside Bolsover, Rother Valley etc and they need a fairly radical NW strategy
The RedWall is now the BlueWall, albeit with two shades of blue. To win these people over you have to pander to populism and "othering", although Farage is better at that than your Party are. Besides that doesn't return the Lib Dem BlueWall seats to you. I wonder in the same way once safe Labour seats are lost forever whether that might also be true of the LibDem gains in the Home Counties. Johnson's loutish behaviour didn't go down well in genteel Buckinghamshire.
And did anyone see Steve Baker's meltdown on GMB, blaming Ozzie and Balls for his defeat? Nurse, Nurse over here quickly please!
Never mind Red wall or Blue wall, someone appears to have constructed an Orange wall across the south on Thursday night. You can travel from Eastbourne to Barnstaple without leaving LD territory.
Actually Baggy Point ...
Only Geoffrey Cox stopping the OrangeWall reaching to Padstow.
Lib Dems in second place there now, the bar charts can surely be prepped up.
Was having a chat with my dad this morning about the road not taken with Boris hanging on, given how weak the Labour vote share was I think we'd be in a hung parliament right now with Boris clinging on as PM. I'm actually not sure whether that would be better than this loveless landslide.
To give them their due I don't think most of the 2019 Tory MPs went to parliament to spend their time lying on the Prime minister's behalf. I don't blame them for getting rid of him.
The polling was not great, but also not apocalyptic at the time. But he kept asking too much of his MPs to defend his own personal, rather than policy, cockups. That wears MPs down after awhile.
Was having a chat with my dad this morning about the road not taken with Boris hanging on, given how weak the Labour vote share was I think we'd be in a hung parliament right now with Boris clinging on as PM. I'm actually not sure whether that would be better than this loveless landslide.
Question is really how much shitty behaviour a party should tolerate from its leader on the grounds that they're the leader and they're a winner?
You have to draw a line somewhere, or you end up in the dismal situation the Republicans find themselves in with Trump. And whilst the Boris isn't anything like as awful as the Donald, that doesn't mean that he hadn't crossed the line... probably some time before he was kicked out.
Watch this it’s fascinating - I asked James Timpson what he’d do about prisons and sentencing if he was in charge. He believes only a third of prisoners in jail should definitely be there. He’s now in charge of prisons (but not sentencing). [VIDEO]
Good appointment. The starting point might be that once you have sorted out which prisoners (more than the current number, and not all murderers) should never be let out on account of either badness or madness, the rest are coming out sometime and the rest of us are less safe if they come out still deeply immature or bad or mad - or any combination - so the big case against the Daily Mail/Sun 'lock 'em up' line is that it fails to protect us.
In response, I would say, you have to try very hard to get into gaol. Most people who are inside are there because either they have done really heinous things, or they're recidivists, and judges have already bent over backwards giving them non-custodial sentences. Fortunately, crime is mostly a young person's (especially, a young man's activity), and most criminals grow out of it, eventually.
Gary Plumb, the man who was convicted of soliciting the murder of Holly Willoughby, had already been convicted twice of attempting to kidnap women, and had served a total of 16 months, a sentence so light that it's almost condoning what he did.
Most people who are in gaol very much deserve to be there.
A while back, some kids who participated in the murder of another - stabbing near Oxford Street - got a year, IIRC. They held the victim down…
Because of time in custody, early release etc. this was literally Out For Christmas.
We need to be more creative in our punishments. Inflicting brief but severe mental pain for violent criminals?
Constant electronic surveillance via robot. So intrusive it ruins your life. Etc
All that can be done and it will still deter and it will save shitloads of cash. Imprisonment is an 18th century solution for 21st century villains
Some thoughts on the future of the SNP, and of Scottish Independence.
After heavy defeats, the Tories more right wing and Labour went more left wing, before realising it wasn’t getting them back to power.
I expect the SNP hierarchy to double down on their progressive agenda and continue to pay lip service to independence. The same people are still in control of the party and will continue to alienate the remaining members who value party democracy. They will be responsible for arranging the order of potential list MSPs on the ballot. Many insiders are now ex MPs (Smyth, Nicolson, Thewliss, Oswald) and will be looking for places at the top of the lists. The SNP are likely to be more reliant on list MSPs after they lose more constituency MSPs in 2026.
At some point in the future, there will be a battle for the heart and soul of the party. Until this happens, the party will not recover. However, success is cyclical. I have a feeling that the SNP will be next challenging for power at the 2036 Holyrood election. Expect Indyref 2 some time in the 2040s.
F1: backed Piastri at 12 each way to top qualifying. If dry or with minimal rain effect, I think he's got a solid shot, if it's properly wet this is far less likely.
Watch this it’s fascinating - I asked James Timpson what he’d do about prisons and sentencing if he was in charge. He believes only a third of prisoners in jail should definitely be there. He’s now in charge of prisons (but not sentencing). [VIDEO]
Good appointment. The starting point might be that once you have sorted out which prisoners (more than the current number, and not all murderers) should never be let out on account of either badness or madness, the rest are coming out sometime and the rest of us are less safe if they come out still deeply immature or bad or mad - or any combination - so the big case against the Daily Mail/Sun 'lock 'em up' line is that it fails to protect us.
In response, I would say, you have to try very hard to get into gaol. Most people who are inside are there because either they have done really heinous things, or they're recidivists, and judges have already bent over backwards giving them non-custodial sentences. Fortunately, crime is mostly a young person's (especially, a young man's activity), and most criminals grow out of it, eventually.
Gary Plumb, the man who was convicted of soliciting the murder of Holly Willoughby, had already been convicted twice of attempting to kidnap women, and had served a total of 16 months, a sentence so light that it's almost condoning what he did.
Most people who are in gaol very much deserve to be there.
One issue is that a lot of the demand for high prison sentences are driven by disgust and repulsion towards the dark side of human nature that isn't really processed and reflected on. At some point you need to think what you really want to do with someone like this character Plumb. It is very easy to just say 'throw away the key' but is a whole life sentence really correct/proportionate for someone that didn't act out on their ideas? If not a life sentence what is going to be achieved by say 10 years in jail (as I would guess would be the likely outcome) - a 500k bill and then after he is out he is going to be dependent on welfare and categorised as vulnerable and probably in all likelihood a threat to public safety with nothing to lose?
ANME clearly shows the importance of candidate selection. It was more than anything a vote against Douglas Ross attempting to carpet-bag. Duguid would have won comfortably.
The Conservatives should almost focus on nothing else but high-quality candidate selection.
No way James Arbuthnot would have lost Hampshire North East either.
Can be difficult to get seats back from the Lib Dems once they're in, they (2015 excepted !) normally don't have to deal with the mucky business of government. The seat you really want next time round as a Tory candidate is Truss' old one - that to my mind is the easiest Con Gain of 2029 or whenever right now.
Your old campaigning ground of Derbyshire NE had an almost identical result in 2024 to that in 2015:
The likely Conservative gains in 2029 are going to include some non-standard places.
I wonder when the Conservatives will realise that and what it will do to their strategy and policy ideas.
Darlington, Redcar, Middlesborough South, the Stocktons need to figure in alongside Bolsover, Rother Valley etc and they need a fairly radical NW strategy
One idea would be to give Reform a free run in Sunderland/Durham etc in return for standing down round here and other close seconds.
The Tories need to fight Reform tooth and nail, pointing out the vacuity of their policies and weakness of their leaders. If they cede them any ground, they are consigning themselves to the bin.
They also need to work incredibly hard in the constituencies in which reform have MPs - pointing out how little they do for them, picking up such casework-type slack as they have access to, championing local issues. Knocking out the leadership at the next election will finish Reform off for this cycle.
More well meaning advice to viciously attack other right wingers and become more centrist from *checks notes* non conservatives.
Fair point perhaps, though Reform attacked the Conservatives just as much as anyone else so that was right on right. I think the Tories will try to heal on the right before going for the centre, but it's not a one way street where the Tories cannot also go after Reform, who openly sought to replace them. They are the Tory enemy too, just of a different kind and requiring different strategies.
I think there's a misconception in politicians that they cannot appeal in different directions. Yes you can risk looking schizophrenic, but no one is ideologically consistent 100% of the time, it is possible to not repel centrists whilst still keeping on board people on your left or right.
I agree - the two parties should continue to oppose each other, as Labour and the Lib Dems have done. Otherwise there would be no merit in them seeking different seats and voters.
My slight irritation is that people on a site called 'politicalbetting.com' can continue to peddle psephological fantasy, insisting that the Tories lost because they weren't centrist and managerial enough, as well as insisting that they fight tooth and nail with right-wing parties whose supporters are closely aligned in opinion with theirs. These aren't insights, they are peoples' political hopes dressed up as insights.
The Tories are in a real fix because one way or another they need to sort out the Reform issue in order to rebuild. But that’s easier said than done - they need some of Reform’s voting base, and simply saying “well, be centre-right and competent and the electoral problem will fix itself” might be true (though no guarantee - look what has happened to the right in other countries) but it is also easier said than done in an opposition that has just been in government and roundly discredited for being incompetent. Who are these excellent centre right administrators who are going to pull in the voters and where were they keeping them for the past few years?
In some ways it is less risky and easier for them to go full populist right (which I do not want), eat the Reform vote, lose (assuming they would do so), and tack back to the centre in time when people are willing to give another party a chance. But that requires long term strategic thinking and clear appreciation that the party is at least 2 terms away from power, and political parties do not exist with that kind of long-term leadership. It also causes a problem with a number of MPs (eg Noakes) who are much further to the left of the membership.
Of course this is all still based on the assumption that elections will be won in the centre. We expect that to hold, but it may not.
Tories need to totally crush Reform or be totally absorbed by them to stand a chance at the next election. Otherwise they need Lib Dem and Labour voters to switch to them, which isn't easy to do if they are accommodating the far right.
WRT Reform, they need to wait for a bit, to see what happens. They might easily just implode.
2024, they were NOTA.
Now they are the above. 2029, we will either have a new NOTA - or the Tories will be an acceptable vote.
Was having a chat with my dad this morning about the road not taken with Boris hanging on, given how weak the Labour vote share was I think we'd be in a hung parliament right now with Boris clinging on as PM. I'm actually not sure whether that would be better than this loveless landslide.
To give them their due I don't think most of the 2019 Tory MPs went to parliament to spend their time lying on the Prime minister's behalf. I don't blame them for getting rid of him.
The polling was not great, but also not apocalyptic at the time. But he kept asking too much of his MPs to defend his own personal, rather than policy, cockups. That wears MPs down after awhile.
And everyone treats the polling as static. Given his personal behaviour it is hard to believe it wouldn't have continued downwards.
On experiences at the count I regret to say not a single drawing of genitals appeared on any votes I saw, most disappointing.
I did see one where someone had written in Andrew Bridgen, and another where someone had replaced all the candidates with 'genuine socialists' Corbyn, Abbott and Shaheen.
Was having a chat with my dad this morning about the road not taken with Boris hanging on, given how weak the Labour vote share was I think we'd be in a hung parliament right now with Boris clinging on as PM. I'm actually not sure whether that would be better than this loveless landslide.
The Conservatives have lost 20% since 2019.
Perhaps:
5% for the lockdown parties 5% for all the sleaze 5% for the Truss disaster 5% for rises in interest rates, prices, taxes
ANME clearly shows the importance of candidate selection. It was more than anything a vote against Douglas Ross attempting to carpet-bag. Duguid would have won comfortably.
The Conservatives should almost focus on nothing else but high-quality candidate selection.
No way James Arbuthnot would have lost Hampshire North East either.
Can be difficult to get seats back from the Lib Dems once they're in, they (2015 excepted !) normally don't have to deal with the mucky business of government. The seat you really want next time round as a Tory candidate is Truss' old one - that to my mind is the easiest Con Gain of 2029 or whenever right now.
Your old campaigning ground of Derbyshire NE had an almost identical result in 2024 to that in 2015:
The likely Conservative gains in 2029 are going to include some non-standard places.
I wonder when the Conservatives will realise that and what it will do to their strategy and policy ideas.
Darlington, Redcar, Middlesborough South, the Stocktons need to figure in alongside Bolsover, Rother Valley etc and they need a fairly radical NW strategy
One idea would be to give Reform a free run in Sunderland/Durham etc in return for standing down round here and other close seconds.
The Tories need to fight Reform tooth and nail, pointing out the vacuity of their policies and weakness of their leaders. If they cede them any ground, they are consigning themselves to the bin.
They also need to work incredibly hard in the constituencies in which reform have MPs - pointing out how little they do for them, picking up such casework-type slack as they have access to, championing local issues. Knocking out the leadership at the next election will finish Reform off for this cycle.
More well meaning advice to viciously attack other right wingers and become more centrist from *checks notes* non conservatives.
Fair point perhaps, though Reform attacked the Conservatives just as much as anyone else so that was right on right. I think the Tories will try to heal on the right before going for the centre, but it's not a one way street where the Tories cannot also go after Reform, who openly sought to replace them. They are the Tory enemy too, just of a different kind and requiring different strategies.
I think there's a misconception in politicians that they cannot appeal in different directions. Yes you can risk looking schizophrenic, but no one is ideologically consistent 100% of the time, it is possible to not repel centrists whilst still keeping on board people on your left or right.
I agree - the two parties should continue to oppose each other, as Labour and the Lib Dems have done. Otherwise there would be no merit in them seeking different seats and voters.
My slight irritation is that people on a site called 'politicalbetting.com' can continue to peddle psephological fantasy, insisting that the Tories lost because they weren't centrist and managerial enough, as well as insisting that they fight tooth and nail with right-wing parties whose supporters are closely aligned in opinion with theirs. These aren't insights, they are peoples' political hopes dressed up as insights.
The Tories are in a real fix because one way or another they need to sort out the Reform issue in order to rebuild. But that’s easier said than done - they need some of Reform’s voting base, and simply saying “well, be centre-right and competent and the electoral problem will fix itself” might be true (though no guarantee - look what has happened to the right in other countries) but it is also easier said than done in an opposition that has just been in government and roundly discredited for being incompetent. Who are these excellent centre right administrators who are going to pull in the voters and where were they keeping them for the past few years?
In some ways it is less risky and easier for them to go full populist right (which I do not want), eat the Reform vote, lose (assuming they would do so), and tack back to the centre in time when people are willing to give another party a chance. But that requires long term strategic thinking and clear appreciation that the party is at least 2 terms away from power, and political parties do not exist with that kind of long-term leadership. It also causes a problem with a number of MPs (eg Noakes) who are much further to the left of the membership.
Of course this is all still based on the assumption that elections will be won in the centre. We expect that to hold, but it may not.
Tories need to totally crush Reform or be totally absorbed by them to stand a chance at the next election. Otherwise they need Lib Dem and Labour voters to switch to them, which isn't easy to do if they are accommodating the far right.
WRT Reform, they need to wait for a bit, to see what happens. They might easily just implode.
ANME clearly shows the importance of candidate selection. It was more than anything a vote against Douglas Ross attempting to carpet-bag. Duguid would have won comfortably.
The Conservatives should almost focus on nothing else but high-quality candidate selection.
No way James Arbuthnot would have lost Hampshire North East either.
Can be difficult to get seats back from the Lib Dems once they're in, they (2015 excepted !) normally don't have to deal with the mucky business of government. The seat you really want next time round as a Tory candidate is Truss' old one - that to my mind is the easiest Con Gain of 2029 or whenever right now.
Your old campaigning ground of Derbyshire NE had an almost identical result in 2024 to that in 2015:
The likely Conservative gains in 2029 are going to include some non-standard places.
I wonder when the Conservatives will realise that and what it will do to their strategy and policy ideas.
Darlington, Redcar, Middlesborough South, the Stocktons need to figure in alongside Bolsover, Rother Valley etc and they need a fairly radical NW strategy
One idea would be to give Reform a free run in Sunderland/Durham etc in return for standing down round here and other close seconds.
The Tories need to fight Reform tooth and nail, pointing out the vacuity of their policies and weakness of their leaders. If they cede them any ground, they are consigning themselves to the bin.
They also need to work incredibly hard in the constituencies in which reform have MPs - pointing out how little they do for them, picking up such casework-type slack as they have access to, championing local issues. Knocking out the leadership at the next election will finish Reform off for this cycle.
More well meaning advice to viciously attack other right wingers and become more centrist from *checks notes* non conservatives.
Fair point perhaps, though Reform attacked the Conservatives just as much as anyone else so that was right on right. I think the Tories will try to heal on the right before going for the centre, but it's not a one way street where the Tories cannot also go after Reform, who openly sought to replace them. They are the Tory enemy too, just of a different kind and requiring different strategies.
I think there's a misconception in politicians that they cannot appeal in different directions. Yes you can risk looking schizophrenic, but no one is ideologically consistent 100% of the time, it is possible to not repel centrists whilst still keeping on board people on your left or right.
I agree - the two parties should continue to oppose each other, as Labour and the Lib Dems have done. Otherwise there would be no merit in them seeking different seats and voters.
My slight irritation is that people on a site called 'politicalbetting.com' can continue to peddle psephological fantasy, insisting that the Tories lost because they weren't centrist and managerial enough, as well as insisting that they fight tooth and nail with right-wing parties whose supporters are closely aligned in opinion with theirs. These aren't insights, they are peoples' political hopes dressed up as insights.
The Tories are in a real fix because one way or another they need to sort out the Reform issue in order to rebuild. But that’s easier said than done - they need some of Reform’s voting base, and simply saying “well, be centre-right and competent and the electoral problem will fix itself” might be true (though no guarantee - look what has happened to the right in other countries) but it is also easier said than done in an opposition that has just been in government and roundly discredited for being incompetent. Who are these excellent centre right administrators who are going to pull in the voters and where were they keeping them for the past few years?
In some ways it is less risky and easier for them to go full populist right (which I do not want), eat the Reform vote, lose (assuming they would do so), and tack back to the centre in time when people are willing to give another party a chance. But that requires long term strategic thinking and clear appreciation that the party is at least 2 terms away from power, and political parties do not exist with that kind of long-term leadership. It also causes a problem with a number of MPs (eg Noakes) who are much further to the left of the membership.
Of course this is all still based on the assumption that elections will be won in the centre. We expect that to hold, but it may not.
Tories need to totally crush Reform or be totally absorbed by them to stand a chance at the next election. Otherwise they need Lib Dem and Labour voters to switch to them, which isn't easy to do if they are accommodating the far right.
WRT Reform, they need to wait for a bit, to see what happens. They might easily just implode.
That seems the most likely. Tice seems sensible and I know nothing about one of them, but generally going by their time in the EU parliament they fall out. if they don't do that they might say or do something that initiates a recall election and of course Farage is famous for not doing the bread and butter work on committees. I wouldn't want to be one of his constituents with an issue.
On experiences at the count I regret to say not a single drawing of genitals appeared on any votes I saw, most disappointing.
I did see one where someone had written in Andrew Bridgen, and another where someone had replaced all the candidates with 'genuine socialists' Corbyn, Abbott and Shaheen.
Watch this it’s fascinating - I asked James Timpson what he’d do about prisons and sentencing if he was in charge. He believes only a third of prisoners in jail should definitely be there. He’s now in charge of prisons (but not sentencing). [VIDEO]
Good appointment. The starting point might be that once you have sorted out which prisoners (more than the current number, and not all murderers) should never be let out on account of either badness or madness, the rest are coming out sometime and the rest of us are less safe if they come out still deeply immature or bad or mad - or any combination - so the big case against the Daily Mail/Sun 'lock 'em up' line is that it fails to protect us.
In response, I would say, you have to try very hard to get into gaol. Most people who are inside are there because either they have done really heinous things, or they're recidivists, and judges have already bent over backwards giving them non-custodial sentences. Fortunately, crime is mostly a young person's (especially, a young man's activity), and most criminals grow out of it, eventually.
Gary Plumb, the man who was convicted of soliciting the murder of Holly Willoughby, had already been convicted twice of attempting to kidnap women, and had served a total of 16 months, a sentence so light that it's almost condoning what he did.
Most people who are in gaol very much deserve to be there.
A while back, some kids who participated in the murder of another - stabbing near Oxford Street - got a year, IIRC. They held the victim down…
Because of time in custody, early release etc. this was literally Out For Christmas.
We need to be more creative in our punishments. Inflicting brief but severe mental pain for violent criminals?
Constant electronic surveillance via robot. So intrusive it ruins your life. Etc
All that can be done and it will still deter and it will save shitloads of cash. Imprisonment is an 18th century solution for 21st century villains
We could make them read a constant stream of your posts, I guess. (Though we'd have to remove the Bill of Rights edict against cruel and unusual punishments obvs.)
Keir's speech is on btw. It's a long list of things.
Not really. Apart from change, delivery, public service and standards - the general themes about being different from the chaotic Tories - there expressly wasn't anything much on policy. It's mood music again, not detail. Probably the most significant thing is that he's starting off with a tour of the devolved administrations, followed by inviting all the metro mayors to a conference on Tuesday. It's an early indication that the interest in devolution is genuine.
Watch this it’s fascinating - I asked James Timpson what he’d do about prisons and sentencing if he was in charge. He believes only a third of prisoners in jail should definitely be there. He’s now in charge of prisons (but not sentencing). [VIDEO]
Good appointment. The starting point might be that once you have sorted out which prisoners (more than the current number, and not all murderers) should never be let out on account of either badness or madness, the rest are coming out sometime and the rest of us are less safe if they come out still deeply immature or bad or mad - or any combination - so the big case against the Daily Mail/Sun 'lock 'em up' line is that it fails to protect us.
In response, I would say, you have to try very hard to get into gaol. Most people who are inside are there because either they have done really heinous things, or they're recidivists, and judges have already bent over backwards giving them non-custodial sentences. Fortunately, crime is mostly a young person's (especially, a young man's activity), and most criminals grow out of it, eventually.
Gary Plumb, the man who was convicted of soliciting the murder of Holly Willoughby, had already been convicted twice of attempting to kidnap women, and had served a total of 16 months, a sentence so light that it's almost condoning what he did.
Most people who are in gaol very much deserve to be there.
A while back, some kids who participated in the murder of another - stabbing near Oxford Street - got a year, IIRC. They held the victim down…
Because of time in custody, early release etc. this was literally Out For Christmas.
We need to be more creative in our punishments. Inflicting brief but severe mental pain for violent criminals?
Constant electronic surveillance via robot. So intrusive it ruins your life. Etc
All that can be done and it will still deter and it will save shitloads of cash. Imprisonment is an 18th century solution for 21st century villains
There are many options with surveillance that never existed before which would potentially act as punishment and so avoid the need for jail.
I suppose you could try something like psychological torture via AI, but this would probably raise human rights concerns.
Ok Rwanda is gone. What are they going to do to resolve the situation then?
Farage is busy today but will soon enough be on the case again.
1. "The situation" is broadly unresolvable to the satisfaction of the populist right. Rwanda was not a solution to that problem. It was part of the "do nothing real, just play politics" agenda of the last decade.
2. The actual problems are multifacted - and largely go away when people are feeling optimistic about their lot. Jobs, wages, housing are the underlying issues and not fixed by shipping a few immigrants to Rwanda at great expense (or indeed bringing immigrants in to do the jobs we won't for salaries we won't tolerate). 3. There is no quick fix to 2. We need to see what happens over a decade.
The problem is with (2) and (3) is that they have at most half a decade or Farage will be hovering over the red wall like a vulture in 2029.
But if they don't do 2 and 3 they might as well not bother at all.
There is *nothing* they can do that will fix 1 - Farage will be there twisting and turning in the wind and spouting his populist rhetoric.
Instead of trying, they should get on with 2, and promote the crap out of any positive impact they *can* have in the next 5 years.
Reform’s future success or failure won’t now just depend on Farage. It will also depend on how Tice, Anderson, Lowe and McMurdock perform in parliament and in the media.
One reason I'm sure that Farage is exceptionally relieved that they have nowhere near two dozen, let alone 100 MPs.
Comments
I do actually think if she'd just been a little slower in moving she'd still have been PM, and the eventual result might have been a little better, even just because the faultlines from out ouster would not be in play.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_28#/media/File:ConservativePartyPoster1987.jpg
2. The actual problems are multifacted - and largely go away when people are feeling optimistic about their lot. Jobs, wages, housing are the underlying issues and not fixed by shipping a few immigrants to Rwanda at great expense (or indeed bringing immigrants in to do the jobs we won't for salaries we won't tolerate).
3. There is no quick fix to 2. We need to see what happens over a decade.
My slight irritation is that people on a site called 'politicalbetting.com' can continue to peddle psephological fantasy, insisting that the Tories lost because they weren't centrist and managerial enough, as well as insisting that they fight tooth and nail with right-wing parties whose supporters are closely aligned in opinion with theirs. These aren't insights, they are peoples' political hopes dressed up as insights.
I would be surprised if European issues took up much government time, and I expect the government to be low-key about the things that are done.
Self financing. And 100% immigrant friendly to boot.
Still, could be worse:
https://github.com/Romejanic/Whitespace
The career criminals (few in number but prolific) need warehousing. We had a local rum blossom, whose career consists of - get out of prison, find a woman, put her in hospital due to rage, go to court. He’s been round that loop a few times. He needs warehousing - if nothing else, to reduce the load on A&E.
The other thing I was renowned for was assiduously recording every bit of personal info; dogs name, partner's occupation, any political or local issues they mention, a big holiday or family event just enjoyed. Noted it all down, into the computer, and all hand written back onto the cards before the next election. As a councillor you only need to impress someone by 'remembering' or connecting over something like that and you have their vote for life.
The problem now for Brexit, given it's not going to be reversed, is that it replaced membership of the European Union with a void. That void badly needs filling and it's going to take a lot of government time and political investment. Actually a lot more than continuing membership of the EU where you let the system run with things.
Blair was an unusual case there as he came in on a deal with his Chancellor that he would not get too involved with the domestic. Look where that got us.
Scotland - 10.5% of MPs
NE England - 0%
NW England - 4%
Yorkshire and the Humber - 2%
Wales - 3%
E Midlands - 0%
W Midlands - 3.5%
E England - 11.5%
London - 8%
SE England - 26%
SW England - 38%
The interesting thing is the SW includes places they have essentially abandoned in the last 10 years but which used to be strong second places at least.
So whilst holding the 38% itself will not be easy, there is still room to grow in the region.
I hope, Ian, that this is not the end of your efforts to get into parliament and that the Party gives you a more winnable seat next time!
A favourite moment was at one of the counts, when one of the defeated Tories came up to me and said "I don't understand how you keep doing it; we never see anything from you". I just smiled.
Its much easier to go the Tont Blair route of tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.
I hope that wasn't a subtle Faragist dig?
The case for Rejoin could then be about the future, and not about revenge for the lies on the bus. Or the country might find that it's quite comfortable with a Brexit where Britain is on good terms with the EU, but does its own thing from time to time.
I'd like to think that Britain would one day rejoin the EU in an optimistic way, rather than with an air of Brexit having failed, and being defeated by it. With a sense that Britain could perfectly happily continue outside the EU, but wanted to be part of the EU as well.
'Kingston Residents Group - Justice for Sub-Postmasters' got 2.3%
There is *nothing* they can do that will fix 1 - Farage will be there twisting and turning in the wind and spouting his populist rhetoric.
Instead of trying, they should get on with 2, and promote the crap out of any positive impact they *can* have in the next 5 years.
In some ways it is less risky and easier for them to go full populist right (which I do not want), eat the Reform vote, lose (assuming they would do so), and tack back to the centre in time when people are willing to give another party a chance. But that requires long term strategic thinking and clear appreciation that the party is at least 2 terms away from power, and political parties do not exist with that kind of long-term leadership. It also causes a problem with a number of MPs (eg Noakes) who are much further to the left of the membership.
Of course this is all still based on the assumption that elections will be won in the centre. We expect that to hold, but it may not.
She should have focused on response to the energy crisis first - a bill tying the energy support package in with energy supply side reforms, so the 'response to the energy crisis' was tied into one package with fracking. Labour would have probably tried to amend out the fracking, but would have failed I think. Isolating that from a 'budget' could have negated the need for significant OBR involvement and probably prevented a market attack on bonds.
Once that's through, concentrate on a fully-costed minibudget.
A big problem for Truss would still have been immigration - any moves to reduce it significantly will always be leaped upon by the OBR to downgrade their growth forecasts and leave no room for any tax cuts. That's why Truss wanted to shut Suella up. She'd probably have done the same as Sunak - a flashy boat solution but little action on legal migration till the very end of the period in office. I do think she'd have let Rwanda (or her Rwanda) get off the ground before calling the election. And definitely would have ensured it had the legal teeth to work, up to and including putting leaving the ECHR if they proved an issue in the Tory manifesto.
We're not a Great Power but we are still a power, simply by virtue of size, relative wealth, and global connections.
Why bother. We have free trade with the single market.
It would make more sense to join Schenegan if immigration can be sorted. Given the difficulties the issue is causing *within* the EU that is no longer unthinkable.
The problem is that US can no longer afford to be world policeman. National Debt Interest now exceeds Military spending (*the* end of empire klaxon) and the dollar has lost its monopoly in international trade, so no more printy printy without weimaresque consequences.
It means pointing out the fatuity of their populism, and providing Conservative solutions to the underlying problems.
Not co-opting their sloganeering.
Talk to the people the Party has lost to the populist right, and show that you really understand them and have real Conservative solutions to the problems. Like the Conservatives used to do.
It was easier to do that when in Government, of course, when they could *actually* do something and run on their record. But that ship has sailed.
Understandably, seeing as we don't exactly swap details of what we're doing in depth!
Firstly, we had no paid-for deliverers. I can understand how Labour may have assumed we had to have them, with the amount of delivery, but we'd assiduously built up our volunteer network over several years. Consider: we had twenty-odd district councillors, all of whom had built up their local networks, and one of the first things Olly did was to find more and more volunteers to complete the networks and add redundancy.
Even so, I personally delivered fifteen rounds in the final five days.
Secondly, we did have plenty of canvassing. It started several years ago as we built up local government support and deepened further after 2019. Many places had several canvasses-worth of good data, and we had teams out every day through the campaign. It can be hard to see other party's canvassing - I personally only noticed Labour canvassers on the penultimate day when I ran into Nick and his team in South Didcot. But I can personally testify to plenty of canvassing teams. After all, you don't get so many stakeboard sites (approaching 400) without having done a LOT of canvassing. And the stakeboards everywhere reinforced that message that Lib Dems were the alternative.
We also had telling and GOTV - I personally carried out a 4-hour shift in south Didcot (Meadowhall). No Labour tellers there (or in Drayton); only Lib Dems, but I was told that there were Labour tellers elsewhere (for the first time in our memory). Very few Tory tellers anywhere, but a handful were present.
Voters noticed our canvassers even if Nick didn't - some brought it up to me unprompted while I was telling (and a couple said it made their minds up for us at the last moment, which I thought usually didn't happen).
I think Nick's campaign was too late in the day - we'd been laying the foundations for a long time by then. As he says, once the underlying message has hit home, it's hard to change, and the lesson here is to get that message out early. Leafleting wasn't just in the campaign - with our network in place, we'd been leafleting many areas once per month for several months before the campaign was called. Olly had major name recognition by the election, which also helped.
What I would say about this is that labour need to study what happened before, see that it works almost as an algorhythmic circuit, and try to find a way of pre-empting the inevitable consequence of "liberal reform".
Also, if the cost of each prison place is £50k per year, and the prison population is expected to rise by 30,000 inmates (as predicted on the current trajectory), then the annual cost of meeting public demand for the additional incarceration is £1.5 billion per year, this adds little to the economy, and the problems of poor detection of crime continue and are exacerbated by prisons failing to rehabilitate.
Gary Plumb, the man who was convicted of soliciting the murder of Holly Willoughby, had already been convicted twice of attempting to kidnap women, and had served a total of 16 months, a sentence so light that it's almost condoning what he did.
Most people who are in gaol very much deserve to be there.
Shapur may win the youth angle, though. He was crowned before he was born, the crown being placed on his mother's pregnant belly.
It was the fear to face down their own extremists that did for both parties, and the lesson is the same - get rid of the nutters or the electorate will do it for you.
Ironically, it was Herbert Morrison - who made his name as leader of the LCC - who was largely responsible for that decision as President of the Board of Trade, though that was largely a matter of political expediency in the face of cabinet in-fighting.
Then down at the street level, high levels of knife crime and more recently this big rise in what I call shitty crime, nicking phones, bikes, mopeds and the shoplifting, etc that appear to have become basically decriminalised. The BBC did a piece from a rough part of Middlesbrough and said 94% of all crime there goes unsolved.
'Two votes for every pensioner - don't let Labour steal your second vote!'
It isn't me or others saying the SNP crushing hurts the mandate, it was John Swinney. He put Independence on page 1 and said that a majority of MPs would represent a mandate. They got crushed, so his own argument says there was a rejection of that mandate.
We can't have a referendum every 5 years. If people vote in a new government with a mandate for a new referendum that would be one thing. But the same government that had a mandate for a referendum which it lost saying "we still have a mandate, lets do it again"? No.
Because of time in custody, early release etc. this was literally Out For Christmas.
He'd have had to have been found another safe seat but I am not sure any seat would have been safe enough to get him re-elected.
You have to draw a line somewhere, or you end up in the dismal situation the Republicans find themselves in with Trump. And whilst the Boris isn't anything like as awful as the Donald, that doesn't mean that he hadn't crossed the line... probably some time before he was kicked out.
Constant electronic surveillance via robot. So intrusive it ruins your life. Etc
All that can be done and it will still deter and it will save shitloads of cash. Imprisonment is an 18th century solution for 21st century villains
After heavy defeats, the Tories more right wing and Labour went more left wing, before realising it wasn’t getting them back to power.
I expect the SNP hierarchy to double down on their progressive agenda and continue to pay lip service to independence. The same people are still in control of the party and will continue to alienate the remaining members who value party democracy. They will be responsible for arranging the order of potential list MSPs on the ballot. Many insiders are now ex MPs (Smyth, Nicolson, Thewliss, Oswald) and will be looking for places at the top of the lists. The SNP are likely to be more reliant on list MSPs after they lose more constituency MSPs in 2026.
At some point in the future, there will be a battle for the heart and soul of the party. Until this happens, the party will not recover. However, success is cyclical. I have a feeling that the SNP will be next challenging for power at the 2036 Holyrood election. Expect Indyref 2 some time in the 2040s.
Betting PostF1: backed Piastri at 12 each way to top qualifying. If dry or with minimal rain effect, I think he's got a solid shot, if it's properly wet this is far less likely.
https://enormo-haddock.blogspot.com/2024/07/uk-pre-qualifying-2024.html
Edited extra bit: and with that, I must be off.
Now they are the above. 2029, we will either have a new NOTA - or the Tories will be an acceptable vote.
At least not yet!!
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings..."
I did see one where someone had written in Andrew Bridgen, and another where someone had replaced all the candidates with 'genuine socialists' Corbyn, Abbott and Shaheen.
Perhaps:
5% for the lockdown parties
5% for all the sleaze
5% for the Truss disaster
5% for rises in interest rates, prices, taxes
The first three could have been avoided.
Starmer destroyed his own party with a series of purges & reversals of policy and ended up losing 300,00 members and 500,000 voters.
His scorched earth policy will come back to haunt him when the Tories eventually reunite & reorganise.
https://nitter.poast.org/DrEoinOCleirigh/status/1809250080949403919#m
What would a non-destroyed party have gotten - 640 MPs?
I suppose you could try something like psychological torture via AI, but this would probably raise human rights concerns.
His answer: "... will all now be liable for VAT."
Which as well as being an excellent gag (which is why I remember it, it was sometime in the 90s I think), is probably pretty near the truth.