Heading down you can clearly see more tactical/incumbent voting patterns where the national picture is outperformed. And I think it blows apart the myth of any sort of Carmichael PV - he got in because O&S is the last redoubt of the Lib Dems in Scotland !
It's been suggested that Carmichael didn't even win Shetland.
'Orkney and Shetland, the long time redoubt of liberalism in Scotland, held this time by the skin of his teeth by the then Scottish Secretary, Alastair Carmichael, is not what it was. For Argyll has had communications and information from troubled Orcadian Liberals since election night. The story is that Shetland voted SNP and it was only the greater weight of the Liberal Democrat majority in Orkney that produced the overall Lib Dem majority – reduced to 817.'
Nick's comment about the lack of red Liberals is interesting. It seems to me this is one of the major unanswered questions of the election. I was rock-sure of Broxtowe because there were 9,000 LibDem votes up for grabs. What happened to them? Didn't vote? Voted Tory? Voted Labour, but this switch was overwhelmed by Lab to Tory switchers terrified of SNP?
The position of the 'Red Liberals' in Lab/Con marginals always greatly puzzled me. I could see that in Con/LD marginals, people who preferred a Labour to a Conservative government might well have voted LibDem in 2010, and become disgruntled when the LibDems went on to support a Conservative-led government, but I always found it hard to understand how this was supposed to work in seats like Broxtowe. If they really didn't want a Tory-led government, why on earth would they not have voted for Nick in 2010?
That always suggested to me that we should have expected little net LD->Lab switching in Con/Lab marginals.
Also some very good comments yesterday from @SandyRentool and @SouthamObserver about the Labour election race. For the sake of their party I hope that they are listening to members and supporters like these two - or will they ignore them and choose another leader who's unelectable to the general public? That the Tories are all shouting for Burnham should tell the MPs that he's not the right leader.
Does it matter to MPs that he's the wrong leader? They could surely just as easily see that Brown was the wrong leader. 85% + 1 of them nominated the mad shouting fool anyway. They will likewise clamour to nominate Butcher not because they think he'll win the general election - they're written that off - but because he'll win the leadership election. The Labour party is a suck-up fest or it is nothing.
Butcher cuts a fascinatingly weird figure. If he read English at Cambridge, he'd have read Dickens. Presumably he was appalled by Oliver Twist, where he would have sided not with Oliver, but with Mr. Bumble the Beadle, the producer interest. Likewise he'd have sided against Nicholas Nickleby and with Wackford Squeers, the producer of bad schooling. He would have been utterly disgusted that Dickens was blackening the reputation of Dotheboys Hall in this way.
The producers at whom Dickens took aim are the exact antecedents of the staff of Mid-Staffs: stuffing their own pockets, doing very little, and all the while enjoying and aggressively demanding high public esteem for their selfless supposed good deeds while their charges suffer and die in Dickensian squalor. Dickens was clearly wasting his breath on Butcher, who seems to have come away with the idea that the sick and the orphans were the villains of the piece. Anyone tactless enough to mention that Labour brought back Dickensian workhouses for poor people should, it seem, shut and be grateful to Nanny for their gruel.
Ukip was plunged into a fresh crisis last night as it faced axing half its staff because of a funding shortage.
The party had expected to cash in on the four million votes it got at the general election with £3.3million of public money by 2020.
But after its sole MP Douglas Carswell refused the full £650,000-a-year parliamentary funding to which Ukip is entitled, saying the party should not ‘jump on the gravy train’, it is now being forced to cut back dramatically on staff.
Work is interfering with the Hampshire discussion!
It's the countryside that makes Hampshire. Basingstoke is a new town mistake (although there are worse ones) but Winchester is sublime, Portsmouth is historically stimulating and Southampton a dynamic port close to some beautiful parts of the country.
One of the saddest thing is the decline of the Hampshire accent. The Hampshire "burr". This is simply dying out and there is virtually no one left, now, under 65 who still speaks with it.
On the train down to London. England is looking stunning. Sun through cloud, green grass glistening; breeze on budding trees. What a beautiful country.
Comments
And we're keeping it for old times sake
That always suggested to me that we should have expected little net LD->Lab switching in Con/Lab marginals.
The party had expected to cash in on the four million votes it got at the general election with £3.3million of public money by 2020.
But after its sole MP Douglas Carswell refused the full £650,000-a-year parliamentary funding to which Ukip is entitled, saying the party should not ‘jump on the gravy train’, it is now being forced to cut back dramatically on staff.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3090282/Ukip-sacks-half-staff-sole-MP-turns-funding-Party-faces-fresh-crisis-Douglas-Carswell-refused-650-000-year-funding-entitled-to.html#ixzz3aldingZz
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It's the countryside that makes Hampshire. Basingstoke is a new town mistake (although there are worse ones) but Winchester is sublime, Portsmouth is historically stimulating and Southampton a dynamic port close to some beautiful parts of the country.
One of the saddest thing is the decline of the Hampshire accent. The Hampshire "burr". This is simply dying out and there is virtually no one left, now, under 65 who still speaks with it.