Politico: The Biden administration is rethinking a costly system of government-run mass vaccination sites after data revealed the program is lagging well behind a much cheaper federal effort to distribute doses via retail pharmacies.
The government has shipped millions of doses to the 21 mass vaccination hubs, or “pilot” community centers, in states such as California, Florida, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas. The hubs are part of a $4 billion federal system that funds more than 1,000 smaller vaccination locations across the country and provides other vaccination support — such as supplies — to states across the country. The Federal Emergency Management Agency did not respond to repeated questions about how much the pilot sites cost.
Despite the money the federal government has spent on the mass-vaccination pilot sites, they are administering just a fraction of the shots given across the country each day. Federal data show the retail pharmacy program — which has signed up 21 chains and 17,000 stores — can reach far more Americans in a shorter time, according to four senior officials with direct knowledge of the matter. The bottom line, those sources said, is that more Americans seem to be willing to walk to their local pharmacist to get the vaccine than to travel to a federal vaccination site for the shot.
Several studies have shown that the British public, and I believe, the American has at least as much trust in pharmacists ....... generally community ones, in shops ...... as they do in GP's. My (long-ago, now) experience was that being asked for advice could be a 'many times a day' experience, especially where the same pharmacist had ben visible in the pharmacy for several years.
Here in Spain they are really good. They are heavily linked in via the prescription system and ultra helpful.
Unfortunately in Germany a doctor has to be involved in every vaccination, so it would need a change in the law to allow pharmacies to offer jabs.
Seriously? I had a three year course of cancer treatment delivered entirely by NHS nurses. No wonder vaccinations are taking so long in Germany.
Having said that, most other big European countries seem to be moving at the same speed, so it can’t be the only reason unless doctors are required in the same way in those countries as well.
It was a slightly pointless point by not fire. He knows what I meant. 1997 was a once in a lifetime result, just as 1945 and 1979 were. The fact that 1983 and 2001 almost replicated them isn't pedantry. Okay, I suppose 'generation' would be less hyperbole
We may need to put 2019 in the same category: a seismic shift.
Ydoethur, the thing is that if we're saying that Labour have gone from representing the working class to representing the Metropolitan elite then fine but they won't win power from such a base. It's not even entirely true. There are large swathes of cities, especially in the north and east, which did not reap the Eurostar love-in of the Blairite years. It's a London centric party now.
I really think Labour are in huge trouble. It's not simply about Sir Keir Starmer. It's their whole vision. What do they stand for and represent now that Boris has swung a sufficient number of working class voters behind his Brexit Britain?
I will bet that 2019 was the political reboot for the tories and we should ignore the preceding pre-Brexit semi tory wins. I could see a scenario where Labour are out of power for at least another 10, perhaps 15, years. They need to find a reason for existing and right now I've no idea what it is. I don't think they do either.
Anyone? What's their vision which is going to recapture the north?
I think this is the key to the Red Wall poll yesterday. 37% have no idea what Starmer is for. They get that he is not Corbyn, and displays flags like a Jubilee summer fete, but where is the beef?
Clearly not being Corbyn is insufficient to win power, but it was the necessary first step. What Labour really needs is the LibDems to rise from the dead and begin to build that anti Tory coalition. Alas.
It's not so simple as assuming a Lab-SNP coalition would see them over the line, for at least two reasons.
1. The British press will scaremonger massively at the prospect of Sturgeon holding the reins of Westminster power. This will work. It will frighten decent ordinary English and Welsh citizens to vote for anyone but Labour.
2. The price of SNP coalition would be indyref2, probably leading to the break up of the Union and (ironically) the loss of all Labour seats north of the border anyway.
Unless Labour win back their Scottish Westminster MPs, as far as I can see they're totally screwed.
Am I the only one who sees a switch in support? Labour need a reset. If they supported independence for Scotland it would probably guarantee it but it is almost inevitable now anyway. Once independence has gone away there will be a vacancy for competent centre left governance which Labour should be able to take advantage of.
There would also be less if an issue in traditional labour supporting areas of England outside Metros. Whilst people might not want a Corbyn government in hock to SNP there would be an option for Centre left Government which would be enhanced in my view if they can vote as leader someone based outside of North London.
It was a slightly pointless point by not fire. He knows what I meant. 1997 was a once in a lifetime result, just as 1945 and 1979 were. The fact that 1983 and 2001 almost replicated them isn't pedantry. Okay, I suppose 'generation' would be less hyperbole
We may need to put 2019 in the same category: a seismic shift.
Ydoethur, the thing is that if we're saying that Labour have gone from representing the working class to representing the Metropolitan elite then fine but they won't win power from such a base. It's not even entirely true. There are large swathes of cities, especially in the north and east, which did not reap the Eurostar love-in of the Blairite years. It's a London centric party now.
I really think Labour are in huge trouble. It's not simply about Sir Keir Starmer. It's their whole vision. What do they stand for and represent now that Boris has swung a sufficient number of working class voters behind his Brexit Britain?
I will bet that 2019 was the political reboot for the tories and we should ignore the preceding pre-Brexit semi tory wins. I could see a scenario where Labour are out of power for at least another 10, perhaps 15, years. They need to find a reason for existing and right now I've no idea what it is. I don't think they do either.
Anyone? What's their vision which is going to recapture the north?
I think this is the key to the Red Wall poll yesterday. 37% have no idea what Starmer is for. They get that he is not Corbyn, and displays flags like a Jubilee summer fete, but where is the beef?
Clearly not being Corbyn is insufficient to win power, but it was the necessary first step. What Labour really needs is the LibDems to rise from the dead and begin to build that anti Tory coalition. Alas.
Indeed, the LibDems are key to a non-Conservative future.
Those polled aren't paying attention to events if they are suggesting Labour are playing party politics with the pandemic. That would be my biggest criticism of Starmer's Labour, they have called Johnson out on absolutely nothing, excess deaths, PPE procurement corruption, track and trace profligacy and the September non-lockdowns.
The media narrative is at present very much in Johnson's favour, and it is a false narrative. Can this continue?
If those are the main reasons why people in the Red Wall are not voting Labour they are very far from insurmountable.
I still work to the notion that Government's lose elections, oppositions don't win them.
The calibre of Johnsonian Conservatives are such that they are quite capable of monumental errors that lead to defeat. My fear is monumental errors are being ignored by voters. This is where a little opposition from Starmer and his front bench might come in handy.
It is reported this morning on the news that the Spanish authorities are desperate to have tourists back, but will also be slapping them with large fines if caught sunbathing without one of the evil masks on. I am inferring from this that people are forced to wear them outdoors basically the whole time except when exercising. These daft regulations apply to everyone from the age of six upwards.
It has not been adequately explained why it would be that your typical family of four from some sun-starved corner of Lancashire would want to spend their entire holiday in a hot, sweaty gag, having to constantly force miserable children to keep the hot, sweaty gags on as well, and to come back afterwards with a neat little set of rectangular white patches burnt into their faces for weeks afterwards.
I mean, ideally the UK Government will render the issue moot by telling them not to go anyway, but if and when foreign travel is allowed there will be a lot of people who will rush off to these sunshine destinations, oblivious to whatever madcap regulations exist there, and end up getting a very unpleasant surprise.
Face masks are irritating enough wandering around shops or public buildings for a short time. I cannot imagine wearing one whilst sunbathing. It is also difficult to come up with a more pointless time in which to wear a mask in that you are outdoors, probably socially distant on your sunbed, and not particularly active, occasionally going for a dip in a chlorinated pool. You are just not going to pick up the virus in such a scenario, even if the person under the next parasol is infected. Yet another stupid regulation which fails to focus on the actual risks.
The nightclub you might go to after your day by the pool is of course a completely different kettle of fish.
Yes.
The combination of sun, fresh air, and sea makes it all but impossible to spread the virus.
Plus, of course, Brits will all be vaccinated by then.
But here's my prediction: Spain will not, in fact, have these measures in place in July and August.
I think that is right. By July a reasonable proportion of the most vulnerable will have been vaccinated.
Even if Spain only manages 10% of its adult population a month (and I suspect they'll manage more than that) they will still be at more than 40% of the adult population by the end of July.
Might there not be a danger in parts of Europe that a natural fall in case numbers and deaths caused by seasonality will significant boost vaccine hesitancy (and at a more dangerous overall level than you will get in eg. the UK where we are so far ahead of the curve)? People nervous/indifferent about getting vaccines are not going to be encouraged to change their minds if their respective national situations seem under control anyway.
And of course, high levels of vaccination in the first wave is extremely important for averting trouble next winter because 1) it will mean an existing level of protection in the population against serious illness 2) it is much more simple running a one shot "booster" programme
It's possible, maybe even likely but remember three things:
1. People aren't blind. They'll see that life has returned to normal, and there haven't been widespread deaths from vaccines, in places like the UK, etc. And the more countries reach practical vaccine completion, the harder it will be to ignore.
2. There are distinct personal advantages (beyond not dying) that will come from being vaccinated. Like being able to travel beyond France.
3. Even if these two are wrong, the world will be awash with vaccines come September. So, countries would be able to reverse course pretty quickly.
Politico: The Biden administration is rethinking a costly system of government-run mass vaccination sites after data revealed the program is lagging well behind a much cheaper federal effort to distribute doses via retail pharmacies.
The government has shipped millions of doses to the 21 mass vaccination hubs, or “pilot” community centers, in states such as California, Florida, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas. The hubs are part of a $4 billion federal system that funds more than 1,000 smaller vaccination locations across the country and provides other vaccination support — such as supplies — to states across the country. The Federal Emergency Management Agency did not respond to repeated questions about how much the pilot sites cost.
Despite the money the federal government has spent on the mass-vaccination pilot sites, they are administering just a fraction of the shots given across the country each day. Federal data show the retail pharmacy program — which has signed up 21 chains and 17,000 stores — can reach far more Americans in a shorter time, according to four senior officials with direct knowledge of the matter. The bottom line, those sources said, is that more Americans seem to be willing to walk to their local pharmacist to get the vaccine than to travel to a federal vaccination site for the shot.
Several studies have shown that the British public, and I believe, the American has at least as much trust in pharmacists ....... generally community ones, in shops ...... as they do in GP's. My (long-ago, now) experience was that being asked for advice could be a 'many times a day' experience, especially where the same pharmacist had ben visible in the pharmacy for several years.
Here in Spain they are really good. They are heavily linked in via the prescription system and ultra helpful.
Unfortunately in Germany a doctor has to be involved in every vaccination, so it would need a change in the law to allow pharmacies to offer jabs.
That's crazy.
Another very sensible step the UK took was the big drive to sign up / train people to be involved in the vaccine rollout, even if it did mean initially the ridiculous situation of having to do things like anti-extremist and diversity training courses.
Morning all. Just a reminder that over the last week or so, the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the last Director of National Intelligence have both described how the US does not have air superiority over its areas of military operation, including its own nuclear bases.
I dunno y'doethur. I think part of the problem is that they haven't won in their previously safe seats. Ever since Ed Miliband they have been very Metropolitan. Miliband was disastrously metropolitan. Corbyn was hardly a Scottish vote winner and was also a middle class metropolitan, whatever his clan claim to the contrary. And now they have another Londoner metropolitan.
They've lost Scotland and they've lost the Red Wall. They've lost their constituency base, retreating instead to policies that sound great to residents of Islington but totally and utterly out of touch with ordinary voters. I can't see Remainer Keir Starmer winning back the kind of people they need.
So they'll probably continue to do well in London. And that will be it.
But that’s exactly the point. That’s their core vote now. They don’t care about reaching out to others, including those who used to vote for them. It’s the strategy they’ve had for 80 years, applied to a different group of voters.
That’s why @SandyRentool said the other day in great frustration that he wanted a Labour Party that represented the workers.
Some of the comments this morning are a bit apocalyptic, since the poll in fact shows 18 Labour gains out of the 45 seats surveyed. There's a small shift to the Tories, as there has been nationally, so the previous poll showing 36 Labour gains is not replicated. A small swing back reinstates the 36. Given that we're talking about 3 years from now, it's silly to base long-term prediction on that happening or not happening. I'm more concerned about the 10-point YG lead nationally yesterday - that really is a substantial vaccine bounce. We'll see if it's sustained in other polls.
Yesterday's YouGov had the Tories below their general election result. It's the Labour vote going down and the Green and LibDem votes at 15 points combined that gives the 10 point lead. In other words, the votes already exist to deprive the Tories of their majority. The challenge is in how they are distributed. I don't think that any other pollster has labour as low as YouGov does, but several have the Tories higher. My guess is that the real Tory lead right now is around six points.
Politico: The Biden administration is rethinking a costly system of government-run mass vaccination sites after data revealed the program is lagging well behind a much cheaper federal effort to distribute doses via retail pharmacies.
The government has shipped millions of doses to the 21 mass vaccination hubs, or “pilot” community centers, in states such as California, Florida, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas. The hubs are part of a $4 billion federal system that funds more than 1,000 smaller vaccination locations across the country and provides other vaccination support — such as supplies — to states across the country. The Federal Emergency Management Agency did not respond to repeated questions about how much the pilot sites cost.
Despite the money the federal government has spent on the mass-vaccination pilot sites, they are administering just a fraction of the shots given across the country each day. Federal data show the retail pharmacy program — which has signed up 21 chains and 17,000 stores — can reach far more Americans in a shorter time, according to four senior officials with direct knowledge of the matter. The bottom line, those sources said, is that more Americans seem to be willing to walk to their local pharmacist to get the vaccine than to travel to a federal vaccination site for the shot.
Several studies have shown that the British public, and I believe, the American has at least as much trust in pharmacists ....... generally community ones, in shops ...... as they do in GP's. My (long-ago, now) experience was that being asked for advice could be a 'many times a day' experience, especially where the same pharmacist had ben visible in the pharmacy for several years.
Here in Spain they are really good. They are heavily linked in via the prescription system and ultra helpful.
Unfortunately in Germany a doctor has to be involved in every vaccination, so it would need a change in the law to allow pharmacies to offer jabs.
Seriously? I had a three year course of cancer treatment delivered entirely by NHS nurses. No wonder vaccinations are taking so long in Germany.
Having said that, most other big European countries seem to be moving at the same speed, so it can’t be the only reason unless doctors are required in the same way in those countries as well.
Have France dropped that nonsense rule yet where you had to see a GP to give the ok before you could get a jab?
But they want them to be made in the EU, don’t have a factory yet and haven’t approved Sputnik.
Book domestic UK holidays this summer, folks!
There's a fair bit of support from various figures in France to approve Sputnik to help speed up the campaign. It's supposedly a good vaccine but I'm not sure how I'd feel about being offered it given the lack of transparency surrounding it.
The UK has no need for it but I wonder if it would be approved if there was a similar shortage of vaccines there, and whether British people would trust getting it?
It was a slightly pointless point by not fire. He knows what I meant. 1997 was a once in a lifetime result, just as 1945 and 1979 were. The fact that 1983 and 2001 almost replicated them isn't pedantry. Okay, I suppose 'generation' would be less hyperbole
We may need to put 2019 in the same category: a seismic shift.
Ydoethur, the thing is that if we're saying that Labour have gone from representing the working class to representing the Metropolitan elite then fine but they won't win power from such a base. It's not even entirely true. There are large swathes of cities, especially in the north and east, which did not reap the Eurostar love-in of the Blairite years. It's a London centric party now.
I really think Labour are in huge trouble. It's not simply about Sir Keir Starmer. It's their whole vision. What do they stand for and represent now that Boris has swung a sufficient number of working class voters behind his Brexit Britain?
I will bet that 2019 was the political reboot for the tories and we should ignore the preceding pre-Brexit semi tory wins. I could see a scenario where Labour are out of power for at least another 10, perhaps 15, years. They need to find a reason for existing and right now I've no idea what it is. I don't think they do either.
Anyone? What's their vision which is going to recapture the north?
I think this is the key to the Red Wall poll yesterday. 37% have no idea what Starmer is for. They get that he is not Corbyn, and displays flags like a Jubilee summer fete, but where is the beef?
Clearly not being Corbyn is insufficient to win power, but it was the necessary first step. What Labour really needs is the LibDems to rise from the dead and begin to build that anti Tory coalition. Alas.
Indeed, the LibDems are key to a non-Conservative future.
Those polled aren't paying attention to events if they are suggesting Labour are playing party politics with the pandemic. That would be my biggest criticism of Starmer's Labour, they have called Johnson out on absolutely nothing, excess deaths, PPE procurement corruption, track and trace profligacy and the September non-lockdowns.
The media narrative is at present very much in Johnson's favour, and it is a false narrative. Can this continue?
If those are the main reasons why people in the Red Wall are not voting Labour they are very far from insurmountable.
I still work to the notion that Government's lose elections, oppositions don't win them.
The calibre of Johnsonian Conservatives are such that they are quite capable of monumental errors that lead to defeat. My fear is monumental errors are being ignored by voters. This is where a little opposition from Starmer and his front bench might come in handy.
While the pandemic dominates the narrative the Tories will live and die by how they manage it. They lost support when they were doing badly, they have gained it as a result of the vaccine roll-out. In that Red Wall poll, the second most cited reason for not backing Labour was that it was playing politics with the pandemic - ie, that it was showing too much opposition. It was two points behind the top reason: not knowing what Labour stands for - ie, not showing enough opposition. I am not sure how you square that!!
It was a slightly pointless point by not fire. He knows what I meant. 1997 was a once in a lifetime result, just as 1945 and 1979 were. The fact that 1983 and 2001 almost replicated them isn't pedantry. Okay, I suppose 'generation' would be less hyperbole
We may need to put 2019 in the same category: a seismic shift.
Ydoethur, the thing is that if we're saying that Labour have gone from representing the working class to representing the Metropolitan elite then fine but they won't win power from such a base. It's not even entirely true. There are large swathes of cities, especially in the north and east, which did not reap the Eurostar love-in of the Blairite years. It's a London centric party now.
I really think Labour are in huge trouble. It's not simply about Sir Keir Starmer. It's their whole vision. What do they stand for and represent now that Boris has swung a sufficient number of working class voters behind his Brexit Britain?
I will bet that 2019 was the political reboot for the tories and we should ignore the preceding pre-Brexit semi tory wins. I could see a scenario where Labour are out of power for at least another 10, perhaps 15, years. They need to find a reason for existing and right now I've no idea what it is. I don't think they do either.
Anyone? What's their vision which is going to recapture the north?
I think this is the key to the Red Wall poll yesterday. 37% have no idea what Starmer is for. They get that he is not Corbyn, and displays flags like a Jubilee summer fete, but where is the beef?
Clearly not being Corbyn is insufficient to win power, but it was the necessary first step. What Labour really needs is the LibDems to rise from the dead and begin to build that anti Tory coalition. Alas.
Indeed, the LibDems are key to a non-Conservative future.
Those polled aren't paying attention to events if they are suggesting Labour are playing party politics with the pandemic. That would be my biggest criticism of Starmer's Labour, they have called Johnson out on absolutely nothing, excess deaths, PPE procurement corruption, track and trace profligacy and the September non-lockdowns.
The media narrative is at present very much in Johnson's favour, and it is a false narrative. Can this continue?
If those are the main reasons why people in the Red Wall are not voting Labour they are very far from insurmountable.
I still work to the notion that Government's lose elections, oppositions don't win them.
The calibre of Johnsonian Conservatives are such that they are quite capable of monumental errors that lead to defeat. My fear is monumental errors are being ignored by voters. This is where a little opposition from Starmer and his front bench might come in handy.
While the pandemic dominates the narrative the Tories will live and die by how they manage it. They lost support when they were doing badly, they have gained it as a result of the vaccine roll-out. In that Red Wall poll, the second most cited reason for not backing Labour was that it was playing politics with the pandemic - ie, that it was showing too much opposition. It was two points behind the top reason: not knowing what Labour stands for - ie, not showing enough opposition. I am not sure how you square that!!
Things will change after the pandemic. The task for Labour is to ignore today’s polls and build the policies for the aftermath.
I dunno y'doethur. I think part of the problem is that they haven't won in their previously safe seats. Ever since Ed Miliband they have been very Metropolitan. Miliband was disastrously metropolitan. Corbyn was hardly a Scottish vote winner and was also a middle class metropolitan, whatever his clan claim to the contrary. And now they have another Londoner metropolitan.
They've lost Scotland and they've lost the Red Wall. They've lost their constituency base, retreating instead to policies that sound great to residents of Islington but totally and utterly out of touch with ordinary voters. I can't see Remainer Keir Starmer winning back the kind of people they need.
So they'll probably continue to do well in London. And that will be it.
But that’s exactly the point. That’s their core vote now. They don’t care about reaching out to others, including those who used to vote for them. It’s the strategy they’ve had for 80 years, applied to a different group of voters.
That’s why @SandyRentool said the other day in great frustration that he wanted a Labour Party that represented the workers.
But blue collar workers don't want to be represented by Labour anymore. The question is "what have Labour ever done for us?". It's Boris' NHS now.
What have the Conservatives done for us? Cheap borrowing!
Creation of the NHS buys no cheap mortgage or the 250 a month lease on a new Series 3. We are living in a material world, and I am a material...voter.
Politico: The Biden administration is rethinking a costly system of government-run mass vaccination sites after data revealed the program is lagging well behind a much cheaper federal effort to distribute doses via retail pharmacies.
The government has shipped millions of doses to the 21 mass vaccination hubs, or “pilot” community centers, in states such as California, Florida, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas. The hubs are part of a $4 billion federal system that funds more than 1,000 smaller vaccination locations across the country and provides other vaccination support — such as supplies — to states across the country. The Federal Emergency Management Agency did not respond to repeated questions about how much the pilot sites cost.
Despite the money the federal government has spent on the mass-vaccination pilot sites, they are administering just a fraction of the shots given across the country each day. Federal data show the retail pharmacy program — which has signed up 21 chains and 17,000 stores — can reach far more Americans in a shorter time, according to four senior officials with direct knowledge of the matter. The bottom line, those sources said, is that more Americans seem to be willing to walk to their local pharmacist to get the vaccine than to travel to a federal vaccination site for the shot.
Several studies have shown that the British public, and I believe, the American has at least as much trust in pharmacists ....... generally community ones, in shops ...... as they do in GP's. My (long-ago, now) experience was that being asked for advice could be a 'many times a day' experience, especially where the same pharmacist had ben visible in the pharmacy for several years.
I was once told that the “Boots nurse” was the most trusted British healthcare professional among the general public ... despite no such role existing
It was a slightly pointless point by not fire. He knows what I meant. 1997 was a once in a lifetime result, just as 1945 and 1979 were. The fact that 1983 and 2001 almost replicated them isn't pedantry. Okay, I suppose 'generation' would be less hyperbole
We may need to put 2019 in the same category: a seismic shift.
Ydoethur, the thing is that if we're saying that Labour have gone from representing the working class to representing the Metropolitan elite then fine but they won't win power from such a base. It's not even entirely true. There are large swathes of cities, especially in the north and east, which did not reap the Eurostar love-in of the Blairite years. It's a London centric party now.
I really think Labour are in huge trouble. It's not simply about Sir Keir Starmer. It's their whole vision. What do they stand for and represent now that Boris has swung a sufficient number of working class voters behind his Brexit Britain?
I will bet that 2019 was the political reboot for the tories and we should ignore the preceding pre-Brexit semi tory wins. I could see a scenario where Labour are out of power for at least another 10, perhaps 15, years. They need to find a reason for existing and right now I've no idea what it is. I don't think they do either.
Anyone? What's their vision which is going to recapture the north?
I think this is the key to the Red Wall poll yesterday. 37% have no idea what Starmer is for. They get that he is not Corbyn, and displays flags like a Jubilee summer fete, but where is the beef?
Clearly not being Corbyn is insufficient to win power, but it was the necessary first step. What Labour really needs is the LibDems to rise from the dead and begin to build that anti Tory coalition. Alas.
Indeed, the LibDems are key to a non-Conservative future.
Those polled aren't paying attention to events if they are suggesting Labour are playing party politics with the pandemic. That would be my biggest criticism of Starmer's Labour, they have called Johnson out on absolutely nothing, excess deaths, PPE procurement corruption, track and trace profligacy and the September non-lockdowns.
The media narrative is at present very much in Johnson's favour, and it is a false narrative. Can this continue?
If those are the main reasons why people in the Red Wall are not voting Labour they are very far from insurmountable.
I still work to the notion that Government's lose elections, oppositions don't win them.
The calibre of Johnsonian Conservatives are such that they are quite capable of monumental errors that lead to defeat. My fear is monumental errors are being ignored by voters. This is where a little opposition from Starmer and his front bench might come in handy.
While the pandemic dominates the narrative the Tories will live and die by how they manage it. They lost support when they were doing badly, they have gained it as a result of the vaccine roll-out. In that Red Wall poll, the second most cited reason for not backing Labour was that it was playing politics with the pandemic - ie, that it was showing too much opposition. It was two points behind the top reason: not knowing what Labour stands for - ie, not showing enough opposition. I am not sure how you square that!!
Things will change after the pandemic. The task for Labour is to ignore today’s polls and build the policies for the aftermath.
I completely agree. I also suspect that Tory hubris will be a helpful tool.
It was a slightly pointless point by not fire. He knows what I meant. 1997 was a once in a lifetime result, just as 1945 and 1979 were. The fact that 1983 and 2001 almost replicated them isn't pedantry. Okay, I suppose 'generation' would be less hyperbole
We may need to put 2019 in the same category: a seismic shift.
Ydoethur, the thing is that if we're saying that Labour have gone from representing the working class to representing the Metropolitan elite then fine but they won't win power from such a base. It's not even entirely true. There are large swathes of cities, especially in the north and east, which did not reap the Eurostar love-in of the Blairite years. It's a London centric party now.
I really think Labour are in huge trouble. It's not simply about Sir Keir Starmer. It's their whole vision. What do they stand for and represent now that Boris has swung a sufficient number of working class voters behind his Brexit Britain?
I will bet that 2019 was the political reboot for the tories and we should ignore the preceding pre-Brexit semi tory wins. I could see a scenario where Labour are out of power for at least another 10, perhaps 15, years. They need to find a reason for existing and right now I've no idea what it is. I don't think they do either.
Anyone? What's their vision which is going to recapture the north?
I've made suggestions before but the obvious ones are to address real issues for those who are missing out. So they should be championing the rights of casual workers with zero hour contracts and all the joys of "self employment". They should be focusing on those who can't get housing, who are stuck living at home with mum and dad until their mid 20s. They should be more radical about student debt which is now blighting an entire generation's opportunities to get their own home. They should be more realistic and pragmatic in drugs policy and help those afflicted rather than jailing them.
Many of these groups are young and don't vote enough but they have relatives and friends who do and must be disappointed that the State shows so little interest in them. Once upon a time, under a different economic structure, trade unions would have represented many of these people but they are no longer relevant. Nevertheless, they need a champion and Labour could be it.
Did you watch "The Syndicate" last night? Exactly the sort of people you describe, who need a champion. The firm where the young people worked was taken over, and they were told that they would, in the future, be on pro hours contracts.
I didn't, I was working until late, but yes. A huge swathe of our workforce are being casualised. It was an existing trend but it seems to have been given a huge boost by Covid, the lockdown and delivery culture. Who is going to speak for these people? If its not Labour what the hell is Labour for?
Unfortunately though Labour will do it wrong as can been seen already. They will take the "Zero hour contracts are evil" route and must be abolished rather than seeing what the difference is between those jobs people like them for and those jobs in which they are used to exploit workers
Yet the Scottish still want more money and if you even vaguely point this out to people outside Scotland their desire for Scotland to go independent rises rapidly.
Publish that information and ask for a Scottish independence referendum with the whole UK voting and I reckon the Scots would vote to remain while the English voted by 60%+ to get rid.
But they want them to be made in the EU, don’t have a factory yet and haven’t approved Sputnik.
Book domestic UK holidays this summer, folks!
There's a fair bit of support from various figures in France to approve Sputnik to help speed up the campaign. It's supposedly a good vaccine but I'm not sure how I'd feel about being offered it given the lack of transparency surrounding it.
The UK has no need for it but I wonder if it would be approved if there was a similar shortage of vaccines there, and whether British people would trust getting it?
Several countries have run their own trials before approving a vaccine, so even if our authorities had doubts about the evidence provided from elsewhere, they could have run a trial here if that had been necessary.
I don't see any reason to reject a vaccine based on where it comes from, except that the evidence might have been judged in an unscrupulous attempt to sell more of it.
It was once the case that Labour held the demographic advantage which the Tories now hold - they needed a lot fewer votes to win a majority than the Tories.
A few big things have changed: The Tories have adapted to changing times, and Labour have not. Labour could and should be the one nation popular party but have blown it; Labour are confined to enclaves with multiple supporters bases, holding incompatible views, but no overall spectrum of support. The Tories have played a ruthless but legitimate game, Labour haven't. Under Corbyn they took a dislike to the electorate. This can never work.
Plus Scotland. Labour dominated Scotland. The party which takes loads of seats on a tiny national share is the SNP. If you add Lab + SNP in the model here, the social democrat left have 379 seats on 49% of the vote. Maybe Holyrood was simply Westminster making the Danegeld mistake again.
But they want them to be made in the EU, don’t have a factory yet and haven’t approved Sputnik.
Book domestic UK holidays this summer, folks!
There's a fair bit of support from various figures in France to approve Sputnik to help speed up the campaign. It's supposedly a good vaccine but I'm not sure how I'd feel about being offered it given the lack of transparency surrounding it.
The UK has no need for it but I wonder if it would be approved if there was a similar shortage of vaccines there, and whether British people would trust getting it?
Several countries have run their own trials before approving a vaccine, so even if our authorities had doubts about the evidence provided from elsewhere, they could have run a trial here if that had been necessary.
I don't see any reason to reject a vaccine based on where it comes from, except that the evidence might have been judged in an unscrupulous attempt to sell more of it.
Trials need to take place where the virus is rampant, which is not here. At least not at the moment.
Yet the Scottish still want more money and if you even vaguely point this out to people outside Scotland their desire for Scotland to go independent rises rapidly.
Publish that information and ask for a Scottish independence referendum with the whole UK voting and I reckon the Scots would vote to remain while the English voted by 60%+ to get rid.
I was interested in the ideas put forward for some kind of federal structure on recent threads, and have been wondering whether there could be any advantage in combining some of those ideas with a rotating Premiership. So whatever the makeup of the UK parliament and administration, the PM would come from the party in power in whichever of E, W, S, NI.
Make life a bit lumpy for the administration, but gives every part a look-in.
But they want them to be made in the EU, don’t have a factory yet and haven’t approved Sputnik.
Book domestic UK holidays this summer, folks!
There's a fair bit of support from various figures in France to approve Sputnik to help speed up the campaign. It's supposedly a good vaccine but I'm not sure how I'd feel about being offered it given the lack of transparency surrounding it.
The UK has no need for it but I wonder if it would be approved if there was a similar shortage of vaccines there, and whether British people would trust getting it?
Several countries have run their own trials before approving a vaccine, so even if our authorities had doubts about the evidence provided from elsewhere, they could have run a trial here if that had been necessary.
I don't see any reason to reject a vaccine based on where it comes from, except that the evidence might have been judged in an unscrupulous attempt to sell more of it.
Trials need to take place where the virus is rampant, which is not here. At least not at the moment.
True, but @Paristonda implied the scenario where we hadn't been so fortunate with vaccine supply.
But they want them to be made in the EU, don’t have a factory yet and haven’t approved Sputnik.
Book domestic UK holidays this summer, folks!
There's a fair bit of support from various figures in France to approve Sputnik to help speed up the campaign. It's supposedly a good vaccine but I'm not sure how I'd feel about being offered it given the lack of transparency surrounding it.
The UK has no need for it but I wonder if it would be approved if there was a similar shortage of vaccines there, and whether British people would trust getting it?
Several countries have run their own trials before approving a vaccine, so even if our authorities had doubts about the evidence provided from elsewhere, they could have run a trial here if that had been necessary.
I don't see any reason to reject a vaccine based on where it comes from, except that the evidence might have been judged in an unscrupulous attempt to sell more of it.
I wrote "evidence might have been fudged" which got changed to "judged" !!
On the subject of unions it will be interesting to see post covid how effective rail and tube strikes are going to be. I suspect now people are more geared up for homeworking and companies used to it they will become more a minor incovenience than previously .
It was a slightly pointless point by not fire. He knows what I meant. 1997 was a once in a lifetime result, just as 1945 and 1979 were. The fact that 1983 and 2001 almost replicated them isn't pedantry. Okay, I suppose 'generation' would be less hyperbole
We may need to put 2019 in the same category: a seismic shift.
Ydoethur, the thing is that if we're saying that Labour have gone from representing the working class to representing the Metropolitan elite then fine but they won't win power from such a base. It's not even entirely true. There are large swathes of cities, especially in the north and east, which did not reap the Eurostar love-in of the Blairite years. It's a London centric party now.
I really think Labour are in huge trouble. It's not simply about Sir Keir Starmer. It's their whole vision. What do they stand for and represent now that Boris has swung a sufficient number of working class voters behind his Brexit Britain?
I will bet that 2019 was the political reboot for the tories and we should ignore the preceding pre-Brexit semi tory wins. I could see a scenario where Labour are out of power for at least another 10, perhaps 15, years. They need to find a reason for existing and right now I've no idea what it is. I don't think they do either.
Anyone? What's their vision which is going to recapture the north?
I think this is the key to the Red Wall poll yesterday. 37% have no idea what Starmer is for. They get that he is not Corbyn, and displays flags like a Jubilee summer fete, but where is the beef?
Clearly not being Corbyn is insufficient to win power, but it was the necessary first step. What Labour really needs is the LibDems to rise from the dead and begin to build that anti Tory coalition. Alas.
Indeed, the LibDems are key to a non-Conservative future.
Those polled aren't paying attention to events if they are suggesting Labour are playing party politics with the pandemic. That would be my biggest criticism of Starmer's Labour, they have called Johnson out on absolutely nothing, excess deaths, PPE procurement corruption, track and trace profligacy and the September non-lockdowns.
The media narrative is at present very much in Johnson's favour, and it is a false narrative. Can this continue?
If those are the main reasons why people in the Red Wall are not voting Labour they are very far from insurmountable.
I still work to the notion that Government's lose elections, oppositions don't win them.
The calibre of Johnsonian Conservatives are such that they are quite capable of monumental errors that lead to defeat. My fear is monumental errors are being ignored by voters. This is where a little opposition from Starmer and his front bench might come in handy.
While the pandemic dominates the narrative the Tories will live and die by how they manage it. They lost support when they were doing badly, they have gained it as a result of the vaccine roll-out. In that Red Wall poll, the second most cited reason for not backing Labour was that it was playing politics with the pandemic - ie, that it was showing too much opposition. It was two points behind the top reason: not knowing what Labour stands for - ie, not showing enough opposition. I am not sure how you square that!!
Agreed. The notion that only the Conservatives can manage the (presumably Labour incurred from pre-2010) debt, puzzles me. Spending has been cut to the bone, and Johnson claims no new taxes. Ah, we'll pay our way out through economic growth...ROFL!
Apologies if this has already been mentioned but between 2010 and 2015 Martin's model said the Blue Meanies needed a lead of over 10% just for a majority of 2 seats.
Sometimes where and how the votes are distributed can be key.
It is reported this morning on the news that the Spanish authorities are desperate to have tourists back, but will also be slapping them with large fines if caught sunbathing without one of the evil masks on. I am inferring from this that people are forced to wear them outdoors basically the whole time except when exercising. These daft regulations apply to everyone from the age of six upwards.
It has not been adequately explained why it would be that your typical family of four from some sun-starved corner of Lancashire would want to spend their entire holiday in a hot, sweaty gag, having to constantly force miserable children to keep the hot, sweaty gags on as well, and to come back afterwards with a neat little set of rectangular white patches burnt into their faces for weeks afterwards.
I mean, ideally the UK Government will render the issue moot by telling them not to go anyway, but if and when foreign travel is allowed there will be a lot of people who will rush off to these sunshine destinations, oblivious to whatever madcap regulations exist there, and end up getting a very unpleasant surprise.
Face masks are irritating enough wandering around shops or public buildings for a short time. I cannot imagine wearing one whilst sunbathing. It is also difficult to come up with a more pointless time in which to wear a mask in that you are outdoors, probably socially distant on your sunbed, and not particularly active, occasionally going for a dip in a chlorinated pool. You are just not going to pick up the virus in such a scenario, even if the person under the next parasol is infected. Yet another stupid regulation which fails to focus on the actual risks.
The nightclub you might go to after your day by the pool is of course a completely different kettle of fish.
Yes.
The combination of sun, fresh air, and sea makes it all but impossible to spread the virus.
Plus, of course, Brits will all be vaccinated by then.
But here's my prediction: Spain will not, in fact, have these measures in place in July and August.
I think that is right. By July a reasonable proportion of the most vulnerable will have been vaccinated.
Even if Spain only manages 10% of its adult population a month (and I suspect they'll manage more than that) they will still be at more than 40% of the adult population by the end of July.
Here's the current French projection; one imagines that other Euro counties will be pretty similar.
It may not work out quite like this, as the last few months have shown. But, the prediction for April is to get roughly as many jabs as they have had so far. And that ought to be pretty solid, given the way the supply chain works (most of those jabs already exist in some form). Furthermore, AZ isn't that important a part of the mix.
The graph isn't quite exponential growth, but it's damn near. And exponential growth always wins. Apart from "coughs and sneezes spread diseases, catch your cold in your handkerchief", it's the most important lesson of the last year or so.
Starmer’s ratings are appalling, yet all his supporters want to talk about is Corbyn. Classic case of not wanting to face your own problems and focussing on saying someone else is worse.
The snag with letting Sir Keir off the hook by blaming it all on Corbyn and saying it will take years to regain trust etc, is that Boris took over from Theresa May when she was doing as badly as Corbyn, and has completely turned the party’s fortunes around. It is possible if the leader has something about them
Mike do you know how Scotland feeds into this? Have Labour ever won an outright majority off only seats south of the border?
Another way to ask that is that if Labour continue to flounder in Scotland is their route to an overall majority impossible?
(I know some will say that they can form a coalition with the SNP but we all know what the price of that would be.)
Blair did, I believe
I don't think so, Charles.
Labour Party seats won in Scotland during General Elections:
1997: 56 2001: 56 2005: 41 (boundary changes meant Blair lost 5 seats not 15)
Gordon Brown took over and in:
2010 Labour also won 41 seats in Scotland
In 2015 Labour won 1 seat in Scotland, losing 40 of their MPs under Metropolitan Miliband. In 2017, Corbynism took them up to 7 seats in Scotland, losing all of those gains in 2019 when Labour again returned to 1 seat.
I fail to see how Labour can possibly win a majority unless they win back their Scottish base.
In 1997 Blair won 328 out of 529 English seats. That’s a majority of English seats (and very close to a majority in the UK Parliament with the break being 330).
He also won 34/40 seats in Wales pushing him over the line.
(I’m agreeing with your point, btw, is that it is very hard for Labour without Scotland - Blair is the exception that proves the rule)
Yep but, with respect Charles, Tony Blair's 1997 General Election win was a once in lifetime Labour victory. The Conservatives lost 171 seats. It was a tsunami.
I think you probably know that, and that it will not be repeated under Keir Starmer, as you acknowledge.
We need to be real. I cannot see how Labour can win a General Election majority again unless they regain their base in Scotland.
Pedantic, but 1997 was not a “once in a lifetime” result. The 2001 GE had almost exactly the same outcome
So represented a continuation, not a once in a lifetime reversal of electoral fortunes of such magnitude.
Labour lost a handful of seats in 2001 but the result was pretty close to 1997. I made a mistake down thread. It was the 2005 election where a lead of 2.8% gave Blair an overall majority of 60 which made people wonder if the Tories could win again. It really took the GFC and the incompetence of Brown to change that apparent dominance.
I remain unpersuaded that there is anything any more inevitable about the efficiency that Boris achieved in 2019.
I agree that the future is not written in stone. But it is hard to see what forces might transform Labour's fortunes within the space of three years, even if the government becomes significantly less popular.
It was a slightly pointless point by not fire. He knows what I meant. 1997 was a once in a lifetime result, just as 1945 and 1979 were. The fact that 1983 and 2001 almost replicated them isn't pedantry. Okay, I suppose 'generation' would be less hyperbole
We may need to put 2019 in the same category: a seismic shift.
Ydoethur, the thing is that if we're saying that Labour have gone from representing the working class to representing the Metropolitan elite then fine but they won't win power from such a base. It's not even entirely true. There are large swathes of cities, especially in the north and east, which did not reap the Eurostar love-in of the Blairite years. It's a London centric party now.
I really think Labour are in huge trouble. It's not simply about Sir Keir Starmer. It's their whole vision. What do they stand for and represent now that Boris has swung a sufficient number of working class voters behind his Brexit Britain?
I will bet that 2019 was the political reboot for the tories and we should ignore the preceding pre-Brexit semi tory wins. I could see a scenario where Labour are out of power for at least another 10, perhaps 15, years. They need to find a reason for existing and right now I've no idea what it is. I don't think they do either.
Anyone? What's their vision which is going to recapture the north?
I think this is the key to the Red Wall poll yesterday. 37% have no idea what Starmer is for. They get that he is not Corbyn, and displays flags like a Jubilee summer fete, but where is the beef?
Clearly not being Corbyn is insufficient to win power, but it was the necessary first step. What Labour really needs is the LibDems to rise from the dead and begin to build that anti Tory coalition. Alas.
Indeed, the LibDems are key to a non-Conservative future.
Those polled aren't paying attention to events if they are suggesting Labour are playing party politics with the pandemic. That would be my biggest criticism of Starmer's Labour, they have called Johnson out on absolutely nothing, excess deaths, PPE procurement corruption, track and trace profligacy and the September non-lockdowns.
The media narrative is at present very much in Johnson's favour, and it is a false narrative. Can this continue?
If those are the main reasons why people in the Red Wall are not voting Labour they are very far from insurmountable.
You can't win against a government which has not self destructed (and despite apparent efforts this one has not) unless you can tell the middling non political voter about retail issues:
what is wrong how you will put it right what your vision is for the future where there is clear ground and difference between you and the other lot.
At this moment Labour' score out of 10 on these 4 is about 2 0 1 -5
At the time, 1996/7, Blair would have scored between 8 and 10 on all of these. Boris and co score well ahead of SKS on all four. And they are in government.
But they want them to be made in the EU, don’t have a factory yet and haven’t approved Sputnik.
Book domestic UK holidays this summer, folks!
There's a fair bit of support from various figures in France to approve Sputnik to help speed up the campaign. It's supposedly a good vaccine but I'm not sure how I'd feel about being offered it given the lack of transparency surrounding it.
The UK has no need for it but I wonder if it would be approved if there was a similar shortage of vaccines there, and whether British people would trust getting it?
Several countries have run their own trials before approving a vaccine, so even if our authorities had doubts about the evidence provided from elsewhere, they could have run a trial here if that had been necessary.
I don't see any reason to reject a vaccine based on where it comes from, except that the evidence might have been judged in an unscrupulous attempt to sell more of it.
Trials need to take place where the virus is rampant, which is not here. At least not at the moment.
True, but @Paristonda implied the scenario where we hadn't been so fortunate with vaccine supply.
Well yes, any port in a storm. But the thing is, the Germans seems to be willing to go for a pig in a poke called Sputnik rather than entertain a vaccine that is conjectured to have adverse consequences with an extremely small likelihood.
On the subject of unions it will be interesting to see post covid how effective rail and tube strikes are going to be. I suspect now people are more geared up for homeworking and companies used to it they will become more a minor incovenience than previously .
Doesn't that depend on whether the authorities and the Mayor of London grow a backbone or not?
It's not long since Ken Livingstone was cheering on tube strikes whilst he was Mayor.
Yet the Scottish still want more money and if you even vaguely point this out to people outside Scotland their desire for Scotland to go independent rises rapidly.
Publish that information and ask for a Scottish independence referendum with the whole UK voting and I reckon the Scots would vote to remain while the English voted by 60%+ to get rid.
I was interested in the ideas put forward for some kind of federal structure on recent threads, and have been wondering whether there could be any advantage in combining some of those ideas with a rotating Premiership. So whatever the makeup of the UK parliament and administration, the PM would come from the party in power in whichever of E, W, S, NI.
Make life a bit lumpy for the administration, but gives every part a look-in.
It was a slightly pointless point by not fire. He knows what I meant. 1997 was a once in a lifetime result, just as 1945 and 1979 were. The fact that 1983 and 2001 almost replicated them isn't pedantry. Okay, I suppose 'generation' would be less hyperbole
We may need to put 2019 in the same category: a seismic shift.
Ydoethur, the thing is that if we're saying that Labour have gone from representing the working class to representing the Metropolitan elite then fine but they won't win power from such a base. It's not even entirely true. There are large swathes of cities, especially in the north and east, which did not reap the Eurostar love-in of the Blairite years. It's a London centric party now.
I really think Labour are in huge trouble. It's not simply about Sir Keir Starmer. It's their whole vision. What do they stand for and represent now that Boris has swung a sufficient number of working class voters behind his Brexit Britain?
I will bet that 2019 was the political reboot for the tories and we should ignore the preceding pre-Brexit semi tory wins. I could see a scenario where Labour are out of power for at least another 10, perhaps 15, years. They need to find a reason for existing and right now I've no idea what it is. I don't think they do either.
Anyone? What's their vision which is going to recapture the north?
I've made suggestions before but the obvious ones are to address real issues for those who are missing out. So they should be championing the rights of casual workers with zero hour contracts and all the joys of "self employment". They should be focusing on those who can't get housing, who are stuck living at home with mum and dad until their mid 20s. They should be more radical about student debt which is now blighting an entire generation's opportunities to get their own home. They should be more realistic and pragmatic in drugs policy and help those afflicted rather than jailing them.
Many of these groups are young and don't vote enough but they have relatives and friends who do and must be disappointed that the State shows so little interest in them. Once upon a time, under a different economic structure, trade unions would have represented many of these people but they are no longer relevant. Nevertheless, they need a champion and Labour could be it.
Did you watch "The Syndicate" last night? Exactly the sort of people you describe, who need a champion. The firm where the young people worked was taken over, and they were told that they would, in the future, be on pro hours contracts.
I didn't, I was working until late, but yes. A huge swathe of our workforce are being casualised. It was an existing trend but it seems to have been given a huge boost by Covid, the lockdown and delivery culture. Who is going to speak for these people? If its not Labour what the hell is Labour for?
I think that the paradox is that the rise of the gig economy and a casualised workforce is a response to the success of private sector unions in the past. Many of the issues that drove unionisation became law over the decades, holiday pay, sick pay, prevention of arbitrary dismissal, health and safety etc etc. When these things all became law, unions lost much of their purpose.
The rise of the gig economy, and it goes far beyond Deliveroo with casual workers in all sorts of academic and office jobs, is a way of circumventing these laws. We have looser employment protections than many EU countries, tighter than the USA, but it does show through in job creation and flexibility.
Perhaps there is a sweetspot where workers are protected from abusive employers yet hiring/firing are permissable to the point that the economy is flexible and dynamic, but we don't seem to have found it yet.
An alternative is to redesign a Universal Credit type scheme so that gig and ZHC workers have a safety net via the government as bread and butter, with the gig job as the jam. It would make lives easier and less hand to mouth, and might even incentivise gig employers into better terms and conditions.
The mistake that many unions made - and some are/have corrected, to their credit - is realising their changed role in the system. Which should be to help provide access to the employment laws you mention. The pitch - Union membership as insurance against problems at work.
Absolutely. I am in the HCSA, a union quite different to the BMA. There is no politics or climate change advocacy, which are fine things but not what I want from a union. What they do have is very formidable representatives for those hauled up before the beak. In comparison the BMA reps are supine and unprepared. I know, because I used to be the beak.
When I get in trouble, I don't want a lapdog as my advocate, I want the pit bull.
I'd argue the same applies to teaching unions - though there representation is possibly more dependent on the quality of the local individuals. It's not at all unusual in my experience for some heads to exercise power arbitrarily, and there needs to be something to keep them in check.
On the subject of unions it will be interesting to see post covid how effective rail and tube strikes are going to be. I suspect now people are more geared up for homeworking and companies used to it they will become more a minor incovenience than previously .
Doesn't that depend on whether the authorities and the Mayor of London grow a backbone or not?
It's not long since Ken Livingstone was cheering on tube strikes whilst he was Mayor.
Not really the power of train and tube strikes is the disruption they cause by lost working time. If even 40% can just shrug and say will work from home for those days then it massively reduces the leverage
Mike do you know how Scotland feeds into this? Have Labour ever won an outright majority off only seats south of the border?
Another way to ask that is that if Labour continue to flounder in Scotland is their route to an overall majority impossible?
(I know some will say that they can form a coalition with the SNP but we all know what the price of that would be.)
Blair did, I believe
I don't think so, Charles.
Labour Party seats won in Scotland during General Elections:
1997: 56 2001: 56 2005: 41 (boundary changes meant Blair lost 5 seats not 15)
Gordon Brown took over and in:
2010 Labour also won 41 seats in Scotland
In 2015 Labour won 1 seat in Scotland, losing 40 of their MPs under Metropolitan Miliband. In 2017, Corbynism took them up to 7 seats in Scotland, losing all of those gains in 2019 when Labour again returned to 1 seat.
I fail to see how Labour can possibly win a majority unless they win back their Scottish base.
In 1997 Blair won 328 out of 529 English seats. That’s a majority of English seats (and very close to a majority in the UK Parliament with the break being 330).
He also won 34/40 seats in Wales pushing him over the line.
(I’m agreeing with your point, btw, is that it is very hard for Labour without Scotland - Blair is the exception that proves the rule)
Yep but, with respect Charles, Tony Blair's 1997 General Election win was a once in lifetime Labour victory. The Conservatives lost 171 seats. It was a tsunami.
I think you probably know that, and that it will not be repeated under Keir Starmer, as you acknowledge.
We need to be real. I cannot see how Labour can win a General Election majority again unless they regain their base in Scotland.
Pedantic, but 1997 was not a “once in a lifetime” result. The 2001 GE had almost exactly the same outcome
So represented a continuation, not a once in a lifetime reversal of electoral fortunes of such magnitude.
Labour lost a handful of seats in 2001 but the result was pretty close to 1997. I made a mistake down thread. It was the 2005 election where a lead of 2.8% gave Blair an overall majority of 60 which made people wonder if the Tories could win again. It really took the GFC and the incompetence of Brown to change that apparent dominance.
I remain unpersuaded that there is anything any more inevitable about the efficiency that Boris achieved in 2019.
I agree that the future is not written in stone. But it is hard to see what forces might transform Labour's fortunes within the space of three years, even if the government becomes significantly less popular.
Economic chaos. It is heading straight for us when furlough stops. Yes people can spend their lockdown savings (I dug into my savings) on new cars and holidays to cheer themselves up, but those are once only economic boosters.
Maybe the vaccine bounce will pay the mortgage, what do I know?
Mike do you know how Scotland feeds into this? Have Labour ever won an outright majority off only seats south of the border?
Another way to ask that is that if Labour continue to flounder in Scotland is their route to an overall majority impossible?
(I know some will say that they can form a coalition with the SNP but we all know what the price of that would be.)
Blair did, I believe
I don't think so, Charles.
Labour Party seats won in Scotland during General Elections:
1997: 56 2001: 56 2005: 41 (boundary changes meant Blair lost 5 seats not 15)
Gordon Brown took over and in:
2010 Labour also won 41 seats in Scotland
In 2015 Labour won 1 seat in Scotland, losing 40 of their MPs under Metropolitan Miliband. In 2017, Corbynism took them up to 7 seats in Scotland, losing all of those gains in 2019 when Labour again returned to 1 seat.
I fail to see how Labour can possibly win a majority unless they win back their Scottish base.
In 1997 Blair won 328 out of 529 English seats. That’s a majority of English seats (and very close to a majority in the UK Parliament with the break being 330).
He also won 34/40 seats in Wales pushing him over the line.
(I’m agreeing with your point, btw, is that it is very hard for Labour without Scotland - Blair is the exception that proves the rule)
Yep but, with respect Charles, Tony Blair's 1997 General Election win was a once in lifetime Labour victory. The Conservatives lost 171 seats. It was a tsunami.
I think you probably know that, and that it will not be repeated under Keir Starmer, as you acknowledge.
We need to be real. I cannot see how Labour can win a General Election majority again unless they regain their base in Scotland.
Pedantic, but 1997 was not a “once in a lifetime” result. The 2001 GE had almost exactly the same outcome
So represented a continuation, not a once in a lifetime reversal of electoral fortunes of such magnitude.
Labour lost a handful of seats in 2001 but the result was pretty close to 1997. I made a mistake down thread. It was the 2005 election where a lead of 2.8% gave Blair an overall majority of 60 which made people wonder if the Tories could win again. It really took the GFC and the incompetence of Brown to change that apparent dominance.
I remain unpersuaded that there is anything any more inevitable about the efficiency that Boris achieved in 2019.
I agree that the future is not written in stone. But it is hard to see what forces might transform Labour's fortunes within the space of three years, even if the government becomes significantly less popular.
Economic chaos. It is heading straight for us when furlough stops. Yes people can spend their lockdown savings (I dug into my savings) on new cars and holidays to cheer themselves up, but those are once only economic boosters.
Maybe the vaccine bounce will pay the mortgage, what do I know?
Fingers crossed for a horrible, deep recession it is then!
It was a slightly pointless point by not fire. He knows what I meant. 1997 was a once in a lifetime result, just as 1945 and 1979 were. The fact that 1983 and 2001 almost replicated them isn't pedantry. Okay, I suppose 'generation' would be less hyperbole
We may need to put 2019 in the same category: a seismic shift.
Ydoethur, the thing is that if we're saying that Labour have gone from representing the working class to representing the Metropolitan elite then fine but they won't win power from such a base. It's not even entirely true. There are large swathes of cities, especially in the north and east, which did not reap the Eurostar love-in of the Blairite years. It's a London centric party now.
I really think Labour are in huge trouble. It's not simply about Sir Keir Starmer. It's their whole vision. What do they stand for and represent now that Boris has swung a sufficient number of working class voters behind his Brexit Britain?
I will bet that 2019 was the political reboot for the tories and we should ignore the preceding pre-Brexit semi tory wins. I could see a scenario where Labour are out of power for at least another 10, perhaps 15, years. They need to find a reason for existing and right now I've no idea what it is. I don't think they do either.
Anyone? What's their vision which is going to recapture the north?
I've made suggestions before but the obvious ones are to address real issues for those who are missing out. So they should be championing the rights of casual workers with zero hour contracts and all the joys of "self employment". They should be focusing on those who can't get housing, who are stuck living at home with mum and dad until their mid 20s. They should be more radical about student debt which is now blighting an entire generation's opportunities to get their own home. They should be more realistic and pragmatic in drugs policy and help those afflicted rather than jailing them.
Many of these groups are young and don't vote enough but they have relatives and friends who do and must be disappointed that the State shows so little interest in them. Once upon a time, under a different economic structure, trade unions would have represented many of these people but they are no longer relevant. Nevertheless, they need a champion and Labour could be it.
Did you watch "The Syndicate" last night? Exactly the sort of people you describe, who need a champion. The firm where the young people worked was taken over, and they were told that they would, in the future, be on pro hours contracts.
I didn't, I was working until late, but yes. A huge swathe of our workforce are being casualised. It was an existing trend but it seems to have been given a huge boost by Covid, the lockdown and delivery culture. Who is going to speak for these people? If its not Labour what the hell is Labour for?
I think that the paradox is that the rise of the gig economy and a casualised workforce is a response to the success of private sector unions in the past. Many of the issues that drove unionisation became law over the decades, holiday pay, sick pay, prevention of arbitrary dismissal, health and safety etc etc. When these things all became law, unions lost much of their purpose.
The rise of the gig economy, and it goes far beyond Deliveroo with casual workers in all sorts of academic and office jobs, is a way of circumventing these laws. We have looser employment protections than many EU countries, tighter than the USA, but it does show through in job creation and flexibility.
Perhaps there is a sweetspot where workers are protected from abusive employers yet hiring/firing are permissable to the point that the economy is flexible and dynamic, but we don't seem to have found it yet.
An alternative is to redesign a Universal Credit type scheme so that gig and ZHC workers have a safety net via the government as bread and butter, with the gig job as the jam. It would make lives easier and less hand to mouth, and might even incentivise gig employers into better terms and conditions.
The mistake that many unions made - and some are/have corrected, to their credit - is realising their changed role in the system. Which should be to help provide access to the employment laws you mention. The pitch - Union membership as insurance against problems at work.
Thinking off the top of my head, is the decline in unions due to the decline of large employers? When large parts of the workforce were employed by large employers (e.g. car manufacturers), the unions were able to perform a collective bargaining role effectively. Now the only monolithic employer left is the public sector - where unions are still strong. N.B. this is based on the premise that the proportion of the workforce employed by large employers has declined - this feels true, but I'd be happy to be contradicted.
Politico: The Biden administration is rethinking a costly system of government-run mass vaccination sites after data revealed the program is lagging well behind a much cheaper federal effort to distribute doses via retail pharmacies.
The government has shipped millions of doses to the 21 mass vaccination hubs, or “pilot” community centers, in states such as California, Florida, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas. The hubs are part of a $4 billion federal system that funds more than 1,000 smaller vaccination locations across the country and provides other vaccination support — such as supplies — to states across the country. The Federal Emergency Management Agency did not respond to repeated questions about how much the pilot sites cost.
Despite the money the federal government has spent on the mass-vaccination pilot sites, they are administering just a fraction of the shots given across the country each day. Federal data show the retail pharmacy program — which has signed up 21 chains and 17,000 stores — can reach far more Americans in a shorter time, according to four senior officials with direct knowledge of the matter. The bottom line, those sources said, is that more Americans seem to be willing to walk to their local pharmacist to get the vaccine than to travel to a federal vaccination site for the shot.
Several studies have shown that the British public, and I believe, the American has at least as much trust in pharmacists ....... generally community ones, in shops ...... as they do in GP's. My (long-ago, now) experience was that being asked for advice could be a 'many times a day' experience, especially where the same pharmacist had ben visible in the pharmacy for several years.
Here in Spain they are really good. They are heavily linked in via the prescription system and ultra helpful.
Valencia has the most pharmacists I have ever seen by a long shot, one every 200 yards or so, throughout the city centre. Quite baffling to someone from the UK why there are so many, guess not being in the big supermarkets a key part of it.
Apologies if this has already been mentioned but between 2010 and 2015 Martin's model said the Blue Meanies needed a lead of over 10% just for a majority of 2 seats.
Sometimes where and how the votes are distributed can be key.
And also how determined the other lot are to kick you out.
One of my favourite bits of electoral statistical gubbins is how stable the Conservative share of the vote was between 1979 and 1992. Always between 42% and 44%. And lower in 1983 than in 1979. But that covered everything from a landslide to a just-about-working majority. The difference in 1992 was that the non-Conservative forces implicitly worked out that kicking the government was the important thing and so plenty of people were prepared to vote for best-placed challengers. In 1983 and 2019, people weren't.
And in 1997, the enthusiasm to vote however was necessary to kick Conservatives out turned a defeat into a rout.
Which takes us back to those YouGov polls with the Greens on 7% or so. Are there really that many disgruntled lefties who are more concerned with sending a message to Starmer than to Johnson? Quite possibly yes. In which case, heaven help us all.
For PB's Royal Gossip Enthusiasts, the Archbishop speaks:
In an interview with the Italian newspaper la Repubblica, Welby was asked about what happened. He said the legal wedding took place on the Saturday, adding: “But I won’t say what happened at any other meetings.”
The archbishop told the paper: “If any of you ever talk to a priest, you expect them to keep that talk confidential. It doesn’t matter who I’m talking to. I had a number of private and pastoral meetings with the duke and duchess before the wedding.
“The legal wedding was on the Saturday. I signed the wedding certificate, which is a legal document, and I would have committed a serious criminal offence if I signed it knowing it was false.”
During the interview, Meghan had told Winfrey: “You know, three days before our wedding we got married. No one knows that, but we called the archbishop and we just said, ‘Look, this thing, this spectacle, is for the world, but we want our union between us.’”
Yet the Scottish still want more money and if you even vaguely point this out to people outside Scotland their desire for Scotland to go independent rises rapidly.
Publish that information and ask for a Scottish independence referendum with the whole UK voting and I reckon the Scots would vote to remain while the English voted by 60%+ to get rid.
I was interested in the ideas put forward for some kind of federal structure on recent threads, and have been wondering whether there could be any advantage in combining some of those ideas with a rotating Premiership. So whatever the makeup of the UK parliament and administration, the PM would come from the party in power in whichever of E, W, S, NI.
Make life a bit lumpy for the administration, but gives every part a look-in.
I have one major objection to that: DUP
No, NO, NO!
Sinn Fein are quite possibly going to be largest party in Norn shortly. Your scheme could mean a Shinner as UK PM.
Apologies if this has already been mentioned but between 2010 and 2015 Martin's model said the Blue Meanies needed a lead of over 10% just for a majority of 2 seats.
Sometimes where and how the votes are distributed can be key.
And also how determined the other lot are to kick you out.
One of my favourite bits of electoral statistical gubbins is how stable the Conservative share of the vote was between 1979 and 1992. Always between 42% and 44%. And lower in 1983 than in 1979. But that covered everything from a landslide to a just-about-working majority. The difference in 1992 was that the non-Conservative forces implicitly worked out that kicking the government was the important thing and so plenty of people were prepared to vote for best-placed challengers. In 1983 and 2019, people weren't.
And in 1997, the enthusiasm to vote however was necessary to kick Conservatives out turned a defeat into a rout.
Which takes us back to those YouGov polls with the Greens on 7% or so. Are there really that many disgruntled lefties who are more concerned with sending a message to Starmer than to Johnson? Quite possibly yes. In which case, heaven help us all.
Yes, I think there are. Corbynites who won’t vote Labour now.
It was a slightly pointless point by not fire. He knows what I meant. 1997 was a once in a lifetime result, just as 1945 and 1979 were. The fact that 1983 and 2001 almost replicated them isn't pedantry. Okay, I suppose 'generation' would be less hyperbole
We may need to put 2019 in the same category: a seismic shift.
Ydoethur, the thing is that if we're saying that Labour have gone from representing the working class to representing the Metropolitan elite then fine but they won't win power from such a base. It's not even entirely true. There are large swathes of cities, especially in the north and east, which did not reap the Eurostar love-in of the Blairite years. It's a London centric party now.
I really think Labour are in huge trouble. It's not simply about Sir Keir Starmer. It's their whole vision. What do they stand for and represent now that Boris has swung a sufficient number of working class voters behind his Brexit Britain?
I will bet that 2019 was the political reboot for the tories and we should ignore the preceding pre-Brexit semi tory wins. I could see a scenario where Labour are out of power for at least another 10, perhaps 15, years. They need to find a reason for existing and right now I've no idea what it is. I don't think they do either.
Anyone? What's their vision which is going to recapture the north?
I think this is the key to the Red Wall poll yesterday. 37% have no idea what Starmer is for. They get that he is not Corbyn, and displays flags like a Jubilee summer fete, but where is the beef?
Clearly not being Corbyn is insufficient to win power, but it was the necessary first step. What Labour really needs is the LibDems to rise from the dead and begin to build that anti Tory coalition. Alas.
Indeed, the LibDems are key to a non-Conservative future.
Those polled aren't paying attention to events if they are suggesting Labour are playing party politics with the pandemic. That would be my biggest criticism of Starmer's Labour, they have called Johnson out on absolutely nothing, excess deaths, PPE procurement corruption, track and trace profligacy and the September non-lockdowns.
The media narrative is at present very much in Johnson's favour, and it is a false narrative. Can this continue?
If those are the main reasons why people in the Red Wall are not voting Labour they are very far from insurmountable.
I still work to the notion that Government's lose elections, oppositions don't win them.
The calibre of Johnsonian Conservatives are such that they are quite capable of monumental errors that lead to defeat. My fear is monumental errors are being ignored by voters. This is where a little opposition from Starmer and his front bench might come in handy.
While the pandemic dominates the narrative the Tories will live and die by how they manage it. They lost support when they were doing badly, they have gained it as a result of the vaccine roll-out. In that Red Wall poll, the second most cited reason for not backing Labour was that it was playing politics with the pandemic - ie, that it was showing too much opposition. It was two points behind the top reason: not knowing what Labour stands for - ie, not showing enough opposition. I am not sure how you square that!!
Agreed. The notion that only the Conservatives can manage the (presumably Labour incurred from pre-2010) debt, puzzles me. Spending has been cut to the bone, and Johnson claims no new taxes. Ah, we'll pay our way out through economic growth...ROFL!
It is a religious style belief that must not be questioned, or it will be realised as absurd, and who wants to think of themselves as having been absurd?
Mike do you know how Scotland feeds into this? Have Labour ever won an outright majority off only seats south of the border?
Another way to ask that is that if Labour continue to flounder in Scotland is their route to an overall majority impossible?
(I know some will say that they can form a coalition with the SNP but we all know what the price of that would be.)
Blair did, I believe
I don't think so, Charles.
Labour Party seats won in Scotland during General Elections:
1997: 56 2001: 56 2005: 41 (boundary changes meant Blair lost 5 seats not 15)
Gordon Brown took over and in:
2010 Labour also won 41 seats in Scotland
In 2015 Labour won 1 seat in Scotland, losing 40 of their MPs under Metropolitan Miliband. In 2017, Corbynism took them up to 7 seats in Scotland, losing all of those gains in 2019 when Labour again returned to 1 seat.
I fail to see how Labour can possibly win a majority unless they win back their Scottish base.
In 1997 Blair won 328 out of 529 English seats. That’s a majority of English seats (and very close to a majority in the UK Parliament with the break being 330).
He also won 34/40 seats in Wales pushing him over the line.
(I’m agreeing with your point, btw, is that it is very hard for Labour without Scotland - Blair is the exception that proves the rule)
Yep but, with respect Charles, Tony Blair's 1997 General Election win was a once in lifetime Labour victory. The Conservatives lost 171 seats. It was a tsunami.
I think you probably know that, and that it will not be repeated under Keir Starmer, as you acknowledge.
We need to be real. I cannot see how Labour can win a General Election majority again unless they regain their base in Scotland.
Pedantic, but 1997 was not a “once in a lifetime” result. The 2001 GE had almost exactly the same outcome
So represented a continuation, not a once in a lifetime reversal of electoral fortunes of such magnitude.
Labour lost a handful of seats in 2001 but the result was pretty close to 1997. I made a mistake down thread. It was the 2005 election where a lead of 2.8% gave Blair an overall majority of 60 which made people wonder if the Tories could win again. It really took the GFC and the incompetence of Brown to change that apparent dominance.
I remain unpersuaded that there is anything any more inevitable about the efficiency that Boris achieved in 2019.
I agree that the future is not written in stone. But it is hard to see what forces might transform Labour's fortunes within the space of three years, even if the government becomes significantly less popular.
Economic chaos. It is heading straight for us when furlough stops. Yes people can spend their lockdown savings (I dug into my savings) on new cars and holidays to cheer themselves up, but those are once only economic boosters.
Maybe the vaccine bounce will pay the mortgage, what do I know?
Fingers crossed for a horrible, deep recession it is then!
OK Einstein, how do we avoid it? Retail jobs-gone, hospitality jobs gone, travel industry jobs-gone. The steel industry in dire trouble. So how do we avert this recession, unless Sunak can crack on with his job retention schemes until GE2024.
Apologies if this has already been mentioned but between 2010 and 2015 Martin's model said the Blue Meanies needed a lead of over 10% just for a majority of 2 seats.
Sometimes where and how the votes are distributed can be key.
The LD's lying dead in the water possibly changes that dynamic.
Apologies if this has already been mentioned but between 2010 and 2015 Martin's model said the Blue Meanies needed a lead of over 10% just for a majority of 2 seats.
Sometimes where and how the votes are distributed can be key.
Mike do you know how Scotland feeds into this? Have Labour ever won an outright majority off only seats south of the border?
Another way to ask that is that if Labour continue to flounder in Scotland is their route to an overall majority impossible?
(I know some will say that they can form a coalition with the SNP but we all know what the price of that would be.)
Blair did, I believe
I don't think so, Charles.
Labour Party seats won in Scotland during General Elections:
1997: 56 2001: 56 2005: 41 (boundary changes meant Blair lost 5 seats not 15)
Gordon Brown took over and in:
2010 Labour also won 41 seats in Scotland
In 2015 Labour won 1 seat in Scotland, losing 40 of their MPs under Metropolitan Miliband. In 2017, Corbynism took them up to 7 seats in Scotland, losing all of those gains in 2019 when Labour again returned to 1 seat.
I fail to see how Labour can possibly win a majority unless they win back their Scottish base.
In 1997 Blair won 328 out of 529 English seats. That’s a majority of English seats (and very close to a majority in the UK Parliament with the break being 330).
He also won 34/40 seats in Wales pushing him over the line.
(I’m agreeing with your point, btw, is that it is very hard for Labour without Scotland - Blair is the exception that proves the rule)
Yep but, with respect Charles, Tony Blair's 1997 General Election win was a once in lifetime Labour victory. The Conservatives lost 171 seats. It was a tsunami.
I think you probably know that, and that it will not be repeated under Keir Starmer, as you acknowledge.
We need to be real. I cannot see how Labour can win a General Election majority again unless they regain their base in Scotland.
Pedantic, but 1997 was not a “once in a lifetime” result. The 2001 GE had almost exactly the same outcome
So represented a continuation, not a once in a lifetime reversal of electoral fortunes of such magnitude.
Labour lost a handful of seats in 2001 but the result was pretty close to 1997. I made a mistake down thread. It was the 2005 election where a lead of 2.8% gave Blair an overall majority of 60 which made people wonder if the Tories could win again. It really took the GFC and the incompetence of Brown to change that apparent dominance.
I remain unpersuaded that there is anything any more inevitable about the efficiency that Boris achieved in 2019.
I agree that the future is not written in stone. But it is hard to see what forces might transform Labour's fortunes within the space of three years, even if the government becomes significantly less popular.
Economic chaos. It is heading straight for us when furlough stops. Yes people can spend their lockdown savings (I dug into my savings) on new cars and holidays to cheer themselves up, but those are once only economic boosters.
Maybe the vaccine bounce will pay the mortgage, what do I know?
Fingers crossed for a horrible, deep recession it is then!
OK Einstein, how do we avoid it? Retail jobs-gone, hospitality jobs gone, travel industry jobs-gone. The steel industry in dire trouble. So how do we avert this recession, unless Sunak can crack on with his job retention schemes until GE2024.
I don’t know, I was just saying Boris haters want to hope there is one or they’ll never be rid of him
Apologies if this has already been mentioned but between 2010 and 2015 Martin's model said the Blue Meanies needed a lead of over 10% just for a majority of 2 seats.
Sometimes where and how the votes are distributed can be key.
i.e. some votes are worth more than others.
As someone who has always lived in pretty safe seats, whats the best marginal in the country to move to?
Apologies if this has already been mentioned but between 2010 and 2015 Martin's model said the Blue Meanies needed a lead of over 10% just for a majority of 2 seats.
Sometimes where and how the votes are distributed can be key.
And also how determined the other lot are to kick you out.
One of my favourite bits of electoral statistical gubbins is how stable the Conservative share of the vote was between 1979 and 1992. Always between 42% and 44%. And lower in 1983 than in 1979. But that covered everything from a landslide to a just-about-working majority. The difference in 1992 was that the non-Conservative forces implicitly worked out that kicking the government was the important thing and so plenty of people were prepared to vote for best-placed challengers. In 1983 and 2019, people weren't.
And in 1997, the enthusiasm to vote however was necessary to kick Conservatives out turned a defeat into a rout.
Which takes us back to those YouGov polls with the Greens on 7% or so. Are there really that many disgruntled lefties who are more concerned with sending a message to Starmer than to Johnson? Quite possibly yes. In which case, heaven help us all.
Yes, I think there are. Corbynites who won’t vote Labour now.
The are plenty in NIP although that is hardly a viable route to destroying this nefandous regime.
Apologies if this has already been mentioned but between 2010 and 2015 Martin's model said the Blue Meanies needed a lead of over 10% just for a majority of 2 seats.
Sometimes where and how the votes are distributed can be key.
The LD's lying dead in the water possibly changes that dynamic.
Partly, in 2015 in England & Wales there was a swing from Con to Lab but Labour only made a net gain of two seats from the Tories, the Tories gained 8 seats from Labour, without that no Tory majority.
Once Labour realise increasing their majorities in Liverpool and other very safe seats ain't going to help them they might have a chance.
Mike do you know how Scotland feeds into this? Have Labour ever won an outright majority off only seats south of the border?
Another way to ask that is that if Labour continue to flounder in Scotland is their route to an overall majority impossible?
(I know some will say that they can form a coalition with the SNP but we all know what the price of that would be.)
Blair did, I believe
I don't think so, Charles.
Labour Party seats won in Scotland during General Elections:
1997: 56 2001: 56 2005: 41 (boundary changes meant Blair lost 5 seats not 15)
Gordon Brown took over and in:
2010 Labour also won 41 seats in Scotland
In 2015 Labour won 1 seat in Scotland, losing 40 of their MPs under Metropolitan Miliband. In 2017, Corbynism took them up to 7 seats in Scotland, losing all of those gains in 2019 when Labour again returned to 1 seat.
I fail to see how Labour can possibly win a majority unless they win back their Scottish base.
In 1997 Blair won 328 out of 529 English seats. That’s a majority of English seats (and very close to a majority in the UK Parliament with the break being 330).
He also won 34/40 seats in Wales pushing him over the line.
(I’m agreeing with your point, btw, is that it is very hard for Labour without Scotland - Blair is the exception that proves the rule)
Yep but, with respect Charles, Tony Blair's 1997 General Election win was a once in lifetime Labour victory. The Conservatives lost 171 seats. It was a tsunami.
I think you probably know that, and that it will not be repeated under Keir Starmer, as you acknowledge.
We need to be real. I cannot see how Labour can win a General Election majority again unless they regain their base in Scotland.
Pedantic, but 1997 was not a “once in a lifetime” result. The 2001 GE had almost exactly the same outcome
So represented a continuation, not a once in a lifetime reversal of electoral fortunes of such magnitude.
Labour lost a handful of seats in 2001 but the result was pretty close to 1997. I made a mistake down thread. It was the 2005 election where a lead of 2.8% gave Blair an overall majority of 60 which made people wonder if the Tories could win again. It really took the GFC and the incompetence of Brown to change that apparent dominance.
I remain unpersuaded that there is anything any more inevitable about the efficiency that Boris achieved in 2019.
I agree that the future is not written in stone. But it is hard to see what forces might transform Labour's fortunes within the space of three years, even if the government becomes significantly less popular.
Economic chaos. It is heading straight for us when furlough stops. Yes people can spend their lockdown savings (I dug into my savings) on new cars and holidays to cheer themselves up, but those are once only economic boosters.
Maybe the vaccine bounce will pay the mortgage, what do I know?
Fingers crossed for a horrible, deep recession it is then!
OK Einstein, how do we avoid it? Retail jobs-gone, hospitality jobs gone, travel industry jobs-gone. The steel industry in dire trouble. So how do we avert this recession, unless Sunak can crack on with his job retention schemes until GE2024.
We can hardly avoid a deep recession, given that it has already happened. The next couple of years will be a recovery of sorts.
"Of course Electoral Calculus gives a simplified picture but the overall message is bang on – it is the distribution of the Labour vote which is very high in its strongholds but there are not enough marginals."
If Labour can get to 44.7% in the polls, then certainly won't be off the back of more votes in Tower Hamlets - there just aren't enough votes.
Therefore this analysis is more useful, I think, as a reminder of the challenge that Labour have in adding 50% to their share of the vote across the rest of the country, not as a separate challenge in and of itself.
Apologies if this has already been mentioned but between 2010 and 2015 Martin's model said the Blue Meanies needed a lead of over 10% just for a majority of 2 seats.
Sometimes where and how the votes are distributed can be key.
i.e. some votes are worth more than others.
Yes, has always been the case.
I mean in 1997 the Lib Dems saw their vote share fall 1% and their total votes down nearly 800,000 from 1992 but they more than doubled their MPs from 20 to 46.
For PB's Royal Gossip Enthusiasts, the Archbishop speaks:
In an interview with the Italian newspaper la Repubblica, Welby was asked about what happened. He said the legal wedding took place on the Saturday, adding: “But I won’t say what happened at any other meetings.”
The archbishop told the paper: “If any of you ever talk to a priest, you expect them to keep that talk confidential. It doesn’t matter who I’m talking to. I had a number of private and pastoral meetings with the duke and duchess before the wedding.
“The legal wedding was on the Saturday. I signed the wedding certificate, which is a legal document, and I would have committed a serious criminal offence if I signed it knowing it was false.”
During the interview, Meghan had told Winfrey: “You know, three days before our wedding we got married. No one knows that, but we called the archbishop and we just said, ‘Look, this thing, this spectacle, is for the world, but we want our union between us.’”
Who could have guessed that the Archbishop of Canterbury knows what he is doing, takes marriage very seriously, and is scrupulous about obeying the law?
I think I may have said at the time that if Welby had done what they claimed that would have been the end of his time in office. It was obvious that Harry and Meghan were wrong.
Mike do you know how Scotland feeds into this? Have Labour ever won an outright majority off only seats south of the border?
Another way to ask that is that if Labour continue to flounder in Scotland is their route to an overall majority impossible?
(I know some will say that they can form a coalition with the SNP but we all know what the price of that would be.)
Blair did, I believe
I don't think so, Charles.
Labour Party seats won in Scotland during General Elections:
1997: 56 2001: 56 2005: 41 (boundary changes meant Blair lost 5 seats not 15)
Gordon Brown took over and in:
2010 Labour also won 41 seats in Scotland
In 2015 Labour won 1 seat in Scotland, losing 40 of their MPs under Metropolitan Miliband.
In 2017, Corbynism took them up to 7 seats in Scotland, losing all of those gains in 2019 when Labour again returned to 1 seat.
I fail to see how Labour can possibly win a majority unless they win back their Scottish base.
Yes, if you look at what the Labour majorities would have been in 1997, 2001 and 2005 with only 1 Scottish seat in place of what actually happened, you can see what a big difference it would have made:
1997: 69 majority instead of 179 2001: 57 majority instead of 167 2005: short by 9 instead of 66 majority
Politico: The Biden administration is rethinking a costly system of government-run mass vaccination sites after data revealed the program is lagging well behind a much cheaper federal effort to distribute doses via retail pharmacies.
The government has shipped millions of doses to the 21 mass vaccination hubs, or “pilot” community centers, in states such as California, Florida, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas. The hubs are part of a $4 billion federal system that funds more than 1,000 smaller vaccination locations across the country and provides other vaccination support — such as supplies — to states across the country. The Federal Emergency Management Agency did not respond to repeated questions about how much the pilot sites cost.
Despite the money the federal government has spent on the mass-vaccination pilot sites, they are administering just a fraction of the shots given across the country each day. Federal data show the retail pharmacy program — which has signed up 21 chains and 17,000 stores — can reach far more Americans in a shorter time, according to four senior officials with direct knowledge of the matter. The bottom line, those sources said, is that more Americans seem to be willing to walk to their local pharmacist to get the vaccine than to travel to a federal vaccination site for the shot.
Several studies have shown that the British public, and I believe, the American has at least as much trust in pharmacists ....... generally community ones, in shops ...... as they do in GP's. My (long-ago, now) experience was that being asked for advice could be a 'many times a day' experience, especially where the same pharmacist had ben visible in the pharmacy for several years.
Here in Spain they are really good. They are heavily linked in via the prescription system and ultra helpful.
Valencia has the most pharmacists I have ever seen by a long shot, one every 200 yards or so, throughout the city centre. Quite baffling to someone from the UK why there are so many, guess not being in the big supermarkets a key part of it.
There are, or were when I had much to do with it, quite a few Spanish pharmacists in the UK, too, waiting for 'dead mens shoes' to take over a pharmacy.
Apologies if this has already been mentioned but between 2010 and 2015 Martin's model said the Blue Meanies needed a lead of over 10% just for a majority of 2 seats.
Sometimes where and how the votes are distributed can be key.
And also how determined the other lot are to kick you out.
One of my favourite bits of electoral statistical gubbins is how stable the Conservative share of the vote was between 1979 and 1992. Always between 42% and 44%. And lower in 1983 than in 1979. But that covered everything from a landslide to a just-about-working majority. The difference in 1992 was that the non-Conservative forces implicitly worked out that kicking the government was the important thing and so plenty of people were prepared to vote for best-placed challengers. In 1983 and 2019, people weren't.
And in 1997, the enthusiasm to vote however was necessary to kick Conservatives out turned a defeat into a rout.
Which takes us back to those YouGov polls with the Greens on 7% or so. Are there really that many disgruntled lefties who are more concerned with sending a message to Starmer than to Johnson? Quite possibly yes. In which case, heaven help us all.
That is absolutely spot on. The key will be how determined the electorate is to kick out the Tories. Right now, it isn't - even though, according to YouGov, Tory support is down on the general election. It's also worth remembering that at the start of the last election campaign, Labour was on 21% with YouGov.
Someone made the point to me on twitter that Boris and the Government have been all over the media and tv for a year, and that’s why they are dominating the opposition so much. Made me think maybe this is a dry run for a GE in a way, and that way the polling makes sense. Put the charismatic frontman on tv non stop and polling changes... the last 4 polls have been leads of 4,8,8 & 10, so the 7/4 @Quincel advised on Con Maj looks fantastic. Anything above EVS must be value in my book
Apologies if this has already been mentioned but between 2010 and 2015 Martin's model said the Blue Meanies needed a lead of over 10% just for a majority of 2 seats.
Sometimes where and how the votes are distributed can be key.
And also how determined the other lot are to kick you out.
One of my favourite bits of electoral statistical gubbins is how stable the Conservative share of the vote was between 1979 and 1992. Always between 42% and 44%. And lower in 1983 than in 1979. But that covered everything from a landslide to a just-about-working majority. The difference in 1992 was that the non-Conservative forces implicitly worked out that kicking the government was the important thing and so plenty of people were prepared to vote for best-placed challengers. In 1983 and 2019, people weren't.
And in 1997, the enthusiasm to vote however was necessary to kick Conservatives out turned a defeat into a rout.
Which takes us back to those YouGov polls with the Greens on 7% or so. Are there really that many disgruntled lefties who are more concerned with sending a message to Starmer than to Johnson? Quite possibly yes. In which case, heaven help us all.
Yes, I think there are. Corbynites who won’t vote Labour now.
I wonder how many of them voted Labour prior to Corbyn being in control - it can't have been many.
Although it's also highly likely that a lot of those Green voters are younger and may not have been eligible to vote in prior elections.
Apologies if this has already been mentioned but between 2010 and 2015 Martin's model said the Blue Meanies needed a lead of over 10% just for a majority of 2 seats.
Sometimes where and how the votes are distributed can be key.
The LD's lying dead in the water possibly changes that dynamic.
Partly, in 2015 in England & Wales there was a swing from Con to Lab but Labour only made a net gain of two seats from the Tories, the Tories gained 8 seats from Labour, without that no Tory majority.
Once Labour realise increasing their majorities in Liverpool and other very safe seats ain't going to help them they might have a chance.
The Tory 2015 majority was largely as a result of gains from the LibDems. Coupled of course with the rise of the SNP.
Utterly disgraceful amount of litter in Endcliffe park this morning, I expect other parks around the country will be similar.
It's mainly the fault of the litterers of course, but why can't the authorities provide extra bins when they must know huge crowds are likely? I was walking round a large park recently which had one litter bin for thousands of visitors and it was overflowing in all directions with paper coffee cups.
Yet the Scottish still want more money and if you even vaguely point this out to people outside Scotland their desire for Scotland to go independent rises rapidly.
Publish that information and ask for a Scottish independence referendum with the whole UK voting and I reckon the Scots would vote to remain while the English voted by 60%+ to get rid.
I was interested in the ideas put forward for some kind of federal structure on recent threads, and have been wondering whether there could be any advantage in combining some of those ideas with a rotating Premiership. So whatever the makeup of the UK parliament and administration, the PM would come from the party in power in whichever of E, W, S, NI.
Make life a bit lumpy for the administration, but gives every part a look-in.
I have one major objection to that: DUP
No, NO, NO!
Sinn Fein are quite possibly going to be largest party in Norn shortly. Your scheme could mean a Shinner as UK PM.
The ghost of Daniel O'Connell stays Hi!
Be a bit awkward if the PM refused to sit in parliament, wouldn't it?
We'd also be getting regular commons votes on Scottish independence, presumably.
Apologies if this has already been mentioned but between 2010 and 2015 Martin's model said the Blue Meanies needed a lead of over 10% just for a majority of 2 seats.
Sometimes where and how the votes are distributed can be key.
The LD's lying dead in the water possibly changes that dynamic.
Partly, in 2015 in England & Wales there was a swing from Con to Lab but Labour only made a net gain of two seats from the Tories, the Tories gained 8 seats from Labour, without that no Tory majority.
Once Labour realise increasing their majorities in Liverpool and other very safe seats ain't going to help them they might have a chance.
The Tory 2015 majority was largely as a result of gains from the LibDems. Coupled of course with the rise of the SNP.
Even if Labour had held everyone of their 41 Scottish seats the Tories would have still won a majority.
Apologies if this has already been mentioned but between 2010 and 2015 Martin's model said the Blue Meanies needed a lead of over 10% just for a majority of 2 seats.
Sometimes where and how the votes are distributed can be key.
And also how determined the other lot are to kick you out.
One of my favourite bits of electoral statistical gubbins is how stable the Conservative share of the vote was between 1979 and 1992. Always between 42% and 44%. And lower in 1983 than in 1979. But that covered everything from a landslide to a just-about-working majority. The difference in 1992 was that the non-Conservative forces implicitly worked out that kicking the government was the important thing and so plenty of people were prepared to vote for best-placed challengers. In 1983 and 2019, people weren't.
And in 1997, the enthusiasm to vote however was necessary to kick Conservatives out turned a defeat into a rout.
Which takes us back to those YouGov polls with the Greens on 7% or so. Are there really that many disgruntled lefties who are more concerned with sending a message to Starmer than to Johnson? Quite possibly yes. In which case, heaven help us all.
That is absolutely spot on. The key will be how determined the electorate is to kick out the Tories. Right now, it isn't - even though, according to YouGov, Tory support is down on the general election. It's also worth remembering that at the start of the last election campaign, Labour was on 21% with YouGov.
In the last YouGov before Boris became leader the Cons led 25-21. So, two new leaders have taken over from unpopular predecessors, and its now 42-32
Mike do you know how Scotland feeds into this? Have Labour ever won an outright majority off only seats south of the border?
Another way to ask that is that if Labour continue to flounder in Scotland is their route to an overall majority impossible?
(I know some will say that they can form a coalition with the SNP but we all know what the price of that would be.)
Blair did, I believe
I don't think so, Charles.
Labour Party seats won in Scotland during General Elections:
1997: 56 2001: 56 2005: 41 (boundary changes meant Blair lost 5 seats not 15)
Gordon Brown took over and in:
2010 Labour also won 41 seats in Scotland
In 2015 Labour won 1 seat in Scotland, losing 40 of their MPs under Metropolitan Miliband. In 2017, Corbynism took them up to 7 seats in Scotland, losing all of those gains in 2019 when Labour again returned to 1 seat.
I fail to see how Labour can possibly win a majority unless they win back their Scottish base.
In 1997 Blair won 328 out of 529 English seats. That’s a majority of English seats (and very close to a majority in the UK Parliament with the break being 330).
He also won 34/40 seats in Wales pushing him over the line.
(I’m agreeing with your point, btw, is that it is very hard for Labour without Scotland - Blair is the exception that proves the rule)
Yep but, with respect Charles, Tony Blair's 1997 General Election win was a once in lifetime Labour victory. The Conservatives lost 171 seats. It was a tsunami.
I think you probably know that, and that it will not be repeated under Keir Starmer, as you acknowledge.
We need to be real. I cannot see how Labour can win a General Election majority again unless they regain their base in Scotland.
Pedantic, but 1997 was not a “once in a lifetime” result. The 2001 GE had almost exactly the same outcome
So represented a continuation, not a once in a lifetime reversal of electoral fortunes of such magnitude.
Labour lost a handful of seats in 2001 but the result was pretty close to 1997. I made a mistake down thread. It was the 2005 election where a lead of 2.8% gave Blair an overall majority of 60 which made people wonder if the Tories could win again. It really took the GFC and the incompetence of Brown to change that apparent dominance.
I remain unpersuaded that there is anything any more inevitable about the efficiency that Boris achieved in 2019.
I agree that the future is not written in stone. But it is hard to see what forces might transform Labour's fortunes within the space of three years, even if the government becomes significantly less popular.
Economic chaos. It is heading straight for us when furlough stops. Yes people can spend their lockdown savings (I dug into my savings) on new cars and holidays to cheer themselves up, but those are once only economic boosters.
Maybe the vaccine bounce will pay the mortgage, what do I know?
Fingers crossed for a horrible, deep recession it is then!
OK Einstein, how do we avoid it? Retail jobs-gone, hospitality jobs gone, travel industry jobs-gone. The steel industry in dire trouble. So how do we avert this recession, unless Sunak can crack on with his job retention schemes until GE2024.
I don't dispute the basic point, but one thing that will be interesting is whether there's a bit of an entrepreneurial boom. Anecdata, but I know of a number of furloughed people who have taken the opportunity to pursue the cottage business they'd been mulling or half doing for a while. Some seem to be doing pretty well - Etsy shops and the like. It's breathing space to try something else out low/zero risk - still get furlough pay and the bonus of whatever the business manages to bring in.
I suspect most will scale back/fold once the main employment becomes available again, but for some, maybe not...
Utterly disgraceful amount of litter in Endcliffe park this morning, I expect other parks around the country will be similar.
It's mainly the fault of the litterers of course, but why can't the authorities provide extra bins when they must know huge crowds are likely? I was walking round a large park recently which had one litter bin for thousands of visitors and it was overflowing in all directions with paper coffee cups.
You'll never get enough bins for when a park gets people in those numbers, people ought to have the common decency to bag it up and take it home with themselves.
For PB's Royal Gossip Enthusiasts, the Archbishop speaks:
In an interview with the Italian newspaper la Repubblica, Welby was asked about what happened. He said the legal wedding took place on the Saturday, adding: “But I won’t say what happened at any other meetings.”
The archbishop told the paper: “If any of you ever talk to a priest, you expect them to keep that talk confidential. It doesn’t matter who I’m talking to. I had a number of private and pastoral meetings with the duke and duchess before the wedding.
“The legal wedding was on the Saturday. I signed the wedding certificate, which is a legal document, and I would have committed a serious criminal offence if I signed it knowing it was false.”
During the interview, Meghan had told Winfrey: “You know, three days before our wedding we got married. No one knows that, but we called the archbishop and we just said, ‘Look, this thing, this spectacle, is for the world, but we want our union between us.’”
Who could have guessed that the Archbishop of Canterbury knows what he is doing, takes marriage very seriously, and is scrupulous about obeying the law?
I think I may have said at the time that if Welby had done what they claimed that would have been the end of his time in office. It was obvious that Harry and Meghan were wrong.
Would get really fun if H&M now come back and say "but he told us we were married!"
Politico: The Biden administration is rethinking a costly system of government-run mass vaccination sites after data revealed the program is lagging well behind a much cheaper federal effort to distribute doses via retail pharmacies.
The government has shipped millions of doses to the 21 mass vaccination hubs, or “pilot” community centers, in states such as California, Florida, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas. The hubs are part of a $4 billion federal system that funds more than 1,000 smaller vaccination locations across the country and provides other vaccination support — such as supplies — to states across the country. The Federal Emergency Management Agency did not respond to repeated questions about how much the pilot sites cost.
Despite the money the federal government has spent on the mass-vaccination pilot sites, they are administering just a fraction of the shots given across the country each day. Federal data show the retail pharmacy program — which has signed up 21 chains and 17,000 stores — can reach far more Americans in a shorter time, according to four senior officials with direct knowledge of the matter. The bottom line, those sources said, is that more Americans seem to be willing to walk to their local pharmacist to get the vaccine than to travel to a federal vaccination site for the shot.
Several studies have shown that the British public, and I believe, the American has at least as much trust in pharmacists ....... generally community ones, in shops ...... as they do in GP's. My (long-ago, now) experience was that being asked for advice could be a 'many times a day' experience, especially where the same pharmacist had ben visible in the pharmacy for several years.
Here in Spain they are really good. They are heavily linked in via the prescription system and ultra helpful.
Valencia has the most pharmacists I have ever seen by a long shot, one every 200 yards or so, throughout the city centre. Quite baffling to someone from the UK why there are so many, guess not being in the big supermarkets a key part of it.
There are, or were when I had much to do with it, quite a few Spanish pharmacists in the UK, too, waiting for 'dead mens shoes' to take over a pharmacy.
That sounds slightly sinister! Much twirling of moustaches and doctoring of the proprietor's meds?
Near me, there's a general use football field. The edges of it always have plenty of litter from people presumably chucking it from cars (there's a busy road adjacent). People are responsible for cleaning up after themselves. Or should be.
If you look at the 2005 and 2010 results, you would conclude that to win a majority, Labour would need Nuneaton.
Currently held by the Conservatives on a 29% majority.
It's difficult to see how Labour are going to get back into power without winning not necessarily Nuneaton itself but seats very similar to it. Unless they really are going to start taking constituencies like Croydon South which currently have smaller majorities.
Mike do you know how Scotland feeds into this? Have Labour ever won an outright majority off only seats south of the border?
Another way to ask that is that if Labour continue to flounder in Scotland is their route to an overall majority impossible?
(I know some will say that they can form a coalition with the SNP but we all know what the price of that would be.)
Blair did, I believe
I don't think so, Charles.
Labour Party seats won in Scotland during General Elections:
1997: 56 2001: 56 2005: 41 (boundary changes meant Blair lost 5 seats not 15)
Gordon Brown took over and in:
2010 Labour also won 41 seats in Scotland
In 2015 Labour won 1 seat in Scotland, losing 40 of their MPs under Metropolitan Miliband. In 2017, Corbynism took them up to 7 seats in Scotland, losing all of those gains in 2019 when Labour again returned to 1 seat.
I fail to see how Labour can possibly win a majority unless they win back their Scottish base.
In 1997 Blair won 328 out of 529 English seats. That’s a majority of English seats (and very close to a majority in the UK Parliament with the break being 330).
He also won 34/40 seats in Wales pushing him over the line.
(I’m agreeing with your point, btw, is that it is very hard for Labour without Scotland - Blair is the exception that proves the rule)
Yep but, with respect Charles, Tony Blair's 1997 General Election win was a once in lifetime Labour victory. The Conservatives lost 171 seats. It was a tsunami.
I think you probably know that, and that it will not be repeated under Keir Starmer, as you acknowledge.
We need to be real. I cannot see how Labour can win a General Election majority again unless they regain their base in Scotland.
Pedantic, but 1997 was not a “once in a lifetime” result. The 2001 GE had almost exactly the same outcome
Also 1945 was similar, in fact even more of a swing. 52 years is much less than the average lifetime.
(Unless of course we're adopting the SNP defintion of a lifetime ...)
If you look at the 2005 and 2010 results, you would conclude that to win a majority, Labour would need Nuneaton.
Currently held by the Conservatives on a 29% majority.
There's all sorts of quirks out there now Mansfield being a safer Tory seat than say Esher and Walton.
Possibly quirks. Or possibly a new normal. In the early 1980s you wouldn't have guessed that 40 years in the future West Virginia would have become one of the Republicans safest bets in a presidential election. Maybe this is the same thing happening here, in both directions?
Mike do you know how Scotland feeds into this? Have Labour ever won an outright majority off only seats south of the border?
Another way to ask that is that if Labour continue to flounder in Scotland is their route to an overall majority impossible?
(I know some will say that they can form a coalition with the SNP but we all know what the price of that would be.)
Blair did, I believe
I don't think so, Charles.
Labour Party seats won in Scotland during General Elections:
1997: 56 2001: 56 2005: 41 (boundary changes meant Blair lost 5 seats not 15)
Gordon Brown took over and in:
2010 Labour also won 41 seats in Scotland
In 2015 Labour won 1 seat in Scotland, losing 40 of their MPs under Metropolitan Miliband. In 2017, Corbynism took them up to 7 seats in Scotland, losing all of those gains in 2019 when Labour again returned to 1 seat.
I fail to see how Labour can possibly win a majority unless they win back their Scottish base.
In 1997 Blair won 328 out of 529 English seats. That’s a majority of English seats (and very close to a majority in the UK Parliament with the break being 330).
He also won 34/40 seats in Wales pushing him over the line.
(I’m agreeing with your point, btw, is that it is very hard for Labour without Scotland - Blair is the exception that proves the rule)
Yep but, with respect Charles, Tony Blair's 1997 General Election win was a once in lifetime Labour victory. The Conservatives lost 171 seats. It was a tsunami.
I think you probably know that, and that it will not be repeated under Keir Starmer, as you acknowledge.
We need to be real. I cannot see how Labour can win a General Election majority again unless they regain their base in Scotland.
Pedantic, but 1997 was not a “once in a lifetime” result. The 2001 GE had almost exactly the same outcome
So represented a continuation, not a once in a lifetime reversal of electoral fortunes of such magnitude.
Labour lost a handful of seats in 2001 but the result was pretty close to 1997. I made a mistake down thread. It was the 2005 election where a lead of 2.8% gave Blair an overall majority of 60 which made people wonder if the Tories could win again. It really took the GFC and the incompetence of Brown to change that apparent dominance.
I remain unpersuaded that there is anything any more inevitable about the efficiency that Boris achieved in 2019.
I agree that the future is not written in stone. But it is hard to see what forces might transform Labour's fortunes within the space of three years, even if the government becomes significantly less popular.
Economic chaos. It is heading straight for us when furlough stops. Yes people can spend their lockdown savings (I dug into my savings) on new cars and holidays to cheer themselves up, but those are once only economic boosters.
Maybe the vaccine bounce will pay the mortgage, what do I know?
Fingers crossed for a horrible, deep recession it is then!
OK Einstein, how do we avoid it? Retail jobs-gone, hospitality jobs gone, travel industry jobs-gone. The steel industry in dire trouble. So how do we avert this recession, unless Sunak can crack on with his job retention schemes until GE2024.
I don't dispute the basic point, but one thing that will be interesting is whether there's a bit of an entrepreneurial boom. Anecdata, but I know of a number of furloughed people who have taken the opportunity to pursue the cottage business they'd been mulling or half doing for a while. Some seem to be doing pretty well - Etsy shops and the like. It's breathing space to try something else out low/zero risk - still get furlough pay and the bonus of whatever the business manages to bring in.
I suspect most will scale back/fold once the main employment becomes available again, but for some, maybe not...
I suspect we'll see a period when some of these businesses will keep going, perhaps with a partner or younger relative who is otherwise under- or un-employed holding the fort. In this connection, Grandson 2, who is aiming for Uni in Autumn was, until this time last year, employed at weekends at a Golf Club, sometimes on golf-associated duties, sometimes on the catering side. I gather that he doesn't expect to be able to go back there; they expect to be able to find enough regular f/t staff.
Mike do you know how Scotland feeds into this? Have Labour ever won an outright majority off only seats south of the border?
Another way to ask that is that if Labour continue to flounder in Scotland is their route to an overall majority impossible?
(I know some will say that they can form a coalition with the SNP but we all know what the price of that would be.)
Blair did, I believe
I don't think so, Charles.
Labour Party seats won in Scotland during General Elections:
1997: 56 2001: 56 2005: 41 (boundary changes meant Blair lost 5 seats not 15)
Gordon Brown took over and in:
2010 Labour also won 41 seats in Scotland
In 2015 Labour won 1 seat in Scotland, losing 40 of their MPs under Metropolitan Miliband. In 2017, Corbynism took them up to 7 seats in Scotland, losing all of those gains in 2019 when Labour again returned to 1 seat.
I fail to see how Labour can possibly win a majority unless they win back their Scottish base.
In 1997 Blair won 328 out of 529 English seats. That’s a majority of English seats (and very close to a majority in the UK Parliament with the break being 330).
He also won 34/40 seats in Wales pushing him over the line.
(I’m agreeing with your point, btw, is that it is very hard for Labour without Scotland - Blair is the exception that proves the rule)
Yep but, with respect Charles, Tony Blair's 1997 General Election win was a once in lifetime Labour victory. The Conservatives lost 171 seats. It was a tsunami.
I think you probably know that, and that it will not be repeated under Keir Starmer, as you acknowledge.
We need to be real. I cannot see how Labour can win a General Election majority again unless they regain their base in Scotland.
Pedantic, but 1997 was not a “once in a lifetime” result. The 2001 GE had almost exactly the same outcome
Also 1945 was similar, in fact even more of a swing. 52 years is much less than the average lifetime.
(Unless of course we're adopting the SNP defintion of a lifetime ...)
For those actually voting in 1945, 52 years is getting towards that, though.
Utterly disgraceful amount of litter in Endcliffe park this morning, I expect other parks around the country will be similar.
I walked through a country park yesterday evening - no litter to be seen.
However at the weekend I walked down a footpath that runs alongside it and there was loads there - I can only assume people were lobbing their crap over the fence into the bushes.
A lot of it was cans, mainly beer cans tbh.
This was where I saw a volunteer way off the paths in the park picking stuff up - much respect to the guy.
If you look at the 2005 and 2010 results, you would conclude that to win a majority, Labour would need Nuneaton.
Currently held by the Conservatives on a 29% majority.
It's difficult to see how Labour are going to get back into power without winning not necessarily Nuneaton itself but seats very similar to it. Unless they really are going to start taking constituencies like Croydon South which currently have smaller majorities.
It is worse than that. If they don't win back the Scottish SNP seats, and also fail at some of the top 125 or so Tory seat targets, you have to go way further down the list, to Basingstoke and JRM's seat in Somerset for example. For this they would have to positively win in a Blair like way and the Tories have their wheels come off.
if Labour have a plan, it involves keeping it very dark at the moment.
It was once the case that Labour held the demographic advantage which the Tories now hold - they needed a lot fewer votes to win a majority than the Tories.
A few big things have changed: The Tories have adapted to changing times, and Labour have not. Labour could and should be the one nation popular party but have blown it; Labour are confined to enclaves with multiple supporters bases, holding incompatible views, but no overall spectrum of support. The Tories have played a ruthless but legitimate game, Labour haven't. Under Corbyn they took a dislike to the electorate. This can never work.
Plus Scotland. Labour dominated Scotland. The party which takes loads of seats on a tiny national share is the SNP. If you add Lab + SNP in the model here, the social democrat left have 379 seats on 49% of the vote. Maybe Holyrood was simply Westminster making the Danegeld mistake again.
It’s almost as if Corbin wasn’t very good at political strategy.
If you look at the 2005 and 2010 results, you would conclude that to win a majority, Labour would need Nuneaton.
Currently held by the Conservatives on a 29% majority.
There's all sorts of quirks out there now Mansfield being a safer Tory seat than say Esher and Walton.
Possibly quirks. Or possibly a new normal. In the early 1980s you wouldn't have guessed that 40 years in the future West Virginia would have become one of the Republicans safest bets in a presidential election. Maybe this is the same thing happening here, in both directions?
If there is a trend in the past few years it is that targeting and investment in marginals has left a soft underbelly of safe seats ready to raid at the right time. When the sun finally sets on this Tory administration, it could be rather interesting.
It was a slightly pointless point by not fire. He knows what I meant. 1997 was a once in a lifetime result, just as 1945 and 1979 were. The fact that 1983 and 2001 almost replicated them isn't pedantry. Okay, I suppose 'generation' would be less hyperbole
We may need to put 2019 in the same category: a seismic shift.
Ydoethur, the thing is that if we're saying that Labour have gone from representing the working class to representing the Metropolitan elite then fine but they won't win power from such a base. It's not even entirely true. There are large swathes of cities, especially in the north and east, which did not reap the Eurostar love-in of the Blairite years. It's a London centric party now.
I really think Labour are in huge trouble. It's not simply about Sir Keir Starmer. It's their whole vision. What do they stand for and represent now that Boris has swung a sufficient number of working class voters behind his Brexit Britain?
I will bet that 2019 was the political reboot for the tories and we should ignore the preceding pre-Brexit semi tory wins. I could see a scenario where Labour are out of power for at least another 10, perhaps 15, years. They need to find a reason for existing and right now I've no idea what it is. I don't think they do either.
Anyone? What's their vision which is going to recapture the north?
I think this is the key to the Red Wall poll yesterday. 37% have no idea what Starmer is for. They get that he is not Corbyn, and displays flags like a Jubilee summer fete, but where is the beef?
Clearly not being Corbyn is insufficient to win power, but it was the necessary first step. What Labour really needs is the LibDems to rise from the dead and begin to build that anti Tory coalition. Alas.
Why the "Alas", Mr Jonathan? The Lib Dems have been rising (hardly "from the dead", except in terms of Tory wishful thinking) in the number of councillors elected in the last two rounds of local elections. I am confident that this trend will continue this year, despite all the Conservatives' attempts to suppress Lib Dem campaigning.
Your other point is more valid. Labour need to stop being so arrogant and recognise that they cannot scoop all non-Tories into the Labour net. The alternative to Tories is not Labour. Do they want to build an anti-Tory coalition? Not as far as we can see.
We have a hopelessly incompetent government, who just cannot see just how much they are destroying the country. Impending doom is the fault of the Conservatives, clearly, but also the fault of Labour because of their arrogance.
Comments
Having said that, most other big European countries seem to be moving at the same speed, so it can’t be the only reason unless doctors are required in the same way in those countries as well.
Either Keith or Kendrick.
There would also be less if an issue in traditional labour supporting areas of England outside Metros. Whilst people might not want a Corbyn government in hock to SNP there would be an option for Centre left Government which would be enhanced in my view if they can vote as leader someone based outside of North London.
The calibre of Johnsonian Conservatives are such that they are quite capable of monumental errors that lead to defeat. My fear is monumental errors are being ignored by voters. This is where a little opposition from Starmer and his front bench might come in handy.
1. People aren't blind. They'll see that life has returned to normal, and there haven't been widespread deaths from vaccines, in places like the UK, etc. And the more countries reach practical vaccine completion, the harder it will be to ignore.
2. There are distinct personal advantages (beyond not dying) that will come from being vaccinated. Like being able to travel beyond France.
3. Even if these two are wrong, the world will be awash with vaccines come September. So, countries would be able to reverse course pretty quickly.
Another very sensible step the UK took was the big drive to sign up / train people to be involved in the vaccine rollout, even if it did mean initially the ridiculous situation of having to do things like anti-extremist and diversity training courses.
Ignore away because you don’t like what it means!
The UK has no need for it but I wonder if it would be approved if there was a similar shortage of vaccines there, and whether British people would trust getting it?
Spain's Foreign Minister
Digital vaccine certificates will be available from June
Looks like they are on their way
What have the Conservatives done for us? Cheap borrowing!
Creation of the NHS buys no cheap mortgage or the 250 a month lease on a new Series 3. We are living in a material world, and I am a material...voter.
Publish that information and ask for a Scottish independence referendum with the whole UK voting and I reckon the Scots would vote to remain while the English voted by 60%+ to get rid.
I don't see any reason to reject a vaccine based on where it comes from, except that the evidence might have been judged in an unscrupulous attempt to sell more of it.
A few big things have changed: The Tories have adapted to changing times, and Labour have not. Labour could and should be the one nation popular party but have blown it; Labour are confined to enclaves with multiple supporters bases, holding incompatible views, but no overall spectrum of support. The Tories have played a ruthless but legitimate game, Labour haven't. Under Corbyn they took a dislike to the electorate. This can never work.
Plus Scotland. Labour dominated Scotland. The party which takes loads of seats on a tiny national share is the SNP. If you add Lab + SNP in the model here, the social democrat left have 379 seats on 49% of the vote. Maybe Holyrood was simply Westminster making the Danegeld mistake again.
https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/1376566113627164674?s=21
https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/1376843718632869888?s=21
Make life a bit lumpy for the administration, but gives every part a look-in.
https://twitter.com/jamesjohnson252/status/1376956255894446082?s=21
Mr. Moonshine, sounds concerning.
Sometimes where and how the votes are distributed can be key.
It may not work out quite like this, as the last few months have shown. But, the prediction for April is to get roughly as many jabs as they have had so far. And that ought to be pretty solid, given the way the supply chain works (most of those jabs already exist in some form). Furthermore, AZ isn't that important a part of the mix.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ExK82qKUcAMfxlz?format=jpg&name=4096x4096
The graph isn't quite exponential growth, but it's damn near. And exponential growth always wins. Apart from "coughs and sneezes spread diseases, catch your cold in your handkerchief", it's the most important lesson of the last year or so.
The snag with letting Sir Keir off the hook by blaming it all on Corbyn and saying it will take years to regain trust etc, is that Boris took over from Theresa May when she was doing as badly as Corbyn, and has completely turned the party’s fortunes around. It is possible if the leader has something about them
But it is hard to see what forces might transform Labour's fortunes within the space of three years, even if the government becomes significantly less popular.
what is wrong
how you will put it right
what your vision is for the future
where there is clear ground and difference between you and the other lot.
At this moment Labour' score out of 10 on these 4 is about
2
0
1
-5
At the time, 1996/7, Blair would have scored between 8 and 10 on all of these. Boris and co score well ahead of SKS on all four. And they are in government.
It's not long since Ken Livingstone was cheering on tube strikes whilst he was Mayor.
No, NO, NO!
It's not at all unusual in my experience for some heads to exercise power arbitrarily, and there needs to be something to keep them in check.
Maybe the vaccine bounce will pay the mortgage, what do I know?
N.B. this is based on the premise that the proportion of the workforce employed by large employers has declined - this feels true, but I'd be happy to be contradicted.
One of my favourite bits of electoral statistical gubbins is how stable the Conservative share of the vote was between 1979 and 1992. Always between 42% and 44%. And lower in 1983 than in 1979. But that covered everything from a landslide to a just-about-working majority. The difference in 1992 was that the non-Conservative forces implicitly worked out that kicking the government was the important thing and so plenty of people were prepared to vote for best-placed challengers. In 1983 and 2019, people weren't.
And in 1997, the enthusiasm to vote however was necessary to kick Conservatives out turned a defeat into a rout.
Which takes us back to those YouGov polls with the Greens on 7% or so. Are there really that many disgruntled lefties who are more concerned with sending a message to Starmer than to Johnson? Quite possibly yes. In which case, heaven help us all.
In an interview with the Italian newspaper la Repubblica, Welby was asked about what happened. He said the legal wedding took place on the Saturday, adding: “But I won’t say what happened at any other meetings.”
The archbishop told the paper: “If any of you ever talk to a priest, you expect them to keep that talk confidential. It doesn’t matter who I’m talking to. I had a number of private and pastoral meetings with the duke and duchess before the wedding.
“The legal wedding was on the Saturday. I signed the wedding certificate, which is a legal document, and I would have committed a serious criminal offence if I signed it knowing it was false.”
During the interview, Meghan had told Winfrey: “You know, three days before our wedding we got married. No one knows that, but we called the archbishop and we just said, ‘Look, this thing, this spectacle, is for the world, but we want our union between us.’”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/mar/30/archbishop-of-canterbury-harry-and-meghans-legal-wedding-was-on-saturday
The ghost of Daniel O'Connell stays Hi!
Once Labour realise increasing their majorities in Liverpool and other very safe seats ain't going to help them they might have a chance.
The next couple of years will be a recovery of sorts.
If Labour can get to 44.7% in the polls, then certainly won't be off the back of more votes in Tower Hamlets - there just aren't enough votes.
Therefore this analysis is more useful, I think, as a reminder of the challenge that Labour have in adding 50% to their share of the vote across the rest of the country, not as a separate challenge in and of itself.
I mean in 1997 the Lib Dems saw their vote share fall 1% and their total votes down nearly 800,000 from 1992 but they more than doubled their MPs from 20 to 46.
I think I may have said at the time that if Welby had done what they claimed that would have been the end of his time in office. It was obvious that Harry and Meghan were wrong.
1997: 69 majority instead of 179
2001: 57 majority instead of 167
2005: short by 9 instead of 66 majority
Although it's also highly likely that a lot of those Green voters are younger and may not have been eligible to vote in prior elections.
https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/local-news/beautiful-endcliffe-park-sheffield-looks-20291642
We'd also be getting regular commons votes on Scottish independence, presumably.
Currently held by the Conservatives on a 29% majority.
I suspect most will scale back/fold once the main employment becomes available again, but for some, maybe not...
What's the biggest constituency majority the Tories won in 2010 and 2015 that the Tories didn't win in 2019?
It may be 2 seats, or just 1 seat.
Near me, there's a general use football field. The edges of it always have plenty of litter from people presumably chucking it from cars (there's a busy road adjacent). People are responsible for cleaning up after themselves. Or should be.
(Unless of course we're adopting the SNP defintion of a lifetime ...)
Do we qualify?
In the early 1980s you wouldn't have guessed that 40 years in the future West Virginia would have become one of the Republicans safest bets in a presidential election. Maybe this is the same thing happening here, in both directions?
In this connection, Grandson 2, who is aiming for Uni in Autumn was, until this time last year, employed at weekends at a Golf Club, sometimes on golf-associated duties, sometimes on the catering side.
I gather that he doesn't expect to be able to go back there; they expect to be able to find enough regular f/t staff.
However at the weekend I walked down a footpath that runs alongside it and there was loads there - I can only assume people were lobbing their crap over the fence into the bushes.
A lot of it was cans, mainly beer cans tbh.
This was where I saw a volunteer way off the paths in the park picking stuff up - much respect to the guy.
23k Tory majority in 2015 now LD held.
The answer for 2010 maybe Putney.
if Labour have a plan, it involves keeping it very dark at the moment.
France and Germany appear to be missing for starters
Your other point is more valid. Labour need to stop being so arrogant and recognise that they cannot scoop all non-Tories into the Labour net. The alternative to Tories is not Labour. Do they want to build an anti-Tory coalition? Not as far as we can see.
We have a hopelessly incompetent government, who just cannot see just how much they are destroying the country. Impending doom is the fault of the Conservatives, clearly, but also the fault of Labour because of their arrogance.