Well well, it seems that it really *is* 1993 after all, at least in South Buckinghamshire. The Con-LD swing of 25% is broadly comparable with Newbury (28%,) though not quite as enormous as Christchurch (35%.) It's not even as if the turnout, given that this was a by-election, was particularly low.
I'm genuinely astonished. Can anyone think of any result since the start of the Coalition as remotely encouraging as this for the Lib Dems, who have basically been flat on the canvas since then? Richmond Park in 2016 doesn't come close (although FWIW I dare say that, if Sarah Olney had any residual concerns about her seat flipping back to the Tories again next time around, they've just evaporated.)
It's hugely encouraging, and well deserved, to see the Government get a good kicking like this. It'll also put the fear of God into a lot of Southern Tory MPs. Yes, I know general elections are obviously a very different beast to by-elections, but if the realignment is happening, as it appears to be, then you would expect this to occur in the South as well as the North.
Right up until this morning I'd have assumed that the Tories could win a comfortable majority again next time by knocking over what's left of the Red Wall at a much faster rate than they lose territory in the Home Counties. Now I'm not so sure. HOWEVER... this is one situation where the opinion polls, fickle as they are, can now come in very handy. A lot of people will be looking hard over the next few months for any sign of a Liberal Democrat revival off the back of this. If their ratings stay on the floor then it may suggest that this is just a flash in the pan; if they finally start to creep back upwards then all bets are off.
This election result reminds me rather of Eastbourne 1990. LibDems on the rope. Election in safe Conservative seat. Massive swing.
Didn't lead to the LibDems heading towards government (or, at least, not for another two decades).
But it lead to them throwing of the Green challenge, and it presaged a period when Labour voters were very willing to lend their vote to the Yellow Peril.
Reduction of Labour vote to near-vanishing point in C&A seems to me to NOT be another mark of Labour Party weakness near as much, as a sign of the tactical voting acumen of Labour voters, especially in the Home Counties & outer London.
A source of strength IF Labour can also win tactical support from Lib Dems AND others, including disaffected Tories, particularly in Lab-Con marginals. AND hold on to - or win back - a critical mass of its own traditional base.
Wow, quite the win for the yellows that. Well done to Mike and everyone else who backed them.
I’m not sure it changes too much - Tory MPs in the commuter belt know that the LDs are clearly a threat. The problem for the LDs is that when we get to the GE, voters will know that a vote for the LDs is a vote for a coalition with Labour and the SNP. And when it comes to it, I’m not sure the Cheshams, Guildfords, and Winchesters have it in them.
I'm not so sure about that. I don't know if, with Corbyn out of the way, appeals from the Tories not to back the Coalition of Chaos will work nearly so well on middle class, wet progressive-type voters in the South East as they will on what used to be the traditional Labour vote further away from the metropolis. The comfortably off may be up for a bit of Champagne socialism (just so long as they feel that it doesn't threaten their property wealth significantly,) and may not share the detestation of that nice, sensible Ms Sturgeon (especially with how she's been portrayed during the pandemic) that Cameron deployed to help his party scrape over the finishing line in 2015.
The Liberal Democrats could find themselves moving into the position where they can say that Labour isn't going to come close to winning a majority ever again, so to exchange Boris Johnson for a less right-wing option (and one that won't build 20,000 Barratt boxes for plebs at the bottom of your road,) you need to vote for us. We will then end up holding the balance of power and will stop Labour from doing anything too nutty, or the SNP from bleeding the English taxpayer dry.
Whether or not you or I would trust them not to concede anything in exchange for a pledge to ram PR through Parliament without a referendum is beside the point. A lot of people either will trust them, or won't care one way or the other so long as they can give the Tories a good shoeing.
Also congratulations to Mike and others who backed them.
Time for Boris to get a grip and complete the vaccination programme then come up with a clear and coherent plan to sort out the ongoing NHS and economic mess.
The LDs are not showing any sign of a breakthrough that will seriously impact the next GE.
We've seen similar results many times before in by-elections where LD in 2nd place to Con.
Not recently we haven’t!
Since the coalition, LibDem by-elections have been *****y hard work. Eastleigh - which in hindsight gave the party false reassurance - was only won because of the big UKIP vote. Ditto Brecon & Radnor - their most recent win - which was a grind of a by-election and again only won because the Tory vote was split. Witney didn’t fall, and Richmond Park - possibly the best constituency in the country for the 21st century LibDems - was won only by a sliver.
This by-election is notable for being the first since 2003/4 that the LibDems have made look easy, and the first landslide gain from the Tories since Romsey, twenty one years ago.
There can't have been that many statisticians or gamblers at the count.
Betfair didn't move until 1.20am or thereabouts. If I'd been there I'd have figured it out over 2 hours earlier, if not during the last few days of the campaign itself, and made thousands.
There were some amazing pictures on twitter from the constituency yesterday. I don't normally go in for the idea that placards equate to votes but some streets were a wall of LibDem orange.
The LDs are not showing any sign of a breakthrough that will seriously impact the next GE.
We've seen similar results many times before in by-elections where LD in 2nd place to Con.
Not recently we haven’t!
Since the coalition, LibDem by-elections have been *****y hard work. Eastleigh - which in hindsight gave the party false reassurance - was only won because of the big UKIP vote. Ditto Brecon & Radnor - their most recent win - which was a grind of a by-election and again only won because the Tory vote was split. Witney didn’t fall, and Richmond Park - possibly the best constituency in the country for the 21st century LibDems - was won only by a sliver.
This by-election is notable for being the first since 2003/4 that the LibDems have made look easy, and the first landslide gain from the Tories since Romsey, twenty one years ago.
What's really astonishing about C&A is that you could still get on the LDs at really good odds when it must have been really clear they were going to win
For one thing, LDs clearly lied about their internal polling numbers. Just NOT the way pundits & punters thought.
That depends. Although clearly if they were winning by miles they were never going to say so.
It is possible that the very recent taking away of freedom day has gone down very badly, particularly in a middle class middle aged area like C&A where the vaccination rate is high and most will feel the pandemic is over.
Managed to get back to sleep for a couple of hours and woke up with the same smile. I got hold of a pair of Wimbledon tickets yesterday too so it was a good day.
One of the reasons the LibDems did so relatively poorly in 2019 was I'm afraid Jo Swinson. There's no reason to be overly vindictive (leave that to Nicola Sturgeon) but Jo really wasn't up to it. And her equivalent of 'go back and prepare for Government' didn't go down well.
This is such a brilliant result for the LibDems and for everyone who hates this nasty and ghastly Alf Garnett leaning tory agenda. Well, everyone who knows that Boris Johnson is a schmuck.
They've done well They did well on vaccines. There are so many other things which aren't.
Wow, quite the win for the yellows that. Well done to Mike and everyone else who backed them.
I’m not sure it changes too much - Tory MPs in the commuter belt know that the LDs are clearly a threat. The problem for the LDs is that when we get to the GE, voters will know that a vote for the LDs is a vote for a coalition with Labour and the SNP. And when it comes to it, I’m not sure the Cheshams, Guildfords, and Winchesters have it in them.
I'm not so sure about that. I don't know if, with Corbyn out of the way, appeals from the Tories not to back the Coalition of Chaos will work nearly so well on middle class, wet progressive-type voters in the South East as they will on what used to be the traditional Labour vote further away from the metropolis. The comfortably off may be up for a bit of Champagne socialism (just so long as they feel that it doesn't threaten their property wealth significantly,) and may not share the detestation of that nice, sensible Ms Sturgeon (especially with how she's been portrayed during the pandemic) that Cameron deployed to help his party scrape over the finishing line in 2015.
The Liberal Democrats could find themselves moving into the position where they can say that Labour isn't going to come close to winning a majority ever again, so to exchange Boris Johnson for a less right-wing option (and one that won't build 20,000 Barratt boxes for plebs at the bottom of your road,) you need to vote for us. We will then end up holding the balance of power and will stop Labour from doing anything too nutty, or the SNP from bleeding the English taxpayer dry.
Whether or not you or I would trust them not to concede anything in exchange for a pledge to ram PR through Parliament without a referendum is beside the point. A lot of people either will trust them, or won't care one way or the other so long as they can give the Tories a good shoeing.
They certainly don't mind the Wokeness - it's an article of faith amongst many professionals now - but, like you say, they will if it hits them in the pocket, or if houses are built in their backyard.
I think it really does depend on Labour's policy offering v. the Conservatives at the next election, and the candidates for PM.
What's really astonishing about C&A is that you could still get on the LDs at really good odds when it must have been really clear they were going to win
For one thing, LDs clearly lied about their internal polling numbers. Just NOT the way pundits & punters thought.
That depends. Although clearly if they were winning by miles they were never going to say so.
It is possible that the very recent taking away of freedom day has gone down very badly, particularly in a middle class middle aged area like C&A where the vaccination rate is high and most will feel the pandemic is over.
I suppose that might have something to do with it as well. Frankly we are all guessing right now. But it's good to see a nice scratch being made in the Government's electoral Teflon coating, all the same.
Just re-upping this news in case it got overlooked. Covid appears to cause significant brain damage in some non hospitalised individuals. It will need more research to see if this resolves, or causes long term problems.
Brain imaging before and after COVID-19 in UK Biobank https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v1 There is strong evidence for brain-related pathologies in COVID-19, some of which could be a consequence of viral neurotropism. The vast majority of brain imaging studies so far have focused on qualitative, gross pathology of moderate to severe cases, often carried out on hospitalised patients. It remains unknown however whether the impact of COVID-19 can be detected in milder cases, in a quantitative and automated manner, and whether this can reveal a possible mechanism for the spread of the disease. UK Biobank scanned over 40,000 participants before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, making it possible to invite back in 2021 hundreds of previously-imaged participants for a second imaging visit. Here, we studied the effects of the disease in the brain using multimodal data from 782 participants from the UK Biobank COVID-19 re-imaging study, with 394 participants having tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection between their two scans. We used structural and functional brain scans from before and after infection, to compare longitudinal brain changes between these 394 COVID-19 patients and 388 controls who were matched for age, sex, ethnicity and interval between scans. We identified significant effects of COVID-19 in the brain with a loss of grey matter in the left parahippocampal gyrus, the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex and the left insula. When looking over the entire cortical surface, these results extended to the anterior cingulate cortex, supramarginal gyrus and temporal pole. We further compared COVID-19 patients who had been hospitalised (n=15) with those who had not (n=379), and while results were not significant, we found comparatively similar findings to the COVID-19 vs control group comparison, with, in addition, a greater loss of grey matter in the cingulate cortex, central nucleus of the amygdala and hippocampal cornu ammonis (all |Z| > 3). Our findings thus consistently relate to loss of grey matter in limbic cortical areas directly linked to the primary olfactory and gustatory system. Unlike in post hoc disease studies, the availability of pre-infection imaging data helps avoid the danger of pre-existing risk factors or clinical conditions being mis-interpreted as disease effects. Since a possible entry point of the virus to the central nervous system might be via the olfactory mucosa and the olfactory bulb, these brain imaging results might be the in vivo hallmark of the spread of the disease (or the virus itself) via olfactory and gustatory pathways.
This anti-woke agenda also contains a lot of nastiness. There's some downright racism, homophobia and transphobia in it.
That's not to say the pendulum didn't need correcting but the Cummings-Johnson inspired stoking of the white working class northern vote is going to bite them in the arse down south.
Wow, quite the win for the yellows that. Well done to Mike and everyone else who backed them.
I’m not sure it changes too much - Tory MPs in the commuter belt know that the LDs are clearly a threat. The problem for the LDs is that when we get to the GE, voters will know that a vote for the LDs is a vote for a coalition with Labour and the SNP. And when it comes to it, I’m not sure the Cheshams, Guildfords, and Winchesters have it in them.
I'm not so sure about that. I don't know if, with Corbyn out of the way, appeals from the Tories not to back the Coalition of Chaos will work nearly so well on middle class, wet progressive-type voters in the South East as they will on what used to be the traditional Labour vote further away from the metropolis. The comfortably off may be up for a bit of Champagne socialism (just so long as they feel that it doesn't threaten their property wealth significantly,) and may not share the detestation of that nice, sensible Ms Sturgeon (especially with how she's been portrayed during the pandemic) that Cameron deployed to help his party scrape over the finishing line in 2015.
The Liberal Democrats could find themselves moving into the position where they can say that Labour isn't going to come close to winning a majority ever again, so to exchange Boris Johnson for a less right-wing option (and one that won't build 20,000 Barratt boxes for plebs at the bottom of your road,) you need to vote for us. We will then end up holding the balance of power and will stop Labour from doing anything too nutty, or the SNP from bleeding the English taxpayer dry.
Whether or not you or I would trust them not to concede anything in exchange for a pledge to ram PR through Parliament without a referendum is beside the point. A lot of people either will trust them, or won't care one way or the other so long as they can give the Tories a good shoeing.
They certainly don't mind the Wokeness - it's an article of faith amongst many professionals now - but, like you say, they will if it hits them in the pocket, or if houses are built in their backyard.
I think it really does depend on Labour's policy offering v. the Conservatives at the next election, and the candidates for PM.
Yes, we simply have no idea what the Labour leader stands for. It’s all well and good thinking that not being Corbyn will be enough, but we need to see what Starmer’s policies are.
What's really astonishing about C&A is that you could still get on the LDs at really good odds when it must have been really clear they were going to win
For one thing, LDs clearly lied about their internal polling numbers. Just NOT the way pundits & punters thought.
That depends. Although clearly if they were winning by miles they were never going to say so.
It is possible that the very recent taking away of freedom day has gone down very badly, particularly in a middle class middle aged area like C&A where the vaccination rate is high and most will feel the pandemic is over.
I suppose that might have something to do with it as well. Frankly we are all guessing right now. But it's good to see a nice scratch being made in the Government's electoral Teflon coating, all the same.
For sure.
Tories don’t really like Johnson, but tolerate him because he’s an electoral winner, right?
The vaccine effect has clearly worn off, for one thing.
What's really astonishing about C&A is that you could still get on the LDs at really good odds when it must have been really clear they were going to win
For one thing, LDs clearly lied about their internal polling numbers. Just NOT the way pundits & punters thought.
That depends. Although clearly if they were winning by miles they were never going to say so.
It is possible that the very recent taking away of freedom day has gone down very badly, particularly in a middle class middle aged area like C&A where the vaccination rate is high and most will feel the pandemic is over.
I suppose that might have something to do with it as well. Frankly we are all guessing right now. But it's good to see a nice scratch being made in the Government's electoral Teflon coating, all the same.
For sure.
Tories don’t really like Johnson, but tolerate him because he’s an electoral winner, right?
That's going to be interesting to watch. He has made a LOT of enemies in the party along the way. Whilst he was winning they remained relatively quiet. If he begins losing support things could change and we could see the knives come out.
Mildly surprised, though many here called it. Didn't back it myself, alas.
Neither did I; I admit I didn’t think it would fall, although thankfully didn’t back my conviction with any money, the odds not making it worthwhile! Maybe I would have had a better clue had I gone and paid the seat a visit.
It’s really only the last week that there’s been the sort of buzz in LibDem circles and calls for everyone to go help in the seat that usually indicate a win is on the cards. My instinct is that the swing happened relatively late in the day.
This is such a brilliant result for the LibDems and for everyone who hates this nasty and ghastly Alf Garnett leaning tory agenda. Well, everyone who knows that Boris Johnson is a schmuck.
What has been forgotten in the tories' recent fleg strewn auto da fé is that there are still millions of people and therefore voters who fucking hate Brexit. Not even so much the actuality of it but the reactionary, intellectually impoverished and essentially eugenicist worldview it typifies.
This anti-woke agenda also contains a lot of nastiness. There's some downright racism, homophobia and transphobia in it.
That's not to say the pendulum didn't need correcting but the Cummings-Johnson inspired stoking of the white working class northern vote is going to bite them in the arse down south.
Amongst other things.
There are extremists on both sides. Clearly, if you are a bit of bigot you're going to side with anti-Wokeness. There's also bigotry (of a different form) on the other side, including reverse racism, nastiness to feminists, nonsensical dogma, and the weaponising of sexuality.
The bigger issue though is that the country is perfectly split on, or slightly against, most of it, and there are lots of moderates on both sides.
"Woke" gets the stronger criticism because it's the article of faith of the day by the elites, and very much in the ascendancy - it isn't challenged much by them so it will be challenged by others.
It's easy to forget too that Boris Johnson won in 2019 on the back of a faintly ridiculous remainer Parliament (whatever one's views on Brexit) and against the most left-wing, radical, and anti-semitic leader of the opposition in this nation's history.
Corbyn was the most unelectable main leader ever to stand for the office of PM.
Mildly surprised, though many here called it. Didn't back it myself, alas.
Neither did I; I admit I didn’t think it would fall, although thankfully didn’t back my conviction with any money, the odds not making it worthwhile! Maybe I would have had a better clue had I gone and paid the seat a visit.
It’s really only the last week that there’s been the sort of buzz in LibDem circles and calls for everyone to go help in the seat that usually indicate a win is on the cards. My instinct is that the swing happened relatively late in the day.
Sorry to the Tory MP who told me a month ago they would lose Chesham and Amersham - and I thought ‘I can’t put that in - it’s only my second column. I’ll look insane’
Confirmation bias is a marvellous force of nature.
The most likely interpretation that Boris and No.10 draw from this result is that southern voters want more of the liberally stuff they're already doing, so expect the conversation on climate change and COP26 to be turned up to 11.
Managed to get back to sleep for a couple of hours and woke up with the same smile. I got hold of a pair of Wimbledon tickets yesterday too so it was a good day.
One of the reasons the LibDems did so relatively poorly in 2019 was I'm afraid Jo Swinson. There's no reason to be overly vindictive (leave that to Nicola Sturgeon) but Jo really wasn't up to it. And her equivalent of 'go back and prepare for Government' didn't go down well.
This is such a brilliant result for the LibDems and for everyone who hates this nasty and ghastly Alf Garnett leaning tory agenda. Well, everyone who knows that Boris Johnson is a schmuck.
They've done well They did well on vaccines. There are so many other things which aren't.
Have you heard much from Ed Davey in the last year?
Managed to get back to sleep for a couple of hours and woke up with the same smile. I got hold of a pair of Wimbledon tickets yesterday too so it was a good day.
One of the reasons the LibDems did so relatively poorly in 2019 was I'm afraid Jo Swinson. There's no reason to be overly vindictive (leave that to Nicola Sturgeon) but Jo really wasn't up to it. And her equivalent of 'go back and prepare for Government' didn't go down well.
This is such a brilliant result for the LibDems and for everyone who hates this nasty and ghastly Alf Garnett leaning tory agenda. Well, everyone who knows that Boris Johnson is a schmuck.
They've done well They did well on vaccines. There are so many other things which aren't.
Have you heard much from Ed Davey in the last year?
I don't think he'd have done much better.
No but she was really poor in the debates. I mean dreadful, frankly. Ed Davey would have been a lot better, in a SKS kind of way.
This is such a brilliant result for the LibDems and for everyone who hates this nasty and ghastly Alf Garnett leaning tory agenda. Well, everyone who knows that Boris Johnson is a schmuck.
What has been forgotten in the tories' recent fleg strewn auto da fé is that there are still millions of people and therefore voters who fucking hate Brexit. Not even so much the actuality of it but the reactionary, intellectually impoverished and essentially eugenicist worldview it typifies.
Let me disavow you of something straight away: this by-election isn't about Brexit.
I think the only party that can be in any way happy with that result is the Lib Dems. For them, it’s perfect. A landslide in a remainery seat with a campaign on local issues is the Grimond strategy successfully modernised. Lots of lovely publicity. A new MP increasing their parliamentary strength by 8%. Ed Davey’s recent strategy vindicated. Plenty of similar seats to target for next time.
But the Tories - lost the seat (nuff said) Greens - nowhere at all, so much for being a repository for ex-Labour votes Labour - did worse than the Greens in a seat where they were second less than five years ago. RefUK - did worse than Labour. That is surely the end of them as a party.
Not often you get such a binary result. Usually one party tries to spin some positive out of a defeat. Even ridiculously (Hazel Blears springs to mind). Nobody can do that here.
Just re-upping this news in case it got overlooked. Covid appears to cause significant brain damage in some non hospitalised individuals. It will need more research to see if this resolves, or causes long term problems.
Brain imaging before and after COVID-19 in UK Biobank https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v1 There is strong evidence for brain-related pathologies in COVID-19, some of which could be a consequence of viral neurotropism. The vast majority of brain imaging studies so far have focused on qualitative, gross pathology of moderate to severe cases, often carried out on hospitalised patients. It remains unknown however whether the impact of COVID-19 can be detected in milder cases, in a quantitative and automated manner, and whether this can reveal a possible mechanism for the spread of the disease. UK Biobank scanned over 40,000 participants before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, making it possible to invite back in 2021 hundreds of previously-imaged participants for a second imaging visit. Here, we studied the effects of the disease in the brain using multimodal data from 782 participants from the UK Biobank COVID-19 re-imaging study, with 394 participants having tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection between their two scans. We used structural and functional brain scans from before and after infection, to compare longitudinal brain changes between these 394 COVID-19 patients and 388 controls who were matched for age, sex, ethnicity and interval between scans. We identified significant effects of COVID-19 in the brain with a loss of grey matter in the left parahippocampal gyrus, the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex and the left insula. When looking over the entire cortical surface, these results extended to the anterior cingulate cortex, supramarginal gyrus and temporal pole. We further compared COVID-19 patients who had been hospitalised (n=15) with those who had not (n=379), and while results were not significant, we found comparatively similar findings to the COVID-19 vs control group comparison, with, in addition, a greater loss of grey matter in the cingulate cortex, central nucleus of the amygdala and hippocampal cornu ammonis (all |Z| > 3). Our findings thus consistently relate to loss of grey matter in limbic cortical areas directly linked to the primary olfactory and gustatory system. Unlike in post hoc disease studies, the availability of pre-infection imaging data helps avoid the danger of pre-existing risk factors or clinical conditions being mis-interpreted as disease effects. Since a possible entry point of the virus to the central nervous system might be via the olfactory mucosa and the olfactory bulb, these brain imaging results might be the in vivo hallmark of the spread of the disease (or the virus itself) via olfactory and gustatory pathways.
So, if I understand you correctly, you're saying that the Liberal Democrats won Chesham & Amersham because the voters were all brain damaged by Covid.
What's really astonishing about C&A is that you could still get on the LDs at really good odds when it must have been really clear they were going to win
For one thing, LDs clearly lied about their internal polling numbers. Just NOT the way pundits & punters thought.
That depends. Although clearly if they were winning by miles they were never going to say so.
It is possible that the very recent taking away of freedom day has gone down very badly, particularly in a middle class middle aged area like C&A where the vaccination rate is high and most will feel the pandemic is over.
I suppose that might have something to do with it as well. Frankly we are all guessing right now. But it's good to see a nice scratch being made in the Government's electoral Teflon coating, all the same.
For sure.
Tories don’t really like Johnson, but tolerate him because he’s an electoral winner, right?
The vaccine effect has clearly worn off, for one thing.
Boris? Boris is utterly untrustworthy and unreliable.
He'll turn 180 degrees on a head of a pin if he thinks he needs to do something differently to win again, and shamelessly too - claiming he's always believed it.
I expect this by-election to have political effects because CCHQ will now start to try and pivot to address the concerns of southern voters, and they'll almost certainly do so on the wrong things.
This anti-woke agenda also contains a lot of nastiness. There's some downright racism, homophobia and transphobia in it.
That's not to say the pendulum didn't need correcting but the Cummings-Johnson inspired stoking of the white working class northern vote is going to bite them in the arse down south.
Amongst other things.
There are extremists on both sides. Clearly, if you are a bit of bigot you're going to side with anti-Wokeness. There's also bigotry (of a different form) on the other side, including reverse racism, nastiness to feminists, nonsensical dogma, and the weaponising of sexuality.
The bigger issue though is that the country is perfectly split on, or slightly against, most of it, and there are lots of moderates on both sides.
"Woke" gets the stronger criticism because it's the article of faith of the day by the elites, and very much in the ascendancy - it isn't challenged much by them so it will be challenged by others.
The difference is that most of us will be happy with a bit of wind taken out of its sails, most statues staying up, and the issue moving into the realm of casual humour alongside political correctness gone mad and elf and safety.
The number of people who want to see everyone who ever supported a progressive social cause drowned in the nearest river is pretty small. Just you, really
Hurrah. Love the way that the usual suspects on the left and right are uniting to spin this terrific result for the LDs as bad for Labour.
This is all about showing there is life in the yellow dog yet. If it is about anything else, it is about providing evidence that the Tory blue underbelly is soft.
Managed to get back to sleep for a couple of hours and woke up with the same smile. I got hold of a pair of Wimbledon tickets yesterday too so it was a good day.
One of the reasons the LibDems did so relatively poorly in 2019 was I'm afraid Jo Swinson. There's no reason to be overly vindictive (leave that to Nicola Sturgeon) but Jo really wasn't up to it. And her equivalent of 'go back and prepare for Government' didn't go down well.
This is such a brilliant result for the LibDems and for everyone who hates this nasty and ghastly Alf Garnett leaning tory agenda. Well, everyone who knows that Boris Johnson is a schmuck.
They've done well They did well on vaccines. There are so many other things which aren't.
I never saw the appeal of Jo Swinson either.
For the record, I don't see the appeal of Layla or Wera either. Sarah Olney seems boring and normal. I don't know who Munira is.
There is exactly one LibDem MP with half an ounce of charisma: Daisy Cooper. And I have exactly zero idea what her political views are.
This is such a brilliant result for the LibDems and for everyone who hates this nasty and ghastly Alf Garnett leaning tory agenda. Well, everyone who knows that Boris Johnson is a schmuck.
What has been forgotten in the tories' recent fleg strewn auto da fé is that there are still millions of people and therefore voters who fucking hate Brexit. Not even so much the actuality of it but the reactionary, intellectually impoverished and essentially eugenicist worldview it typifies.
Let me disavow you of something straight away: this by-election isn't about Brexit.
See my post on confirmation bias.
Yes and no. Not dissatisfaction with Brexit specifically, but Brexit is part of the Tories’ shift away from the educated middle classes in search of its new constituency, and that new constituency isn’t C & A.
Managed to get back to sleep for a couple of hours and woke up with the same smile. I got hold of a pair of Wimbledon tickets yesterday too so it was a good day.
One of the reasons the LibDems did so relatively poorly in 2019 was I'm afraid Jo Swinson. There's no reason to be overly vindictive (leave that to Nicola Sturgeon) but Jo really wasn't up to it. And her equivalent of 'go back and prepare for Government' didn't go down well.
This is such a brilliant result for the LibDems and for everyone who hates this nasty and ghastly Alf Garnett leaning tory agenda. Well, everyone who knows that Boris Johnson is a schmuck.
They've done well They did well on vaccines. There are so many other things which aren't.
Have you heard much from Ed Davey in the last year?
This anti-woke agenda also contains a lot of nastiness. There's some downright racism, homophobia and transphobia in it.
That's not to say the pendulum didn't need correcting but the Cummings-Johnson inspired stoking of the white working class northern vote is going to bite them in the arse down south.
Amongst other things.
There are extremists on both sides. Clearly, if you are a bit of bigot you're going to side with anti-Wokeness. There's also bigotry (of a different form) on the other side, including reverse racism, nastiness to feminists, nonsensical dogma, and the weaponising of sexuality.
The bigger issue though is that the country is perfectly split on, or slightly against, most of it, and there are lots of moderates on both sides.
"Woke" gets the stronger criticism because it's the article of faith of the day by the elites, and very much in the ascendancy - it isn't challenged much by them so it will be challenged by others.
The difference is that most of us will be happy with a bit of wind taken out of its sails, most statues staying up, and the issue moving into the realm of casual humour alongside political correctness gone mad and elf and safety.
The number of people who want to see everyone who ever supported a progressive social cause drowned in the nearest river is pretty small. Just you, really
I am deeply disappointed that the people of #CheshamAndAmersham have, under the extraordinary circumstances of a by-election, voted for someone else to represent them in Parliament. Our work to regain the trust of local people begins today. @caca_tories https://twitter.com/pdfleet/status/1405706248956358657
What's really astonishing about C&A is that you could still get on the LDs at really good odds when it must have been really clear they were going to win
For one thing, LDs clearly lied about their internal polling numbers. Just NOT the way pundits & punters thought.
That depends. Although clearly if they were winning by miles they were never going to say so.
It is possible that the very recent taking away of freedom day has gone down very badly, particularly in a middle class middle aged area like C&A where the vaccination rate is high and most will feel the pandemic is over.
I suppose that might have something to do with it as well. Frankly we are all guessing right now. But it's good to see a nice scratch being made in the Government's electoral Teflon coating, all the same.
For sure.
Tories don’t really like Johnson, but tolerate him because he’s an electoral winner, right?
The vaccine effect has clearly worn off, for one thing.
Boris? Boris is utterly untrustworthy and unreliable.
He'll turn 180 degrees on a head of a pin if he thinks he needs to do something differently to win again, and shamelessly too - claiming he's always believed it.
I expect this by-election to have political effects because CCHQ will now start to try and pivot to address the concerns of southern voters, and they'll almost certainly do so on the wrong things.
Or he'll give in to the NIMBYs and neuter the planning reforms. Which is the wrong thing to do, but popular with certain selfish twunts who want to pull up the ladder.
Stunning result for the LDs and congratulations to them - Conservative candidate also steady under fire pointing to LD campaign (which can’t be scaled in a GE) rather than lashing out at the government. Longer term greatest losers are the Greens (not the new LibDems) and SKS’ Labour - their “southern metropolitan core” more metropolitan than southern. Mrs May may be thinking about that NATO job….
Just re-upping this news in case it got overlooked. Covid appears to cause significant brain damage in some non hospitalised individuals. It will need more research to see if this resolves, or causes long term problems.
Brain imaging before and after COVID-19 in UK Biobank https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v1 There is strong evidence for brain-related pathologies in COVID-19, some of which could be a consequence of viral neurotropism. The vast majority of brain imaging studies so far have focused on qualitative, gross pathology of moderate to severe cases, often carried out on hospitalised patients. It remains unknown however whether the impact of COVID-19 can be detected in milder cases, in a quantitative and automated manner, and whether this can reveal a possible mechanism for the spread of the disease. UK Biobank scanned over 40,000 participants before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, making it possible to invite back in 2021 hundreds of previously-imaged participants for a second imaging visit. Here, we studied the effects of the disease in the brain using multimodal data from 782 participants from the UK Biobank COVID-19 re-imaging study, with 394 participants having tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection between their two scans. We used structural and functional brain scans from before and after infection, to compare longitudinal brain changes between these 394 COVID-19 patients and 388 controls who were matched for age, sex, ethnicity and interval between scans. We identified significant effects of COVID-19 in the brain with a loss of grey matter in the left parahippocampal gyrus, the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex and the left insula. When looking over the entire cortical surface, these results extended to the anterior cingulate cortex, supramarginal gyrus and temporal pole. We further compared COVID-19 patients who had been hospitalised (n=15) with those who had not (n=379), and while results were not significant, we found comparatively similar findings to the COVID-19 vs control group comparison, with, in addition, a greater loss of grey matter in the cingulate cortex, central nucleus of the amygdala and hippocampal cornu ammonis (all |Z| > 3). Our findings thus consistently relate to loss of grey matter in limbic cortical areas directly linked to the primary olfactory and gustatory system. Unlike in post hoc disease studies, the availability of pre-infection imaging data helps avoid the danger of pre-existing risk factors or clinical conditions being mis-interpreted as disease effects. Since a possible entry point of the virus to the central nervous system might be via the olfactory mucosa and the olfactory bulb, these brain imaging results might be the in vivo hallmark of the spread of the disease (or the virus itself) via olfactory and gustatory pathways.
So, if I understand you correctly, you're saying that the Liberal Democrats won Chesham & Amersham because the voters were all brain damaged by Covid.
It’s a thought, but I doubt the numbers stack up. Your “all” is clearly unsupported by the data.
It's easy to forget too that Boris Johnson won in 2019 on the back of a faintly ridiculous remainer Parliament (whatever one's views on Brexit) and against the most left-wing, radical, and anti-semitic leader of the opposition in this nation's history.
Corbyn was the most unelectable main leader ever to stand for the office of PM.
Wonder when he'll get the whip restored. He's mostly kept quiet I'm impressed Keir hasn't yielded and restored it already.
This anti-woke agenda also contains a lot of nastiness. There's some downright racism, homophobia and transphobia in it.
That's not to say the pendulum didn't need correcting but the Cummings-Johnson inspired stoking of the white working class northern vote is going to bite them in the arse down south.
Amongst other things.
There is distinct unpleasantness on both sides. However people overly fixed on one side of the debate or other only see virtue in their own side.
What's really astonishing about C&A is that you could still get on the LDs at really good odds when it must have been really clear they were going to win
For one thing, LDs clearly lied about their internal polling numbers. Just NOT the way pundits & punters thought.
That depends. Although clearly if they were winning by miles they were never going to say so.
It is possible that the very recent taking away of freedom day has gone down very badly, particularly in a middle class middle aged area like C&A where the vaccination rate is high and most will feel the pandemic is over.
I suppose that might have something to do with it as well. Frankly we are all guessing right now. But it's good to see a nice scratch being made in the Government's electoral Teflon coating, all the same.
For sure.
Tories don’t really like Johnson, but tolerate him because he’s an electoral winner, right?
The vaccine effect has clearly worn off, for one thing.
Boris? Boris is utterly untrustworthy and unreliable.
He'll turn 180 degrees on a head of a pin if he thinks he needs to do something differently to win again, and shamelessly too - claiming he's always believed it.
I expect this by-election to have political effects because CCHQ will now start to try and pivot to address the concerns of southern voters, and they'll almost certainly do so on the wrong things.
Or he'll give in to the NIMBYs and neuter the planning reforms. Which is the wrong thing to do, but popular with certain selfish twunts who want to pull up the ladder.
It certainly isn’t the wrong thing to do. The planning reforms (sic) are wrong in principle and the planning system is not the problem in practice.
What's really astonishing about C&A is that you could still get on the LDs at really good odds when it must have been really clear they were going to win
For one thing, LDs clearly lied about their internal polling numbers. Just NOT the way pundits & punters thought.
That depends. Although clearly if they were winning by miles they were never going to say so.
It is possible that the very recent taking away of freedom day has gone down very badly, particularly in a middle class middle aged area like C&A where the vaccination rate is high and most will feel the pandemic is over.
I suppose that might have something to do with it as well. Frankly we are all guessing right now. But it's good to see a nice scratch being made in the Government's electoral Teflon coating, all the same.
For sure.
Tories don’t really like Johnson, but tolerate him because he’s an electoral winner, right?
The vaccine effect has clearly worn off, for one thing.
Boris? Boris is utterly untrustworthy and unreliable.
He'll turn 180 degrees on a head of a pin if he thinks he needs to do something differently to win again, and shamelessly too - claiming he's always believed it.
I expect this by-election to have political effects because CCHQ will now start to try and pivot to address the concerns of southern voters, and they'll almost certainly do so on the wrong things.
Or he'll give in to the NIMBYs and neuter the planning reforms. Which is the wrong thing to do, but popular with certain selfish twunts who want to pull up the ladder.
The reforms would have been hated in the shires anyway and he has the numbers to push anything he wants through. But assuming politicians like quick fixes, it's the obvious sacrifice.
This anti-woke agenda also contains a lot of nastiness. There's some downright racism, homophobia and transphobia in it.
That's not to say the pendulum didn't need correcting but the Cummings-Johnson inspired stoking of the white working class northern vote is going to bite them in the arse down south.
Amongst other things.
There are extremists on both sides. Clearly, if you are a bit of bigot you're going to side with anti-Wokeness. There's also bigotry (of a different form) on the other side, including reverse racism, nastiness to feminists, nonsensical dogma, and the weaponising of sexuality.
The bigger issue though is that the country is perfectly split on, or slightly against, most of it, and there are lots of moderates on both sides.
"Woke" gets the stronger criticism because it's the article of faith of the day by the elites, and very much in the ascendancy - it isn't challenged much by them so it will be challenged by others.
The difference is that most of us will be happy with a bit of wind taken out of its sails, most statues staying up, and the issue moving into the realm of casual humour alongside political correctness gone mad and elf and safety.
The number of people who want to see everyone who ever supported a progressive social cause drowned in the nearest river is pretty small. Just you, really
Except I don't, but otherwise good post.
My apols for exaggerating just a tad, in order to make such a good point
I am deeply disappointed that the people of #CheshamAndAmersham have, under the extraordinary circumstances of a by-election, voted for someone else to represent them in Parliament. Our work to regain the trust of local people begins today. @caca_tories https://twitter.com/pdfleet/status/1405706248956358657
He should dissolve the people and elect another.
Although at least we know now that Laura Pidcock has found work running comms for failed Tory candidates like herself
The signs, if you were seeing clearly (I wasn’t), have been there. HS2, NIMBYism, OGH talking about how the tories not having enough tellers which is something I never saw anywhere they were even slightly competitive in, the reports of LD being “quietly confident” which usually means it is in the bag, the awful messaging over the putting back of “freedom day”, the awful polling of Labour and feeling SKS is not the chap for the job, the crumbling of the blue wall in the likes of Surrey in the locals, the knowledge of the PM being slapdash in everything. All there for those with eyes. Those who have had it away like bandits, I salute you.
There are some good posts on here and the one about hard left and hard right is apposite.
I think it's worth remembering that Tony Blair won several landslides on the back of economic prosperity and social liberalism.
The 1992-7 Major government contained a lot of the same nastiness that I'm seeing re-emerge in the current tory party and that didn't end well for them.
And one other last point. Someone posted on here a while back that we shouldn't judge Johnson's poll leads during a pandemic crisis. These are extraordinary times but they will abate. 2024 is a long way off still and we should be pandemic free by then.
I'm just wondering whether to do the unthinkable and bet against a tory win.
There are all sorts of things that we should be doing to improve access to the best education for everyone. But a simple cap on people from a certain background is not the way to achieve it. It’s more important to look at the roadblocks - in secondary education and, frankly, in the culture of many schools - sadly teachers are not without fault - that dissuaded people from applying.
It’s worth looking at programmes like Step-Up or the six form results from Michaela. Taught in the right way, pushed appropriately, encouraged and supported you can get fantastic results even from very poor communities
Hurrah. Love the way that the usual suspects on the left and right are uniting to spin this terrific result for the LDs as bad for Labour.
This is all about showing there is life in the yellow dog yet. If it is about anything else, it is about providing evidence that the Tory blue underbelly is soft.
Nicely done.
Well, objectively, it is a bad result for Labour. Their voters have clearly switched en masse to the Lib Dems. That might help them in a general election if it cost the Tories Esher and Walton, Henley, Maidenhead, Cheltenham etc but then again, it might not.
But it is a much worse result for the Tories, who clearly also lost votes to the Lib Dems and to the NOTA party. They do not want that result to be replicated across the Home Counties at the next election.
Sorry to the Tory MP who told me a month ago they would lose Chesham and Amersham - and I thought ‘I can’t put that in - it’s only my second column. I’ll look insane’
The government has been clear that its priority is levelling up the north. Walking around parliament, you can feel the mission in action. “Red wall” MPs are buoyant, fresh with reports of their most recent meeting with a minister to discuss an extended train line here, a new hospital there. Meanwhile, their southern colleagues feel left out in the cold. Many fret that some of the rhetoric that accompanies the project is whittling away their majorities: rhetoric they variously describe as “anti-graduate”, “anti-globalist” and “anti-metropolitan”. They worry that the Conservative Party is losing something fundamental to its character. As one home counties MP put it to me: “There is something very strange about a centre-right party that cannot count on the votes of affluent young professionals.”
Nonetheless, this phenomenon is about to have a big impact on British politics. Tory MPs can see it happening, and they are worried. This isn’t only about holding on to their jobs. Just as the loss of the old mining towns broke the hearts of many Labour MPs, for veteran Tories the threat to these seats shakes the very foundations of the party they joined. The more fearful they become, the more they will start to push back against Boris Johnson’s government. And when they do, the uneasy peace that has settled in the Conservative Party over recent weeks will explode into conflict once more.
There are some good posts on here and the one about hard left and hard right is apposite.
I think it's worth remembering that Tony Blair won several landslides on the back of economic prosperity and social liberalism.
The 1992-7 Major government contained a lot of the same nastiness that I'm seeing re-emerge in the current tory party and that didn't end well for them.
And one other last point. Someone posted on here a while back that we shouldn't judge Johnson's poll leads during a pandemic crisis. These are extraordinary times but they will abate. 2024 is a long way off still and we should be pandemic free by then.
I'm just wondering whether to do the unthinkable and bet against a tory win.
What LibDems (and Labour) need more than anything is the return of Lib/Lab tactical voting and the ability to carve off chunks of the soft rump of the Tory vote.
Hurrah. Love the way that the usual suspects on the left and right are uniting to spin this terrific result for the LDs as bad for Labour.
This is all about showing there is life in the yellow dog yet. If it is about anything else, it is about providing evidence that the Tory blue underbelly is soft.
Nicely done.
Well, objectively, it is a bad result for Labour. Their voters have clearly switched en masse to the Lib Dems. That might help them in a general election if it cost the Tories Esher and Walton, Henley, Maidenhead, Cheltenham etc but then again, it might not.
But it is a much worse result for the Tories, who clearly also lost votes to the Lib Dems and to the NOTA party. They do not want that result to be replicated across the Home Counties at the next election.
If Lib/Lab tactical voting is now a thing again, that is nothing but a good news for Labour and the Lib Dems.
Hurrah. Love the way that the usual suspects on the left and right are uniting to spin this terrific result for the LDs as bad for Labour.
This is all about showing there is life in the yellow dog yet. If it is about anything else, it is about providing evidence that the Tory blue underbelly is soft.
Nicely done.
Well, objectively, it is a bad result for Labour. Their voters have clearly switched en masse to the Lib Dems. That might help them in a general election if it cost the Tories Esher and Walton, Henley, Maidenhead, Cheltenham etc but then again, it might not.
But it is a much worse result for the Tories, who clearly also lost votes to the Lib Dems and to the NOTA party. They do not want that result to be replicated across the Home Counties at the next election.
If Lib/Lab tactical voting is now a thing again, that is nothing but a good news for Labour and the Lib Dems.
For the Lib Dems it may be good news.
Where will Labour find a Lib Dem vote for reciprocal squeezing?
Good morning. What was that about a Grimond-type result!
What this result will do is give the LD's something they haven't had for about 10 years; really positive publicity. And if a significant number of Labour voters in the South start to think again that voting LD is OK, then the next round of Council elections could be worrying for the Conservatives.
And, too, if Labour, as I think they will, hold Batley & Spen Tory Central Office will seriously wonder if the shine has come off PM Johnson.
Sorry to the Tory MP who told me a month ago they would lose Chesham and Amersham - and I thought ‘I can’t put that in - it’s only my second column. I’ll look insane’
The government has been clear that its priority is levelling up the north. Walking around parliament, you can feel the mission in action. “Red wall” MPs are buoyant, fresh with reports of their most recent meeting with a minister to discuss an extended train line here, a new hospital there. Meanwhile, their southern colleagues feel left out in the cold. Many fret that some of the rhetoric that accompanies the project is whittling away their majorities: rhetoric they variously describe as “anti-graduate”, “anti-globalist” and “anti-metropolitan”. They worry that the Conservative Party is losing something fundamental to its character. As one home counties MP put it to me: “There is something very strange about a centre-right party that cannot count on the votes of affluent young professionals.”
Yep. Brilliantly put.
Labour under Sir Keir Starmer and the Lib Dems under, er, Ed Davey have such an opportunity 'down South.'
What the LibDems do so well at local level is tuck away principles in order to win. Starmer needs to do something similar in the south. He's an intelligent metropolitan barrister: perfect material for appealing to affluent professionals if he starts getting his act together.
What worries me about him more than the fact that he's so dour is that whenever there's an open goal he shoots wide.
Hurrah. Love the way that the usual suspects on the left and right are uniting to spin this terrific result for the LDs as bad for Labour.
This is all about showing there is life in the yellow dog yet. If it is about anything else, it is about providing evidence that the Tory blue underbelly is soft.
Nicely done.
Well, objectively, it is a bad result for Labour. Their voters have clearly switched en masse to the Lib Dems. That might help them in a general election if it cost the Tories Esher and Walton, Henley, Maidenhead, Cheltenham etc but then again, it might not.
But it is a much worse result for the Tories, who clearly also lost votes to the Lib Dems and to the NOTA party. They do not want that result to be replicated across the Home Counties at the next election.
If Lib/Lab tactical voting is now a thing again, that is nothing but a good news for Labour and the Lib Dems.
For the Lib Dems it may be good news.
Where will Labour find a Lib Dem vote for reciprocal squeezing?
Westminster? 260 Labour MPs with 30 LDs is a heck of a lot better for Labour than 260 Labour MPs with 10 LDs.
This is such a brilliant result for the LibDems and for everyone who hates this nasty and ghastly Alf Garnett leaning tory agenda. Well, everyone who knows that Boris Johnson is a schmuck.
What has been forgotten in the tories' recent fleg strewn auto da fé is that there are still millions of people and therefore voters who fucking hate Brexit. Not even so much the actuality of it but the reactionary, intellectually impoverished and essentially eugenicist worldview it typifies.
Let me disavow you of something straight away: this by-election isn't about Brexit.
See my post on confirmation bias.
Yes and no. Not dissatisfaction with Brexit specifically, but Brexit is part of the Tories’ shift away from the educated middle classes in search of its new constituency, and that new constituency isn’t C & A.
I'd say if Brexit was your chief concern you'd have been amongst the 25k that voted for Labour, LD or the Greens at the 2019 election, no? And I note the LDs got only 15k of that.
Sarah Greens grand vote total is less than that at 21k.
It looks to me like all progressives rallied around her, and turned out, whilst Conservatives sat at home. If they'd all turned out at GE levels it would have been (by my reckoning) very marginal.
The key point is this: if you were virulently anti-Brexit (and there's definitely c.25% of the population like that) you were already voting Lib Dem.
Hurrah. Love the way that the usual suspects on the left and right are uniting to spin this terrific result for the LDs as bad for Labour.
This is all about showing there is life in the yellow dog yet. If it is about anything else, it is about providing evidence that the Tory blue underbelly is soft.
Nicely done.
Well, objectively, it is a bad result for Labour. Their voters have clearly switched en masse to the Lib Dems. That might help them in a general election if it cost the Tories Esher and Walton, Henley, Maidenhead, Cheltenham etc but then again, it might not.
But it is a much worse result for the Tories, who clearly also lost votes to the Lib Dems and to the NOTA party. They do not want that result to be replicated across the Home Counties at the next election.
If Lib/Lab tactical voting is now a thing again, that is nothing but a good news for Labour and the Lib Dems.
For the Lib Dems it may be good news.
Where will Labour find a Lib Dem vote for reciprocal squeezing?
London, Brighton, Bristol, Exeter, Southampton, etc and the halo of seats around them.
Even so, if the LDs can win 40 seats from the Tories next time, parliamentary arithmetic changes considerably.
Hurrah. Love the way that the usual suspects on the left and right are uniting to spin this terrific result for the LDs as bad for Labour.
This is all about showing there is life in the yellow dog yet. If it is about anything else, it is about providing evidence that the Tory blue underbelly is soft.
Nicely done.
Well, objectively, it is a bad result for Labour. Their voters have clearly switched en masse to the Lib Dems. That might help them in a general election if it cost the Tories Esher and Walton, Henley, Maidenhead, Cheltenham etc but then again, it might not.
But it is a much worse result for the Tories, who clearly also lost votes to the Lib Dems and to the NOTA party. They do not want that result to be replicated across the Home Counties at the next election.
If Lib/Lab tactical voting is now a thing again, that is nothing but a good news for Labour and the Lib Dems.
For the Lib Dems it may be good news.
Where will Labour find a Lib Dem vote for reciprocal squeezing?
Westminster? 260 Labour MPs with 30 LDs is a heck of a lot better for Labour than 260 Labour MPs with 10 LDs.
I meant in the constituencies! I can think of Kensington, Westminster, Finchley. Beyond that I’m struggling to think of marginal seats where Labour are second with significant Lib Dem votes. There may be a couple in Scotland.
Chesham & Amersham is another example of the alienation so many Tory heartland voters feel, left behind by the vast forces that have reshaped the economic landscape, etc etc etc. https://thecritic.co.uk/the-woodfired-brick-wall/
Hurrah. Love the way that the usual suspects on the left and right are uniting to spin this terrific result for the LDs as bad for Labour.
This is all about showing there is life in the yellow dog yet. If it is about anything else, it is about providing evidence that the Tory blue underbelly is soft.
Nicely done.
Well, objectively, it is a bad result for Labour. Their voters have clearly switched en masse to the Lib Dems. That might help them in a general election if it cost the Tories Esher and Walton, Henley, Maidenhead, Cheltenham etc but then again, it might not.
But it is a much worse result for the Tories, who clearly also lost votes to the Lib Dems and to the NOTA party. They do not want that result to be replicated across the Home Counties at the next election.
If Lib/Lab tactical voting is now a thing again, that is nothing but a good news for Labour and the Lib Dems.
For the Lib Dems it may be good news.
Where will Labour find a Lib Dem vote for reciprocal squeezing?
There are plenty of southern towns and cities in particular where reciprocity would work for Labour. I'm thinking of places like Exeter, Bristol, Portsmouth and along the southern coast. And then there's London which could really benefit from both parties getting their heads together.
Hurrah. Love the way that the usual suspects on the left and right are uniting to spin this terrific result for the LDs as bad for Labour.
This is all about showing there is life in the yellow dog yet. If it is about anything else, it is about providing evidence that the Tory blue underbelly is soft.
Nicely done.
Well, objectively, it is a bad result for Labour. Their voters have clearly switched en masse to the Lib Dems. That might help them in a general election if it cost the Tories Esher and Walton, Henley, Maidenhead, Cheltenham etc but then again, it might not.
But it is a much worse result for the Tories, who clearly also lost votes to the Lib Dems and to the NOTA party. They do not want that result to be replicated across the Home Counties at the next election.
If Lib/Lab tactical voting is now a thing again, that is nothing but a good news for Labour and the Lib Dems.
For the Lib Dems it may be good news.
Where will Labour find a Lib Dem vote for reciprocal squeezing?
London, Brighton, Bristol, Exeter, Southampton, etc and the halo of seats around them.
Even so, if the LDs can win 40 seats from the Tories next time, parliamentary arithmetic changes considerably.
Ummm - you’re saying that there are Lib Dem votes to squeeze in seats Labour already hold?
Newsflash - it’s the seats they don’t hold that they need to win.
Hurrah. Love the way that the usual suspects on the left and right are uniting to spin this terrific result for the LDs as bad for Labour.
This is all about showing there is life in the yellow dog yet. If it is about anything else, it is about providing evidence that the Tory blue underbelly is soft.
Nicely done.
Well, objectively, it is a bad result for Labour. Their voters have clearly switched en masse to the Lib Dems. That might help them in a general election if it cost the Tories Esher and Walton, Henley, Maidenhead, Cheltenham etc but then again, it might not.
But it is a much worse result for the Tories, who clearly also lost votes to the Lib Dems and to the NOTA party. They do not want that result to be replicated across the Home Counties at the next election.
If Lib/Lab tactical voting is now a thing again, that is nothing but a good news for Labour and the Lib Dems.
For the Lib Dems it may be good news.
Where will Labour find a Lib Dem vote for reciprocal squeezing?
Westminster? 260 Labour MPs with 30 LDs is a heck of a lot better for Labour than 260 Labour MPs with 10 LDs.
I meant in the constituencies! I can think of Kensington, Westminster, Finchley. Beyond that I’m struggling to think of marginal seats where Labour are second with significant Lib Dem votes. There may be a couple in Scotland.
Hurrah. Love the way that the usual suspects on the left and right are uniting to spin this terrific result for the LDs as bad for Labour.
This is all about showing there is life in the yellow dog yet. If it is about anything else, it is about providing evidence that the Tory blue underbelly is soft.
Nicely done.
Well, objectively, it is a bad result for Labour. Their voters have clearly switched en masse to the Lib Dems. That might help them in a general election if it cost the Tories Esher and Walton, Henley, Maidenhead, Cheltenham etc but then again, it might not.
But it is a much worse result for the Tories, who clearly also lost votes to the Lib Dems and to the NOTA party. They do not want that result to be replicated across the Home Counties at the next election.
If Lib/Lab tactical voting is now a thing again, that is nothing but a good news for Labour and the Lib Dems.
For the Lib Dems it may be good news.
Where will Labour find a Lib Dem vote for reciprocal squeezing?
Westminster? 260 Labour MPs with 30 LDs is a heck of a lot better for Labour than 260 Labour MPs with 10 LDs.
I meant in the constituencies! I can think of Kensington, Westminster, Finchley. Beyond that I’m struggling to think of marginal seats where Labour are second with significant Lib Dem votes. There may be a couple in Scotland.
I know you meant that but it doesnt hold up because the strategic benefit of a pact for Labour is clearly in potential Westminster parliaments. Both sides dont need to win extra seats to make it win-win.
Hurrah. Love the way that the usual suspects on the left and right are uniting to spin this terrific result for the LDs as bad for Labour.
This is all about showing there is life in the yellow dog yet. If it is about anything else, it is about providing evidence that the Tory blue underbelly is soft.
Nicely done.
Well, objectively, it is a bad result for Labour. Their voters have clearly switched en masse to the Lib Dems. That might help them in a general election if it cost the Tories Esher and Walton, Henley, Maidenhead, Cheltenham etc but then again, it might not.
But it is a much worse result for the Tories, who clearly also lost votes to the Lib Dems and to the NOTA party. They do not want that result to be replicated across the Home Counties at the next election.
If Lib/Lab tactical voting is now a thing again, that is nothing but a good news for Labour and the Lib Dems.
For the Lib Dems it may be good news.
Where will Labour find a Lib Dem vote for reciprocal squeezing?
Westminster? 260 Labour MPs with 30 LDs is a heck of a lot better for Labour than 260 Labour MPs with 10 LDs.
I meant in the constituencies! I can think of Kensington, Westminster, Finchley. Beyond that I’m struggling to think of marginal seats where Labour are second with significant Lib Dem votes. There may be a couple in Scotland.
I know you meant that but it doesnt hold up because the strategic benefit of a pact for Labour is clearly in potential Westminster parliaments. Both sides dont need to win extra seats to make it win-win.
But we were talking about Labour winning seats with tactical Lib Dem votes.
Comments
Didn't lead to the LibDems heading towards government (or, at least, not for another two decades).
But it lead to them throwing of the Green challenge, and it presaged a period when Labour voters were very willing to lend their vote to the Yellow Peril.
To think that earlier this week one PB’er was talking about UNS and the LibDem national poll rating….
Granted hadn't expected by election data to be key.
A source of strength IF Labour can also win tactical support from Lib Dems AND others, including disaffected Tories, particularly in Lab-Con marginals. AND hold on to - or win back - a critical mass of its own traditional base.
In 2017 Labour finished 2nd with over 11,000 votes their highest ever vote share in C&A?
SKS simply has to go if he loses B&S
The Liberal Democrats could find themselves moving into the position where they can say that Labour isn't going to come close to winning a majority ever again, so to exchange Boris Johnson for a less right-wing option (and one that won't build 20,000 Barratt boxes for plebs at the bottom of your road,) you need to vote for us. We will then end up holding the balance of power and will stop Labour from doing anything too nutty, or the SNP from bleeding the English taxpayer dry.
Whether or not you or I would trust them not to concede anything in exchange for a pledge to ram PR through Parliament without a referendum is beside the point. A lot of people either will trust them, or won't care one way or the other so long as they can give the Tories a good shoeing.
Also congratulations to Mike and others who backed them.
Time for Boris to get a grip and complete the vaccination programme then come up with a clear and coherent plan to sort out the ongoing NHS and economic mess.
👍
Since the coalition, LibDem by-elections have been *****y hard work. Eastleigh - which in hindsight gave the party false reassurance - was only won because of the big UKIP vote. Ditto Brecon & Radnor - their most recent win - which was a grind of a by-election and again only won because the Tory vote was split. Witney didn’t fall, and Richmond Park - possibly the best constituency in the country for the 21st century LibDems - was won only by a sliver.
This by-election is notable for being the first since 2003/4 that the LibDems have made look easy, and the first landslide gain from the Tories since Romsey, twenty one years ago.
It is possible that the very recent taking away of freedom day has gone down very badly, particularly in a middle class middle aged area like C&A where the vaccination rate is high and most will feel the pandemic is over.
One of the reasons the LibDems did so relatively poorly in 2019 was I'm afraid Jo Swinson. There's no reason to be overly vindictive (leave that to Nicola Sturgeon) but Jo really wasn't up to it. And her equivalent of 'go back and prepare for Government' didn't go down well.
This is such a brilliant result for the LibDems and for everyone who hates this nasty and ghastly Alf Garnett leaning tory agenda. Well, everyone who knows that Boris Johnson is a schmuck.
They've done wellThey did well on vaccines. There are so many other things which aren't.I think it really does depend on Labour's policy offering v. the Conservatives at the next election, and the candidates for PM.
Covid appears to cause significant brain damage in some non hospitalised individuals. It will need more research to see if this resolves, or causes long term problems.
That's not to say the pendulum didn't need correcting but the Cummings-Johnson inspired stoking of the white working class northern vote is going to bite them in the arse down south.
Amongst other things.
Assuming he’s still the leader, of course.
Mildly surprised, though many here called it. Didn't back it myself, alas.
Tories don’t really like Johnson, but tolerate him because he’s an electoral winner, right?
The vaccine effect has clearly worn off, for one thing.
Shame the Lib Dems were the beneficiaries after they campaigned on NIMBYism instead of liberalism, as far as I know.
If I was a C&A voter I wouldn't have voted Tory yesterday.
It’s really only the last week that there’s been the sort of buzz in LibDem circles and calls for everyone to go help in the seat that usually indicate a win is on the cards. My instinct is that the swing happened relatively late in the day.
The bigger issue though is that the country is perfectly split on, or slightly against, most of it, and there are lots of moderates on both sides.
"Woke" gets the stronger criticism because it's the article of faith of the day by the elites, and very much in the ascendancy - it isn't challenged much by them so it will be challenged by others.
Corbyn was the most unelectable main leader ever to stand for the office of PM.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/as-tories-celebrate-their-red-wall-victories-existential-dread-stalks-the-home-counties-wz8xhwkwg
The most likely interpretation that Boris and No.10 draw from this result is that southern voters want more of the liberally stuff they're already doing, so expect the conversation on climate change and COP26 to be turned up to 11.
I don't think he'd have done much better.
See my post on confirmation bias.
I've 400 constituencies voted leave, about 240 Remain. If that's how you want seats to split, that's not good for you.
But the Tories - lost the seat (nuff said)
Greens - nowhere at all, so much for being a repository for ex-Labour votes
Labour - did worse than the Greens in a seat where they were second less than five years ago.
RefUK - did worse than Labour. That is surely the end of them as a party.
Not often you get such a binary result. Usually one party tries to spin some positive out of a defeat. Even ridiculously (Hazel Blears springs to mind). Nobody can do that here.
The losing Tory seems to think the LDs were trying a bit too hard & that this was unsporting..
He'll turn 180 degrees on a head of a pin if he thinks he needs to do something differently to win again, and shamelessly too - claiming he's always believed it.
I expect this by-election to have political effects because CCHQ will now start to try and pivot to address the concerns of southern voters, and they'll almost certainly do so on the wrong things.
The number of people who want to see everyone who ever supported a progressive social cause drowned in the nearest river is pretty small. Just you, really
This is all about showing there is life in the yellow dog yet. If it is about anything else, it is about providing evidence that the Tory blue underbelly is soft.
Nicely done.
For the record, I don't see the appeal of Layla or Wera either. Sarah Olney seems boring and normal. I don't know who Munira is.
There is exactly one LibDem MP with half an ounce of charisma: Daisy Cooper. And I have exactly zero idea what her political views are.
It's like apologists complaining about the tactics of an opposing general who beat their side. Yeah, they won, but a bit basic and defensive etc.
I am deeply disappointed that the people of #CheshamAndAmersham have, under the extraordinary circumstances of a by-election, voted for someone else to represent them in Parliament. Our work to regain the trust of local people begins today. @caca_tories
https://twitter.com/pdfleet/status/1405706248956358657
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/rimac-nevera-hypercar-first-drive
If not, the technology will al least trickle down to Porsche in due course.
Although at least we know now that Laura Pidcock has found work running comms for failed Tory candidates like herself
All there for those with eyes. Those who have had it away like bandits, I salute you.
I think it's worth remembering that Tony Blair won several landslides on the back of economic prosperity and social liberalism.
The 1992-7 Major government contained a lot of the same nastiness that I'm seeing re-emerge in the current tory party and that didn't end well for them.
And one other last point. Someone posted on here a while back that we shouldn't judge Johnson's poll leads during a pandemic crisis. These are extraordinary times but they will abate. 2024 is a long way off still and we should be pandemic free by then.
I'm just wondering whether to do the unthinkable and bet against a tory win.
There are all sorts of things that we should be doing to improve access to the best education for everyone. But a simple cap on people from a certain background is not the way to achieve it. It’s more important to look at the roadblocks - in secondary education and, frankly, in the culture of many schools - sadly teachers are not without fault - that dissuaded people from applying.
It’s worth looking at programmes like Step-Up or the six form results from Michaela. Taught in the right way, pushed appropriately, encouraged and supported you can get fantastic results even from very poor communities
But it is a much worse result for the Tories, who clearly also lost votes to the Lib Dems and to the NOTA party. They do not want that result to be replicated across the Home Counties at the next election.
The Tory blue wall’s crumbled.
Sensational Lib Dem win in Chesham and Amersham by 8,028 votes, demolishing a 16,223 Con majority.
Southern discomfort now for Johnson.
Tory MPs will demand he talks less about the North and scraps planning rules changes.
https://twitter.com/Kevin_Maguire/status/1405757427224498180?s=20
Nonetheless, this phenomenon is about to have a big impact on British politics. Tory MPs can see it happening, and they are worried. This isn’t only about holding on to their jobs. Just as the loss of the old mining towns broke the hearts of many Labour MPs, for veteran Tories the threat to these seats shakes the very foundations of the party they joined. The more fearful they become, the more they will start to push back against Boris Johnson’s government. And when they do, the uneasy peace that has settled in the Conservative Party over recent weeks will explode into conflict once more.
There is now evidence that can happen. Hurrah.
https://twitter.com/RichJolly/status/1405765955758673927
Where will Labour find a Lib Dem vote for reciprocal squeezing?
What this result will do is give the LD's something they haven't had for about 10 years; really positive publicity. And if a significant number of Labour voters in the South start to think again that voting LD is OK, then the next round of Council elections could be worrying for the Conservatives.
And, too, if Labour, as I think they will, hold Batley & Spen Tory Central Office will seriously wonder if the shine has come off PM Johnson.
Labour under Sir Keir Starmer and the Lib Dems under, er, Ed Davey have such an opportunity 'down South.'
What the LibDems do so well at local level is tuck away principles in order to win. Starmer needs to do something similar in the south. He's an intelligent metropolitan barrister: perfect material for appealing to affluent professionals if he starts getting his act together.
What worries me about him more than the fact that he's so dour is that whenever there's an open goal he shoots wide.
Oops, have they overdone the red wall stuff a teensy bit?
Sarah Greens grand vote total is less than that at 21k.
It looks to me like all progressives rallied around her, and turned out, whilst Conservatives sat at home. If they'd all turned out at GE levels it would have been (by my reckoning) very marginal.
The key point is this: if you were virulently anti-Brexit (and there's definitely c.25% of the population like that) you were already voting Lib Dem.
Even so, if the LDs can win 40 seats from the Tories next time, parliamentary arithmetic changes considerably.
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-woodfired-brick-wall/
Newsflash - it’s the seats they don’t hold that they need to win.
I think I beat Mike to it but happy to be corrected.
I laid CP at 1.06 20 May. Then further bets later. Took a bit of profit yesterday (darn it) but coffers two grand up this morning. Yeah.
Now I just need a holiday to spend it on.
I always liked Jerry the best!
So your point wasn’t really relevant.