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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Dramatic council by-election boost for UKIP in Suffolk
Vote share changes from 2011 in the Haverhill, Suffolk, district council by election
UKIP 54% +54
LAB 24.5% -12.7
CON 16% -31.9
LD 5.5% -9.4
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I hate jet lag.
I'm just reading a sci fi book by Peter Hamilton - an English author who comes from Rutland.
It's called Misspent Youth and the story is painted against a rampant Europe where the UK has finally given in and joined the Euro and everything else Brussels driven. The EU is effectively a federal state and the British have still not been given a vote. There's massive civil unrest across the whole of Europe.
An interesting read in the current climate - if you like sci fi that is!
That was unpleasant!
Talking of book rcommendations, just reading a great account of the Battle of Brooklyn - 1776 by David McCullough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Long_Island
The Ukip winner is also the successful County Councillor for the area so clearly has local pull in the area.
It's simply a matter of putting a single win in context. So congratulations to the Ukip winner but "small earthquake in Chile - nobody hurt" springs to mind.
We have the least impressive set of political leaders (of all three "main" parties) that any of us can remember. The only conceivable exception is Boris Johnson, but in truth he's part of the problem: a low opinion of his fellow men & women and so only interested in his own career - he's done absolutely nothing as Mayor of London that any leftie has felt motivated to demonstrate against (a fact his opponents in the next Tory leadership election will be sure to point out) so feels obliged to "talk right". Talk's cheap, of course.
Those who doubt the shoddy quality of to-day's lot should contemplate the candidates in the 1976 Labour leadership election: Benn, Callaghan, Crosland, Foot, Healey, Jenkins. And for some reason people here don't bang on about which Lib Dem MPs have had their reputation enhanced by three-and-a-years of office. Naturally, it beats me why not...
It is against this background that we see an almost total political disconnect amongst the younger generation (controversial inquest verdict in Tottenham, David Lammy on holiday on Mars, seemingly) and passion reserved for the oldies voting in impossibilists, whether Kippers in Suffolk or Greens in Brighton.
Is Weimarization too strong a term? Globalization is bringing an end to the expanded petty bourgeoisie that Western societies have used as their primary recipe for social glue since the end of imperialism in the fasts of the Mahatma & the jungles of Vietnam. There is absolutely no evidence that the electoral process is an effective tool for running countries whose living standards are in free fall (which is what a government deficit at the top of the Keynesian cycle really means, once you hack through the economists' verbal undergrowth). So far the IMF has been enough to sort out the smaller economies who have been at the front of the slide to the clifftop. But small countries (such as the Irish Republic) have a longstanding, tried-and-trusted way of dealing with reducing living standards. It's called emigration. Would it work for us? Where would we go? The White Highlands of east Africa?
The internet is merely making things worse - the spat between Tim and Sean Thomas (which I missed but I can all too easily imagine) is typical. The downside of being rude on the web is simply too small - actually, it's almost non-existent. It legitimises negative emotions in a way that nothing else does, to an extent previously undreamt-of.
And betting on politics? Why, there's been nothing like it since the Emperor Nero took up the fiddle. (Sorry, Mike, but think on!)
Brown made many deep mistakes as chancellor, but it can easily be argued that he did some things right after the crash to avert the worst (although he did not 'save the world'). Cameron and Clegg formed a coalition that has been remarkably successful, and put the economy back on the road to stability despite problems in the Eurozone.
We all get too excited about the minutiae of politics that excite us day by day, and forget the broader picture. The success of the coalition will not save Cameron in 2015; that is up to other factors. But the long view may see things very differently.
Mark Hughes @MarkJHughes 7h
Election result
Borough Green & Long Mill ward of Tonbridge & Malling Borough Council
Ind 38%
Conservative 33%
#UKIP 20%
Labour 5%
Green 4%
Yes, I'm sure that my great-granddad would have hated to live in a society where there is no rationing, clothes are available in a vast array of colours and styles, we have massive access to media in all sorts of formats, including radio and TV, and there's this little thing called the Internet. Public transport is widely available, and car ownership is high.
If you get ill, we have the NHS and many advances in drugs, knowledge and equipment. We're living longer than ever, which is, of course, a sure sign of a free fall in living standards.
And of course, the failure of Apple's over-priced and over-hyped goods such as the fondleslab are a sure sign that consumers have no capital to spend on pointless fripperies.
Yes, the 1930s were a so much better time to live in.
They cd do well GE2015 but the Sale result will look poor for them. (I don't think 2nd is odds on)
(Their vote is beginning to take on some 'lumpiness' (Essential in FPTP)...
Such places gave the largest Lab to Con swings between 2001 and 2011. Not, as I've pointed out before from any desire to 'vote blue go green' or to increase overseas aid, but because of rising disgruntlement about deindustrialisation and immigration.
They are the places that the Conservatives now need to win big in if they are to win general elections (in order to counter the leftward shift of the public sector middle class) but where the metropolitan Conservative leadership now looks no different to the metropolitan Labour leadership. Hence an open door for UKIP.
Cheer up kids, you'll be up to your eyes in debt if you but a house and the rental market is a joke, but never mind: there's a new iPad out so don't complain!
Intellectual dishonesty on your part JJ
"French President Francois Hollande says he is considering suing a magazine after it claimed he was having an affair with an actress.
Mr Hollande told AFP the report was an "attack on the right to privacy".
The latest edition of the weekly tabloid Closer features seven pages of revelations and photos about his alleged affair with Julie Gayet.
Ms Gayet, 41, is an established television and cinema actress who has appeared in more than 50 films.
Rumours of their alleged relationship have been circulating on the internet for many months.
Last March, she filed a complaint with prosecutors in Paris against various bloggers and websites that were reporting on the rumours.
Her lawyer at the time said there was no basis to the claims.
Mr Hollande told the Agence France Presse in a statement that he "like every other citizen has a right" to privacy."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25679146
I agree with much of your analysis. But if you are right the place in history of the current national political leadership will be dire and your solution of flight to Uganda can only be Private Eye code for the comforts of Eros.
Haverhill's the run-down, unkempt gateway to a better land.
"The number of patients waiting longer than they should for diagnostic services like MRI scans and ultrasounds has trebled in the last two years.
New figures also show patients in Wales face significantly longer waits than those in England for similar tests.
The Welsh government said health boards were working to address backlog issues.
The number of people waiting more than nine months for hospital treatment in Wales has also reached its highest level in two years.
When a patient is referred for diagnostic services such as a CT scan or an endoscopy they are meant to be seen within eight weeks - the so-called "operational standard".
But according to the figures for November 2013, more than 23,500 were left waiting longer - up from just under 8,000 two years ago.
Statistics also show 32% of patients in Wales waited longer than eight weeks for an ultrasound scan compared with 0.1% in England whose figures were released on Tuesday.
And for CT scans, 7.5% of patients in Wales were waiting more than eight weeks whereas the figure for England is 0.07%."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-25677498
China is soon going to stop "stealing" jobs from the West. In fact, it's already happening. Wage costs there are increasing rapidly; the labour pool is already topping out and will soon be in decline; energy costs in China (which used to be very low) are rising rapidly; and most importantly, China is soon going to start consuming more and exporting less. They're becoming rich too: and when you get rich, you want the iPad, and not to get up at 5am and work for 14 hours a day. In the US, we're already seeing companies move manufacturing back on-shore. Five years ago, it was not unreasonable to expect Intel to move more of its semiconductor manufacturing to the Far East - now, instead, the cranes are out at their giant Dublin fab, and more manufacturing capacity is being added there.
We've had a shitty five years for living standards - as MrJones so rightly points out - because we become over-levered. Between 1997 and 2007 or so, private sector debt in the UK roughly doubled from 1x GDP to 2x GDP. We are now - slowly and somewhat painfully - paying that off. Our living standards cannot be expected to rise much during that process of debt repayment. It's a similar story in some other European countries (Spain, Ireland) and in the US.
But things are indisputably getting better. The slow reduction in unemployment will soon start to feed through into modestly higher wage rates. The structural changes to the size of our government mean that we're in better shape than we've been for some time. All-in-all, things are getting better.
This does not mean they cannot be thrown off course. Our nearest neighbour, France, remains the most unreformed economy in Europe, and could go horribly wrong. But the general winds are favourable. Things are getting better, and - while we're some way off boom times again - living standards should begin to improve at an increasingly rapid pace as our debt is paid off.
But see it as intellectual dishonesty if you like.
Labour massively contributed to all the 'problems' you mention.
House prices shot up under Labour between 1997 and 2010.
Education is still free: higher education has to paid for, but then Labour introduced the arbitrary and nonsensical plan to have 50% of the young going to university. That had to be paid for.
If the things you mention are problems, then Labour's got massive responsibility for them.
But regardless, I still don't agree with the original argument that living standards are in free fall. On that, we might just have to disagree.
Haverhill really does stand out between Cambridge on one side and rural Suffolk on the other, the contrast is very striking.
But dump of a town it may be its also a place which saw a huge swing to the Conservatives after 2001 and its those sort of voters who made Cameron prime minister.
If the Conservatives lose those votes in 2015 ...
Also interestingly, given that we're talking about a pathetically small area , is that the Suffolk hinterland is lovely and posh and expensive, whereas the Essex hinterland (my brother lives in Steeple Bumpstead) is physically just as nice to look at but is notably less posh and less expensive. I always felt that there is an unwritten class barrier along the Essex / Suffolk border. Funny country England.
To paraphrase two famous bad translations from videogames:
All your votes are belong to UKIP!
Farage will make Cameron, Clegg and Miliband fall down!
We'll have to wait and see whether this is replicated elsewhere.
FPT: Mr. 565, I quite agree. Umunna's got the wonkiness of E. Miliband and the self-satisfaction of Blair. At least Miliband's awkwardness comes across as genuine.
Let's go back to the fifties if you like. My parents never had a driving licence; cars were far too expensive. Fridges were a luxury, we only got our first television (twelve inch black and white), when I was twelve, our heating was a single coal fire, carpets were seen only in films, and obesity wasn't a problem - but having enough to eat was.
Our own house? Pie in the sky. Luxury was nine of us in a three-bed council house. Our previous home had been a tiny cottage in the middle of nowhere condemned and pulled down as being unfit even in the early fifties.
Today's generation are spoilt rotten.
Congratulations, you've turned me into my grandad, and I don't even live in Yorkshire.
So let me ask you a question (I think it's my turn!). Which do you think has done the UK more harm, the Labour Party or al-Qaeda?
Isn't the result showing the voters saying: "A plague on all your houses" or in the words of the Sun(?), "Up yours Delors".
Is this result a bit of a forerunner for the Euros next year?
It's not just funny it should serve as a caution to anyone thinking of responding to the current climate with a variation of 'you've never had it so good'. I doubt the public will buy it but feel free to try it out and see.
Are they the kind of people that live in Haverhill?
The nearest doctor was 3 mile walk away, (a bus ran twice a day but at the wrong time), most people grew their own fruit and veg, nobody had a TV but many had a piano. Certainly finding enough protein was a problem (and we also owned a dairy farm) but fish was not rationed and we were about 5 miles from the sea.
We did have carpets but fitted ones were unknown, and those and the furniture were expected to last a lifetime and were in good condition when my parents died. HP was virtually unknown as you did not buy something unless you had saved up enough.
People were more independent, expectations were lower, but pursuit of excellency at work, at school and at home was higher as was ambition.
Put another way, it wasn't just the low turnout: had the turnout been 29% with UKIP not winning a single extra vote and the other parties increasing their shares proportionately, it would still have been knife-edge.
Thank you - I stand (or am seated) corrected.
Must do something about that sticker on my desk to get a 2014 office diary - a bit of fatigue setting in as did work most of Christmas and New Year.
And as Sean Fear has pointed out the Conservatives came third in the 18-24 demographic in 1974 and first among those same people in 1992.
What the Conservatives do need though is to find the right people and policies to attract the voters they need to win elections.
I've got more than one Ladbrokes account and between them I cant cover the £20 at 11/2 I laid Robert!
al-Qaeda's effect on Britain is all on the negative side, although the effect is less pronounced in scale than the positives and negatives of Labour.
So the answer would depend on your outlook on politics. I' not going to answer, as the comparison is utterly bogus.
Which is better: a jet fighter or a pedalo?
Most of the people in the pubs I've been to have been blue-collar workers, and seem a very different clientèle to (say) the excellent Lion in Stoke-by-Clare.
Then again, that might just be the pubs I've chosen to enter in Haverhill. Perhaps I choose dark, seedy places. ;-)
There's some great walks in the area - for instance the Roman Road from near Cambridge, or the Stour Valley Path.
I can imagine many in the gentrified areas voting UKIP, and also many of the blue-collar workers. It would depend on exactly where the voting district's borders are.
BTW, Innocent, David Lammy did comment at some length on the Tottenham inquest - it was locally reported together with Khan. Didn't say anything inflammatory - in fact everyone quoted seems to have been fairly reasonable, including the Duggan family, who appealed for calm and legal process yesterday. That sounds grim! My closest was more or less a day trip to Shanghai, not quite as bad - fly out Monday night, give a talk at a conference on arrival, fly back next morning. I think the trick is to ignore the plane, daylight etc. - just work or whatever on your laptop, have a sleep when you're tired (hello nitrazepam) and don't tempt your body to adjust back and forth.
Today's YouGov poll data shows LAB with 5% lead amongst men & a 5% lead amongst women. Yet reports an overall LAB lead of 6%. Am I missing something?
cheers
Personally, I think it happens, and that it's very good for the economy, but that it'll be a 2025 phenomenon rather than a 2013 one.
You're tight about using "you've never had it so good. Even in the bad old days, Obadiah was happy because it's all about relative poverty and comparison. And one of the problems about for example, the eighties was conspicuous consumption.
If everyone else is similar, you accept the conditions as normal. But if you see others enjoying a different lifestyle, and not just in films, it produces dissatisfaction. The sight of next door neighbours enjoying barbecues and having large plasma TVs when living on benefits, while you're going off to work is manna for the Mail and very effective.
Although our current definition of poverty is outrageous when you lived through the fifties, the comparative element is the nub. We may have had hand-me-down clothes but so did everyone else we knew. Nowadays designer labels may be necessary or kids feel deprived. I can understand even if I don't sympathise.
A bright start for the day in London.
UKIP trending.
However, I must say I was a bit disappointed with Paul Nuttalls performance in QT last night. Not at all on the ball! Lets hope that Patrick O'Flynn does much better on radio 4 today.
Farage is in his 40s, Nuttall in his 30s
Do all UKIP politicians look a decade older than they are
Cons: 32.47%
LAB: 37.70%
LD: 9.45%
UKIP: 12.97%
But the pressures coming to the fore in China are being replicated in places such as Korea and even Singapore and Hong Kong - and they boil down to people wanting more from their governments. The idea that we have to engage in a remorseless race to the bottom in order to compete with other countries does not stand up to any serious scrutiny. As Richard Nabavi said the other day, what we have to do is understand our strengths and build on these. They should give us enough USPs to hold our own in a world in which more and more people are going to be affluent enough to afford to buy high quality goods and services.
Rural Suffolk is more mixed than outsiders might imagine. As well as Aldeburgh, there's Leiston. As well as Sudbury, there's Great Cornard. Haverhill is tucked away in the corner of Suffolk and there's not much incentive to go visiting it, despite JosiasJessop's valiant attempt for Haverhill tourism.
Lammy was specifically asked by Andrew Neil yesterday whether it was true that Mark Duggan was a gangster and a known criminal... he refused to comment, despite saying he was on close terms with the Duggan family.
I am not saying the guy should have been shot, but the almost absolute whitewash of the fact he had a gun on him seconds before he was shot, and for all the policeman knew was still armed (turned out to be a mobile phone?), and that police intelligence said he was a crack dealer suspected of involvement in murders, is disgraceful...
Why do Lammy, Abbott and Jasper feel the need to defend certain drug dealing, gun toting, suspected murderers?
Wouldn't it have been great if one of Mark Duggans family had said "We love Mark, but if he hadn't been carrying a gun or involved in gangs he would still be alive today"..
But, no, that would mean someone taking responsibility for actions... better to blame someone else, particularly an institution, for the inevitable consequence of a life lead in a certain way. So, instead of setting an example and making the case for not carrying guns or getting involved in drugs, we have MP's casting aspersions on the police, and a drug dealing, gun toting gang member cast as a martyr
[EDIT: Having re-read your post, I think this is what you were proposing anyway!]
As for the Mail, so what? The press will continue their downward spiral of influence. It is inevitable. They also get far more traffic on celeb gossip as a cursory glance at their website shows with the sheer overwhelming number of those kind of stories. It's not an accident they blanket their website with that, it's their bread and butter. In the end that's what will keep them alive and keeps their web algorithms harvesting pageviews. (along with pet stories, the bizarre, weather stories, cancer cure/scare and all the other tabloid staples that never change) Scandals too of course and facts like MPs awarding themselves an 11% pay rise tend to infuriate the public even more that any amount of anecdotal plasma TVs.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2014/jan/09/question-time-with-norman-baker-chuka-umunna-nadine-dorries-paul-nuttall-and-susie-boniface-bbcqt-politics-live-blog
Nuttall seems to have stuck to UKIP lines on stuff, all his positions look perfectly sensible (within the UKIP framework) to me.
Just had a look at Lewisham - the 3 seats there are all Labour safe seats with the Lib Dems in second.
About as far from UKIP fertile territory as you can get ! Perhaps this is why Nuttall didn't look good on the TV...
UKIP: 550+
Tories: 0
Liberals: 0
Labour: 75
http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/cgi-bin/usercode.pl?CON=16&TVCON=&LAB=24.5&TVLAB=&LIB=5.5&TVLIB=&UKIP=50®ion=All+GB+changed+seats&boundary=2010&seat=--Show+all--&minorparties=Y
Eastern England is becoming a UKIP stronghold obviously, but no wonder the old parties are getting worried.
NO ONE IS SAYING IMMIGRATION SHOULD STOP, WE JUST WANT TO BE ABLE TO CONTROL IT TO ENSURE ONLY THE BEST COME
Actually, Nadine Dorries seemed to speak more coherently on UKIP policies, shame she said vote Conservative at the end of it all!
Firstl Populus VI figures of 2014: Lab 40; Cons 33; LD 11; UKIP 8 (=); Oth 7 Tables http://popu.lu/s_vi140110
Con -2
Lab +3
LD -1
UKIP -1
The places you mention exemplify the problem: Southwold, Aldeburgh or Walberswick are massively popular (how many famous people live in Walberswick?) and this popularity - especially with rich Londoners - forces many locals to less salubrious areas.
I think you're being a bit unfair wrt Leiston. I've always quite liked it.
La Reding accuses Cameron of lying and scaremongering.
I'm not sure quite what the EU Commission are playing at on this one, but Nigel Farage must think it's Christmas in january.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/10562740/David-Cameron-lying-to-British-voters-about-the-EU-and-immigration-Viviane-Reding-claims.html