Marine Le Pen was in Trump Tower today. She was on a, ahem, private trip. But she was "hosted" by a "friend" of Trump. Her spokesman said he didn't know who she'd be meeting with. Trump won't see her. But she caught the lift upwards. Et cetera.
The guy sitting opposite her is her partner Louis Aliot. Who are the other two?
Will the likes of Chuka Umunna look at this and think they'd be better off changing sides, and would the Lib Dems have them?
He should, and they should. I'm a British patriot and I want a functioning Opposition, able to take power when the Tories fail (as they will)
Also, 48% of Brits voted Remain and clearly many of them are not lunatic, red-trousered Remoaners - they need representing.
The referendum has realigned our politics as the indyref did in Scotland, so our parties need to realign, too,
We need
A hard left socialist pro-Brexit party under Corbyn
A soft left soft Remain Labour party under Chuka
A fiercely pro-Remain LD party (possibly allied with the above)
A soft right, soft Brexit Tory party under May
A hard right 100% single source full fat extra caffeine Brexit UKIP under Farage & Sons
In other words, we need PR.
Yes. As an ardent one-time FPTP-er I am now fully converted to the cause of electoral reform. Especially now we've Brexited (i.e. the last, primary task of FPTP is achieved).
I quite like the Scottish system.
I'm pretty much with you there.
Apart from the AGE it takes to calculate the winner....
Con - sometimes necessary but never nice Lab - disaster zone and nasty with it Oth - weird and intense (at best) or dangerous and nasty (at worst)
So what does someone who wants to signal how virtuous they are vote for in a byelection ?
Those famous "virtue-signalers" of suburban Sunderland?
We metropolitan elites have spread our tentacles very far!
As a matter of interest, how far is this ward from the Nissan plant? is this a local effect rather than something wider?
Well we'll see in May how much substance there is to LibDem recovery.
But I've been reading PB long enough to have seen enough 'Lib Dem winning here' talk on Thursday nights which didn't amount to much when it really mattered.
Marine Le Pen was in Trump Tower today. She was on a, ahem, private trip. But she was "hosted" by a "friend" of Trump. Her spokesman said he didn't know who she'd be meeting with. Trump won't see her. But she caught the lift upwards. Et cetera.
The guy sitting opposite her is her partner Louis Aliot. Who are the other two?
Trump did meet Matteo Salvini, the chief of the Northern League to which Lombardi belongs, but Trump actually didn’t want to meet him, he said later. “I didn’t even know him,” he said, in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, adding that there was no “common ground to be explored with Europe’s far-right parties” and that he did not want to “establish alliances beyond the Atlantic.”
If Brexit were the issue propelling the LibDems to good results in locals, then the effect would show up to an even greater degree in national polls, where Brexit is massively more relevant. This isn't happening. Ergo, Brexit is not the issue propelling the LibDems to good results in locals.
1. The LibDem activist base is enthused. They are pounding the streets, they are delivering leaflets and knocking on doors. 2. LibDem toxicity has evaporated. People will now vote tactically for them, or as a protest. 3. Now we're voting to Leave, the LD's Euroenthusiam is no longer a massive voter-repellent. (Indeed, they seem to be collecting both Remain and Soft Brexit votes.)
You'd have to be really churlish and/or partisan to deny that the Lib Dems are doing very well in local council by elections.
The full locals in May are going to be fun.
They are.
Motivation in parish council by elections seems to be the key at this time of year.
I'll not be worrying until we see unexpected results in Parly by elections.
Wot? like Richmond Park?
Not unexpected. LDs win Copeland and I would be worried...
Not going to happen. I was telephoning in Copeland for 2 hours tonight and got 1 likely LD the entire time. This is a good result for the LDs but largely a protest at the former Labour councillor's woeful neglect of his duties in my view
If Brexit were the issue propelling the LibDems to good results in locals, then the effect would show up to an even greater degree in national polls, where Brexit is massively more relevant. This isn't happening. Ergo, Brexit is not the issue propelling the LibDems to good results in locals.
1. The LibDem activist base is enthused. They are pounding the streets, they are delivering leaflets and knocking on doors. 2. LibDem toxicity has evaporated. People will now vote tactically for them, or as a protest. 3. Now we're voting to Leave, the LD's Euroenthusiam is no longer a massive voter-repellent. (Indeed, they seem to be collecting both Remain and Soft Brexit votes.)
And Brexit hasn't really started to go wrong yet. The ground is fertile for a more significant comeback, and the position of both Labour and the Tories is likely to get worse from here no matter what happens.
Con - sometimes necessary but never nice Lab - disaster zone and nasty with it Oth - weird and intense (at best) or dangerous and nasty (at worst)
So what does someone who wants to signal how virtuous they are vote for in a byelection ?
Those famous "virtue-signalers" of suburban Sunderland?
We metropolitan elites have spread our tentacles very far!
As a matter of interest, how far is this ward from the Nissan plant? is this a local effect rather than something wider?
Well we'll see in May how much substance there is to LibDem recovery.
But I've been reading PB long enough to have seen enough 'Lib Dem winning here' talk on Thursday nights which didn't amount to much when it really mattered.
The LibDems actually had quite a good night in 2013, in terms of seats at least. Although they lost something like 60% of their vote, they only lost a third of their seats.
May 2017 is likely to only show modest LibDem gains.
You'd have to be really churlish and/or partisan to deny that the Lib Dems are doing very well in local council by elections.
The full locals in May are going to be fun.
They are.
Motivation in parish council by elections seems to be the key at this time of year.
I'll not be worrying until we see unexpected results in Parly by elections.
Wot? like Richmond Park?
Not unexpected. LDs win Copeland and I would be worried...
Not going to happen. I was telephoning in Copeland for 2 hours tonight and got 1 likely LD the entire time. This is a good result for the LDs but largely a protest at the former Labour councillor's woeful neglect of his duties in my view
Evidence that the North East is recoiling from Brexit?
Have you looked at the Labour party recently?
Yes, Labour are doing brilliantly under the stewardship of Corbyn, who would be doing even better if the Blairites weren't destabilising him, and collaboration with the Tories and media
You'd have to be really churlish and/or partisan to deny that the Lib Dems are doing very well in local council by elections.
The full locals in May are going to be fun.
They are.
Motivation in parish council by elections seems to be the key at this time of year.
I'll not be worrying until we see unexpected results in Parly by elections.
Wot? like Richmond Park?
Not unexpected. LDs win Copeland and I would be worried...
Not going to happen. I was telephoning in Copeland for 2 hours tonight and got 1 likely LD the entire time. This is a good result for the LDs but largely a protest at the former Labour councillor's woeful neglect of his duties in my view
LibDems don't have phones! You need to use WhatsApp or Telegram if you want to contact them.
You'd have to be really churlish and/or partisan to deny that the Lib Dems are doing very well in local council by elections.
The full locals in May are going to be fun.
They are.
Motivation in parish council by elections seems to be the key at this time of year.
I'll not be worrying until we see unexpected results in Parly by elections.
Wot? like Richmond Park?
Not unexpected. LDs win Copeland and I would be worried...
Not going to happen. I was telephoning in Copeland for 2 hours tonight and got 1 likely LD the entire time. This is a good result for the LDs but largely a protest at the former Labour councillor's woeful neglect of his duties in my view
LibDems don't have phones! You need to use WhatsApp or Telegram if you want to contact them.
You'd have to be really churlish and/or partisan to deny that the Lib Dems are doing very well in local council by elections.
The full locals in May are going to be fun.
They are.
Motivation in parish council by elections seems to be the key at this time of year.
I'll not be worrying until we see unexpected results in Parly by elections.
Wot? like Richmond Park?
Not unexpected. LDs win Copeland and I would be worried...
Not going to happen. I was telephoning in Copeland for 2 hours tonight and got 1 likely LD the entire time. This is a good result for the LDs but largely a protest at the former Labour councillor's woeful neglect of his duties in my view
Useful info, thanks.
How did the phone banking go?
It was a questionnaire format so difficult to tell exactly eg views on local issues, likelihood to support parties from 0 to 10 but generally of those that did respond (and there was some apathy or people out) reasonably positive for the Tories and very supportive of Brexit with only a handful having backed Remain a handful of UKIP, 1 LD and not many more willing to commit to Labour. The chap next to me had a guy who was Labour all his life but never again. Tories on the other hand would happily say so and if it comes down to turnout the blues could edge it but it will have to be worked for
You'd have to be really churlish and/or partisan to deny that the Lib Dems are doing very well in local council by elections.
The full locals in May are going to be fun.
They are.
Motivation in parish council by elections seems to be the key at this time of year.
I'll not be worrying until we see unexpected results in Parly by elections.
Wot? like Richmond Park?
Not unexpected. LDs win Copeland and I would be worried...
Not going to happen. I was telephoning in Copeland for 2 hours tonight and got 1 likely LD the entire time. This is a good result for the LDs but largely a protest at the former Labour councillor's woeful neglect of his duties in my view
Useful info, thanks.
How did the phone banking go?
It was a questionnaire format so difficult to tell exactly eg views on local issues, likelihood to support parties from 0 to 10 but generally of those that did respond (and there was some apathy or people out) reasonably positive for the Tories and very supportive of Brexit with only a handful having backed Remain a handful of UKIP, 1 LD and not many more willing to commit to Labour. The chap next to me had a guy who was Labour all his life but never again. Tories on the other hand would happily say so and if it comes down to turnout the blues could edge it but it will have to be worked for
Are you local? I'd happily be involved with remote phone banking if it is possible...
You'd have to be really churlish and/or partisan to deny that the Lib Dems are doing very well in local council by elections.
The full locals in May are going to be fun.
They are.
Motivation in parish council by elections seems to be the key at this time of year.
I'll not be worrying until we see unexpected results in Parly by elections.
Wot? like Richmond Park?
Not unexpected. LDs win Copeland and I would be worried...
Not going to happen. I was telephoning in Copeland for 2 hours tonight and got 1 likely LD the entire time. This is a good result for the LDs but largely a protest at the former Labour councillor's woeful neglect of his duties in my view
Useful info, thanks.
How did the phone banking go?
It was a questionnaire format so difficult to tell exactly eg views on local issues, likelihood to support parties from 0 to 10 but generally of those that did respond (and there was some apathy or people out) reasonably positive for the Tories and very supportive of Brexit with only a handful having backed Remain a handful of UKIP, 1 LD and not many more willing to commit to Labour. The chap next to me had a guy who was Labour all his life but never again. Tories on the other hand would happily say so and if it comes down to turnout the blues could edge it but it will have to be worked for
Are you local? I'd happily be involved with remote phone banking if it is possible...
On the topic of Le Pen and Trump, she is instinctively and vocally anti-big business; he is the opposite.
I doubt their shared nationalism is enough to create any kind of 'alliance'.
And yet Les Republicains, who promise to lower corporate taxes, haven't been to Trump's Tower as far as anyone knows, although according to Politico.EU they wanted to meet him.
Evidence that the North East is recoiling from Brexit?
Have you looked at the Labour party recently?
Yes, Labour are doing brilliantly under the stewardship of Corbyn, who would be doing even better if the Blairites weren't destabilising him, and collaboration with the Tories and media
It would have been the right decision, forcing Brown to be more disciplined and anchoring us in the EU in the inner core with much more power.
That was a joke, right?
The UK would've been like Ireland, only two orders of magnitude greater. It would've ruined us.
As far as the Lib Dem fightback is concerned, I still think the national polls indicate roughly where they'd finish if there were a General Election in the Spring. These little council by-election wins are very likely down to fired-up activists getting the vote out in very low turnout elections, and in both Three Rivers (traditional liberal ward) and Sunderland (sitting Labour councillor given the heave-ho for non-attendance,) there seem to have been specific local factors working in their favour.
They may also be getting some assistance from angry Remainers in some of these elections, but it may prove rather hard to separate the relative importance of the two effects - a strong ground game, and Remainer sentiment. FWIW I reckon that most of the electorate voted pragmatically in that referendum and have already accepted the result and moved on.
If Continuity Remain were that strong an influence on the behaviour of the electorate, the Lib Dems at least - if not the Greens as well - really ought to be doing significantly better on Westminster VI than they actually are.
You'd have to be really churlish and/or partisan to deny that the Lib Dems are doing very well in local council by elections.
The full locals in May are going to be fun.
They are.
Motivation in parish council by elections seems to be the key at this time of year.
I'll not be worrying until we see unexpected results in Parly by elections.
Wot? like Richmond Park?
Not unexpected. LDs win Copeland and I would be worried...
Not going to happen. I was telephoning in Copeland for 2 hours tonight and got 1 likely LD the entire time. This is a good result for the LDs but largely a protest at the former Labour councillor's woeful neglect of his duties in my view
Useful info, thanks.
How did the phone banking go?
It was a questionnaire format so difficult to tell exactly eg views on local issues, likelihood to support parties from 0 to 10 but generally of those that did respond (and there was some apathy or people out) reasonably positive for the Tories and very supportive of Brexit with only a handful having backed Remain a handful of UKIP, 1 LD and not many more willing to commit to Labour. The chap next to me had a guy who was Labour all his life but never again. Tories on the other hand would happily say so and if it comes down to turnout the blues could edge it but it will have to be worked for
Are you local? I'd happily be involved with remote phone banking if it is possible...
You'd have to be really churlish and/or partisan to deny that the Lib Dems are doing very well in local council by elections.
The full locals in May are going to be fun.
They are.
Motivation in parish council by elections seems to be the key at this time of year.
I'll not be worrying until we see unexpected results in Parly by elections.
Wot? like Richmond Park?
Not unexpected. LDs win Copeland and I would be worried...
Not going to happen. I was telephoning in Copeland for 2 hours tonight and got 1 likely LD the entire time. This is a good result for the LDs but largely a protest at the former Labour councillor's woeful neglect of his duties in my view
Useful info, thanks.
How did the phone banking go?
It was a questionnaire format so difficult to tell exactly eg views on local issues, likelihood to support parties from 0 to 10 but generally of those that did respond (and there was some apathy or people out) reasonably positive for the Tories and very supportive of Brexit with only a handful having backed Remain a handful of UKIP, 1 LD and not many more willing to commit to Labour. The chap next to me had a guy who was Labour all his life but never again. Tories on the other hand would happily say so and if it comes down to turnout the blues could edge it but it will have to be worked for
Are you local? I'd happily be involved with remote phone banking if it is possible...
Surprised this has to be CCHQ based; there must be a way of doing this remotely.
There are also regional Tory centres you can do it from if easier and you can also do it from home I believe if you contact them https://www.conservatives.com/copelandlocal
All those expensive theatres and surgeons lying idle for want of beds, and patients cancelled on the day.
Very familiar to me.
I was hospitalised in a fairly new build hospital.
The ward was dirty.
There were some great staff and there others too.
I never saw a cleaner once.
There were old people with dementia blocking beds and keeping others awake all night.
Incidentally the nurses just ignored them as much as they could get away with.
Staff I talked with were complaining about wards closed due to lack of staff and resources.
All very familiar I am sure.
This was when Labour were in power.
So, how do we sort this out?
I left the Labour party 14 years ago because of 2 things : Iraq war and secondly the management of the NHS.
Lib Dems are the only party to have been on the right side of the biggest issues in the last couple of decades. (Iraq, Brexit)
The LibDems wanted to join the Euro.
It would have been the right decision, forcing Brown to be more disciplined and anchoring us in the EU in the inner core with much more power.
Setting aside the rights and wrongs, do you accept, as an ardent EU federalist, how extreme your views seem to most average Britons?
Well, yes it's hard to argue otherwise given where we are at the moment.
I think the country took a wrong turn somewhere in the early Blair years and Brexit is the end point of developments that started at that time. But Brexit is a process not an event and it will force us to look at some of the fundamental issues afresh and there's still time for the conclusions we reach as a nation to be different.
Marine Le Pen was in Trump Tower today. She was on a, ahem, private trip. But she was "hosted" by a "friend" of Trump. Her spokesman said he didn't know who she'd be meeting with. Trump won't see her. But she caught the lift upwards. Et cetera.
The guy sitting opposite her is her partner Louis Aliot. Who are the other two?
Yep, one of them is Lombardi. According to Reuters she was "seen at Trump Tower" with Ludovic De Danne, but unless a lot of his hair recently fell out he isn't the third guy in the photograph.
Comments
Motivation in parish council by elections seems to be the key at this time of year.
I'll not be worrying until we see unexpected results in Parly by elections.
The ward was dirty.
There were some great staff and there others too.
I never saw a cleaner once.
There were old people with dementia blocking beds and keeping others awake all night.
Incidentally the nurses just ignored them as much as they could get away with.
Staff I talked with were complaining about wards closed due to lack of staff and resources.
All very familiar I am sure.
This was when Labour were in power.
So, how do we sort this out?
http://www.politico.eu/article/trumps-ambassador-europe-far-right-news-lombardi/
Apart from the AGE it takes to calculate the winner....
But I've been reading PB long enough to have seen enough 'Lib Dem winning here' talk on Thursday nights which didn't amount to much when it really mattered.
Trump did meet Matteo Salvini, the chief of the Northern League to which Lombardi belongs, but Trump actually didn’t want to meet him, he said later. “I didn’t even know him,” he said, in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, adding that there was no “common ground to be explored with Europe’s far-right parties” and that he did not want to “establish alliances beyond the Atlantic.”
24 hours to save the pound
2. LibDem toxicity has evaporated. People will now vote tactically for them, or as a protest.
3. Now we're voting to Leave, the LD's Euroenthusiam is no longer a massive voter-repellent. (Indeed, they seem to be collecting both Remain and Soft Brexit votes.)
I remember getting excited year upon year in May, as a geeky teenager, when Hague and others were winning more and more local seats.
It didn't help change the government for years....
May 2017 is likely to only show modest LibDem gains.
How did the phone banking go?
I doubt their shared nationalism is enough to create any kind of 'alliance'.
Likewise he is pro his big government and anti other people's big government.
The parties need ot stop playing football with the NHS.
Something has to change.
The NHS will fight it, (whatever "it" is) and the other parties will scream from the sidelines.
Especially Labour, who will ignore their failings when in power and also ongoing trouble in Wales.
I don't know what the answer is.
I am pretty sure chucking money at it isn't going to be the answer either.
https://www.conservatives.com/copelandcchq
Osborne is seen as extreme by most people, including much of the Tory party. Ditto Miliband, ditto Clegg.
Incidentally, Banks seems to have got this and came over incredibly well on QT. Criticising corporatism, suggesting NHS needs to be reformed etc etc.
The UK would've been like Ireland, only two orders of magnitude greater. It would've ruined us.
As far as the Lib Dem fightback is concerned, I still think the national polls indicate roughly where they'd finish if there were a General Election in the Spring. These little council by-election wins are very likely down to fired-up activists getting the vote out in very low turnout elections, and in both Three Rivers (traditional liberal ward) and Sunderland (sitting Labour councillor given the heave-ho for non-attendance,) there seem to have been specific local factors working in their favour.
They may also be getting some assistance from angry Remainers in some of these elections, but it may prove rather hard to separate the relative importance of the two effects - a strong ground game, and Remainer sentiment. FWIW I reckon that most of the electorate voted pragmatically in that referendum and have already accepted the result and moved on.
If Continuity Remain were that strong an influence on the behaviour of the electorate, the Lib Dems at least - if not the Greens as well - really ought to be doing significantly better on Westminster VI than they actually are.
We dodged a huge bullet.
Surprised this has to be CCHQ based; there must be a way of doing this remotely.
https://www.conservatives.com/copelandlocal
I think the country took a wrong turn somewhere in the early Blair years and Brexit is the end point of developments that started at that time. But Brexit is a process not an event and it will force us to look at some of the fundamental issues afresh and there's still time for the conclusions we reach as a nation to be different.
Replying to Britain Elects
Is there a local context to this result?
Dan Kelly @ObiDanKelnobi
Local people think Labour are shit, would be my guess.
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