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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » If UKIP can’t crack FPTP soon it’ll find itself almost without elected reps when current MEP terms end
Once again an election for a Westminster seat has highlighted the struggle UKIP has with first past the post elections. Even though it was placed third in terms of national vote share at GE2015 it only managed one of the 650 MPs. That was, of course, Carswell’s Clacton seat which he’d won in the 2014 by election when he’d stood as a defector incumbent.
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UKIP has an existential problem, May has knicked their clothes and is wearing them much better than the actual UKIP.
Equally I am surprised, given the grim, downbeat, doom laden depiction we saw of Stoke and its "let down by politicians" electorate on tv that they voted for more of the same.
That Dimbleby surge in full -
UK - By-Elections / Copeland By Election - Winner Conservatives Back x 23-Feb-17
23:18 C 1.75 100.00 1.75 75.49
UK - By-Elections / Copeland By Election - Winner Conservatives Back x 23-Feb-17
23:16 C 2.02 85.00 2.02 86.70
UK - By-Elections / Copeland By Election - Winner Conservatives Back x 23-Feb-17
23:16 C 2.08 35.00 2.08 37.80
UK - By-Elections / Copeland By Election - Winner Conservatives Back x 23-Feb-17
23:16 C 2.08 28.00 2.08 30.24
UK - By-Elections / Copeland By Election - Winner Labour Lay x 23-Feb-17
23:15 C 1.93 5.00 1.93 5.00
UK - By-Elections / Copeland By Election - Winner Conservatives Back x 23-Feb-17
23:15 C 2.08 4.00 2.08 4.32
FPTP screws parties that aren't Labour or Tories.
The SDP back in 1983, with much more electoral nous and incumbents got absolutely shafted by FPTP.
And it is still available on the vanilla forums
http://politicalbetting.vanillaforums.com/discussion/comment/1449482/#Comment_1449482
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/24/jeremy-corbyn-labour-copeland-stoke-leader
e.g.
"There is only one person who broke the Labour Party.
That person is Tony Blair.
Labour's landslide victory in 1997 was won on a left wing prospectus which included the introduction of the minimum wage, a massive investment in public services and education and a tax on "excessive profits".
As the country was heading left after 18 years of Conservative corruption and incompetence, the politically tin eared Blair dragged the party to the right.
In the process he lost Labour 5,000,000 votes, Scotland, and, most importantly, the trust of the public. That loss of trust was also largely responsible for Labour losing the last two General Elections.
And losing Copeland of course.
But in fairness to Blair, in 1997 he did win Labour the votes of a couple of hundred thousand staunch Tories.
Credit where credit is due."
But if you can't beat Gareth Snell in the capital of Brexit, then just exactly where do UKIP win?
What's odd is that the parties can't respond to it.
It's not possible to repeal the Fixed Term Parliament Act by a simple vote in the Commons. It would require primary legislation through both Houses of the (Sovereign) Parliament. The problem would be in the Lords, it's quite possible the Parliament Act would be needed to get it through.
The alternative provision is for 2/3 +1 of the total elected Commons to vote for a motion that Parliament be dissolved and an election held. This requires 434 votes in favour.
UKIPers are mostly like Trumpers. Hating foreigners is their number one and sometimes only obsession.
https://twitter.com/GuidoFawkes/status/835081471572463617
If anyone wants 11-4 on there being a GE this year I'll lay up to a total of £200 liability for myself.
AGreed with others, Labour will not be destroyed. Too sick to win, too stubborn to die. But where there's life there is hope!
The FTPA is like the Dangerous Dogs Act - it's clear what it was trying to do, but the way it's written has a whole pile of unintended consequences.
I'd love to see May go down the vote in the Commons route though, would be bloody hilarious to watch the Official Opposition (Government-in-Waiting) vote against an election!
"When he was asked if he would resign in the light of the fact that Labour’s share of the vote has been falling in a series of byelections now, he ruled out the proposal. He replied:
'I was elected to lead this party. I was elected to lead this party to oppose austerity, to oppose the redistribution of wealth in the wrong direction, which is what this government is doing. We will continue our campaigning work on the NHS, on social care, on housing.' "
I assume McDonnell wrote it for him.
Matt Singh @MattSingh_
My understanding is still that #Copeland close in on the day voting, but postals probably put the Tories over the line #CopelandByElection
Postal votes rule. OK.
Let's not forget the £9m+ the government spent helping the Remain campaign.
Like the Cromwell avatar
If Farage ran for the seat he might just make it there.
Boeing to invest in Sheffield !!!
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2943583/prince-charles-backs-mad-plan-to-sterilise-grey-squirrels-to-protect-rare-reds/
During 2015, the year in which Sweden took the largest number of asylum seekers, the number of reported sex crimes and rapes actually decreased by 11% and 12% respectively compared with 2014 - 18,100 sex offences were reported to the police, of which 5,920 were classified as rape.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39056786
Maybe the time has come to call it a day, or at least scale down. The BNP will probably make a comeback though
Take that, together with the frankly delusional reaction to the results were seeing from the nailed on Corbynites, and everything still suggests that Corbyn still needs to be given a bit more rope - Autumn 2018, with the potential for a new leader to have much the same effect as the successor to Thatcher had on the Tory vote from 1990 to 1992. Nick Palmer is the sort of person that might be used as a barometer - i.e. a Labour member capable of changing their mind who needs to see the light before a challenge stands more than a remote chance. He hasn't, yet, from what I can glean.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/24/data-analysis-corbyn-lost-copeland-ukip-crumbled-uks-brexit/
Nowhere to go after EU exit or winning the Prem.
Can see why she appealed on the doorstep, and will go far I think.
I do recall saying once or twice that if he went, UKIP would go to pot, a la a long serving manager at a football club... The haters said they'd flourish without him!
What can we glean from yesterday’s by-election results?
1. The Conservatives are markedly more popular in 2017 under Theresa May than they were in 2015 under David Cameron.
2. Liberal Democrat fortunes are slowly reviving, with the Party’s improved Stoke and Copeland performances reinforced by recent notable council by-election wins. On the present trend this is likely to have a significant impact on the number of Lib Dem MPs elected in 2010 and especially on those parts of the country (like the South West) where the Conservatives won big in 2015 but with soft majorities.
3. UKIP’s performance in Stoke will be greeted with dismay by the Party as it confirms a pattern of poor post-Referendum results. Stoke should have seen a result for UKIP eclipsing those of the Heywood & Middleton and Eastleigh by-elections where the Party came second. The clock is ticking for Paul Nuttall.
4. Most significantly of all, however, it is hard to see how Labour has any current prospect of victory in 2020. The Party is squeezed from all sides: the Conservatives will benefit from UKIP’s post-Referendum existential threat; Scotland has been lost to the SNP; and the Liberal Democrats are eating away at Labour’s centrist vote base.
In the first three years of the 2010 to 2015 Parliament there were 12 by-elections in England and Wales. Labour’s average improvement in vote share on their 2010 performance was just over 5% points (even including Bradford West which was contested by George Galloway and where Labour lost 20% of their vote share).
Since the 2015 General Election there have been 10 by-elections. Excluding Batley & Spen, Labour’s average performance finds them losing vote share and in the five most recent of these the average loss exceeds 5% points. That is an execrable performance for the Opposition.
In the mid-1990s I headed up the political research unit for a polling company providing data to a Conservative Party that knew it was heading for disaster. I realised that in such circumstances, fuelled by self-delusion and self-preservation, political parties are almost always incapable of changing their trajectory. The Labour Party seems to be facing a similar fate.
I think Nick will be a Corbyn supporter until the day after Corbyn is no longer leader; at which point he will say that he was always the wrong man for the job :-)
The FTPA was written to scupper the Conservatives walking away from the 2010-15 coalition, and that job it did very well. It can't deal with the current situation, where an incoming PM has a massive bounce in the polls, a small Commons majority and some serious business to do - from which an increased public mandate would go down very well.
I say she should try and get 2/3 of the Commons to vote for an election, but if she doesn't get it then carry on watching the party opposite implode, hopefully with a few more by-election wins or defections along the way.
By another total dud from the left.
Corbyn is a problem, but not the only one Labour face. They've lost MPs at every election since 2001, I think. They're torn between metropolitan liberals and the working class.
And I wonder if Leicester/UKIP are considering a return for their respective former managers?
They should have taken the hint.
Edit: one of.
I have plenty of experience of meeting UKIP people at events and I never heard any racism at all. I doubt people who went to BNP meetings could say the same. It's people like you trying to conflate peoples feelings of isolation and despair with race hate that cause the problems in society
One thing for sure is that HM won't want to get herself involved in the mess, if at all possible.
However, who the queen would call in such circumstances would be interesting. She'd be placed in a difficult position. On the one hand, precedent on a lost confidence motion suggests she should call the LotO; on the other, the Tories still have a majority and precedent there is that she should in the first instance see whether an alternative Tory could command a majority (which they couldn't). If Corbyn accepted the commission, he'd become PM at least for a short time. Would he too be obliged to resign / be dismissed if (when) he failed to achieve a vote of confidence or would he be allowed to continue as PM through the election campaign? If not, a return of May would be the only option - but that too would be controversial given her refusal to serve under any other circumstance.
If May did want an early dissolution, going for a Commons motion would be the best bet, particularly if she can hang it off the back of the Lords doing something controversial over A50.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/22/uk-not-about-to-shut-the-door-on-low-skilled-eu-migrants-says-david-davis
That might well mean lots of visas, but then again it might well not, when it firms up a bit the Kippers will start opening purple water from the Tories and their electoral fortunes will revive to some extent.
https://twitter.com/SamCoatesTimes/status/835099127889473537
I dislike this 'n%+1' terminology as it's nearly always wrong. The correct formulation is 'more than 50%'.
I would say a split is virtually inevitable. The question is what split.
@LadPolitics: How about we scrap general elections and just have a rolling schedule of 3 "by-elections" every Thursday?
I doubt your experience met with any reasoned sovereignty argument.
I could be wrong about your experiences of course.