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It looks like there’ll be more celebrations like this over the next three days – politicalbetting.co
It looks like there’ll be more celebrations like this over the next three days – politicalbetting.com
After the overnight results in the Hartlepool by-election and several local council elections, things look very good for the Tories in the first set of elections since the general election.
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In honour of the glorious win in our new heartland of Hartlepool, I’ve had a go at immortalizing the political moment epigrammatically in the traditional manner of the old: with an elegiac couplet or two. Ahem:
INSTAR MERITUM:
principis aurata muros candescere charta
______ingemis, et quanti quis dederitque rogas.
heu, tibi quid paries, partes cum sede repulsae?
______aurea dum spectas, moenia rubra cadunt.
A WELL-EARNED IMAGE:
‘The PM’s walls in Number 10 gleam bright with gilded leaf!’
_____you wail, and quiz ‘How much, and who’s been doling?’
Alas, what good’s a party-wall when your party’s lost its seat?
_____While it’s at walls of gold you gape, the Red Wall keeps on falling.
@DPJHodges
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6m
This is another key test for Starmer. Will he now purge Momentum. If you can be a member of Momentum and a member of Labour then the party has zero chance of recapturing seats like Hartlepool.
Incredibly disappointing defeat in Hartlepool.
We are going backwards in areas we need to be winning.
Labour's leadership needs to urgently change direction.
It should start by championing the popular policies in our recent manifestos - backed by a large majority of voters.
https://twitter.com/RichardBurgon/status/1390550418208563202
Remind me what happened in 2019?
@DPJHodges
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1h
We've got another day of people who spend every hour God sends tweeting "Brexit's a disaster!!!", "Boris is a racist!!!" "The Tories killed the Covid dead!!!!" wailing "what happened!?!?!?". I'll tell you what happened. The real world poked its annoying nose into politics again.
https://twitter.com/enduringrich/status/1390551173988560896
The manifesto which *checks notes* led to one of the biggest Labour defeats ever...that manifesto?
Gavin Barwell
@GavinBarwell
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2h
More important is the realignment in England & Wales. This has been building for a long time & is not just about Brexit. In many parts of the world, politics is becoming less about economics and more about culture, allowing the centre right to win more working class support 5/n
Labour have to get it back to economics by thinking big, as I posted on last thread. Something massive and bold. And maybe the post covid will inflate into a stinking mess and Labour finally have a chance in 2024.
https://twitter.com/GavinBarwell/status/1390557373648023558
His procedures need to be tightened up and the Carrie Antoinette stuff riles people.
He needs to make the most of his luck.
Perhaps we can have a mournful farewell to Starmer done in the style of Catullus?
Or something like that...
https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1390591594856951809?s=19
Of course, he needs to learn from it, and get a tight ship in No10 and buck up the level of professionalism.
Noel Clarke accused of sexual harassment on Doctor Who set
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Complacency and slackness need to be avoided if Boris, the Conservatives and far more importantly the country are to avoid problems.
"Labour source: Just because we have stopped pissing in the bath doesn’t mean people want to jump in with us straight away"
Both American, but plenty to say on same predicaments that Labour are stuck on.
https://twitter.com/addicted2newz/status/1390486757460807681
Labour: "We are the party of working people..."
"Errr, can I stop you there. It appears you are not the party of working people."
Some Lab wit commented that the party is suffering from "long Corbyn".
But sofa so good.
And now you have all stopped laughing at that thought, consider that there are a number of policies from the last manifesto which have clear public support. Renationalisation of the railways being one of them. Now it is something I would vehemently object to but I am not the target audience and I think it is something that would be very popular amongst those former Labour voters in the red wall seats.
What Labour have to do is differentiate between the widespread fear and revulsion of Corbyn and the support for some (but by no means all) of the policies that Labour were advocating in 2019. Starmer can be PM. He has 3 years to get it right and he has the basics. People don't fear him and he has many decent political qualities. I suspect he is a decent man. These things matter and give him a base to build on.
I am making no bets at all on 2024 at the moment.
https://twitter.com/paulbernaluk/status/1390549022369267717?s=21
When pundits who ‘explained’ why Vote Leave’s plan to realign politics was mad/stupid/impossible now give post hoc ‘explanations’ for why it’s all so logical/inevitable … ignore their babble… Pundits = noise not signal. Eg ‘the centre ground’ DOES NOT EXIST, it’s pundit fiction
Classic Dom
Mrs May is sitting there, waiting for her chance, and she isn't the only one.
A new battle plan will mean that every home in England will stick to the same system to recycle plastic, paper and other materials.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/14875570/council-end-barmy-recycling-postcode-lottery
I expect Tories to sail home in Hartlepool with a majority of around 6,000. It will be a Labour massacre, but still unsurprising. Labour will lose some 2019 votes through indifference, some 2019 Labour will go Tory, and virtually all of the 2019 Brexit voters that bother to turn out will go Tory. Bad news for Labour, but not signifying a great deal in the medium to long term.
Labour isn't just fighting the last war, it's fighting the last war badly.
Or get a second of something else? Which could potentially be sooner?
"We've gone to all the expense of putting the bloody wallpaper in so we might as well get some use out of it before the next guy replaces it"
https://twitter.com/Dominic2306/status/1390594515505930241
KS is a beta-lawyer-gamma-politician, like ~all in SW1 he obsesses on Media Reality not Actual Reality, he’s played the lobby game (badly) for a year WITHOUT A MESSAGE TO THE COUNTRY, now the pundits will a/ savage him, b/ tell him he needs to focus on them more, more exclusives!
"The results so far from the BBC's key wards shows that Leave and working class areas are moving more strongly to the Conservatives than are Remain and more middle class places.
In the most Leave voting areas where the last local elections were in 2016, the swing from Labour to Conservative is averaging 12 points. In contrast, in the most Remain voting areas there is currently hardly any swing to Conservatives at all.
In those wards where the last electoral contest was in 2017, there is a four point swing to the Conservatives in the most pro-Leave areas, but a 5 point swing to Labour in the most pro-Remain wards.
This latter pattern means that we can anticipate some Labour gains in places where the last election was in 2017.
In the most working class wards the swing since 2016 is averaging 12 points, whereas it is only 3 points in more middle class areas.
In wards last contested in 2017, the swing to the Conservatives is 4 points in the most working class areas, while there is a 4 point swing to Labour in the most middle class ones.
These figures illustrate the lack of progress that Labour has made in reconnecting with working class voters since the general election."
So it just might get less bad as the results become more southern.
With enemies like that, who needs friends?
(For the vaccinated West anyway, clearly not for India which is a horrible mess).
The Tories are Labour of old if you are northern ex Labour voters and Labour are the sneering condescending metropolitan elite Tories of old.
FPT
So Labour lefties think that the reason they lost Hartlepool was because they weren't loony lefty enough? And the response to the huge defeat there is to double down on Corbyn policies? If that is the case they are deluded beyond belief. Sorry, Jezziah, but your diagnosis is so, so wrong.
In trying to hold both the metro elite and the working class Labour vote together SKS has an impossible task: you can't take the knee wrapped in the Union flag and please both constituencies; you end up alienating both of them. He needs to choose, as Casino mentioned upthread.
Despite people on the left of centre deriding the "culture war" as non-existent, to me it is very real. I was amazed by last evening's discussion on here that so many people had never experienced the impact of wokeness as work. I work for a large US (East Coast) global corporation and our senior management and HR are obsessed by it - our cooperate intranet is like the BBC home page with article after article on E, D & I. Maybe smaller UK firms have yet to be afflicted by it but if anyone has access to the CIPD magazine you will get an idea what is coming in terms of UK HR - the CIPD has bought into the woke agenda hook, line and sinker.
This stuff is not going away. The people of Hartlepool may not be exposed to it in the workplace (yet) but they can see the way it is affecting popular culture and they don't like it.
For now, the Conservatives have parked their tanks on Labour's lawn when it comes to government spending and Boris is seen as standing up for traditional British values. Labour's only response to government spending is to spend more, which lacks credibility, and it appears to be actively against traditional British values.
So what does Labour do? Is the plan to sit and wait for the Tories to implode (most likely when the COVID spending chickens come home to roost), keep the fragile coalition together and hope that by that time demographics have worked in its favour? It might work but it doesn't really address the fundamental issue of where it stands on the British values question.
Blair won for a reason; when the time came, mainstream Britain was not repelled by Labour. It is now.
https://bit.ly/3vSHKMv
box was good for the Tories in Coventry. Street more nailed on than a nailed on thing.
Had mine yesterday.
Part of the problem is that Labour has let the enemy seize the narrative. Many of the policies you refer to, including renationalising the railway, are still LP policy. Most of the 2017 and 2019 manifestos were focused on bread and butter issues - green new deal, skills, investment, housing etc. But the leadership has failed to dent the (false) narrative that all Labour is interested in is wokeness, BLM, Palestine etc. It will take time, and great political skill, for Starmer and others to win the battle of ideas and persuade voters that its policies deal with their priorities, not the priorities of a small rump on the left of the party (many of whom have already left). It's challenging, but doable, especially as I expect the government to make more mistakes as time goes on and Covid fades (hopefully).
Saying this is just down to the vaccine is all well and good, but it's saying that this is all down to the government getting the biggest call of all right - when it's loudest opponents were urging it to do the reverse. So 'just' is doing a lot of work in that analysis.
I say this as one who has swung against the Conservatives over the past year.
*Yes, he used £30,000 or £60,000 of public funds, but that really won't have come across to the average voter.
I quite like Starmer, but something has to change.