Third labour loss in Durham. 1 seat to Lib Dem’s in Aycliffe north. It’s odd how the seats closer to Hartlepool are relatively good for labour.
What I found interesting that the urban core of Blyth and Ashington (in Northumberland) is still solidly Labour. It's the outskirts where the Persimmon new-builds are aplenty where the Tory vote is the strongest, like @Philip_Thompson says.
And a number of Tory seats lost in the once very Blue Tyne Valley. 2 to Labour, 1 Independent and 1 Green. New political geography in one county.
Nick Eardley @nickeardleybbc · 11m Tories in Scotland fear increased turnout is translating to support for SNP, one senior source warning a SNP landslide in constituencies could be on the cards
@josh_wingrove Biden touts his Buy American plans: "Every single thing, from the deck of an aircraft carrier to the railing of a new building, is going to be built by an American company, American workers, American supply chain, so that we invest American tax dollars in American workers."
“America first”, one could say. No new WTO trade round for some years...
A key belief on the left of the Democratic party is that international trade deals - especially NAFTA - paved the way for Trump, by selling out the skilled working class/lower middle class.
Assuming our politics is coalescing around old American demographics. Truss's new deals may begin to jar the New-Conservative voting block?
What jars such blocks is things such as being forced to train up overseas workers to take their jobs. This literally happens in the US.
Trade deals are one thing. The issue isn't opening the economy to international trade. It is opening the economy to low cost countries where social provision is lower etc - creating a race to the bottom.
It is ironic that Labour has become wedded to exactly this - to the un-ending importation of low-skilled labour.
It is worth considering how unions in Australia reacted to this idea.
Nick Eardley @nickeardleybbc · 11m Tories in Scotland fear increased turnout is translating to support for SNP, one senior source warning a SNP landslide in constituencies could be on the cards
SCon mood music was all good until the ballot boxes started opening.
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.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
It's a definition problem. The right of centre defines "woke" as over-obsession with D&I to the exclusion of almost everything else. Whether this is the intended usage by its proponents is a separate question, but hopefully it is clear that, based on the definition above, wokeness is necessarily bad.
I'm totally bought into the principles of inclusivity (indeed, how can anyone reasonably object?) but current corporate attitudes go way beyond what can possibly be considered reasonable. And it's impossible to tell how many people secretly dislike it because everyone's terrified of being branded a bigot and having their career severely limited as a result.
You think big business is prioritizing diversity over making profits?
A lot of big business is making the same mistake as politicians and journalists, in thinking that Twitter represents society.
They fear the twitter pile on more than anything else.
Nick Eardley @nickeardleybbc · 11m Tories in Scotland fear increased turnout is translating to support for SNP, one senior source warning a SNP landslide in constituencies could be on the cards
Don't they always get a landside in the constitutencies?
Turnout in Waverley 42%, which is fairly average. Strong LibDem and anti-Tory Residents showing - Tories probably down to 2 County seats out of 9. Labour making some progress from a very low base.
Nick Eardley @nickeardleybbc · 11m Tories in Scotland fear increased turnout is translating to support for SNP, one senior source warning a SNP landslide in constituencies could be on the cards
SCon mood music was all good until the ballot boxes started opening.
Looks like the "mongo tsunami" is coming for Scotland.
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.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
Indeed. I think part of the challenge for those of us who recognise the benefits of diversity is that it is made harder as a message by people on the woke extreme. That said, today's "PC gone mad" may well be seen by future generations as perfectly normal. Look how perceptions have changed with respect to gay people.
To make a point the other way, I think a danger of woke is that the message, "just being not racist is a cop out, you must be an ANTI racist" can be (wrongly) taken as an instruction to view everything through the prism of race. You can then if you're not careful find yourself thinking about race all the time. Which is what racists do.
Good for you for posting that - that's progress.
Otherwise, I'm leaving the culture war stuff for today, as I'm focussing on the results and my betting.
Jason Allardyce @SundayTimesSco · 6m We’re hearing Tories worried about 6 seats: Ayr, Eastwood, Aberdeenshire West, Edinburgh Central, Dumfriesshire and Galloway and West Dumfries. If they fall the SNP almost certainly gets majority #Holyrood2021
Lineker's tax problem was a straight IR35 issue, wasn't it, rather than one of these shady non-investment investments that used to be fashionable? Tbh I could never quite get my head around it.
Nick Eardley @nickeardleybbc · 11m Tories in Scotland fear increased turnout is translating to support for SNP, one senior source warning a SNP landslide in constituencies could be on the cards
SCon mood music was all good until the ballot boxes started opening.
Twas the grear unknown
was the unknown voter Better Together or coming out to ensure the SNP got such a majority a referendum is unavoidable.
I hear so much genuine anger that different areas do this differently. This is an anger I simply can't understand. It's the work of minutes to understand your own area's recycling system. Still, the government appears to be responding to a genuine demand here.
The concern of course must be that this might result in a poorer service in some areas that currently have very good recycling systems.
Currently Lincolnshire has a brilliant system. They have a single bin which takes just about everything that can possibly be recycled and then it is sorted by the private contractor (Mountain in our area). This makes recycling quick, easy and efficient and you really see a difference with very little going into the landfill bin.
Across the border in Nottinghamshire they also have a single bin system but what you can recycle is severely limited. So no glass for example. Or tetrapacks. This means that my Mum saves all this stuff up and gives it to me to put in my recycling bin each time I see her.
So if the rationalising means Lincolnshire end up with the Nottinghamshire system then that would be a very retrograde step.
Speaking from Nottinghamshire I have a blue bin for my glass, which is collected once a fortnight.
Nick Eardley @nickeardleybbc · 11m Tories in Scotland fear increased turnout is translating to support for SNP, one senior source warning a SNP landslide in constituencies could be on the cards
Nick Eardley @nickeardleybbc · 11m Tories in Scotland fear increased turnout is translating to support for SNP, one senior source warning a SNP landslide in constituencies could be on the cards
SCon mood music was all good until the ballot boxes started opening.
Twas the grear unknown
was the unknown voter Better Together or coming out to ensure the SNP got such a majority a referendum is unavoidable.
Nick Eardley @nickeardleybbc · 11m Tories in Scotland fear increased turnout is translating to support for SNP, one senior source warning a SNP landslide in constituencies could be on the cards
SCon mood music was all good until the ballot boxes started opening.
Looks like the "mongo tsunami" is coming for Scotland.
I swear I saw Mongo Tsunami supporting Catatonia at the Princess Charlotte, Leicester, in the mid-90s.
I have a 1922 copy of The Jungle Book. It has a little swastika on the front and many more decorating the inside.
The ultimate irony being that in our enlightened times many would urge you to burn that book. Uh...like the Nazis did.
I faced that dilemma after buying an openly antisemitic cartoon book from a charity shop.
We should never erase the past, no matter how vile it is to our current society - we should be strong enough and confident enough in our society to live with it and use such things to provide context and show evolution. If we indulge in iconoclasm and book-burning in a puritan frenzy are we no better than the very people we now revile?
To erase the past is to also erase where we have come from - and erase the lessons we have learned along the way.
Dontae the book to a museum or Jewish organisation - it'll be safe in their hands and could help educate others as to why such things led to the atrocities they did.
Third labour loss in Durham. 1 seat to Lib Dem’s in Aycliffe north. It’s odd how the seats closer to Hartlepool are relatively good for labour.
What I found interesting that the urban core of Blyth and Ashington (in Northumberland) is still solidly Labour. It's the outskirts where the Persimmon new-builds are aplenty where the Tory vote is the strongest, like @Philip_Thompson says.
A fair chunk of what's happening is people moving and taking their views with them, rather than people shifting their views.
Maybe in small part, but not entirely. That's why the aggregate numbers are changing.
Who owns and lives in these Persimmon homes? Quite possibly people who were until these holes were built living and renting in the town.
By going from renters to owner occupiers their circumstances have massively changed.
Sure. And it would be interesting to think about the relative balance of the two. But if you look at the new build estates, they tend to be second/third step on the ladder, not starter homes. Even at Northern prices, you need a decent hit of equity to put down the deposit.
And the other question is why do some people switch when they move and others don't? Cambridge Liberalism is gradually spattering the south of the county as the city bursts its skin. Something similar is happening in London. Romford has got a bit of a way to go from that point of view, but the demographics are changing.
I've bet against SNP Maj fwiw off of the Tory smelling salts coming out.
Turnout up 8-11% across multiple constituencies being reported by election officials. This is huuuuge.
But who does it benefit?
No one knows, the general trend is higher turnout better SNP support but that is not a hard and fast rule into how that translates into seats (see 2011 vs 201ť for example)
Jason Allardyce @SundayTimesSco · 6m We’re hearing Tories worried about 6 seats: Ayr, Eastwood, Aberdeenshire West, Edinburgh Central, Dumfriesshire and Galloway and West Dumfries. If they fall the SNP almost certainly gets majority #Holyrood2021
If they are worried about the two Dumfries seats it is all over.
Can anyone recommend me some good twitter handles or hashtags for latest results? I'm looking for one site with the latest coming in around the UK. Preferably troll free.
Mandelson's deft political touch clearly deserted him a long time ago.
" Lord Mandleson, a former MP for Hartlepool and one of the architects of New Labour, said the party had to embrace “Brexit attitudes” if it wanted to win back voters in places like his old constituency. He said that during the campaign voters did not raise the issue of leaving the EU on the doorstep. But he suggested that “Brexit attitudes” were now more important than class in determining how people voted, and that Labour had to respond."
Such a one-dimensional strategy will just result in the loss of London and many similar places to the Lib Dems and Greens, and the reversal of the small inroads into the wider South Labour is making. Labour has to do something much more subtle and challenging than this - it needs to create a common thread between the two places. The Red Wall seats can't win it for Labour alone, clearly, if they lose large areas of metropolitan Britain, too. If Mandelson is advising Starmer purely on this basis, that doesn't inspire much confidence in Labour's future, to me.
I hear so much genuine anger that different areas do this differently. This is an anger I simply can't understand. It's the work of minutes to understand your own area's recycling system. Still, the government appears to be responding to a genuine demand here.
The concern of course must be that this might result in a poorer service in some areas that currently have very good recycling systems.
Currently Lincolnshire has a brilliant system. They have a single bin which takes just about everything that can possibly be recycled and then it is sorted by the private contractor (Mountain in our area). This makes recycling quick, easy and efficient and you really see a difference with very little going into the landfill bin.
Across the border in Nottinghamshire they also have a single bin system but what you can recycle is severely limited. So no glass for example. Or tetrapacks. This means that my Mum saves all this stuff up and gives it to me to put in my recycling bin each time I see her.
So if the rationalising means Lincolnshire end up with the Nottinghamshire system then that would be a very retrograde step.
Tetrapaks are an enormous pain to recycle I’ve read - to the point that the profitability of a recycling service is dominated by the proportion of Tetrapaks in the waste stream (if I recall the article in question correctly).
Jason Allardyce @SundayTimesSco · 6m We’re hearing Tories worried about 6 seats: Ayr, Eastwood, Aberdeenshire West, Edinburgh Central, Dumfriesshire and Galloway and West Dumfries. If they fall the SNP almost certainly gets majority #Holyrood2021
No, that's not how the system works. It mostly comes down to the list votes. Of course, if there's a surge in pro-Indy list votes (SNP or Green), that does matter.
To me it looks like there are signs of the Tories going backwards in the South - but they will be more than happy that with the extraordinary results in the North.
As for Labour and the Lib Dems, it is time to sort out an unofficial pact in the South to do damage down there. To show signs of possible progress in 2024 and where the Tory majority can eventually be removed. This will however take years.
GE19 was ripe for such a pact. It was a quasi Ref2 and the landslide came because the Cons hoovered up Leavers with Remainers split. Maybe next time. Or the next. If not, it has to be electoral reform. Certainly we can't go on for long with the Cons winning easy FPTP majorities off 42% of the vote. That's sterile and dangerous and anti-democratic.
Nick Eardley @nickeardleybbc · 11m Tories in Scotland fear increased turnout is translating to support for SNP, one senior source warning a SNP landslide in constituencies could be on the cards
SCon mood music was all good until the ballot boxes started opening.
Twas the grear unknown
was the unknown voter Better Together or coming out to ensure the SNP got such a majority a referendum is unavoidable.
@josh_wingrove Biden touts his Buy American plans: "Every single thing, from the deck of an aircraft carrier to the railing of a new building, is going to be built by an American company, American workers, American supply chain, so that we invest American tax dollars in American workers."
“America first”, one could say. No new WTO trade round for some years...
A key belief on the left of the Democratic party is that international trade deals - especially NAFTA - paved the way for Trump, by selling out the skilled working class/lower middle class.
Assuming our politics is coalescing around old American demographics. Truss's new deals may begin to jar the New-Conservative voting block?
What jars such blocks is things such as being forced to train up overseas workers to take their jobs. This literally happens in the US.
Trade deals are one thing. The issue isn't opening the economy to international trade. It is opening the economy to low cost countries where social provision is lower etc - creating a race to the bottom.
It is ironic that Labour has become wedded to exactly this - to the un-ending importation of low-skilled labour.
It is worth considering how unions in Australia reacted to this idea.
I have a huge problem with the seeming inability of companies to train their workforce and continual complaints of not being able to find 'skilled' staff nationally. Yet the Britannia Unchained crowd are holding cabinet positions and I'm not sure this bodes well for those in lower income brackets.
I see the push towards cheaper food imports with the consequence of savaging UK farming interests to be a sign of policies to come.
Lineker's tax problem was a straight IR35 issue, wasn't it, rather than one of these shady non-investment investments that used to be fashionable? Tbh I could never quite get my head around it.
I hear so much genuine anger that different areas do this differently. This is an anger I simply can't understand. It's the work of minutes to understand your own area's recycling system. Still, the government appears to be responding to a genuine demand here.
The concern of course must be that this might result in a poorer service in some areas that currently have very good recycling systems.
Currently Lincolnshire has a brilliant system. They have a single bin which takes just about everything that can possibly be recycled and then it is sorted by the private contractor (Mountain in our area). This makes recycling quick, easy and efficient and you really see a difference with very little going into the landfill bin.
Across the border in Nottinghamshire they also have a single bin system but what you can recycle is severely limited. So no glass for example. Or tetrapacks. This means that my Mum saves all this stuff up and gives it to me to put in my recycling bin each time I see her.
So if the rationalising means Lincolnshire end up with the Nottinghamshire system then that would be a very retrograde step.
Speaking from Nottinghamshire I have a blue bin for my glass, which is collected once a fortnight.
Interestingly that doesn't exist in Newark and Sherwood. So the differences are down to district council level. Indeed my daughter is at Uni in Nottingham and they again have a completely different system.
“London Elects website currently down “under maintainance”. They chose a funny day for their maintainence.
Their server has been under strain and throwing errors all morning. Classic capacity problem – no-one ever visits the site until the whole world comes knocking on the same day. It is like being a retailer at Christmas, or bookmaker on Grand National day. If you design for peak capacity, you waste a lot of money. If you design for typical load, your site falls over when it really matters.
The promise of cloud computing was instant scaling of computing resources as demand increased. Turns out it is slightly more complicated than that.
The thing is, it really isn’t that much more complicated any more. Companies like Cloudflare make scalability easy, this one looks like an internal issue between the web server and the database server - at a guess every user page refresh is hitting the DB server directly, rather than a stored procedure running once a minute on the DB and sending the numbers to the web server. The “maintainance” is probably to implement said stored procedure.
Yes, as I speculated a minute ago, it is probably that every end user has requested realtime updates and so every request hits the database. So they need to redesign the application so that realtime means a cached value that gets updated every 60 seconds, which might be hard to rewrite on the fly, or check the database diagnostics for easy tweaks, assuming they've paid a small fortune to Oracle (or whoever) for the diagnostics package.
“London Elects website currently down “under maintainance”. They chose a funny day for their maintainence.
Their server has been under strain and throwing errors all morning. Classic capacity problem – no-one ever visits the site until the whole world comes knocking on the same day. It is like being a retailer at Christmas, or bookmaker on Grand National day. If you design for peak capacity, you waste a lot of money. If you design for typical load, your site falls over when it really matters.
The promise of cloud computing was instant scaling of computing resources as demand increased. Turns out it is slightly more complicated than that.
The thing is, it really isn’t that much more complicated any more. Companies like Cloudflare make scalability easy, this one looks like an internal issue between the web server and the database server - at a guess every user page refresh is hitting the DB server directly, rather than a stored procedure running once a minute on the DB and sending the numbers to the web server. The “maintainance” is probably to implement said stored procedure.
Yes, as I speculated a minute ago, it is probably that every end user has requested realtime updates and so every request hits the database. So they need to redesign the application so that realtime means a cached value that gets updated every 60 seconds, which might be hard to rewrite on the fly, or check the database diagnostics for easy tweaks, assuming they've paid a small fortune to Oracle (or whoever) for the diagnostics package.
I know of one company where what happened was this - they had setup what they thought was a brilliantly scalable design. It automatically scaled on AWS etc to whatever load was applied. It was indeed, close to infinitely scalable.
Because of a lack of caching, when their Big Day eventually came, the site didn't go down, exactly..... It exceeded their spend limits on the cloud options. Which they had set, fortunately......
Labour hold on to win (my mum) the Canterbury City Council Westgate Ward By-election. As a Lib Dem I had conflicted loyalties. I can confidently predict that I wont be winning the Oxford City Council seat of Temple Cowley when counting happens tomorrow.
Nick Eardley @nickeardleybbc · 11m Tories in Scotland fear increased turnout is translating to support for SNP, one senior source warning a SNP landslide in constituencies could be on the cards
SCon mood music was all good until the ballot boxes started opening.
Twas the grear unknown
was the unknown voter Better Together or coming out to ensure the SNP got such a majority a referendum is unavoidable.
And it seems to be the latter.
Too early to say. Could yet be either.
Not if the Tories are worried about Dumfries.
I was bemused by that. This bizarre campaign focused on the peach (list) vote was just bewildering.
Labour hold on to win (my mum) the Canterbury City Council Westgate Ward By-election. As a Lib Dem I had conflicted loyalties. I can confidently predict that I wont be winning the Oxford City Council seat of Temple Cowley when counting happens tomorrow.
Curious, is it normal for LDs to put their mothers up as prizes for winning council candidates?
Labour hold on to win (my mum) the Canterbury City Council Westgate Ward By-election. As a Lib Dem I had conflicted loyalties. I can confidently predict that I wont be winning the Oxford City Council seat of Temple Cowley when counting happens tomorrow.
I assume this is a turnout issue. Was the first held when it was just PCC election (and therefore nobody could be bothered to turn up) and the 2nd with local elections with the consequential higher turnout and bloody nose the Tories are giving Lab in these seats adding to the PCC total.
Lineker's tax problem was a straight IR35 issue, wasn't it, rather than one of these shady non-investment investments that used to be fashionable? Tbh I could never quite get my head around it.
Didn’t the BBC pay many of these liabilities in the past for wealthy ‘talent’ who fell foul of IR35 after the Christa Akroyd case got HMRC interested in this industry.
Mandelson's deft political touch clearly deserted him a long time ago.
" Lord Mandleson, a former MP for Hartlepool and one of the architects of New Labour, said the party had to embrace “Brexit attitudes” if it wanted to win back voters in places like his old constituency. He said that during the campaign voters did not raise the issue of leaving the EU on the doorstep. But he suggested that “Brexit attitudes” were now more important than class in determining how people voted, and that Labour had to respond."
This will just result in the loss of London and similar places to the Lib Dems and Greens, and the reversal of the small inroads into the wider South Labour is making. Labour has to do something much more subtle and challenging than this - it needs to create a common thread. The Red Wall seats can't win it for Labour alone, clearly, if they lose large areas of metropolitan Britain too. If Mandelson is advising Starmer purely on this basis, that doesn't inspire much confidence to me.
Exactly. Mandelson might as well ask Sir Keir to don a blond wig, a fat suit and go around blurting 'Brexit bah hah hah ... Churchill ... Carrie ...' for all the good that will do. Mandelson probably isn't the political mastermind he thinks he is, but was just very lucky in the era he found himself.
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.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
It's a definition problem. The right of centre defines "woke" as over-obsession with D&I to the exclusion of almost everything else. Whether this is the intended usage by its proponents is a separate question, but hopefully it is clear that, based on the definition above, wokeness is necessarily bad.
I'm totally bought into the principles of inclusivity (indeed, how can anyone reasonably object?) but current corporate attitudes go way beyond what can possibly be considered reasonable. And it's impossible to tell how many people secretly dislike it because everyone's terrified of being branded a bigot and having their career severely limited as a result.
You think big business is prioritizing diversity over making profits?
A lot of big business is making the same mistake as politicians and journalists, in thinking that Twitter represents society.
Second seat in swing of just over 6% to the Tories from the SNP. Made no difference as a very safe seat but there are seats where that sort of swing would make a difference. North east though, probably Tories best area.
Nick Eardley @nickeardleybbc · 11m Tories in Scotland fear increased turnout is translating to support for SNP, one senior source warning a SNP landslide in constituencies could be on the cards
SCon mood music was all good until the ballot boxes started opening.
Twas the grear unknown
was the unknown voter Better Together or coming out to ensure the SNP got such a majority a referendum is unavoidable.
And it seems to be the latter.
Too early to say. Could yet be either.
Not if the Tories are worried about Dumfries.
I was bemused by that. This bizarre campaign focused on the peach (list) vote was just bewildering.
Can you explain what the peach vote is please? For those of us not aware?
"Police intervened as a candidate in the Southside seat in Glasgow approached the count hall with followers doing what looked like Nazi salutes.
Derek Jackson, standing as the Liberal Party turned up outside the Emirates with two followers wearing black suits, white shirts and black ties. They each had a yellow star pinned to their jacket fronts with “UNVAX” written on it.
Jackson denied the star was related to the yellow star Jewish people were forced to wear by Nazis during the second world war.
He denied the gesture they made was a Nazi salute.
Nick Eardley @nickeardleybbc · 11m Tories in Scotland fear increased turnout is translating to support for SNP, one senior source warning a SNP landslide in constituencies could be on the cards
SCon mood music was all good until the ballot boxes started opening.
Twas the grear unknown
was the unknown voter Better Together or coming out to ensure the SNP got such a majority a referendum is unavoidable.
And it seems to be the latter.
Too early to say. Could yet be either.
Not if the Tories are worried about Dumfries.
I was bemused by that. This bizarre campaign focused on the peach (list) vote was just bewildering.
Can you explain what the peach vote is please? For those of us not aware?
Is it seriously just the list vote?
I'm guessing it's just the colour of the list ballot.
Labour hold on to win (my mum) the Canterbury City Council Westgate Ward By-election. As a Lib Dem I had conflicted loyalties. I can confidently predict that I wont be winning the Oxford City Council seat of Temple Cowley when counting happens tomorrow.
Labour hold on to win (my mum) the Canterbury City Council Westgate Ward By-election. As a Lib Dem I had conflicted loyalties. I can confidently predict that I wont be winning the Oxford City Council seat of Temple Cowley when counting happens tomorrow.
Nick Eardley @nickeardleybbc · 11m Tories in Scotland fear increased turnout is translating to support for SNP, one senior source warning a SNP landslide in constituencies could be on the cards
SCon mood music was all good until the ballot boxes started opening.
Twas the grear unknown
was the unknown voter Better Together or coming out to ensure the SNP got such a majority a referendum is unavoidable.
And it seems to be the latter.
Too early to say. Could yet be either.
Not if the Tories are worried about Dumfries.
I was bemused by that. This bizarre campaign focused on the peach (list) vote was just bewildering.
Can you explain what the peach vote is please? For those of us not aware?
Is it seriously just the list vote?
I'm guessing it's just the colour of the list ballot.
Correct. That was the colour of the regional vote and the constituency was purple.
Labour hold on to win (my mum) the Canterbury City Council Westgate Ward By-election. As a Lib Dem I had conflicted loyalties. I can confidently predict that I wont be winning the Oxford City Council seat of Temple Cowley when counting happens tomorrow.
Nick Eardley @nickeardleybbc · 11m Tories in Scotland fear increased turnout is translating to support for SNP, one senior source warning a SNP landslide in constituencies could be on the cards
SCon mood music was all good until the ballot boxes started opening.
Twas the grear unknown
was the unknown voter Better Together or coming out to ensure the SNP got such a majority a referendum is unavoidable.
And it seems to be the latter.
Too early to say. Could yet be either.
Not if the Tories are worried about Dumfries.
I was bemused by that. This bizarre campaign focused on the peach (list) vote was just bewildering.
Can you explain what the peach vote is please? For those of us not aware?
Is it seriously just the list vote?
I'm guessing it's just the colour of the list ballot.
Correct. That was the colour of the regional vote and the constituency was purple.
I assume old-fashioned white is just unacceptable these days?
Comments
https://twitter.com/ryancapperauld/status/1390625856842764293
Interesting: some very clear expectation management from @AlexSalmond Q: what counts as @AlbaParty victory? A: "Registering as a political party" He doesn't say winning seats #Holyrood21 https://twitter.com/Political_AlanS/status/1390635594821292036
https://twitter.com/jamesmatthewsky/status/1390638778168102917
New political geography in one county.
Nick Eardley
@nickeardleybbc
·
11m
Tories in Scotland fear increased turnout is translating to support for SNP, one senior source warning a SNP landslide in constituencies could be on the cards
Trade deals are one thing. The issue isn't opening the economy to international trade. It is opening the economy to low cost countries where social provision is lower etc - creating a race to the bottom.
It is ironic that Labour has become wedded to exactly this - to the un-ending importation of low-skilled labour.
It is worth considering how unions in Australia reacted to this idea.
2020 Cleveland PCC Lab 39,467 Tories 74,073 !!!
Otherwise, I'm leaving the culture war stuff for today, as I'm focussing on the results and my betting.
@SundayTimesSco
·
6m
We’re hearing Tories worried about 6 seats: Ayr, Eastwood, Aberdeenshire West, Edinburgh Central, Dumfriesshire and Galloway and West Dumfries. If they fall the SNP almost certainly gets majority #Holyrood2021
was the unknown voter Better Together or coming out to ensure the SNP got such a majority a referendum is unavoidable.
And it seems to be the latter.
I hope that's why. SNP landslide on a high turnout has to mean IndyRef2.
We get to continue to live in interesting times. 🤓
LIBDEM HOLD with 62% of the vote
4.8% swing to SNP
To erase the past is to also erase where we have come from - and erase the lessons we have learned along the way.
Dontae the book to a museum or Jewish organisation - it'll be safe in their hands and could help educate others as to why such things led to the atrocities they did.
But if you look at the new build estates, they tend to be second/third step on the ladder, not starter homes. Even at Northern prices, you need a decent hit of equity to put down the deposit.
And the other question is why do some people switch when they move and others don't? Cambridge Liberalism is gradually spattering the south of the county as the city bursts its skin. Something similar is happening in London. Romford has got a bit of a way to go from that point of view, but the demographics are changing.
Get Boris on the phone.
The More the Scots want to leave?
" Lord Mandleson, a former MP for Hartlepool and one of the architects of New Labour, said the party had to embrace “Brexit attitudes” if it wanted to win back voters in places like his old constituency. He said that during the campaign voters did not raise the issue of leaving the EU on the doorstep. But he suggested that “Brexit attitudes” were now more important than class in determining how people voted, and that Labour had to respond."
Such a one-dimensional strategy will just result in the loss of London and many similar places to the Lib Dems and Greens, and the reversal of the small inroads into the wider South Labour is making. Labour has to do something much more subtle and challenging than this - it needs to create a common thread between the two places. The Red Wall seats can't win it for Labour alone, clearly, if they lose large areas of metropolitan Britain, too. If Mandelson is advising Starmer purely on this basis, that doesn't inspire much confidence in Labour's future, to me.
LD -5
SNP +4.8
Con +1.8
Lab -0.4
It may be one district council.
Edit found it: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2021/scotland/constituencies/S16000135
Small swing to the SNP.
SNP win
52% of the vote, down 4%, Tories up 8%
Suggestions the Tories got tactical support
I see the push towards cheaper food imports with the consequence of savaging UK farming interests to be a sign of policies to come.
https://citywire.co.uk/wealth-manager/news/beckham-lineker-and-rooney-lose-film-scheme-appeal/a1080180
Because of a lack of caching, when their Big Day eventually came, the site didn't go down, exactly..... It exceeded their spend limits on the cloud options. Which they had set, fortunately......
Bit like Marillion...
Labour confident re Edinburgh Southern: “More than fine.” @SkyNews
https://twitter.com/jamesmatthewsky/status/1390642354185543682
Hypothetically if the Tories take all the BXP votes and seats that fall as a result like Hartlepool - goodbye Yvette Cooper for instance ...
and if the Scots leave ...
... Then what would the Tory majority become? Be about 170 surely?
SNP 51.6 (-4.4)
Con 26.4 (+8)
Lab 15.3 (-3)
LD 6 (-1.3)
The cunning 'Veto their vote + call them all Nazis' strategy isn't looking quite so clever now is it.
@SamCoatesSky
·
18s
2021 has been The Brexit Election (again)
Look at these two charts from
@skynews
data team and
@drjennings
Tories clearing hoovering up ex Brexit vote
More evidence of a big post-2017 realignment
https://twitter.com/SamCoatesSky/status/1390642890993455106
I bought one of his albums. Marillion are still selling out the Albert Hall.
Snp down here? (Aberdeen Donside)
@labourleave
·
4h
The cunning 'Veto their vote + call them all Nazis' strategy isn't looking quite so clever now is it.
Is it seriously just the list vote?
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/19286585.anti-vaccination-candidate-performs-nazi-salute-outside-glasgow-election-count/
"Police intervened as a candidate in the Southside seat in Glasgow approached the count hall with followers doing what looked like Nazi salutes.
Derek Jackson, standing as the Liberal Party turned up outside the Emirates with two followers wearing black suits, white shirts and black ties. They each had a yellow star pinned to their jacket fronts with “UNVAX” written on it.
Jackson denied the star was related to the yellow star Jewish people were forced to wear by Nazis during the second world war.
He denied the gesture they made was a Nazi salute.
Instead, he claimed it was a “love salute”."
TORY hold
with 48% of the vote. PC 18%, LD 17%
Tories up 6%, PC up 8%, Lab up 8%, LDs down 11%