Jon Sopel @jonsopel · 3h Have seen queues like this at Trump events over the years, but at a Dem rally? Never happened with Biden or Hillary Clinton. There is something stirring…..
Jenrick turned up for a very quickly arranged Chinese dinner last night. Fluent presentation but the usual hard-right shtick to entice the membership. Hey that worked so well in 1997-2005. I berated him for his open support for Trump (well, what a surprise) to which he replied that the GOP is our "sister party".
No chance of his getting my vote but I fear he'll win. What then after almost 50 years party membership?
Next week it's drinkkies with Mel.
So not only does he support Trump, but he does so for a facile reason. If he is the best the Conservatives can come up with they really might be toast.
More to the point, when you go through the CVs of the new Lib Dem MPs, Lots of ex military, lots of really impressive academic, business, community and local credentials... these are the kinds of MPs who could easily have been conservative. Then you think well, it the Tories go down the Reform/Populist rabbit hole there is an actual conservative party to vote for- moderate decent, pragmatic, hard working, reasonable and sensible. Everything that the Tories used to claim to be.
At this point the Lib Dems only need to take 26 MPs in order to push the Tories into third place or 29 if you took the Tories and Reform together, and yes I know this is a mildly specious argument but under FPTP but there are 72 Lib Dem MPs and only 5 RefUK. However, Truss and now Jenrick saying they support Trump is absolutely lethal, totally lines them up with Farage in the Petin camp and could actually trigger a hard core of the Tories to defect since they completely loathe both Trump and Farage. Local Tories often get on well with local Lib Dems, and we could certainly see emergence of the Lib Dems as the centre right party that many Tories say they are or want to be (but are actually not and definitely would not be as allies of Trump).
Most LDs neither want nor would accept being a centre right party, the social democratic wing of the party would defect en masse to Labour if it tried as effectively happened in 2015 when Clegg's centre right LDs in Cameron's coalition govt got just 8% of the vote
It really takes a special kind of person to lecture someone who has been a member of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats for over 45 years, and who has been pretty active over much of that time, as a candidate, both Parliamentary and local, as an organiser and as a very regular conference attender about what the membership of the party is and what it is not.
I know my party and you, sir, do not.
You don't, you only know the Liberal wing of your party not the Social Democratic wing clearly.
If Orange Book Liberalism was so popular it would not have got just 8% of the vote in 2015 would it? The only examples of Liberal parties being the main centre right party in western nations are in Australia (where they have effectively always held that position in coalition with the conservative Nationals), Japan, where the LDP has been dominant for decades and arguably the Netherlands which is a much more socially liberal nation by culture than the UK is.
If the LDs became a centre right party the social democrats who are heirs of those like Jenkins and Williams and Owen who defected from Labour in the 1980s ie those who make up the Democrats part of the LDs would defect en masse back to Labour which under Starmer would be closer to the old SDP than a centre right Orange Book Liberal party would be
Much as I like you @hyufd, you really aren't right on this one and @Cicero is. We do know our party and you don't. There is no conflict within the LDs between Liberals and Social Democrats. Much of the time even we don't know which colleagues are which. I remember having this discussion at a LD party after the election where we were comparing opinions. I couldn't have told you before those discussions if other members were from one wing or the other, because we just don't have those wings even though some of us are clearly liberals and some of us are clearly social democrats.
Looking at the 2015 election result is daft. We didn't lose because we were Liberals and not Social Democrats. Nobody believes that. We lost because of the coalition and things like Tuition fees. If you asked any voters they couldn't have told you whether we were mainly Liberals or Social Democrats in 2015 and they couldn't now. Only anoraks like us know there is a difference.
And see my other post re being able to win more seats. Here is a bit of info for you. In Guildford in the build up to the election we knocked on 31,000 doors and sent out regular leaflets. During the election we knocked on 32,000 doors. That is nearly everyone twice. 13 leaflets or letters went out and several hundred posterboards went up during the election, although many of those letters were targeted so not to everyone.
There are plenty of Tory seats we could have done that in but didn't have the resources to do so. So we targeted ruthlessly. There are now the next batch of seats to go for and resources we can move from the last lot of targets we have won,
Now that may not happen. The Tories may recover and we may be defending ruthlessly and targeting nowhere. But if it stays the same we will be have many more Tory seats next time as well as some labour ones to go for.
History is on my side. For example, in 1945 the Liberals got just 9% on a centrist or even centre right liberal platform and the Liberals never got over 10% of the vote until Grimond got 11% in 1964, before falling back to 8.5% in 1966. In Feb 1974 Thorpe's Liberals did admittedly peak at 19% (though that was partly a result of his being more charismatic than Heath and Wilson) before falling to 13% under Steel in 1979 after Thorpe's scandals emerged.
Only the social democrat wing of the Labour Party leaving to form the SDP under Roy Jenkins and then forming the Alliance with the Liberals at the 1983 general election got the combined Liberals and SDP over 20% on a centre left platform to 25% and then 22% under Owen in 1987.
The merged parties which formed the LDs then never ceased to get under 15% of the voted from 1992 to 2010, peaking at 22% in 2005 under Charles Kennedy on an even left of Blair's Labour platform never mind just left of the Tories and 23% in 2010 when Clegg pledged to scrap tuition fees before moving right and backing increasing them in government as you say.
After going into coalition with the Tories in 2010 however the LDs collapsed to just 8% in 2015 and although they have got back over 10% since by appealing to hardline Remainers who opposed Brexit they have still not got over 15% again.
If the LDs became a centre right party they would also lose most of the Labour tactical votes that helped win them southern seats from the Tories last month and also have no chance in Labour seats Kennedy won in 2005
The Conservatives however have never polled lower than 30% in a General Election (we know they have in local elections and European parliamentary elections) until July 4th when they polled 24% and won 121 seats, their worst performance since the Reform Act of 1832 so applying historical parallels when we are in uncharted territory seems a little like hopecasting. The last time they polled anywhere near this (1997, 30.7% and 165 seats) they were out of Government for 13 years.
24% was still double the 12% the LDs got.
In 1997 Labour under Blair got 43%, 10% more than the 33% Labour under Starmer got
Your problem with that is that it illustrates two things - the potential for Tory revival at the next election, and the potential for oblivion.
Your opponents winning big without actually doing that well comes with a huge, flashing warning sign.
Only if the rightwing vote is effectively split again
Let’s face it, none of the candidates is Augustus Caesar, they all have grave flaws. Badenoch is flimsy, Patel is widely disliked, Tugendhat is Who?
This guy probably has the fewest flaws. He’s young, articulate, not posh - self made. He looks vaguely prime ministerial and he’s quite right wing without being Suella, voters may like that
Also, it will drive the Corbynite anti-Semites mad if both the PM and the LOTO have “Zio” wives. So it’s worth doing for that alone
Unfortunately he's also an unelectable careerist dud who's very obviously manoeuvring himself to gain the votes of the remaining hard-line factionalists in the PCP in order to get into the final two.
Chasing Farage is a mug's game. The threat from the LibDems hoovering up the remaining Home Counties seats (backbone of the Tory party since Lord Salisbury) is far more existential.
No it isn't, the LDs have pretty much hit their ceiling in the Home Counties, taking almost all the Remain seats and some of the soft Leave seats there on 4th July. They are unlikely to get many if any more and in any case in some of those LD seats the Tory and Reform vote combined was bigger than the LD vote
The LDs will be building up their support in seats they haven’t yet won, as we speak.
From where? If they couldn't win Tory voters this time they are unlikely to win many more next time and they have already squeezed Labour tactical votes in their target seats as far as they can go
We targeted ruthlessly. For instance Farnham and Bordon was not a top target even though it could have been. Supporters were coming from there to other targets like Guildford. If all goes well for the LDs and we don't need to target Guildford the same way as this time we will all be in Farnham and Bordon and if under the same circumstances as the last election it would fall. We nearly took it without working it. Think what we could do if we really went for it.
That will happen all over the country. I would predict that if the election was run with both the LDs and Tories on the same level of popularity as at the GE, but starting with the current seats we would take another 20 seats. At least 2 more in Surrey for a start.
The combined Tory and Reform vote in Farnham was 47%, the LD vote only 33%
How many more times
Stop combining the two
Mind you, hopeless comment by me as @HYUFD is incapable of being wrong
"Let me put it this way, Mr. Big_G. The HYUFD series is the most reliable computer ever made. No HYUFD computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error."
You may be interested that my wife and I had a wonderful day out yesterday taking the TFW train from Llandudno to Blaenau Ffestiniog , crossing the platform and joining the 'quarryman' steam hauled narrow gauge railway which followed the track slate was taken down to Porthmadog for export worldwide, before returning on the quarryman to Blaenau and TFW to Llandudno
It was a lovely day and showcased the beauty of North Wales while slowly passing through
Good to know you and your wife are able to travel and enjoy it!
I did the main line train to Blaenau (along with basically the whole main line network in Wales), but haven't done the narrow gauge lines.
lee harpin @lmharpin Only the SWP could stage an “anti racism” demo where many Jewish participants, including myself, felt absolutely no sense of solidarity with those organising. Thankfully the far right haven’t showed up.
I live in East Finchley and there probably isn't a worse place in the country to hold a far right demonstration. It's Indians and Jewish people across all of Finchley. If more than two Nazi demonstrators turned up I'd be shocked.
lee harpin @lmharpin Only the SWP could stage an “anti racism” demo where many Jewish participants, including myself, felt absolutely no sense of solidarity with those organising. Thankfully the far right haven’t showed up.
Talking of insurance not doing what it says, the famed YouTube scam exposer Coffeezilla is being sued and because of the size of his channel / topics he covers he took out media liability insurance, except on page 31 of the policy in the small print there is a clause that basically means he isn't covered against much at all. Likely to be on the hook for $100ks in legal fees.
Interestingly, during coverage of this, it was claimed that the massive payout of the voting machine story that Fox News got stung with was actually largely covered by their liability insurance and tax write offs.
Let’s face it, none of the candidates is Augustus Caesar, they all have grave flaws. Badenoch is flimsy, Patel is widely disliked, Tugendhat is Who?
This guy probably has the fewest flaws. He’s young, articulate, not posh - self made. He looks vaguely prime ministerial and he’s quite right wing without being Suella, voters may like that
Also, it will drive the Corbynite anti-Semites mad if both the PM and the LOTO have “Zio” wives. So it’s worth doing for that alone
Unfortunately he's also an unelectable careerist dud who's very obviously manoeuvring himself to gain the votes of the remaining hard-line factionalists in the PCP in order to get into the final two.
Chasing Farage is a mug's game. The threat from the LibDems hoovering up the remaining Home Counties seats (backbone of the Tory party since Lord Salisbury) is far more existential.
No it isn't, the LDs have pretty much hit their ceiling in the Home Counties, taking almost all the Remain seats and some of the soft Leave seats there on 4th July. They are unlikely to get many if any more and in any case in some of those LD seats the Tory and Reform vote combined was bigger than the LD vote
The LDs will be building up their support in seats they haven’t yet won, as we speak.
From where? If they couldn't win Tory voters this time they are unlikely to win many more next time and they have already squeezed Labour tactical votes in their target seats as far as they can go
We targeted ruthlessly. For instance Farnham and Bordon was not a top target even though it could have been. Supporters were coming from there to other targets like Guildford. If all goes well for the LDs and we don't need to target Guildford the same way as this time we will all be in Farnham and Bordon and if under the same circumstances as the last election it would fall. We nearly took it without working it. Think what we could do if we really went for it.
That will happen all over the country. I would predict that if the election was run with both the LDs and Tories on the same level of popularity as at the GE, but starting with the current seats we would take another 20 seats. At least 2 more in Surrey for a start.
The combined Tory and Reform vote in Farnham was 47%, the LD vote only 33%
How many more times
Stop combining the two
Mind you, hopeless comment by me as @HYUFD is incapable of being wrong
"Let me put it this way, Mr. Big_G. The HYUFD series is the most reliable computer ever made. No HYUFD computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error."
You may be interested that my wife and I had a wonderful day out yesterday taking the TFW train from Llandudno to Blaenau Ffestiniog , crossing the platform and joining the 'quarryman' steam hauled narrow gauge railway which followed the track slate was taken down to Porthmadog for export worldwide, before returning on the quarryman to Blaenau and TFW to Llandudno
It was a lovely day and showcased the beauty of North Wales while slowly passing through
Good to know you and your wife are able to travel and enjoy it!
I did the main line train to Blaenau (along with basically the whole main line network in Wales), but haven't done the narrow gauge lines.
If you get the opportunity they are really a wonderful experience
lee harpin @lmharpin Only the SWP could stage an “anti racism” demo where many Jewish participants, including myself, felt absolutely no sense of solidarity with those organising. Thankfully the far right haven’t showed up.
Jenrick turned up for a very quickly arranged Chinese dinner last night. Fluent presentation but the usual hard-right shtick to entice the membership. Hey that worked so well in 1997-2005. I berated him for his open support for Trump (well, what a surprise) to which he replied that the GOP is our "sister party".
No chance of his getting my vote but I fear he'll win. What then after almost 50 years party membership?
Next week it's drinkkies with Mel.
So not only does he support Trump, but he does so for a facile reason. If he is the best the Conservatives can come up with they really might be toast.
More to the point, when you go through the CVs of the new Lib Dem MPs, Lots of ex military, lots of really impressive academic, business, community and local credentials... these are the kinds of MPs who could easily have been conservative. Then you think well, it the Tories go down the Reform/Populist rabbit hole there is an actual conservative party to vote for- moderate decent, pragmatic, hard working, reasonable and sensible. Everything that the Tories used to claim to be.
At this point the Lib Dems only need to take 26 MPs in order to push the Tories into third place or 29 if you took the Tories and Reform together, and yes I know this is a mildly specious argument but under FPTP but there are 72 Lib Dem MPs and only 5 RefUK. However, Truss and now Jenrick saying they support Trump is absolutely lethal, totally lines them up with Farage in the Petin camp and could actually trigger a hard core of the Tories to defect since they completely loathe both Trump and Farage. Local Tories often get on well with local Lib Dems, and we could certainly see emergence of the Lib Dems as the centre right party that many Tories say they are or want to be (but are actually not and definitely would not be as allies of Trump).
Most LDs neither want nor would accept being a centre right party, the social democratic wing of the party would defect en masse to Labour if it tried as effectively happened in 2015 when Clegg's centre right LDs in Cameron's coalition govt got just 8% of the vote
It really takes a special kind of person to lecture someone who has been a member of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats for over 45 years, and who has been pretty active over much of that time, as a candidate, both Parliamentary and local, as an organiser and as a very regular conference attender about what the membership of the party is and what it is not.
I know my party and you, sir, do not.
You don't, you only know the Liberal wing of your party not the Social Democratic wing clearly.
If Orange Book Liberalism was so popular it would not have got just 8% of the vote in 2015 would it? The only examples of Liberal parties being the main centre right party in western nations are in Australia (where they have effectively always held that position in coalition with the conservative Nationals), Japan, where the LDP has been dominant for decades and arguably the Netherlands which is a much more socially liberal nation by culture than the UK is.
If the LDs became a centre right party the social democrats who are heirs of those like Jenkins and Williams and Owen who defected from Labour in the 1980s ie those who make up the Democrats part of the LDs would defect en masse back to Labour which under Starmer would be closer to the old SDP than a centre right Orange Book Liberal party would be
Much as I like you @hyufd, you really aren't right on this one and @Cicero is. We do know our party and you don't. There is no conflict within the LDs between Liberals and Social Democrats. Much of the time even we don't know which colleagues are which. I remember having this discussion at a LD party after the election where we were comparing opinions. I couldn't have told you before those discussions if other members were from one wing or the other, because we just don't have those wings even though some of us are clearly liberals and some of us are clearly social democrats.
Looking at the 2015 election result is daft. We didn't lose because we were Liberals and not Social Democrats. Nobody believes that. We lost because of the coalition and things like Tuition fees. If you asked any voters they couldn't have told you whether we were mainly Liberals or Social Democrats in 2015 and they couldn't now. Only anoraks like us know there is a difference.
And see my other post re being able to win more seats. Here is a bit of info for you. In Guildford in the build up to the election we knocked on 31,000 doors and sent out regular leaflets. During the election we knocked on 32,000 doors. That is nearly everyone twice. 13 leaflets or letters went out and several hundred posterboards went up during the election, although many of those letters were targeted so not to everyone.
There are plenty of Tory seats we could have done that in but didn't have the resources to do so. So we targeted ruthlessly. There are now the next batch of seats to go for and resources we can move from the last lot of targets we have won,
Now that may not happen. The Tories may recover and we may be defending ruthlessly and targeting nowhere. But if it stays the same we will be have many more Tory seats next time as well as some labour ones to go for.
History is on my side. For example, in 1945 the Liberals got just 9% on a centrist or even centre right liberal platform and the Liberals never got over 10% of the vote until Grimond got 11% in 1964, before falling back to 8.5% in 1966. In Feb 1974 Thorpe's Liberals did admittedly peak at 19% (though that was partly a result of his being more charismatic than Heath and Wilson) before falling to 13% under Steel in 1979 after Thorpe's scandals emerged.
Only the social democrat wing of the Labour Party leaving to form the SDP under Roy Jenkins and then forming the Alliance with the Liberals at the 1983 general election got the combined Liberals and SDP over 20% on a centre left platform to 25% and then 22% under Owen in 1987.
The merged parties which formed the LDs then never ceased to get under 15% of the voted from 1992 to 2010, peaking at 22% in 2005 under Charles Kennedy on an even left of Blair's Labour platform never mind just left of the Tories and 23% in 2010 when Clegg pledged to scrap tuition fees before moving right and backing increasing them in government as you say.
After going into coalition with the Tories in 2010 however the LDs collapsed to just 8% in 2015 and although they have got back over 10% since by appealing to hardline Remainers who opposed Brexit they have still not got over 15% again.
If the LDs became a centre right party they would also lose most of the Labour tactical votes that helped win them southern seats from the Tories last month and also have no chance in Labour seats Kennedy won in 2005
The Conservatives however have never polled lower than 30% in a General Election (we know they have in local elections and European parliamentary elections) until July 4th when they polled 24% and won 121 seats, their worst performance since the Reform Act of 1832 so applying historical parallels when we are in uncharted territory seems a little like hopecasting. The last time they polled anywhere near this (1997, 30.7% and 165 seats) they were out of Government for 13 years.
24% was still double the 12% the LDs got.
In 1997 Labour under Blair got 43%, 10% more than the 33% Labour under Starmer got
Your problem with that is that it illustrates two things - the potential for Tory revival at the next election, and the potential for oblivion.
Your opponents winning big without actually doing that well comes with a huge, flashing warning sign.
Only if the rightwing vote is effectively split again
What about the last few days makes you feel the right is coming together rather than splintering further?
Trump and the RNC have no field offices. Also a cursory check through social media specifically Facebook the Trump ads are down to a trickle and in many places non-existent. The media should be asking the Trump family what they did with the money. https://x.com/Scaramucci/status/1821266037393813565
lee harpin @lmharpin Only the SWP could stage an “anti racism” demo where many Jewish participants, including myself, felt absolutely no sense of solidarity with those organising. Thankfully the far right haven’t showed up.
I live in East Finchley and there probably isn't a worse place in the country to hold a far right demonstration. It's Indians and Jewish people across all of Finchley. If more than two Nazi demonstrators turned up I'd be shocked.
Doesn't that depend on what variety of far right ?
There are certainly the equivalents of far right in both India and Israel.
Jenrick turned up for a very quickly arranged Chinese dinner last night. Fluent presentation but the usual hard-right shtick to entice the membership. Hey that worked so well in 1997-2005. I berated him for his open support for Trump (well, what a surprise) to which he replied that the GOP is our "sister party".
No chance of his getting my vote but I fear he'll win. What then after almost 50 years party membership?
Next week it's drinkkies with Mel.
So not only does he support Trump, but he does so for a facile reason. If he is the best the Conservatives can come up with they really might be toast.
More to the point, when you go through the CVs of the new Lib Dem MPs, Lots of ex military, lots of really impressive academic, business, community and local credentials... these are the kinds of MPs who could easily have been conservative. Then you think well, it the Tories go down the Reform/Populist rabbit hole there is an actual conservative party to vote for- moderate decent, pragmatic, hard working, reasonable and sensible. Everything that the Tories used to claim to be.
At this point the Lib Dems only need to take 26 MPs in order to push the Tories into third place or 29 if you took the Tories and Reform together, and yes I know this is a mildly specious argument but under FPTP but there are 72 Lib Dem MPs and only 5 RefUK. However, Truss and now Jenrick saying they support Trump is absolutely lethal, totally lines them up with Farage in the Petin camp and could actually trigger a hard core of the Tories to defect since they completely loathe both Trump and Farage. Local Tories often get on well with local Lib Dems, and we could certainly see emergence of the Lib Dems as the centre right party that many Tories say they are or want to be (but are actually not and definitely would not be as allies of Trump).
Most LDs neither want nor would accept being a centre right party, the social democratic wing of the party would defect en masse to Labour if it tried as effectively happened in 2015 when Clegg's centre right LDs in Cameron's coalition govt got just 8% of the vote
It really takes a special kind of person to lecture someone who has been a member of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats for over 45 years, and who has been pretty active over much of that time, as a candidate, both Parliamentary and local, as an organiser and as a very regular conference attender about what the membership of the party is and what it is not.
I know my party and you, sir, do not.
You don't, you only know the Liberal wing of your party not the Social Democratic wing clearly.
If Orange Book Liberalism was so popular it would not have got just 8% of the vote in 2015 would it? The only examples of Liberal parties being the main centre right party in western nations are in Australia (where they have effectively always held that position in coalition with the conservative Nationals), Japan, where the LDP has been dominant for decades and arguably the Netherlands which is a much more socially liberal nation by culture than the UK is.
If the LDs became a centre right party the social democrats who are heirs of those like Jenkins and Williams and Owen who defected from Labour in the 1980s ie those who make up the Democrats part of the LDs would defect en masse back to Labour which under Starmer would be closer to the old SDP than a centre right Orange Book Liberal party would be
Much as I like you @hyufd, you really aren't right on this one and @Cicero is. We do know our party and you don't. There is no conflict within the LDs between Liberals and Social Democrats. Much of the time even we don't know which colleagues are which. I remember having this discussion at a LD party after the election where we were comparing opinions. I couldn't have told you before those discussions if other members were from one wing or the other, because we just don't have those wings even though some of us are clearly liberals and some of us are clearly social democrats.
Looking at the 2015 election result is daft. We didn't lose because we were Liberals and not Social Democrats. Nobody believes that. We lost because of the coalition and things like Tuition fees. If you asked any voters they couldn't have told you whether we were mainly Liberals or Social Democrats in 2015 and they couldn't now. Only anoraks like us know there is a difference.
And see my other post re being able to win more seats. Here is a bit of info for you. In Guildford in the build up to the election we knocked on 31,000 doors and sent out regular leaflets. During the election we knocked on 32,000 doors. That is nearly everyone twice. 13 leaflets or letters went out and several hundred posterboards went up during the election, although many of those letters were targeted so not to everyone.
There are plenty of Tory seats we could have done that in but didn't have the resources to do so. So we targeted ruthlessly. There are now the next batch of seats to go for and resources we can move from the last lot of targets we have won,
Now that may not happen. The Tories may recover and we may be defending ruthlessly and targeting nowhere. But if it stays the same we will be have many more Tory seats next time as well as some labour ones to go for.
History is on my side. For example, in 1945 the Liberals got just 9% on a centrist or even centre right liberal platform and the Liberals never got over 10% of the vote until Grimond got 11% in 1964, before falling back to 8.5% in 1966. In Feb 1974 Thorpe's Liberals did admittedly peak at 19% (though that was partly a result of his being more charismatic than Heath and Wilson) before falling to 13% under Steel in 1979 after Thorpe's scandals emerged.
Only the social democrat wing of the Labour Party leaving to form the SDP under Roy Jenkins and then forming the Alliance with the Liberals at the 1983 general election got the combined Liberals and SDP over 20% on a centre left platform to 25% and then 22% under Owen in 1987.
The merged parties which formed the LDs then never ceased to get under 15% of the voted from 1992 to 2010, peaking at 22% in 2005 under Charles Kennedy on an even left of Blair's Labour platform never mind just left of the Tories and 23% in 2010 when Clegg pledged to scrap tuition fees before moving right and backing increasing them in government as you say.
After going into coalition with the Tories in 2010 however the LDs collapsed to just 8% in 2015 and although they have got back over 10% since by appealing to hardline Remainers who opposed Brexit they have still not got over 15% again.
If the LDs became a centre right party they would also lose most of the Labour tactical votes that helped win them southern seats from the Tories last month and also have no chance in Labour seats Kennedy won in 2005
The Conservatives however have never polled lower than 30% in a General Election (we know they have in local elections and European parliamentary elections) until July 4th when they polled 24% and won 121 seats, their worst performance since the Reform Act of 1832 so applying historical parallels when we are in uncharted territory seems a little like hopecasting. The last time they polled anywhere near this (1997, 30.7% and 165 seats) they were out of Government for 13 years.
24% was still double the 12% the LDs got.
In 1997 Labour under Blair got 43%, 10% more than the 33% Labour under Starmer got
Your problem with that is that it illustrates two things - the potential for Tory revival at the next election, and the potential for oblivion.
Your opponents winning big without actually doing that well comes with a huge, flashing warning sign.
Only if the rightwing vote is effectively split again
The 2019 coalition of voters which led to the Conservative win was a flash in the pan. It had never happened before. It may happen again, but it seems bold to base an election strategy on doing so. Reform voters aren't Tory voters being cheeky.
Interesting how it's become another "free free palestine" mob judging from that video. Not sure how comfortable I'd feel being visibly Jewish walking past that.
Or even being Jewish and showing up to support my local community and stand against far right nazis, only to find I'd walked into a bunch of "free free Palestine" numpties.
Plenty Jewish people want to free Palestine. And those that don't will be proven to be on the wrong side of history (and are also racist as they see Palestinians as lesser)
If you say so.
The Walthamstow protest against fascists is probably the nearest one to me (though still a fair distance) and on another day I might have been tempted to show up.
However, if I went there, expecting to protest against anti-muslim thugs, but found that all the people around me were shouting "free free Palestine", I would be deeply uncomfortable, totally unable to join in, and very frightened in case anyone looked at me, noticed I wasn't joining in, and chanted "he's one of them, get 'im." Unlikely of course, but you see my point. Jewish people should feel free to attend - of all things - a demonstration against Nazis - without it becoming an anti-Israel rally.
I posted ealier: one of the antifa organisations rallying people to be "anti-racist" in North London tonight is openly and virulently anti-Semitic. Quite horrible
I’m the hierarchy of racism to the far left that one is deemed acceptable to many of them. After all they see Israel as a fascist state so by default they see Jewish people in the same light.
Just because the SWP/Far Left oppose the far right doesn’t make them the good guys by default. The lesser of two evils is still an evil.
Let’s face it, none of the candidates is Augustus Caesar, they all have grave flaws. Badenoch is flimsy, Patel is widely disliked, Tugendhat is Who?
This guy probably has the fewest flaws. He’s young, articulate, not posh - self made. He looks vaguely prime ministerial and he’s quite right wing without being Suella, voters may like that
Also, it will drive the Corbynite anti-Semites mad if both the PM and the LOTO have “Zio” wives. So it’s worth doing for that alone
Unfortunately he's also an unelectable careerist dud who's very obviously manoeuvring himself to gain the votes of the remaining hard-line factionalists in the PCP in order to get into the final two.
Chasing Farage is a mug's game. The threat from the LibDems hoovering up the remaining Home Counties seats (backbone of the Tory party since Lord Salisbury) is far more existential.
No it isn't, the LDs have pretty much hit their ceiling in the Home Counties, taking almost all the Remain seats and some of the soft Leave seats there on 4th July. They are unlikely to get many if any more and in any case in some of those LD seats the Tory and Reform vote combined was bigger than the LD vote
The LDs will be building up their support in seats they haven’t yet won, as we speak.
From where? If they couldn't win Tory voters this time they are unlikely to win many more next time and they have already squeezed Labour tactical votes in their target seats as far as they can go
We targeted ruthlessly. For instance Farnham and Bordon was not a top target even though it could have been. Supporters were coming from there to other targets like Guildford. If all goes well for the LDs and we don't need to target Guildford the same way as this time we will all be in Farnham and Bordon and if under the same circumstances as the last election it would fall. We nearly took it without working it. Think what we could do if we really went for it.
That will happen all over the country. I would predict that if the election was run with both the LDs and Tories on the same level of popularity as at the GE, but starting with the current seats we would take another 20 seats. At least 2 more in Surrey for a start.
The combined Tory and Reform vote in Farnham was 47%, the LD vote only 33%
How many more times
Stop combining the two
Mind you, hopeless comment by me as @HYUFD is incapable of being wrong
"Let me put it this way, Mr. Big_G. The HYUFD series is the most reliable computer ever made. No HYUFD computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error."
You may be interested that my wife and I had a wonderful day out yesterday taking the TFW train from Llandudno to Blaenau Ffestiniog , crossing the platform and joining the 'quarryman' steam hauled narrow gauge railway which followed the track slate was taken down to Porthmadog for export worldwide, before returning on the quarryman to Blaenau and TFW to Llandudno
It was a lovely day and showcased the beauty of North Wales while slowly passing through
Good to know you and your wife are able to travel and enjoy it!
I did the main line train to Blaenau (along with basically the whole main line network in Wales), but haven't done the narrow gauge lines.
If you get the opportunity they are really a wonderful experience
Spend the extra for the observation coach (if it is available) on the Ffestiniog, going up or down depending on whjether you want the (perhaps) double Fairlie in view or not.
We also got off at the end of the Talyllyn and went up the old incline to explore the Bryn Eglwys quarries and their buildings and the quarriers village at Abergynolwyn, but no idea how the state of forestry, access, etc. is now. Edit: or even if it is safe in the state of the ruins, plant cover, and so on.
Trump and the RNC have no field offices. Also a cursory check through social media specifically Facebook the Trump ads are down to a trickle and in many places non-existent. The media should be asking the Trump family what they did with the money. https://x.com/Scaramucci/status/1821266037393813565
They could ask Captain Sir Tom’s daughter.
Or look at who has been paying Trumps rather large lawyer fees.
Jenrick turned up for a very quickly arranged Chinese dinner last night. Fluent presentation but the usual hard-right shtick to entice the membership. Hey that worked so well in 1997-2005. I berated him for his open support for Trump (well, what a surprise) to which he replied that the GOP is our "sister party".
No chance of his getting my vote but I fear he'll win. What then after almost 50 years party membership?
Next week it's drinkkies with Mel.
So not only does he support Trump, but he does so for a facile reason. If he is the best the Conservatives can come up with they really might be toast.
More to the point, when you go through the CVs of the new Lib Dem MPs, Lots of ex military, lots of really impressive academic, business, community and local credentials... these are the kinds of MPs who could easily have been conservative. Then you think well, it the Tories go down the Reform/Populist rabbit hole there is an actual conservative party to vote for- moderate decent, pragmatic, hard working, reasonable and sensible. Everything that the Tories used to claim to be.
At this point the Lib Dems only need to take 26 MPs in order to push the Tories into third place or 29 if you took the Tories and Reform together, and yes I know this is a mildly specious argument but under FPTP but there are 72 Lib Dem MPs and only 5 RefUK. However, Truss and now Jenrick saying they support Trump is absolutely lethal, totally lines them up with Farage in the Petin camp and could actually trigger a hard core of the Tories to defect since they completely loathe both Trump and Farage. Local Tories often get on well with local Lib Dems, and we could certainly see emergence of the Lib Dems as the centre right party that many Tories say they are or want to be (but are actually not and definitely would not be as allies of Trump).
Most LDs neither want nor would accept being a centre right party, the social democratic wing of the party would defect en masse to Labour if it tried as effectively happened in 2015 when Clegg's centre right LDs in Cameron's coalition govt got just 8% of the vote
It really takes a special kind of person to lecture someone who has been a member of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats for over 45 years, and who has been pretty active over much of that time, as a candidate, both Parliamentary and local, as an organiser and as a very regular conference attender about what the membership of the party is and what it is not.
I know my party and you, sir, do not.
You don't, you only know the Liberal wing of your party not the Social Democratic wing clearly.
If Orange Book Liberalism was so popular it would not have got just 8% of the vote in 2015 would it? The only examples of Liberal parties being the main centre right party in western nations are in Australia (where they have effectively always held that position in coalition with the conservative Nationals), Japan, where the LDP has been dominant for decades and arguably the Netherlands which is a much more socially liberal nation by culture than the UK is.
If the LDs became a centre right party the social democrats who are heirs of those like Jenkins and Williams and Owen who defected from Labour in the 1980s ie those who make up the Democrats part of the LDs would defect en masse back to Labour which under Starmer would be closer to the old SDP than a centre right Orange Book Liberal party would be
Much as I like you @hyufd, you really aren't right on this one and @Cicero is. We do know our party and you don't. There is no conflict within the LDs between Liberals and Social Democrats. Much of the time even we don't know which colleagues are which. I remember having this discussion at a LD party after the election where we were comparing opinions. I couldn't have told you before those discussions if other members were from one wing or the other, because we just don't have those wings even though some of us are clearly liberals and some of us are clearly social democrats.
Looking at the 2015 election result is daft. We didn't lose because we were Liberals and not Social Democrats. Nobody believes that. We lost because of the coalition and things like Tuition fees. If you asked any voters they couldn't have told you whether we were mainly Liberals or Social Democrats in 2015 and they couldn't now. Only anoraks like us know there is a difference.
And see my other post re being able to win more seats. Here is a bit of info for you. In Guildford in the build up to the election we knocked on 31,000 doors and sent out regular leaflets. During the election we knocked on 32,000 doors. That is nearly everyone twice. 13 leaflets or letters went out and several hundred posterboards went up during the election, although many of those letters were targeted so not to everyone.
There are plenty of Tory seats we could have done that in but didn't have the resources to do so. So we targeted ruthlessly. There are now the next batch of seats to go for and resources we can move from the last lot of targets we have won,
Now that may not happen. The Tories may recover and we may be defending ruthlessly and targeting nowhere. But if it stays the same we will be have many more Tory seats next time as well as some labour ones to go for.
History is on my side. For example, in 1945 the Liberals got just 9% on a centrist or even centre right liberal platform and the Liberals never got over 10% of the vote until Grimond got 11% in 1964, before falling back to 8.5% in 1966. In Feb 1974 Thorpe's Liberals did admittedly peak at 19% (though that was partly a result of his being more charismatic than Heath and Wilson) before falling to 13% under Steel in 1979 after Thorpe's scandals emerged.
Only the social democrat wing of the Labour Party leaving to form the SDP under Roy Jenkins and then forming the Alliance with the Liberals at the 1983 general election got the combined Liberals and SDP over 20% on a centre left platform to 25% and then 22% under Owen in 1987.
The merged parties which formed the LDs then never ceased to get under 15% of the voted from 1992 to 2010, peaking at 22% in 2005 under Charles Kennedy on an even left of Blair's Labour platform never mind just left of the Tories and 23% in 2010 when Clegg pledged to scrap tuition fees before moving right and backing increasing them in government as you say.
After going into coalition with the Tories in 2010 however the LDs collapsed to just 8% in 2015 and although they have got back over 10% since by appealing to hardline Remainers who opposed Brexit they have still not got over 15% again.
If the LDs became a centre right party they would also lose most of the Labour tactical votes that helped win them southern seats from the Tories last month and also have no chance in Labour seats Kennedy won in 2005
The Conservatives however have never polled lower than 30% in a General Election (we know they have in local elections and European parliamentary elections) until July 4th when they polled 24% and won 121 seats, their worst performance since the Reform Act of 1832 so applying historical parallels when we are in uncharted territory seems a little like hopecasting. The last time they polled anywhere near this (1997, 30.7% and 165 seats) they were out of Government for 13 years.
24% was still double the 12% the LDs got.
In 1997 Labour under Blair got 43%, 10% more than the 33% Labour under Starmer got
Your problem with that is that it illustrates two things - the potential for Tory revival at the next election, and the potential for oblivion.
Your opponents winning big without actually doing that well comes with a huge, flashing warning sign.
Only if the rightwing vote is effectively split again
Trump and the RNC have no field offices. Also a cursory check through social media specifically Facebook the Trump ads are down to a trickle and in many places non-existent. The media should be asking the Trump family what they did with the money. https://x.com/Scaramucci/status/1821266037393813565
Despite my instincts, Scaramucci has become a bit of a hero of mine. His The Rest is Politics US podcasts with Katy Kay are brilliant.
He's the kind of Republican the GOP should be rallying behind (they won't of course).
lee harpin @lmharpin Only the SWP could stage an “anti racism” demo where many Jewish participants, including myself, felt absolutely no sense of solidarity with those organising. Thankfully the far right haven’t showed up.
lee harpin @lmharpin Only the SWP could stage an “anti racism” demo where many Jewish participants, including myself, felt absolutely no sense of solidarity with those organising. Thankfully the far right haven’t showed up.
I live in East Finchley and there probably isn't a worse place in the country to hold a far right demonstration. It's Indians and Jewish people across all of Finchley. If more than two Nazi demonstrators turned up I'd be shocked.
Doesn't that depend on what variety of far right ?
There are certainly the equivalents of far right in both India and Israel.
I think if the British far right, Israeli far right and the Indian far right all turned up at the same place for a fight it would be very confusing.
I'm not sure any anti far right protesters need to get involved. They could just leave the 3 groups to fight it out amongst themselves.
Let’s face it, none of the candidates is Augustus Caesar, they all have grave flaws. Badenoch is flimsy, Patel is widely disliked, Tugendhat is Who?
This guy probably has the fewest flaws. He’s young, articulate, not posh - self made. He looks vaguely prime ministerial and he’s quite right wing without being Suella, voters may like that
Also, it will drive the Corbynite anti-Semites mad if both the PM and the LOTO have “Zio” wives. So it’s worth doing for that alone
Unfortunately he's also an unelectable careerist dud who's very obviously manoeuvring himself to gain the votes of the remaining hard-line factionalists in the PCP in order to get into the final two.
Chasing Farage is a mug's game. The threat from the LibDems hoovering up the remaining Home Counties seats (backbone of the Tory party since Lord Salisbury) is far more existential.
No it isn't, the LDs have pretty much hit their ceiling in the Home Counties, taking almost all the Remain seats and some of the soft Leave seats there on 4th July. They are unlikely to get many if any more and in any case in some of those LD seats the Tory and Reform vote combined was bigger than the LD vote
The LDs will be building up their support in seats they haven’t yet won, as we speak.
From where? If they couldn't win Tory voters this time they are unlikely to win many more next time and they have already squeezed Labour tactical votes in their target seats as far as they can go
We targeted ruthlessly. For instance Farnham and Bordon was not a top target even though it could have been. Supporters were coming from there to other targets like Guildford. If all goes well for the LDs and we don't need to target Guildford the same way as this time we will all be in Farnham and Bordon and if under the same circumstances as the last election it would fall. We nearly took it without working it. Think what we could do if we really went for it.
That will happen all over the country. I would predict that if the election was run with both the LDs and Tories on the same level of popularity as at the GE, but starting with the current seats we would take another 20 seats. At least 2 more in Surrey for a start.
The combined Tory and Reform vote in Farnham was 47%, the LD vote only 33%
How many more times
Stop combining the two
Mind you, hopeless comment by me as @HYUFD is incapable of being wrong
"Let me put it this way, Mr. Big_G. The HYUFD series is the most reliable computer ever made. No HYUFD computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error."
You may be interested that my wife and I had a wonderful day out yesterday taking the TFW train from Llandudno to Blaenau Ffestiniog , crossing the platform and joining the 'quarryman' steam hauled narrow gauge railway which followed the track slate was taken down to Porthmadog for export worldwide, before returning on the quarryman to Blaenau and TFW to Llandudno
It was a lovely day and showcased the beauty of North Wales while slowly passing through
Good to know you and your wife are able to travel and enjoy it!
I did the main line train to Blaenau (along with basically the whole main line network in Wales), but haven't done the narrow gauge lines.
If you get the opportunity they are really a wonderful experience
Spend the extra for the observation coach (if it is available) on the Ffestiniog, going up or down depending on whjether you want the (perhaps) double Fairlie in view or not.
We also got off at the end of the Talyllyn and went up the old incline to explore the Bryn Eglwys quarries and their buildings and the quarriers village at Abergynolwyn, but no idea how the state of forestry, access, etc. is now.
We had the observation coach on both the quarryman and the Welsh Highland Caernarfon to Porthmadog journey and while more expensive they are worth it
Interesting. His obvious course now - as I have been saying for some time - is to go into politics, professionally
Big gamble. The Reform vote (at the moment) is probably 15% max, and winning a seat will be really hard. On the other hand there is a vast empty space which he could occupy. The Reform-minded intellectual who is an eloquent speaker
His life span within ultra-lefty academe was always that of a mayfly
The University of Kent is, sadly as it’s a major employer in my home City, in deep financial shit (deeper than most) and that might well have influenced his decision to leave.
I hope they all close. Sorry, but I do. Modern-day academe has nursed the Woke viper in its bosom, and academe is now beyond saving, even science has been compromised
This pains me. Britain is good at this stuff. But it must be done - and various modern pressures mean it will happen anyway within the next decade, whatever my own beliefs. A few universities will survive as expensive, ultra-posh finishing schools for the elite
Let’s face it, none of the candidates is Augustus Caesar, they all have grave flaws. Badenoch is flimsy, Patel is widely disliked, Tugendhat is Who?
This guy probably has the fewest flaws. He’s young, articulate, not posh - self made. He looks vaguely prime ministerial and he’s quite right wing without being Suella, voters may like that
Also, it will drive the Corbynite anti-Semites mad if both the PM and the LOTO have “Zio” wives. So it’s worth doing for that alone
Unfortunately he's also an unelectable careerist dud who's very obviously manoeuvring himself to gain the votes of the remaining hard-line factionalists in the PCP in order to get into the final two.
Chasing Farage is a mug's game. The threat from the LibDems hoovering up the remaining Home Counties seats (backbone of the Tory party since Lord Salisbury) is far more existential.
No it isn't, the LDs have pretty much hit their ceiling in the Home Counties, taking almost all the Remain seats and some of the soft Leave seats there on 4th July. They are unlikely to get many if any more and in any case in some of those LD seats the Tory and Reform vote combined was bigger than the LD vote
The LDs will be building up their support in seats they haven’t yet won, as we speak.
From where? If they couldn't win Tory voters this time they are unlikely to win many more next time and they have already squeezed Labour tactical votes in their target seats as far as they can go
We targeted ruthlessly. For instance Farnham and Bordon was not a top target even though it could have been. Supporters were coming from there to other targets like Guildford. If all goes well for the LDs and we don't need to target Guildford the same way as this time we will all be in Farnham and Bordon and if under the same circumstances as the last election it would fall. We nearly took it without working it. Think what we could do if we really went for it.
That will happen all over the country. I would predict that if the election was run with both the LDs and Tories on the same level of popularity as at the GE, but starting with the current seats we would take another 20 seats. At least 2 more in Surrey for a start.
The combined Tory and Reform vote in Farnham was 47%, the LD vote only 33%
How many more times
Stop combining the two
Mind you, hopeless comment by me as @HYUFD is incapable of being wrong
"Let me put it this way, Mr. Big_G. The HYUFD series is the most reliable computer ever made. No HYUFD computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error."
You may be interested that my wife and I had a wonderful day out yesterday taking the TFW train from Llandudno to Blaenau Ffestiniog , crossing the platform and joining the 'quarryman' steam hauled narrow gauge railway which followed the track slate was taken down to Porthmadog for export worldwide, before returning on the quarryman to Blaenau and TFW to Llandudno
It was a lovely day and showcased the beauty of North Wales while slowly passing through
So good to hear you and your wife are 'out and about' - as I know you had some health issues earlier in the year.
Heartening to hear.
Thank you and you are very kind
My health issues continue and I am having to use a walking stick on occasions but we are so grateful for the medical interventions and continuing care from my consultants
Mate, you're doing pretty well at 84 (is that right?) to be using a walking stick only on occasions!
Long may you thrive and your family likewise
80 with my wife at 84 and yes we are very grateful for all our blessings
Let’s face it, none of the candidates is Augustus Caesar, they all have grave flaws. Badenoch is flimsy, Patel is widely disliked, Tugendhat is Who?
This guy probably has the fewest flaws. He’s young, articulate, not posh - self made. He looks vaguely prime ministerial and he’s quite right wing without being Suella, voters may like that
Also, it will drive the Corbynite anti-Semites mad if both the PM and the LOTO have “Zio” wives. So it’s worth doing for that alone
Unfortunately he's also an unelectable careerist dud who's very obviously manoeuvring himself to gain the votes of the remaining hard-line factionalists in the PCP in order to get into the final two.
Chasing Farage is a mug's game. The threat from the LibDems hoovering up the remaining Home Counties seats (backbone of the Tory party since Lord Salisbury) is far more existential.
No it isn't, the LDs have pretty much hit their ceiling in the Home Counties, taking almost all the Remain seats and some of the soft Leave seats there on 4th July. They are unlikely to get many if any more and in any case in some of those LD seats the Tory and Reform vote combined was bigger than the LD vote
The LDs will be building up their support in seats they haven’t yet won, as we speak.
From where? If they couldn't win Tory voters this time they are unlikely to win many more next time and they have already squeezed Labour tactical votes in their target seats as far as they can go
We targeted ruthlessly. For instance Farnham and Bordon was not a top target even though it could have been. Supporters were coming from there to other targets like Guildford. If all goes well for the LDs and we don't need to target Guildford the same way as this time we will all be in Farnham and Bordon and if under the same circumstances as the last election it would fall. We nearly took it without working it. Think what we could do if we really went for it.
That will happen all over the country. I would predict that if the election was run with both the LDs and Tories on the same level of popularity as at the GE, but starting with the current seats we would take another 20 seats. At least 2 more in Surrey for a start.
The combined Tory and Reform vote in Farnham was 47%, the LD vote only 33%
How many more times
Stop combining the two
Mind you, hopeless comment by me as @HYUFD is incapable of being wrong
"Let me put it this way, Mr. Big_G. The HYUFD series is the most reliable computer ever made. No HYUFD computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error."
You may be interested that my wife and I had a wonderful day out yesterday taking the TFW train from Llandudno to Blaenau Ffestiniog , crossing the platform and joining the 'quarryman' steam hauled narrow gauge railway which followed the track slate was taken down to Porthmadog for export worldwide, before returning on the quarryman to Blaenau and TFW to Llandudno
It was a lovely day and showcased the beauty of North Wales while slowly passing through
So good to hear you and your wife are 'out and about' - as I know you had some health issues earlier in the year.
Heartening to hear.
Thank you and you are very kind
My health issues continue and I am having to use a walking stick on occasions but we are so grateful for the medical interventions and continuing care from my consultants
Mate, you're doing pretty well at 84 (is that right?) to be using a walking stick only on occasions!
Long may you thrive and your family likewise
80 with my wife at 84 and yes we are very grateful for all our blessings
Interesting. His obvious course now - as I have been saying for some time - is to go into politics, professionally
Big gamble. The Reform vote (at the moment) is probably 15% max, and winning a seat will be really hard. On the other hand there is a vast empty space which he could occupy. The Reform-minded intellectual who is an eloquent speaker
His life span within ultra-lefty academe was always that of a mayfly
The University of Kent is, sadly as it’s a major employer in my home City, in deep financial shit (deeper than most) and that might well have influenced his decision to leave.
I hope they all close. Sorry, but I do. Modern-day academe has nursed the Woke viper in its bosom, and academe is now beyond saving, even science has been compromised
This pains me. Britain is good at this stuff. But it must be done - and various modern pressures mean it will happen anyway within the next decade, whatever my own beliefs. A few universities will survive as expensive, ultra-posh finishing schools for the elite
Yes, but you're just a pillock.
Probably I am a pillock, but I am also uncannily accurate about a lot of things. As we have seen today. I have some weird gift, it's probably just a combo of good brains and an unusually open mind, but whatevs
Universities as we know them will be gone within 20 years max, probably a lot less. It will have very little to do with my personal contempt for their politicisation, and a lot more to do with brutal collisions between technology and finance
You just need to be "not far-right" to oppose the far right. And yet the far left and their fellow travellers always seem to think that they are the only ones to occupy that space.
Their presence will put off many people from participating.
This Race War has been exceptionally disappointing. Imagine how desolate I'd feel if I'd been on the point of orgasm about it. Edge City. Like a cock caged cuck.
lee harpin @lmharpin Only the SWP could stage an “anti racism” demo where many Jewish participants, including myself, felt absolutely no sense of solidarity with those organising. Thankfully the far right haven’t showed up.
I live in East Finchley and there probably isn't a worse place in the country to hold a far right demonstration. It's Indians and Jewish people across all of Finchley. If more than two Nazi demonstrators turned up I'd be shocked.
Doesn't that depend on what variety of far right ?
There are certainly the equivalents of far right in both India and Israel.
I think if the British far right, Israeli far right and the Indian far right all turned up at the same place for a fight it would be very confusing.
I'm not sure any anti far right protesters need to get involved. They could just leave the 3 groups to fight it out amongst themselves.
I must find the video of the RSS that a friend sent. Marching in literal, actual, black shorts.
Ouch. He's no longer a professor and now just a Substack author.
You really should have called me James. This article is littered with inaccuracies, including about me leaving academe. You're about to look very silly indeed ...
He claims to have 1000s of paid subscribers to his substack, I presume its £5 a month (never looked), but he is absolutely coining it in. I can actually believe it, there are people doing millions of revenue on substack from a similar approach of a small amount from lots of people.
Let’s face it, none of the candidates is Augustus Caesar, they all have grave flaws. Badenoch is flimsy, Patel is widely disliked, Tugendhat is Who?
This guy probably has the fewest flaws. He’s young, articulate, not posh - self made. He looks vaguely prime ministerial and he’s quite right wing without being Suella, voters may like that
Also, it will drive the Corbynite anti-Semites mad if both the PM and the LOTO have “Zio” wives. So it’s worth doing for that alone
Unfortunately he's also an unelectable careerist dud who's very obviously manoeuvring himself to gain the votes of the remaining hard-line factionalists in the PCP in order to get into the final two.
Chasing Farage is a mug's game. The threat from the LibDems hoovering up the remaining Home Counties seats (backbone of the Tory party since Lord Salisbury) is far more existential.
No it isn't, the LDs have pretty much hit their ceiling in the Home Counties, taking almost all the Remain seats and some of the soft Leave seats there on 4th July. They are unlikely to get many if any more and in any case in some of those LD seats the Tory and Reform vote combined was bigger than the LD vote
The LDs will be building up their support in seats they haven’t yet won, as we speak.
From where? If they couldn't win Tory voters this time they are unlikely to win many more next time and they have already squeezed Labour tactical votes in their target seats as far as they can go
We targeted ruthlessly. For instance Farnham and Bordon was not a top target even though it could have been. Supporters were coming from there to other targets like Guildford. If all goes well for the LDs and we don't need to target Guildford the same way as this time we will all be in Farnham and Bordon and if under the same circumstances as the last election it would fall. We nearly took it without working it. Think what we could do if we really went for it.
That will happen all over the country. I would predict that if the election was run with both the LDs and Tories on the same level of popularity as at the GE, but starting with the current seats we would take another 20 seats. At least 2 more in Surrey for a start.
The combined Tory and Reform vote in Farnham was 47%, the LD vote only 33%
How many more times
Stop combining the two
Mind you, hopeless comment by me as @HYUFD is incapable of being wrong
"Let me put it this way, Mr. Big_G. The HYUFD series is the most reliable computer ever made. No HYUFD computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error."
You may be interested that my wife and I had a wonderful day out yesterday taking the TFW train from Llandudno to Blaenau Ffestiniog , crossing the platform and joining the 'quarryman' steam hauled narrow gauge railway which followed the track slate was taken down to Porthmadog for export worldwide, before returning on the quarryman to Blaenau and TFW to Llandudno
It was a lovely day and showcased the beauty of North Wales while slowly passing through
Good to know you and your wife are able to travel and enjoy it!
I did the main line train to Blaenau (along with basically the whole main line network in Wales), but haven't done the narrow gauge lines.
If you get the opportunity they are really a wonderful experience
Spend the extra for the observation coach (if it is available) on the Ffestiniog, going up or down depending on whjether you want the (perhaps) double Fairlie in view or not.
We also got off at the end of the Talyllyn and went up the old incline to explore the Bryn Eglwys quarries and their buildings and the quarriers village at Abergynolwyn, but no idea how the state of forestry, access, etc. is now.
We had the observation coach on both the quarryman and the Welsh Highland Caernarfon to Porthmadog journey and while more expensive they are worth it
BTW there's now a Landmark Trust cottage *on* the Ffestiniog - somewhere in the middle. Private platform, very tempting (car access not great though).
Jesus Christ two of you made the same desperate unfunny joke
And liked each other's posts
Indeed. I hesitated to mention it, as it felt cruel. It was like finally viewing, through a superb new telescope in the Atacama, the ultimate two-star system of cringe: @Foxy and You making the same scrotum-tighteningly juvenile joke, then actually liking each other's joke
Jenrick turned up for a very quickly arranged Chinese dinner last night. Fluent presentation but the usual hard-right shtick to entice the membership. Hey that worked so well in 1997-2005. I berated him for his open support for Trump (well, what a surprise) to which he replied that the GOP is our "sister party".
No chance of his getting my vote but I fear he'll win. What then after almost 50 years party membership?
Next week it's drinkkies with Mel.
So not only does he support Trump, but he does so for a facile reason. If he is the best the Conservatives can come up with they really might be toast.
More to the point, when you go through the CVs of the new Lib Dem MPs, Lots of ex military, lots of really impressive academic, business, community and local credentials... these are the kinds of MPs who could easily have been conservative. Then you think well, it the Tories go down the Reform/Populist rabbit hole there is an actual conservative party to vote for- moderate decent, pragmatic, hard working, reasonable and sensible. Everything that the Tories used to claim to be.
At this point the Lib Dems only need to take 26 MPs in order to push the Tories into third place or 29 if you took the Tories and Reform together, and yes I know this is a mildly specious argument but under FPTP but there are 72 Lib Dem MPs and only 5 RefUK. However, Truss and now Jenrick saying they support Trump is absolutely lethal, totally lines them up with Farage in the Petin camp and could actually trigger a hard core of the Tories to defect since they completely loathe both Trump and Farage. Local Tories often get on well with local Lib Dems, and we could certainly see emergence of the Lib Dems as the centre right party that many Tories say they are or want to be (but are actually not and definitely would not be as allies of Trump).
Most LDs neither want nor would accept being a centre right party, the social democratic wing of the party would defect en masse to Labour if it tried as effectively happened in 2015 when Clegg's centre right LDs in Cameron's coalition govt got just 8% of the vote
It really takes a special kind of person to lecture someone who has been a member of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats for over 45 years, and who has been pretty active over much of that time, as a candidate, both Parliamentary and local, as an organiser and as a very regular conference attender about what the membership of the party is and what it is not.
I know my party and you, sir, do not.
You don't, you only know the Liberal wing of your party not the Social Democratic wing clearly.
If Orange Book Liberalism was so popular it would not have got just 8% of the vote in 2015 would it? The only examples of Liberal parties being the main centre right party in western nations are in Australia (where they have effectively always held that position in coalition with the conservative Nationals), Japan, where the LDP has been dominant for decades and arguably the Netherlands which is a much more socially liberal nation by culture than the UK is.
If the LDs became a centre right party the social democrats who are heirs of those like Jenkins and Williams and Owen who defected from Labour in the 1980s ie those who make up the Democrats part of the LDs would defect en masse back to Labour which under Starmer would be closer to the old SDP than a centre right Orange Book Liberal party would be
Much as I like you @hyufd, you really aren't right on this one and @Cicero is. We do know our party and you don't. There is no conflict within the LDs between Liberals and Social Democrats. Much of the time even we don't know which colleagues are which. I remember having this discussion at a LD party after the election where we were comparing opinions. I couldn't have told you before those discussions if other members were from one wing or the other, because we just don't have those wings even though some of us are clearly liberals and some of us are clearly social democrats.
Looking at the 2015 election result is daft. We didn't lose because we were Liberals and not Social Democrats. Nobody believes that. We lost because of the coalition and things like Tuition fees. If you asked any voters they couldn't have told you whether we were mainly Liberals or Social Democrats in 2015 and they couldn't now. Only anoraks like us know there is a difference.
And see my other post re being able to win more seats. Here is a bit of info for you. In Guildford in the build up to the election we knocked on 31,000 doors and sent out regular leaflets. During the election we knocked on 32,000 doors. That is nearly everyone twice. 13 leaflets or letters went out and several hundred posterboards went up during the election, although many of those letters were targeted so not to everyone.
There are plenty of Tory seats we could have done that in but didn't have the resources to do so. So we targeted ruthlessly. There are now the next batch of seats to go for and resources we can move from the last lot of targets we have won,
Now that may not happen. The Tories may recover and we may be defending ruthlessly and targeting nowhere. But if it stays the same we will be have many more Tory seats next time as well as some labour ones to go for.
History is on my side. For example, in 1945 the Liberals got just 9% on a centrist or even centre right liberal platform and the Liberals never got over 10% of the vote until Grimond got 11% in 1964, before falling back to 8.5% in 1966. In Feb 1974 Thorpe's Liberals did admittedly peak at 19% (though that was partly a result of his being more charismatic than Heath and Wilson) before falling to 13% under Steel in 1979 after Thorpe's scandals emerged.
Only the social democrat wing of the Labour Party leaving to form the SDP under Roy Jenkins and then forming the Alliance with the Liberals at the 1983 general election got the combined Liberals and SDP over 20% on a centre left platform to 25% and then 22% under Owen in 1987.
The merged parties which formed the LDs then never ceased to get under 15% of the voted from 1992 to 2010, peaking at 22% in 2005 under Charles Kennedy on an even left of Blair's Labour platform never mind just left of the Tories and 23% in 2010 when Clegg pledged to scrap tuition fees before moving right and backing increasing them in government as you say.
After going into coalition with the Tories in 2010 however the LDs collapsed to just 8% in 2015 and although they have got back over 10% since by appealing to hardline Remainers who opposed Brexit they have still not got over 15% again.
If the LDs became a centre right party they would also lose most of the Labour tactical votes that helped win them southern seats from the Tories last month and also have no chance in Labour seats Kennedy won in 2005
The Conservatives however have never polled lower than 30% in a General Election (we know they have in local elections and European parliamentary elections) until July 4th when they polled 24% and won 121 seats, their worst performance since the Reform Act of 1832 so applying historical parallels when we are in uncharted territory seems a little like hopecasting. The last time they polled anywhere near this (1997, 30.7% and 165 seats) they were out of Government for 13 years.
24% was still double the 12% the LDs got.
In 1997 Labour under Blair got 43%, 10% more than the 33% Labour under Starmer got
Your problem with that is that it illustrates two things - the potential for Tory revival at the next election, and the potential for oblivion.
Your opponents winning big without actually doing that well comes with a huge, flashing warning sign.
Only if the rightwing vote is effectively split again
What about the last few days makes you feel the right is coming together rather than splintering further?
Farage shifting to target working class Labour seats now and Jenrick, likely next Tory leader, shifting towards what Reform voters want to hear. Indeed you could well have Reform focusing on working class Labour seats the Tories normally can't reach and the Tories focusing on middle class Labour and LD seats Reform normally can't reach
Let’s face it, none of the candidates is Augustus Caesar, they all have grave flaws. Badenoch is flimsy, Patel is widely disliked, Tugendhat is Who?
This guy probably has the fewest flaws. He’s young, articulate, not posh - self made. He looks vaguely prime ministerial and he’s quite right wing without being Suella, voters may like that
Also, it will drive the Corbynite anti-Semites mad if both the PM and the LOTO have “Zio” wives. So it’s worth doing for that alone
Unfortunately he's also an unelectable careerist dud who's very obviously manoeuvring himself to gain the votes of the remaining hard-line factionalists in the PCP in order to get into the final two.
Chasing Farage is a mug's game. The threat from the LibDems hoovering up the remaining Home Counties seats (backbone of the Tory party since Lord Salisbury) is far more existential.
No it isn't, the LDs have pretty much hit their ceiling in the Home Counties, taking almost all the Remain seats and some of the soft Leave seats there on 4th July. They are unlikely to get many if any more and in any case in some of those LD seats the Tory and Reform vote combined was bigger than the LD vote
The LDs will be building up their support in seats they haven’t yet won, as we speak.
From where? If they couldn't win Tory voters this time they are unlikely to win many more next time and they have already squeezed Labour tactical votes in their target seats as far as they can go
We targeted ruthlessly. For instance Farnham and Bordon was not a top target even though it could have been. Supporters were coming from there to other targets like Guildford. If all goes well for the LDs and we don't need to target Guildford the same way as this time we will all be in Farnham and Bordon and if under the same circumstances as the last election it would fall. We nearly took it without working it. Think what we could do if we really went for it.
That will happen all over the country. I would predict that if the election was run with both the LDs and Tories on the same level of popularity as at the GE, but starting with the current seats we would take another 20 seats. At least 2 more in Surrey for a start.
The combined Tory and Reform vote in Farnham was 47%, the LD vote only 33%
How many more times
Stop combining the two
Mind you, hopeless comment by me as @HYUFD is incapable of being wrong
"Let me put it this way, Mr. Big_G. The HYUFD series is the most reliable computer ever made. No HYUFD computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error."
You may be interested that my wife and I had a wonderful day out yesterday taking the TFW train from Llandudno to Blaenau Ffestiniog , crossing the platform and joining the 'quarryman' steam hauled narrow gauge railway which followed the track slate was taken down to Porthmadog for export worldwide, before returning on the quarryman to Blaenau and TFW to Llandudno
It was a lovely day and showcased the beauty of North Wales while slowly passing through
Good to know you and your wife are able to travel and enjoy it!
I did the main line train to Blaenau (along with basically the whole main line network in Wales), but haven't done the narrow gauge lines.
If you get the opportunity they are really a wonderful experience
Spend the extra for the observation coach (if it is available) on the Ffestiniog, going up or down depending on whjether you want the (perhaps) double Fairlie in view or not.
We also got off at the end of the Talyllyn and went up the old incline to explore the Bryn Eglwys quarries and their buildings and the quarriers village at Abergynolwyn, but no idea how the state of forestry, access, etc. is now.
We had the observation coach on both the quarryman and the Welsh Highland Caernarfon to Porthmadog journey and while more expensive they are worth it
BTW there's now a Landmark Trust cottage *on* the Ffestiniog - somewhere in the middle. Private platform, very tempting (car access not great though).
Jon Sopel @jonsopel · 3h Have seen queues like this at Trump events over the years, but at a Dem rally? Never happened with Biden or Hillary Clinton. There is something stirring…..
Step back and think logically instead of drinking the kool-aid - if the people who queue up for hours to see Trump are generally nutters with nothing better to do, why isn’t the same true for people who do so the same with Harris?
You are letting your wishes get ahead of you. The people who are queueing for Harris are not swing voters, not independents, as they would be if they were queueing for Trump. Normal voters don’t stand hours in line waiting to hear a candidate speak.
You just need to be "not far-right" to oppose the far right. And yet the far left and their fellow travellers always seem to think that they are the only ones to occupy that space.
Their presence will put off many people from participating.
The far left always were trying to limpet on to other peoples causes, when I was a student. They seemed to think that if they hung around enough, everyone would join the SWP.
I recall they were very put out when the Snackbarists said they hated them just as much as other Western infidels.
This Race War has been exceptionally disappointing. Imagine how desolate I'd feel if I'd been on the point of orgasm about it. Edge City. Like a cock caged cuck.
lee harpin @lmharpin Only the SWP could stage an “anti racism” demo where many Jewish participants, including myself, felt absolutely no sense of solidarity with those organising. Thankfully the far right haven’t showed up.
I live in East Finchley and there probably isn't a worse place in the country to hold a far right demonstration. It's Indians and Jewish people across all of Finchley. If more than two Nazi demonstrators turned up I'd be shocked.
Doesn't that depend on what variety of far right ?
There are certainly the equivalents of far right in both India and Israel.
I think if the British far right, Israeli far right and the Indian far right all turned up at the same place for a fight it would be very confusing.
I'm not sure any anti far right protesters need to get involved. They could just leave the 3 groups to fight it out amongst themselves.
I must find the video of the RSS that a friend sent. Marching in literal, actual, black shorts.
Heil Spode!
That doesn't sound like the Royal Statistical Society I know...
Jon Sopel @jonsopel · 3h Have seen queues like this at Trump events over the years, but at a Dem rally? Never happened with Biden or Hillary Clinton. There is something stirring…..
Step back and think logically instead of drinking the kool-aid - if the people who queue up for hours to see Trump are generally nutters with nothing better to do, why isn’t the same true for people who do so the same with Harris?
You are letting your wishes get ahead of you. The people who are queueing for Harris are not swing voters, not independents, as they would be if they were queueing for Trump. Normal voters don’t stand hours in line waiting to hear a candidate speak.
A plane crashes on the Ukraine/Republic of China border. Which side do you bury the survivors?
Ouch. He's no longer a professor and now just a Substack author.
You really should have called me James. This article is littered with inaccuracies, including about me leaving academe. You're about to look very silly indeed ...
Something honorary or emeritus would fall under the 'not leaving academe', quite possibly. As would a Mastership of a Cambridge Uni college. Have to wait and see.
Jenrick turned up for a very quickly arranged Chinese dinner last night. Fluent presentation but the usual hard-right shtick to entice the membership. Hey that worked so well in 1997-2005. I berated him for his open support for Trump (well, what a surprise) to which he replied that the GOP is our "sister party".
No chance of his getting my vote but I fear he'll win. What then after almost 50 years party membership?
Next week it's drinkkies with Mel.
So not only does he support Trump, but he does so for a facile reason. If he is the best the Conservatives can come up with they really might be toast.
More to the point, when you go through the CVs of the new Lib Dem MPs, Lots of ex military, lots of really impressive academic, business, community and local credentials... these are the kinds of MPs who could easily have been conservative. Then you think well, it the Tories go down the Reform/Populist rabbit hole there is an actual conservative party to vote for- moderate decent, pragmatic, hard working, reasonable and sensible. Everything that the Tories used to claim to be.
At this point the Lib Dems only need to take 26 MPs in order to push the Tories into third place or 29 if you took the Tories and Reform together, and yes I know this is a mildly specious argument but under FPTP but there are 72 Lib Dem MPs and only 5 RefUK. However, Truss and now Jenrick saying they support Trump is absolutely lethal, totally lines them up with Farage in the Petin camp and could actually trigger a hard core of the Tories to defect since they completely loathe both Trump and Farage. Local Tories often get on well with local Lib Dems, and we could certainly see emergence of the Lib Dems as the centre right party that many Tories say they are or want to be (but are actually not and definitely would not be as allies of Trump).
Most LDs neither want nor would accept being a centre right party, the social democratic wing of the party would defect en masse to Labour if it tried as effectively happened in 2015 when Clegg's centre right LDs in Cameron's coalition govt got just 8% of the vote
It really takes a special kind of person to lecture someone who has been a member of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats for over 45 years, and who has been pretty active over much of that time, as a candidate, both Parliamentary and local, as an organiser and as a very regular conference attender about what the membership of the party is and what it is not.
I know my party and you, sir, do not.
You don't, you only know the Liberal wing of your party not the Social Democratic wing clearly.
If Orange Book Liberalism was so popular it would not have got just 8% of the vote in 2015 would it? The only examples of Liberal parties being the main centre right party in western nations are in Australia (where they have effectively always held that position in coalition with the conservative Nationals), Japan, where the LDP has been dominant for decades and arguably the Netherlands which is a much more socially liberal nation by culture than the UK is.
If the LDs became a centre right party the social democrats who are heirs of those like Jenkins and Williams and Owen who defected from Labour in the 1980s ie those who make up the Democrats part of the LDs would defect en masse back to Labour which under Starmer would be closer to the old SDP than a centre right Orange Book Liberal party would be
Much as I like you @hyufd, you really aren't right on this one and @Cicero is. We do know our party and you don't. There is no conflict within the LDs between Liberals and Social Democrats. Much of the time even we don't know which colleagues are which. I remember having this discussion at a LD party after the election where we were comparing opinions. I couldn't have told you before those discussions if other members were from one wing or the other, because we just don't have those wings even though some of us are clearly liberals and some of us are clearly social democrats.
Looking at the 2015 election result is daft. We didn't lose because we were Liberals and not Social Democrats. Nobody believes that. We lost because of the coalition and things like Tuition fees. If you asked any voters they couldn't have told you whether we were mainly Liberals or Social Democrats in 2015 and they couldn't now. Only anoraks like us know there is a difference.
And see my other post re being able to win more seats. Here is a bit of info for you. In Guildford in the build up to the election we knocked on 31,000 doors and sent out regular leaflets. During the election we knocked on 32,000 doors. That is nearly everyone twice. 13 leaflets or letters went out and several hundred posterboards went up during the election, although many of those letters were targeted so not to everyone.
There are plenty of Tory seats we could have done that in but didn't have the resources to do so. So we targeted ruthlessly. There are now the next batch of seats to go for and resources we can move from the last lot of targets we have won,
Now that may not happen. The Tories may recover and we may be defending ruthlessly and targeting nowhere. But if it stays the same we will be have many more Tory seats next time as well as some labour ones to go for.
History is on my side. For example, in 1945 the Liberals got just 9% on a centrist or even centre right liberal platform and the Liberals never got over 10% of the vote until Grimond got 11% in 1964, before falling back to 8.5% in 1966. In Feb 1974 Thorpe's Liberals did admittedly peak at 19% (though that was partly a result of his being more charismatic than Heath and Wilson) before falling to 13% under Steel in 1979 after Thorpe's scandals emerged.
Only the social democrat wing of the Labour Party leaving to form the SDP under Roy Jenkins and then forming the Alliance with the Liberals at the 1983 general election got the combined Liberals and SDP over 20% on a centre left platform to 25% and then 22% under Owen in 1987.
The merged parties which formed the LDs then never ceased to get under 15% of the voted from 1992 to 2010, peaking at 22% in 2005 under Charles Kennedy on an even left of Blair's Labour platform never mind just left of the Tories and 23% in 2010 when Clegg pledged to scrap tuition fees before moving right and backing increasing them in government as you say.
After going into coalition with the Tories in 2010 however the LDs collapsed to just 8% in 2015 and although they have got back over 10% since by appealing to hardline Remainers who opposed Brexit they have still not got over 15% again.
If the LDs became a centre right party they would also lose most of the Labour tactical votes that helped win them southern seats from the Tories last month and also have no chance in Labour seats Kennedy won in 2005
There won't be a Tory party, and politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Plenty of ex Tories will never vote for Farage.
Why won't there be a Tory party? Not one leadership contender is suggesting merging with Reform.
However if that did happen Canada style then if the LDs became a centre right One Nation Tory party effectively obviously the social democratic wing of the LDs would in turn move to Labour
I've covered this in several posts to explain why that wouldn't happen. Whether you agree with me or not it is worth trying to take on what we are saying.
I'll try again:
a) Unlike the Tories and Labour although we all have different views (as you know I am a Liberal rather than a Social Democrat) that doesn't really register within the party itself very much. I have no idea what most of the people I campaigned with are. Unless I get into a discussion I am unaware whether a fellow member is a Liberal or Social Democrat. Although individually we are one or the other to some extent, we don't actually have such wings, unlike Labour and the Tories.
b) if you canvas someone (try doing this?) and they tell you they are voting LD, try asking them whether they are Liberals or Social Democrats. Except for the odd person like me you will get a blank response. If you ask which wing a Tory voter or Labour voter is on, many will know.
Don't assume because you have these wings in the Tory party they exist in the same way in the LDs.
However if we went to PR, I do agree and think that split would happen.
Ouch. He's no longer a professor and now just a Substack author.
You really should have called me James. This article is littered with inaccuracies, including about me leaving academe. You're about to look very silly indeed ...
He claims to have 1000s of paid subscribers to his substack, I presume its £5 a month (never looked), but he is absolutely coining it in. I can actually believe it, there are people doing millions of revenue on substack from a similar approach of a small amount from lots of people.
Unless he's just going to say he's still in academe while not holding a university position. Which you can be, sure, but it won't be an impressive quibble to make.
It was my second visit. My first was as a student. Going with family is a different experience. It's a very pretty city, but in trying to give the kids a bowdlerised highlights-in-one-day package on a baking day in August, it quickly starts to feel like every otger capital city: hot and crowded and peppered with angry Arabs and pride flags and American candy stores and graffiti and luxury stores and tat, and the beauty you came to see quickly fades into the background. Even an inspired lunch choice from oldest daughter brought only temporary respite. I mean, we had a nice day. But I was finding it hard to feel as well-disposed to the place as I did last time I visited.
And then, at oldest daughter's polite insistence, we did this. And it was terrifying and brilliant and turned the day into one I will never forget: https://youtu.be/GjgD0cfcmV0?si=DxwfR2xLb2flgUcP
It helps that this is in Noord Amsterdam - a fiveminute ferry ride away from central station, but completely different in feel and
lee harpin @lmharpin Only the SWP could stage an “anti racism” demo where many Jewish participants, including myself, felt absolutely no sense of solidarity with those organising. Thankfully the far right haven’t showed up.
I live in East Finchley and there probably isn't a worse place in the country to hold a far right demonstration. It's Indians and Jewish people across all of Finchley. If more than two Nazi demonstrators turned up I'd be shocked.
Doesn't that depend on what variety of far right ?
There are certainly the equivalents of far right in both India and Israel.
I think if the British far right, Israeli far right and the Indian far right all turned up at the same place for a fight it would be very confusing.
I'm not sure any anti far right protesters need to get involved. They could just leave the 3 groups to fight it out amongst themselves.
I must find the video of the RSS that a friend sent. Marching in literal, actual, black shorts.
Heil Spode!
That doesn't sound like the Royal Statistical Society I know...
I feel a bit sorry for Sky News, who were really looking forward to these riots all day.
Funny thing is Sky are next door to Brentford and that was one of the places rumoured to have a demo/riot so Sky had been telling staff to go home early and avoid public transport. I can confirm West London has been quiet, which was great as the bus was half empty for once.
Jenrick turned up for a very quickly arranged Chinese dinner last night. Fluent presentation but the usual hard-right shtick to entice the membership. Hey that worked so well in 1997-2005. I berated him for his open support for Trump (well, what a surprise) to which he replied that the GOP is our "sister party".
No chance of his getting my vote but I fear he'll win. What then after almost 50 years party membership?
Next week it's drinkkies with Mel.
So not only does he support Trump, but he does so for a facile reason. If he is the best the Conservatives can come up with they really might be toast.
More to the point, when you go through the CVs of the new Lib Dem MPs, Lots of ex military, lots of really impressive academic, business, community and local credentials... these are the kinds of MPs who could easily have been conservative. Then you think well, it the Tories go down the Reform/Populist rabbit hole there is an actual conservative party to vote for- moderate decent, pragmatic, hard working, reasonable and sensible. Everything that the Tories used to claim to be.
At this point the Lib Dems only need to take 26 MPs in order to push the Tories into third place or 29 if you took the Tories and Reform together, and yes I know this is a mildly specious argument but under FPTP but there are 72 Lib Dem MPs and only 5 RefUK. However, Truss and now Jenrick saying they support Trump is absolutely lethal, totally lines them up with Farage in the Petin camp and could actually trigger a hard core of the Tories to defect since they completely loathe both Trump and Farage. Local Tories often get on well with local Lib Dems, and we could certainly see emergence of the Lib Dems as the centre right party that many Tories say they are or want to be (but are actually not and definitely would not be as allies of Trump).
Most LDs neither want nor would accept being a centre right party, the social democratic wing of the party would defect en masse to Labour if it tried as effectively happened in 2015 when Clegg's centre right LDs in Cameron's coalition govt got just 8% of the vote
It really takes a special kind of person to lecture someone who has been a member of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats for over 45 years, and who has been pretty active over much of that time, as a candidate, both Parliamentary and local, as an organiser and as a very regular conference attender about what the membership of the party is and what it is not.
I know my party and you, sir, do not.
You don't, you only know the Liberal wing of your party not the Social Democratic wing clearly.
If Orange Book Liberalism was so popular it would not have got just 8% of the vote in 2015 would it? The only examples of Liberal parties being the main centre right party in western nations are in Australia (where they have effectively always held that position in coalition with the conservative Nationals), Japan, where the LDP has been dominant for decades and arguably the Netherlands which is a much more socially liberal nation by culture than the UK is.
If the LDs became a centre right party the social democrats who are heirs of those like Jenkins and Williams and Owen who defected from Labour in the 1980s ie those who make up the Democrats part of the LDs would defect en masse back to Labour which under Starmer would be closer to the old SDP than a centre right Orange Book Liberal party would be
Much as I like you @hyufd, you really aren't right on this one and @Cicero is. We do know our party and you don't. There is no conflict within the LDs between Liberals and Social Democrats. Much of the time even we don't know which colleagues are which. I remember having this discussion at a LD party after the election where we were comparing opinions. I couldn't have told you before those discussions if other members were from one wing or the other, because we just don't have those wings even though some of us are clearly liberals and some of us are clearly social democrats.
Looking at the 2015 election result is daft. We didn't lose because we were Liberals and not Social Democrats. Nobody believes that. We lost because of the coalition and things like Tuition fees. If you asked any voters they couldn't have told you whether we were mainly Liberals or Social Democrats in 2015 and they couldn't now. Only anoraks like us know there is a difference.
And see my other post re being able to win more seats. Here is a bit of info for you. In Guildford in the build up to the election we knocked on 31,000 doors and sent out regular leaflets. During the election we knocked on 32,000 doors. That is nearly everyone twice. 13 leaflets or letters went out and several hundred posterboards went up during the election, although many of those letters were targeted so not to everyone.
There are plenty of Tory seats we could have done that in but didn't have the resources to do so. So we targeted ruthlessly. There are now the next batch of seats to go for and resources we can move from the last lot of targets we have won,
Now that may not happen. The Tories may recover and we may be defending ruthlessly and targeting nowhere. But if it stays the same we will be have many more Tory seats next time as well as some labour ones to go for.
History is on my side. For example, in 1945 the Liberals got just 9% on a centrist or even centre right liberal platform and the Liberals never got over 10% of the vote until Grimond got 11% in 1964, before falling back to 8.5% in 1966. In Feb 1974 Thorpe's Liberals did admittedly peak at 19% (though that was partly a result of his being more charismatic than Heath and Wilson) before falling to 13% under Steel in 1979 after Thorpe's scandals emerged.
Only the social democrat wing of the Labour Party leaving to form the SDP under Roy Jenkins and then forming the Alliance with the Liberals at the 1983 general election got the combined Liberals and SDP over 20% on a centre left platform to 25% and then 22% under Owen in 1987.
The merged parties which formed the LDs then never ceased to get under 15% of the voted from 1992 to 2010, peaking at 22% in 2005 under Charles Kennedy on an even left of Blair's Labour platform never mind just left of the Tories and 23% in 2010 when Clegg pledged to scrap tuition fees before moving right and backing increasing them in government as you say.
After going into coalition with the Tories in 2010 however the LDs collapsed to just 8% in 2015 and although they have got back over 10% since by appealing to hardline Remainers who opposed Brexit they have still not got over 15% again.
If the LDs became a centre right party they would also lose most of the Labour tactical votes that helped win them southern seats from the Tories last month and also have no chance in Labour seats Kennedy won in 2005
The Conservatives however have never polled lower than 30% in a General Election (we know they have in local elections and European parliamentary elections) until July 4th when they polled 24% and won 121 seats, their worst performance since the Reform Act of 1832 so applying historical parallels when we are in uncharted territory seems a little like hopecasting. The last time they polled anywhere near this (1997, 30.7% and 165 seats) they were out of Government for 13 years.
24% was still double the 12% the LDs got.
In 1997 Labour under Blair got 43%, 10% more than the 33% Labour under Starmer got
Your problem with that is that it illustrates two things - the potential for Tory revival at the next election, and the potential for oblivion.
Your opponents winning big without actually doing that well comes with a huge, flashing warning sign.
Only if the rightwing vote is effectively split again
What about the last few days makes you feel the right is coming together rather than splintering further?
Farage shifting to target working class Labour seats now and Jenrick, likely next Tory leader, shifting towards what Reform voters want to hear. Indeed you could well have Reform focusing on working class Labour seats the Tories normally can't reach and the Tories focusing on middle class Labour and LD seats Reform normally can't reach
Jenrick would be a terrible choice of leader and the conservative party only hope of recovery is to divorce entirely the idea if will accommodate Reform
It was my second visit. My first was as a student. Going with family is a different experience. It's a very pretty city, but in trying to give the kids a bowdlerised highlights-in-one-day package on a baking day in August, it quickly starts to feel like every otger capital city: hot and crowded and peppered with angry Arabs and pride flags and American candy stores and graffiti and luxury stores and tat, and the beauty you came to see quickly fades into the background. Even an inspired lunch choice from oldest daughter brought only temporary respite. I mean, we had a nice day. But I was finding it hard to feel as well-disposed to the place as I did last time I visited.
And then, at oldest daughter's polite insistence, we did this. And it was terrifying and brilliant and turned the day into one I will never forget: https://youtu.be/GjgD0cfcmV0?si=DxwfR2xLb2flgUcP
It helps that this is in Noord Amsterdam - a fiveminute ferry ride away from central station, but completely different in feel and
Hah Looks like fun! I assume you're not the bloke on the left looking shit-scared.
It was my second visit. My first was as a student. Going with family is a different experience. It's a very pretty city, but in trying to give the kids a bowdlerised highlights-in-one-day package on a baking day in August, it quickly starts to feel like every otger capital city: hot and crowded and peppered with angry Arabs and pride flags and American candy stores and graffiti and luxury stores and tat, and the beauty you came to see quickly fades into the background. Even an inspired lunch choice from oldest daughter brought only temporary respite. I mean, we had a nice day. But I was finding it hard to feel as well-disposed to the place as I did last time I visited.
And then, at oldest daughter's polite insistence, we did this. And it was terrifying and brilliant and turned the day into one I will never forget: https://youtu.be/GjgD0cfcmV0?si=DxwfR2xLb2flgUcP
It helps that this is in Noord Amsterdam - a fiveminute ferry ride away from central station, but completely different in feel and
That looks fun
Can I ask why you chose Holland and Amsterdam? It is not what it was
It was my second visit. My first was as a student. Going with family is a different experience. It's a very pretty city, but in trying to give the kids a bowdlerised highlights-in-one-day package on a baking day in August, it quickly starts to feel like every otger capital city: hot and crowded and peppered with angry Arabs and pride flags and American candy stores and graffiti and luxury stores and tat, and the beauty you came to see quickly fades into the background. Even an inspired lunch choice from oldest daughter brought only temporary respite. I mean, we had a nice day. But I was finding it hard to feel as well-disposed to the place as I did last time I visited.
And then, at oldest daughter's polite insistence, we did this. And it was terrifying and brilliant and turned the day into one I will never forget: https://youtu.be/GjgD0cfcmV0?si=DxwfR2xLb2flgUcP
It helps that this is in Noord Amsterdam - a fiveminute ferry ride away from central station, but completely different in feel and
This Race War has been exceptionally disappointing. Imagine how desolate I'd feel if I'd been on the point of orgasm about it. Edge City. Like a cock caged cuck.
Jenrick turned up for a very quickly arranged Chinese dinner last night. Fluent presentation but the usual hard-right shtick to entice the membership. Hey that worked so well in 1997-2005. I berated him for his open support for Trump (well, what a surprise) to which he replied that the GOP is our "sister party".
No chance of his getting my vote but I fear he'll win. What then after almost 50 years party membership?
Next week it's drinkkies with Mel.
So not only does he support Trump, but he does so for a facile reason. If he is the best the Conservatives can come up with they really might be toast.
More to the point, when you go through the CVs of the new Lib Dem MPs, Lots of ex military, lots of really impressive academic, business, community and local credentials... these are the kinds of MPs who could easily have been conservative. Then you think well, it the Tories go down the Reform/Populist rabbit hole there is an actual conservative party to vote for- moderate decent, pragmatic, hard working, reasonable and sensible. Everything that the Tories used to claim to be.
At this point the Lib Dems only need to take 26 MPs in order to push the Tories into third place or 29 if you took the Tories and Reform together, and yes I know this is a mildly specious argument but under FPTP but there are 72 Lib Dem MPs and only 5 RefUK. However, Truss and now Jenrick saying they support Trump is absolutely lethal, totally lines them up with Farage in the Petin camp and could actually trigger a hard core of the Tories to defect since they completely loathe both Trump and Farage. Local Tories often get on well with local Lib Dems, and we could certainly see emergence of the Lib Dems as the centre right party that many Tories say they are or want to be (but are actually not and definitely would not be as allies of Trump).
Most LDs neither want nor would accept being a centre right party, the social democratic wing of the party would defect en masse to Labour if it tried as effectively happened in 2015 when Clegg's centre right LDs in Cameron's coalition govt got just 8% of the vote
It really takes a special kind of person to lecture someone who has been a member of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats for over 45 years, and who has been pretty active over much of that time, as a candidate, both Parliamentary and local, as an organiser and as a very regular conference attender about what the membership of the party is and what it is not.
I know my party and you, sir, do not.
You don't, you only know the Liberal wing of your party not the Social Democratic wing clearly.
If Orange Book Liberalism was so popular it would not have got just 8% of the vote in 2015 would it? The only examples of Liberal parties being the main centre right party in western nations are in Australia (where they have effectively always held that position in coalition with the conservative Nationals), Japan, where the LDP has been dominant for decades and arguably the Netherlands which is a much more socially liberal nation by culture than the UK is.
If the LDs became a centre right party the social democrats who are heirs of those like Jenkins and Williams and Owen who defected from Labour in the 1980s ie those who make up the Democrats part of the LDs would defect en masse back to Labour which under Starmer would be closer to the old SDP than a centre right Orange Book Liberal party would be
Much as I like you @hyufd, you really aren't right on this one and @Cicero is. We do know our party and you don't. There is no conflict within the LDs between Liberals and Social Democrats. Much of the time even we don't know which colleagues are which. I remember having this discussion at a LD party after the election where we were comparing opinions. I couldn't have told you before those discussions if other members were from one wing or the other, because we just don't have those wings even though some of us are clearly liberals and some of us are clearly social democrats.
Looking at the 2015 election result is daft. We didn't lose because we were Liberals and not Social Democrats. Nobody believes that. We lost because of the coalition and things like Tuition fees. If you asked any voters they couldn't have told you whether we were mainly Liberals or Social Democrats in 2015 and they couldn't now. Only anoraks like us know there is a difference.
And see my other post re being able to win more seats. Here is a bit of info for you. In Guildford in the build up to the election we knocked on 31,000 doors and sent out regular leaflets. During the election we knocked on 32,000 doors. That is nearly everyone twice. 13 leaflets or letters went out and several hundred posterboards went up during the election, although many of those letters were targeted so not to everyone.
There are plenty of Tory seats we could have done that in but didn't have the resources to do so. So we targeted ruthlessly. There are now the next batch of seats to go for and resources we can move from the last lot of targets we have won,
Now that may not happen. The Tories may recover and we may be defending ruthlessly and targeting nowhere. But if it stays the same we will be have many more Tory seats next time as well as some labour ones to go for.
History is on my side. For example, in 1945 the Liberals got just 9% on a centrist or even centre right liberal platform and the Liberals never got over 10% of the vote until Grimond got 11% in 1964, before falling back to 8.5% in 1966. In Feb 1974 Thorpe's Liberals did admittedly peak at 19% (though that was partly a result of his being more charismatic than Heath and Wilson) before falling to 13% under Steel in 1979 after Thorpe's scandals emerged.
Only the social democrat wing of the Labour Party leaving to form the SDP under Roy Jenkins and then forming the Alliance with the Liberals at the 1983 general election got the combined Liberals and SDP over 20% on a centre left platform to 25% and then 22% under Owen in 1987.
The merged parties which formed the LDs then never ceased to get under 15% of the voted from 1992 to 2010, peaking at 22% in 2005 under Charles Kennedy on an even left of Blair's Labour platform never mind just left of the Tories and 23% in 2010 when Clegg pledged to scrap tuition fees before moving right and backing increasing them in government as you say.
After going into coalition with the Tories in 2010 however the LDs collapsed to just 8% in 2015 and although they have got back over 10% since by appealing to hardline Remainers who opposed Brexit they have still not got over 15% again.
If the LDs became a centre right party they would also lose most of the Labour tactical votes that helped win them southern seats from the Tories last month and also have no chance in Labour seats Kennedy won in 2005
The Conservatives however have never polled lower than 30% in a General Election (we know they have in local elections and European parliamentary elections) until July 4th when they polled 24% and won 121 seats, their worst performance since the Reform Act of 1832 so applying historical parallels when we are in uncharted territory seems a little like hopecasting. The last time they polled anywhere near this (1997, 30.7% and 165 seats) they were out of Government for 13 years.
24% was still double the 12% the LDs got.
In 1997 Labour under Blair got 43%, 10% more than the 33% Labour under Starmer got
Your problem with that is that it illustrates two things - the potential for Tory revival at the next election, and the potential for oblivion.
Your opponents winning big without actually doing that well comes with a huge, flashing warning sign.
Only if the rightwing vote is effectively split again
What about the last few days makes you feel the right is coming together rather than splintering further?
Farage shifting to target working class Labour seats now and Jenrick, likely next Tory leader, shifting towards what Reform voters want to hear. Indeed you could well have Reform focusing on working class Labour seats the Tories normally can't reach and the Tories focusing on middle class Labour and LD seats Reform normally can't reach
Jenrick would be a terrible choice of leader and the conservative party only hope of recovery is to divorce entirely the idea if will accommodate Reform
So right. The choice is crush or accommodate. It's possible candidates for leader have to lean to accommodate to win the leadership, and will snap back. But it is complete madness. The only strategy is to crush.
It was my second visit. My first was as a student. Going with family is a different experience. It's a very pretty city, but in trying to give the kids a bowdlerised highlights-in-one-day package on a baking day in August, it quickly starts to feel like every otger capital city: hot and crowded and peppered with angry Arabs and pride flags and American candy stores and graffiti and luxury stores and tat, and the beauty you came to see quickly fades into the background. Even an inspired lunch choice from oldest daughter brought only temporary respite. I mean, we had a nice day. But I was finding it hard to feel as well-disposed to the place as I did last time I visited.
And then, at oldest daughter's polite insistence, we did this. And it was terrifying and brilliant and turned the day into one I will never forget: https://youtu.be/GjgD0cfcmV0?si=DxwfR2xLb2flgUcP
It helps that this is in Noord Amsterdam - a fiveminute ferry ride away from central station, but completely different in feel and
...intensity, and an area I hadn't been to before - so I had no preconceived notions for it to live up to. But the activity: I'm a hard man to frighten, but it was one of the scariest things I've ever done. Which is pretty brilliant in itself. I also now have a photo I will forever treasure (I thought they'd sting you for it but you can download it for free) of me and youngest daughter from behind, dangling improbably above the Amsterdam skyline. It's hard to believe it's not greenscreened.
Aside from all that, the best thing about the day was Dutch public transport, which was thrillingly punctual and well connected.
Jenrick turned up for a very quickly arranged Chinese dinner last night. Fluent presentation but the usual hard-right shtick to entice the membership. Hey that worked so well in 1997-2005. I berated him for his open support for Trump (well, what a surprise) to which he replied that the GOP is our "sister party".
No chance of his getting my vote but I fear he'll win. What then after almost 50 years party membership?
Next week it's drinkkies with Mel.
So not only does he support Trump, but he does so for a facile reason. If he is the best the Conservatives can come up with they really might be toast.
More to the point, when you go through the CVs of the new Lib Dem MPs, Lots of ex military, lots of really impressive academic, business, community and local credentials... these are the kinds of MPs who could easily have been conservative. Then you think well, it the Tories go down the Reform/Populist rabbit hole there is an actual conservative party to vote for- moderate decent, pragmatic, hard working, reasonable and sensible. Everything that the Tories used to claim to be.
At this point the Lib Dems only need to take 26 MPs in order to push the Tories into third place or 29 if you took the Tories and Reform together, and yes I know this is a mildly specious argument but under FPTP but there are 72 Lib Dem MPs and only 5 RefUK. However, Truss and now Jenrick saying they support Trump is absolutely lethal, totally lines them up with Farage in the Petin camp and could actually trigger a hard core of the Tories to defect since they completely loathe both Trump and Farage. Local Tories often get on well with local Lib Dems, and we could certainly see emergence of the Lib Dems as the centre right party that many Tories say they are or want to be (but are actually not and definitely would not be as allies of Trump).
Most LDs neither want nor would accept being a centre right party, the social democratic wing of the party would defect en masse to Labour if it tried as effectively happened in 2015 when Clegg's centre right LDs in Cameron's coalition govt got just 8% of the vote
It really takes a special kind of person to lecture someone who has been a member of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats for over 45 years, and who has been pretty active over much of that time, as a candidate, both Parliamentary and local, as an organiser and as a very regular conference attender about what the membership of the party is and what it is not.
I know my party and you, sir, do not.
You don't, you only know the Liberal wing of your party not the Social Democratic wing clearly.
If Orange Book Liberalism was so popular it would not have got just 8% of the vote in 2015 would it? The only examples of Liberal parties being the main centre right party in western nations are in Australia (where they have effectively always held that position in coalition with the conservative Nationals), Japan, where the LDP has been dominant for decades and arguably the Netherlands which is a much more socially liberal nation by culture than the UK is.
If the LDs became a centre right party the social democrats who are heirs of those like Jenkins and Williams and Owen who defected from Labour in the 1980s ie those who make up the Democrats part of the LDs would defect en masse back to Labour which under Starmer would be closer to the old SDP than a centre right Orange Book Liberal party would be
Much as I like you @hyufd, you really aren't right on this one and @Cicero is. We do know our party and you don't. There is no conflict within the LDs between Liberals and Social Democrats. Much of the time even we don't know which colleagues are which. I remember having this discussion at a LD party after the election where we were comparing opinions. I couldn't have told you before those discussions if other members were from one wing or the other, because we just don't have those wings even though some of us are clearly liberals and some of us are clearly social democrats.
Looking at the 2015 election result is daft. We didn't lose because we were Liberals and not Social Democrats. Nobody believes that. We lost because of the coalition and things like Tuition fees. If you asked any voters they couldn't have told you whether we were mainly Liberals or Social Democrats in 2015 and they couldn't now. Only anoraks like us know there is a difference.
And see my other post re being able to win more seats. Here is a bit of info for you. In Guildford in the build up to the election we knocked on 31,000 doors and sent out regular leaflets. During the election we knocked on 32,000 doors. That is nearly everyone twice. 13 leaflets or letters went out and several hundred posterboards went up during the election, although many of those letters were targeted so not to everyone.
There are plenty of Tory seats we could have done that in but didn't have the resources to do so. So we targeted ruthlessly. There are now the next batch of seats to go for and resources we can move from the last lot of targets we have won,
Now that may not happen. The Tories may recover and we may be defending ruthlessly and targeting nowhere. But if it stays the same we will be have many more Tory seats next time as well as some labour ones to go for.
History is on my side. For example, in 1945 the Liberals got just 9% on a centrist or even centre right liberal platform and the Liberals never got over 10% of the vote until Grimond got 11% in 1964, before falling back to 8.5% in 1966. In Feb 1974 Thorpe's Liberals did admittedly peak at 19% (though that was partly a result of his being more charismatic than Heath and Wilson) before falling to 13% under Steel in 1979 after Thorpe's scandals emerged.
Only the social democrat wing of the Labour Party leaving to form the SDP under Roy Jenkins and then forming the Alliance with the Liberals at the 1983 general election got the combined Liberals and SDP over 20% on a centre left platform to 25% and then 22% under Owen in 1987.
The merged parties which formed the LDs then never ceased to get under 15% of the voted from 1992 to 2010, peaking at 22% in 2005 under Charles Kennedy on an even left of Blair's Labour platform never mind just left of the Tories and 23% in 2010 when Clegg pledged to scrap tuition fees before moving right and backing increasing them in government as you say.
After going into coalition with the Tories in 2010 however the LDs collapsed to just 8% in 2015 and although they have got back over 10% since by appealing to hardline Remainers who opposed Brexit they have still not got over 15% again.
If the LDs became a centre right party they would also lose most of the Labour tactical votes that helped win them southern seats from the Tories last month and also have no chance in Labour seats Kennedy won in 2005
The Conservatives however have never polled lower than 30% in a General Election (we know they have in local elections and European parliamentary elections) until July 4th when they polled 24% and won 121 seats, their worst performance since the Reform Act of 1832 so applying historical parallels when we are in uncharted territory seems a little like hopecasting. The last time they polled anywhere near this (1997, 30.7% and 165 seats) they were out of Government for 13 years.
24% was still double the 12% the LDs got.
In 1997 Labour under Blair got 43%, 10% more than the 33% Labour under Starmer got
Your problem with that is that it illustrates two things - the potential for Tory revival at the next election, and the potential for oblivion.
Your opponents winning big without actually doing that well comes with a huge, flashing warning sign.
Only if the rightwing vote is effectively split again
What about the last few days makes you feel the right is coming together rather than splintering further?
Farage shifting to target working class Labour seats now and Jenrick, likely next Tory leader, shifting towards what Reform voters want to hear. Indeed you could well have Reform focusing on working class Labour seats the Tories normally can't reach and the Tories focusing on middle class Labour and LD seats Reform normally can't reach
Jenrick would be a terrible choice of leader and the conservative party only hope of recovery is to divorce entirely the idea if will accommodate Reform
So right. The choice is crush or accommodate. It's possible candidates for leader have to lean to accommodate to win the leadership, and will snap back. But it is complete madness. The only strategy is to crush.
Tories only got 24%, that is never enough to win under FPTP, with Reform however the combined Tory and Reform vote was 38% which certainly is.
Jenrick could reach out to Reform voters, maybe even do a deal with Farage while still not repelling 2019 Conservative voters who went Labour or LD in a way Patel would. So he would also be better able to exploit any unpopularity for the Labour government
. So many anti racists have turned up to drown out the far right racists. The Faragists are in deep retreat. Who'd have thought! Well done GB. Well done Starmer
It was my second visit. My first was as a student. Going with family is a different experience. It's a very pretty city, but in trying to give the kids a bowdlerised highlights-in-one-day package on a baking day in August, it quickly starts to feel like every otger capital city: hot and crowded and peppered with angry Arabs and pride flags and American candy stores and graffiti and luxury stores and tat, and the beauty you came to see quickly fades into the background. Even an inspired lunch choice from oldest daughter brought only temporary respite. I mean, we had a nice day. But I was finding it hard to feel as well-disposed to the place as I did last time I visited.
And then, at oldest daughter's polite insistence, we did this. And it was terrifying and brilliant and turned the day into one I will never forget: https://youtu.be/GjgD0cfcmV0?si=DxwfR2xLb2flgUcP
It helps that this is in Noord Amsterdam - a fiveminute ferry ride away from central station, but completely different in feel and
Hah Looks like fun! I assume you're not the bloke on the left looking shit-scared.
Ha - no! I managed to style it out. But I must admit there was some judicious not-looking-down. Which is most unlike me.
Jenrick turned up for a very quickly arranged Chinese dinner last night. Fluent presentation but the usual hard-right shtick to entice the membership. Hey that worked so well in 1997-2005. I berated him for his open support for Trump (well, what a surprise) to which he replied that the GOP is our "sister party".
No chance of his getting my vote but I fear he'll win. What then after almost 50 years party membership?
Next week it's drinkkies with Mel.
So not only does he support Trump, but he does so for a facile reason. If he is the best the Conservatives can come up with they really might be toast.
More to the point, when you go through the CVs of the new Lib Dem MPs, Lots of ex military, lots of really impressive academic, business, community and local credentials... these are the kinds of MPs who could easily have been conservative. Then you think well, it the Tories go down the Reform/Populist rabbit hole there is an actual conservative party to vote for- moderate decent, pragmatic, hard working, reasonable and sensible. Everything that the Tories used to claim to be.
At this point the Lib Dems only need to take 26 MPs in order to push the Tories into third place or 29 if you took the Tories and Reform together, and yes I know this is a mildly specious argument but under FPTP but there are 72 Lib Dem MPs and only 5 RefUK. However, Truss and now Jenrick saying they support Trump is absolutely lethal, totally lines them up with Farage in the Petin camp and could actually trigger a hard core of the Tories to defect since they completely loathe both Trump and Farage. Local Tories often get on well with local Lib Dems, and we could certainly see emergence of the Lib Dems as the centre right party that many Tories say they are or want to be (but are actually not and definitely would not be as allies of Trump).
Most LDs neither want nor would accept being a centre right party, the social democratic wing of the party would defect en masse to Labour if it tried as effectively happened in 2015 when Clegg's centre right LDs in Cameron's coalition govt got just 8% of the vote
It really takes a special kind of person to lecture someone who has been a member of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats for over 45 years, and who has been pretty active over much of that time, as a candidate, both Parliamentary and local, as an organiser and as a very regular conference attender about what the membership of the party is and what it is not.
I know my party and you, sir, do not.
You don't, you only know the Liberal wing of your party not the Social Democratic wing clearly.
If Orange Book Liberalism was so popular it would not have got just 8% of the vote in 2015 would it? The only examples of Liberal parties being the main centre right party in western nations are in Australia (where they have effectively always held that position in coalition with the conservative Nationals), Japan, where the LDP has been dominant for decades and arguably the Netherlands which is a much more socially liberal nation by culture than the UK is.
If the LDs became a centre right party the social democrats who are heirs of those like Jenkins and Williams and Owen who defected from Labour in the 1980s ie those who make up the Democrats part of the LDs would defect en masse back to Labour which under Starmer would be closer to the old SDP than a centre right Orange Book Liberal party would be
Much as I like you @hyufd, you really aren't right on this one and @Cicero is. We do know our party and you don't. There is no conflict within the LDs between Liberals and Social Democrats. Much of the time even we don't know which colleagues are which. I remember having this discussion at a LD party after the election where we were comparing opinions. I couldn't have told you before those discussions if other members were from one wing or the other, because we just don't have those wings even though some of us are clearly liberals and some of us are clearly social democrats.
Looking at the 2015 election result is daft. We didn't lose because we were Liberals and not Social Democrats. Nobody believes that. We lost because of the coalition and things like Tuition fees. If you asked any voters they couldn't have told you whether we were mainly Liberals or Social Democrats in 2015 and they couldn't now. Only anoraks like us know there is a difference.
And see my other post re being able to win more seats. Here is a bit of info for you. In Guildford in the build up to the election we knocked on 31,000 doors and sent out regular leaflets. During the election we knocked on 32,000 doors. That is nearly everyone twice. 13 leaflets or letters went out and several hundred posterboards went up during the election, although many of those letters were targeted so not to everyone.
There are plenty of Tory seats we could have done that in but didn't have the resources to do so. So we targeted ruthlessly. There are now the next batch of seats to go for and resources we can move from the last lot of targets we have won,
Now that may not happen. The Tories may recover and we may be defending ruthlessly and targeting nowhere. But if it stays the same we will be have many more Tory seats next time as well as some labour ones to go for.
History is on my side. For example, in 1945 the Liberals got just 9% on a centrist or even centre right liberal platform and the Liberals never got over 10% of the vote until Grimond got 11% in 1964, before falling back to 8.5% in 1966. In Feb 1974 Thorpe's Liberals did admittedly peak at 19% (though that was partly a result of his being more charismatic than Heath and Wilson) before falling to 13% under Steel in 1979 after Thorpe's scandals emerged.
Only the social democrat wing of the Labour Party leaving to form the SDP under Roy Jenkins and then forming the Alliance with the Liberals at the 1983 general election got the combined Liberals and SDP over 20% on a centre left platform to 25% and then 22% under Owen in 1987.
The merged parties which formed the LDs then never ceased to get under 15% of the voted from 1992 to 2010, peaking at 22% in 2005 under Charles Kennedy on an even left of Blair's Labour platform never mind just left of the Tories and 23% in 2010 when Clegg pledged to scrap tuition fees before moving right and backing increasing them in government as you say.
After going into coalition with the Tories in 2010 however the LDs collapsed to just 8% in 2015 and although they have got back over 10% since by appealing to hardline Remainers who opposed Brexit they have still not got over 15% again.
If the LDs became a centre right party they would also lose most of the Labour tactical votes that helped win them southern seats from the Tories last month and also have no chance in Labour seats Kennedy won in 2005
The Conservatives however have never polled lower than 30% in a General Election (we know they have in local elections and European parliamentary elections) until July 4th when they polled 24% and won 121 seats, their worst performance since the Reform Act of 1832 so applying historical parallels when we are in uncharted territory seems a little like hopecasting. The last time they polled anywhere near this (1997, 30.7% and 165 seats) they were out of Government for 13 years.
24% was still double the 12% the LDs got.
In 1997 Labour under Blair got 43%, 10% more than the 33% Labour under Starmer got
Your problem with that is that it illustrates two things - the potential for Tory revival at the next election, and the potential for oblivion.
Your opponents winning big without actually doing that well comes with a huge, flashing warning sign.
Only if the rightwing vote is effectively split again
What about the last few days makes you feel the right is coming together rather than splintering further?
Farage shifting to target working class Labour seats now and Jenrick, likely next Tory leader, shifting towards what Reform voters want to hear. Indeed you could well have Reform focusing on working class Labour seats the Tories normally can't reach and the Tories focusing on middle class Labour and LD seats Reform normally can't reach
Jenrick would be a terrible choice of leader and the conservative party only hope of recovery is to divorce entirely the idea if will accommodate Reform
So right. The choice is crush or accommodate. It's possible candidates for leader have to lean to accommodate to win the leadership, and will snap back. But it is complete madness. The only strategy is to crush.
Tories only got 24%, that is never enough to win under FPTP, with Reform however the combined Tory and Reform vote was 38% which certainly is.
Jenrick could reach out to Reform voters, maybe even do a deal with Farage while still not repelling 2019 Conservative voters who went Labour or LD in a way Patel would. So he would also be better able to exploit any unpopularity for the Labour government
You’re relentless. You don’t stop adding Reform to Tory whatever anyone says to you. You’re The Terminator of psephological fallacy.
Jenrick turned up for a very quickly arranged Chinese dinner last night. Fluent presentation but the usual hard-right shtick to entice the membership. Hey that worked so well in 1997-2005. I berated him for his open support for Trump (well, what a surprise) to which he replied that the GOP is our "sister party".
No chance of his getting my vote but I fear he'll win. What then after almost 50 years party membership?
Next week it's drinkkies with Mel.
So not only does he support Trump, but he does so for a facile reason. If he is the best the Conservatives can come up with they really might be toast.
More to the point, when you go through the CVs of the new Lib Dem MPs, Lots of ex military, lots of really impressive academic, business, community and local credentials... these are the kinds of MPs who could easily have been conservative. Then you think well, it the Tories go down the Reform/Populist rabbit hole there is an actual conservative party to vote for- moderate decent, pragmatic, hard working, reasonable and sensible. Everything that the Tories used to claim to be.
At this point the Lib Dems only need to take 26 MPs in order to push the Tories into third place or 29 if you took the Tories and Reform together, and yes I know this is a mildly specious argument but under FPTP but there are 72 Lib Dem MPs and only 5 RefUK. However, Truss and now Jenrick saying they support Trump is absolutely lethal, totally lines them up with Farage in the Petin camp and could actually trigger a hard core of the Tories to defect since they completely loathe both Trump and Farage. Local Tories often get on well with local Lib Dems, and we could certainly see emergence of the Lib Dems as the centre right party that many Tories say they are or want to be (but are actually not and definitely would not be as allies of Trump).
Most LDs neither want nor would accept being a centre right party, the social democratic wing of the party would defect en masse to Labour if it tried as effectively happened in 2015 when Clegg's centre right LDs in Cameron's coalition govt got just 8% of the vote
It really takes a special kind of person to lecture someone who has been a member of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats for over 45 years, and who has been pretty active over much of that time, as a candidate, both Parliamentary and local, as an organiser and as a very regular conference attender about what the membership of the party is and what it is not.
I know my party and you, sir, do not.
You don't, you only know the Liberal wing of your party not the Social Democratic wing clearly.
If Orange Book Liberalism was so popular it would not have got just 8% of the vote in 2015 would it? The only examples of Liberal parties being the main centre right party in western nations are in Australia (where they have effectively always held that position in coalition with the conservative Nationals), Japan, where the LDP has been dominant for decades and arguably the Netherlands which is a much more socially liberal nation by culture than the UK is.
If the LDs became a centre right party the social democrats who are heirs of those like Jenkins and Williams and Owen who defected from Labour in the 1980s ie those who make up the Democrats part of the LDs would defect en masse back to Labour which under Starmer would be closer to the old SDP than a centre right Orange Book Liberal party would be
Much as I like you @hyufd, you really aren't right on this one and @Cicero is. We do know our party and you don't. There is no conflict within the LDs between Liberals and Social Democrats. Much of the time even we don't know which colleagues are which. I remember having this discussion at a LD party after the election where we were comparing opinions. I couldn't have told you before those discussions if other members were from one wing or the other, because we just don't have those wings even though some of us are clearly liberals and some of us are clearly social democrats.
Looking at the 2015 election result is daft. We didn't lose because we were Liberals and not Social Democrats. Nobody believes that. We lost because of the coalition and things like Tuition fees. If you asked any voters they couldn't have told you whether we were mainly Liberals or Social Democrats in 2015 and they couldn't now. Only anoraks like us know there is a difference.
And see my other post re being able to win more seats. Here is a bit of info for you. In Guildford in the build up to the election we knocked on 31,000 doors and sent out regular leaflets. During the election we knocked on 32,000 doors. That is nearly everyone twice. 13 leaflets or letters went out and several hundred posterboards went up during the election, although many of those letters were targeted so not to everyone.
There are plenty of Tory seats we could have done that in but didn't have the resources to do so. So we targeted ruthlessly. There are now the next batch of seats to go for and resources we can move from the last lot of targets we have won,
Now that may not happen. The Tories may recover and we may be defending ruthlessly and targeting nowhere. But if it stays the same we will be have many more Tory seats next time as well as some labour ones to go for.
History is on my side. For example, in 1945 the Liberals got just 9% on a centrist or even centre right liberal platform and the Liberals never got over 10% of the vote until Grimond got 11% in 1964, before falling back to 8.5% in 1966. In Feb 1974 Thorpe's Liberals did admittedly peak at 19% (though that was partly a result of his being more charismatic than Heath and Wilson) before falling to 13% under Steel in 1979 after Thorpe's scandals emerged.
Only the social democrat wing of the Labour Party leaving to form the SDP under Roy Jenkins and then forming the Alliance with the Liberals at the 1983 general election got the combined Liberals and SDP over 20% on a centre left platform to 25% and then 22% under Owen in 1987.
The merged parties which formed the LDs then never ceased to get under 15% of the voted from 1992 to 2010, peaking at 22% in 2005 under Charles Kennedy on an even left of Blair's Labour platform never mind just left of the Tories and 23% in 2010 when Clegg pledged to scrap tuition fees before moving right and backing increasing them in government as you say.
After going into coalition with the Tories in 2010 however the LDs collapsed to just 8% in 2015 and although they have got back over 10% since by appealing to hardline Remainers who opposed Brexit they have still not got over 15% again.
If the LDs became a centre right party they would also lose most of the Labour tactical votes that helped win them southern seats from the Tories last month and also have no chance in Labour seats Kennedy won in 2005
There won't be a Tory party, and politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Plenty of ex Tories will never vote for Farage.
Why won't there be a Tory party? Not one leadership contender is suggesting merging with Reform.
However if that did happen Canada style then if the LDs became a centre right One Nation Tory party effectively obviously the social democratic wing of the LDs would in turn move to Labour
I've covered this in several posts to explain why that wouldn't happen. Whether you agree with me or not it is worth trying to take on what we are saying.
I'll try again:
a) Unlike the Tories and Labour although we all have different views (as you know I am a Liberal rather than a Social Democrat) that doesn't really register within the party itself very much. I have no idea what most of the people I campaigned with are. Unless I get into a discussion I am unaware whether a fellow member is a Liberal or Social Democrat. Although individually we are one or the other to some extent, we don't actually have such wings, unlike Labour and the Tories.
b) if you canvas someone (try doing this?) and they tell you they are voting LD, try asking them whether they are Liberals or Social Democrats. Except for the odd person like me you will get a blank response. If you ask which wing a Tory voter or Labour voter is on, many will know.
Don't assume because you have these wings in the Tory party they exist in the same way in the LDs.
However if we went to PR, I do agree and think that split would happen.
a) It certainly would if the LDs went centre right. See the collapse in the LD vote from 23% in 2010 to just 8% in 2015 after the LDs went into government with the Tories, a level the LDs have still not fully recovered from. You would stay in a centre right Liberal party, social democrats would go to Labour. There is an Orange Book and social democrat LD wing.
b) Social Democrat voters certainly knew they weren't centre right in 2015, hence those that voted LD in 2010 went Labour in 2015.
If we went PR all the main parties would likely split to some degree yes
. So many anti racists have turned up to drown out the far right racists. The Faragists are in deep retreat. Who'd have thought! Well done GB. Well done Starmer
I would caution a victory roll tonight but prudence would suggest to see how the weekend plays out
Furthermore immigration will be a substantial issue going forward
Jenrick turned up for a very quickly arranged Chinese dinner last night. Fluent presentation but the usual hard-right shtick to entice the membership. Hey that worked so well in 1997-2005. I berated him for his open support for Trump (well, what a surprise) to which he replied that the GOP is our "sister party".
No chance of his getting my vote but I fear he'll win. What then after almost 50 years party membership?
Next week it's drinkkies with Mel.
So not only does he support Trump, but he does so for a facile reason. If he is the best the Conservatives can come up with they really might be toast.
More to the point, when you go through the CVs of the new Lib Dem MPs, Lots of ex military, lots of really impressive academic, business, community and local credentials... these are the kinds of MPs who could easily have been conservative. Then you think well, it the Tories go down the Reform/Populist rabbit hole there is an actual conservative party to vote for- moderate decent, pragmatic, hard working, reasonable and sensible. Everything that the Tories used to claim to be.
At this point the Lib Dems only need to take 26 MPs in order to push the Tories into third place or 29 if you took the Tories and Reform together, and yes I know this is a mildly specious argument but under FPTP but there are 72 Lib Dem MPs and only 5 RefUK. However, Truss and now Jenrick saying they support Trump is absolutely lethal, totally lines them up with Farage in the Petin camp and could actually trigger a hard core of the Tories to defect since they completely loathe both Trump and Farage. Local Tories often get on well with local Lib Dems, and we could certainly see emergence of the Lib Dems as the centre right party that many Tories say they are or want to be (but are actually not and definitely would not be as allies of Trump).
Most LDs neither want nor would accept being a centre right party, the social democratic wing of the party would defect en masse to Labour if it tried as effectively happened in 2015 when Clegg's centre right LDs in Cameron's coalition govt got just 8% of the vote
It really takes a special kind of person to lecture someone who has been a member of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats for over 45 years, and who has been pretty active over much of that time, as a candidate, both Parliamentary and local, as an organiser and as a very regular conference attender about what the membership of the party is and what it is not.
I know my party and you, sir, do not.
You don't, you only know the Liberal wing of your party not the Social Democratic wing clearly.
If Orange Book Liberalism was so popular it would not have got just 8% of the vote in 2015 would it? The only examples of Liberal parties being the main centre right party in western nations are in Australia (where they have effectively always held that position in coalition with the conservative Nationals), Japan, where the LDP has been dominant for decades and arguably the Netherlands which is a much more socially liberal nation by culture than the UK is.
If the LDs became a centre right party the social democrats who are heirs of those like Jenkins and Williams and Owen who defected from Labour in the 1980s ie those who make up the Democrats part of the LDs would defect en masse back to Labour which under Starmer would be closer to the old SDP than a centre right Orange Book Liberal party would be
Much as I like you @hyufd, you really aren't right on this one and @Cicero is. We do know our party and you don't. There is no conflict within the LDs between Liberals and Social Democrats. Much of the time even we don't know which colleagues are which. I remember having this discussion at a LD party after the election where we were comparing opinions. I couldn't have told you before those discussions if other members were from one wing or the other, because we just don't have those wings even though some of us are clearly liberals and some of us are clearly social democrats.
Looking at the 2015 election result is daft. We didn't lose because we were Liberals and not Social Democrats. Nobody believes that. We lost because of the coalition and things like Tuition fees. If you asked any voters they couldn't have told you whether we were mainly Liberals or Social Democrats in 2015 and they couldn't now. Only anoraks like us know there is a difference.
And see my other post re being able to win more seats. Here is a bit of info for you. In Guildford in the build up to the election we knocked on 31,000 doors and sent out regular leaflets. During the election we knocked on 32,000 doors. That is nearly everyone twice. 13 leaflets or letters went out and several hundred posterboards went up during the election, although many of those letters were targeted so not to everyone.
There are plenty of Tory seats we could have done that in but didn't have the resources to do so. So we targeted ruthlessly. There are now the next batch of seats to go for and resources we can move from the last lot of targets we have won,
Now that may not happen. The Tories may recover and we may be defending ruthlessly and targeting nowhere. But if it stays the same we will be have many more Tory seats next time as well as some labour ones to go for.
History is on my side. For example, in 1945 the Liberals got just 9% on a centrist or even centre right liberal platform and the Liberals never got over 10% of the vote until Grimond got 11% in 1964, before falling back to 8.5% in 1966. In Feb 1974 Thorpe's Liberals did admittedly peak at 19% (though that was partly a result of his being more charismatic than Heath and Wilson) before falling to 13% under Steel in 1979 after Thorpe's scandals emerged.
Only the social democrat wing of the Labour Party leaving to form the SDP under Roy Jenkins and then forming the Alliance with the Liberals at the 1983 general election got the combined Liberals and SDP over 20% on a centre left platform to 25% and then 22% under Owen in 1987.
The merged parties which formed the LDs then never ceased to get under 15% of the voted from 1992 to 2010, peaking at 22% in 2005 under Charles Kennedy on an even left of Blair's Labour platform never mind just left of the Tories and 23% in 2010 when Clegg pledged to scrap tuition fees before moving right and backing increasing them in government as you say.
After going into coalition with the Tories in 2010 however the LDs collapsed to just 8% in 2015 and although they have got back over 10% since by appealing to hardline Remainers who opposed Brexit they have still not got over 15% again.
If the LDs became a centre right party they would also lose most of the Labour tactical votes that helped win them southern seats from the Tories last month and also have no chance in Labour seats Kennedy won in 2005
The Conservatives however have never polled lower than 30% in a General Election (we know they have in local elections and European parliamentary elections) until July 4th when they polled 24% and won 121 seats, their worst performance since the Reform Act of 1832 so applying historical parallels when we are in uncharted territory seems a little like hopecasting. The last time they polled anywhere near this (1997, 30.7% and 165 seats) they were out of Government for 13 years.
24% was still double the 12% the LDs got.
In 1997 Labour under Blair got 43%, 10% more than the 33% Labour under Starmer got
Your problem with that is that it illustrates two things - the potential for Tory revival at the next election, and the potential for oblivion.
Your opponents winning big without actually doing that well comes with a huge, flashing warning sign.
Only if the rightwing vote is effectively split again
What about the last few days makes you feel the right is coming together rather than splintering further?
Farage shifting to target working class Labour seats now and Jenrick, likely next Tory leader, shifting towards what Reform voters want to hear. Indeed you could well have Reform focusing on working class Labour seats the Tories normally can't reach and the Tories focusing on middle class Labour and LD seats Reform normally can't reach
Jenrick would be a terrible choice of leader and the conservative party only hope of recovery is to divorce entirely the idea if will accommodate Reform
HY has this sussed. An inevitable Labour collapse to Reform in the RedWall and the inevitability of Jenrick recovering the BlueWall gives us a glorious RefCon coalition. But, if the seats are equally shared, who is PM. Jenrick or Farage
It was my second visit. My first was as a student. Going with family is a different experience. It's a very pretty city, but in trying to give the kids a bowdlerised highlights-in-one-day package on a baking day in August, it quickly starts to feel like every otger capital city: hot and crowded and peppered with angry Arabs and pride flags and American candy stores and graffiti and luxury stores and tat, and the beauty you came to see quickly fades into the background. Even an inspired lunch choice from oldest daughter brought only temporary respite. I mean, we had a nice day. But I was finding it hard to feel as well-disposed to the place as I did last time I visited.
And then, at oldest daughter's polite insistence, we did this. And it was terrifying and brilliant and turned the day into one I will never forget: https://youtu.be/GjgD0cfcmV0?si=DxwfR2xLb2flgUcP
It helps that this is in Noord Amsterdam - a fiveminute ferry ride away from central station, but completely different in feel and
...intensity, and an area I hadn't been to before - so I had no preconceived notions for it to live up to. But the activity: I'm a hard man to frighten, but it was one of the scariest things I've ever done. Which is pretty brilliant in itself. I also now have a photo I will forever treasure (I thought they'd sting you for it but you can download it for free) of me and youngest daughter from behind, dangling improbably above the Amsterdam skyline. It's hard to believe it's not greenscreened.
Aside from all that, the best thing about the day was Dutch public transport, which was thrillingly punctual and well connected.
Go to south l'Aveyron!
Honestly, it is the Gallic Garden of Eden. Provence before Peter Mayle and the plebs. Gorgeous towns and villages everywhere. You have brilliant kayaking, wild swimming, hiking, climbing, zipwiring (often over the kayakers). There are endless places to picnic, there is fishing to be done, there are entire valleys to explore with barely anyone else
There are tiny film festivals in the villages. There are cafes in sun splashed squares with Aperols for the adults. There are little museums and galleries and there are big cities not so far away, Lyon, Toulouse, if you insist. Rent a house (they are still incredibly cheap compared to Provence or the Dordogne). Go see Templar towns with real life artisanal cutlers in the ramparts with proper burning forges. Listen to mad boho jazz bands in the very very French village fetes. You will probably be the only non-French people
It is idyllic. I was there with my older daughter and we had superb fun - but a part of me was weirdly yearning to be a Dad with three kids, introducing them to this paradise
It is one hour drive from Rodez, 90 minutes from Montepelier. Amazing
Jenrick turned up for a very quickly arranged Chinese dinner last night. Fluent presentation but the usual hard-right shtick to entice the membership. Hey that worked so well in 1997-2005. I berated him for his open support for Trump (well, what a surprise) to which he replied that the GOP is our "sister party".
No chance of his getting my vote but I fear he'll win. What then after almost 50 years party membership?
Next week it's drinkkies with Mel.
So not only does he support Trump, but he does so for a facile reason. If he is the best the Conservatives can come up with they really might be toast.
More to the point, when you go through the CVs of the new Lib Dem MPs, Lots of ex military, lots of really impressive academic, business, community and local credentials... these are the kinds of MPs who could easily have been conservative. Then you think well, it the Tories go down the Reform/Populist rabbit hole there is an actual conservative party to vote for- moderate decent, pragmatic, hard working, reasonable and sensible. Everything that the Tories used to claim to be.
At this point the Lib Dems only need to take 26 MPs in order to push the Tories into third place or 29 if you took the Tories and Reform together, and yes I know this is a mildly specious argument but under FPTP but there are 72 Lib Dem MPs and only 5 RefUK. However, Truss and now Jenrick saying they support Trump is absolutely lethal, totally lines them up with Farage in the Petin camp and could actually trigger a hard core of the Tories to defect since they completely loathe both Trump and Farage. Local Tories often get on well with local Lib Dems, and we could certainly see emergence of the Lib Dems as the centre right party that many Tories say they are or want to be (but are actually not and definitely would not be as allies of Trump).
Most LDs neither want nor would accept being a centre right party, the social democratic wing of the party would defect en masse to Labour if it tried as effectively happened in 2015 when Clegg's centre right LDs in Cameron's coalition govt got just 8% of the vote
It really takes a special kind of person to lecture someone who has been a member of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats for over 45 years, and who has been pretty active over much of that time, as a candidate, both Parliamentary and local, as an organiser and as a very regular conference attender about what the membership of the party is and what it is not.
I know my party and you, sir, do not.
You don't, you only know the Liberal wing of your party not the Social Democratic wing clearly.
If Orange Book Liberalism was so popular it would not have got just 8% of the vote in 2015 would it? The only examples of Liberal parties being the main centre right party in western nations are in Australia (where they have effectively always held that position in coalition with the conservative Nationals), Japan, where the LDP has been dominant for decades and arguably the Netherlands which is a much more socially liberal nation by culture than the UK is.
If the LDs became a centre right party the social democrats who are heirs of those like Jenkins and Williams and Owen who defected from Labour in the 1980s ie those who make up the Democrats part of the LDs would defect en masse back to Labour which under Starmer would be closer to the old SDP than a centre right Orange Book Liberal party would be
Much as I like you @hyufd, you really aren't right on this one and @Cicero is. We do know our party and you don't. There is no conflict within the LDs between Liberals and Social Democrats. Much of the time even we don't know which colleagues are which. I remember having this discussion at a LD party after the election where we were comparing opinions. I couldn't have told you before those discussions if other members were from one wing or the other, because we just don't have those wings even though some of us are clearly liberals and some of us are clearly social democrats.
Looking at the 2015 election result is daft. We didn't lose because we were Liberals and not Social Democrats. Nobody believes that. We lost because of the coalition and things like Tuition fees. If you asked any voters they couldn't have told you whether we were mainly Liberals or Social Democrats in 2015 and they couldn't now. Only anoraks like us know there is a difference.
And see my other post re being able to win more seats. Here is a bit of info for you. In Guildford in the build up to the election we knocked on 31,000 doors and sent out regular leaflets. During the election we knocked on 32,000 doors. That is nearly everyone twice. 13 leaflets or letters went out and several hundred posterboards went up during the election, although many of those letters were targeted so not to everyone.
There are plenty of Tory seats we could have done that in but didn't have the resources to do so. So we targeted ruthlessly. There are now the next batch of seats to go for and resources we can move from the last lot of targets we have won,
Now that may not happen. The Tories may recover and we may be defending ruthlessly and targeting nowhere. But if it stays the same we will be have many more Tory seats next time as well as some labour ones to go for.
History is on my side. For example, in 1945 the Liberals got just 9% on a centrist or even centre right liberal platform and the Liberals never got over 10% of the vote until Grimond got 11% in 1964, before falling back to 8.5% in 1966. In Feb 1974 Thorpe's Liberals did admittedly peak at 19% (though that was partly a result of his being more charismatic than Heath and Wilson) before falling to 13% under Steel in 1979 after Thorpe's scandals emerged.
Only the social democrat wing of the Labour Party leaving to form the SDP under Roy Jenkins and then forming the Alliance with the Liberals at the 1983 general election got the combined Liberals and SDP over 20% on a centre left platform to 25% and then 22% under Owen in 1987.
The merged parties which formed the LDs then never ceased to get under 15% of the voted from 1992 to 2010, peaking at 22% in 2005 under Charles Kennedy on an even left of Blair's Labour platform never mind just left of the Tories and 23% in 2010 when Clegg pledged to scrap tuition fees before moving right and backing increasing them in government as you say.
After going into coalition with the Tories in 2010 however the LDs collapsed to just 8% in 2015 and although they have got back over 10% since by appealing to hardline Remainers who opposed Brexit they have still not got over 15% again.
If the LDs became a centre right party they would also lose most of the Labour tactical votes that helped win them southern seats from the Tories last month and also have no chance in Labour seats Kennedy won in 2005
The Conservatives however have never polled lower than 30% in a General Election (we know they have in local elections and European parliamentary elections) until July 4th when they polled 24% and won 121 seats, their worst performance since the Reform Act of 1832 so applying historical parallels when we are in uncharted territory seems a little like hopecasting. The last time they polled anywhere near this (1997, 30.7% and 165 seats) they were out of Government for 13 years.
24% was still double the 12% the LDs got.
In 1997 Labour under Blair got 43%, 10% more than the 33% Labour under Starmer got
Your problem with that is that it illustrates two things - the potential for Tory revival at the next election, and the potential for oblivion.
Your opponents winning big without actually doing that well comes with a huge, flashing warning sign.
Only if the rightwing vote is effectively split again
What about the last few days makes you feel the right is coming together rather than splintering further?
Farage shifting to target working class Labour seats now and Jenrick, likely next Tory leader, shifting towards what Reform voters want to hear. Indeed you could well have Reform focusing on working class Labour seats the Tories normally can't reach and the Tories focusing on middle class Labour and LD seats Reform normally can't reach
Jenrick would be a terrible choice of leader and the conservative party only hope of recovery is to divorce entirely the idea if will accommodate Reform
HY has this sussed. An inevitable Labour collapse to Reform in the RedWall and the inevitability of Jenrick recovering the BlueWall gives us a glorious RefCon coalition. But, if the seats are equally shared, who is PM. Jenrick or Farage
Ouch. He's no longer a professor and now just a Substack author.
You really should have called me James. This article is littered with inaccuracies, including about me leaving academe. You're about to look very silly indeed ...
He claims to have 1000s of paid subscribers to his substack, I presume its £5 a month (never looked), but he is absolutely coining it in. I can actually believe it, there are people doing millions of revenue on substack from a similar approach of a small amount from lots of people.
Unless he's just going to say he's still in academe while not holding a university position. Which you can be, sure, but it won't be an impressive quibble to make.
To be honest if I was making £50k+ a month from substack I wouldn't be pissing about teaching undergrads at a mid tier UK university.
Jenrick turned up for a very quickly arranged Chinese dinner last night. Fluent presentation but the usual hard-right shtick to entice the membership. Hey that worked so well in 1997-2005. I berated him for his open support for Trump (well, what a surprise) to which he replied that the GOP is our "sister party".
No chance of his getting my vote but I fear he'll win. What then after almost 50 years party membership?
Next week it's drinkkies with Mel.
So not only does he support Trump, but he does so for a facile reason. If he is the best the Conservatives can come up with they really might be toast.
More to the point, when you go through the CVs of the new Lib Dem MPs, Lots of ex military, lots of really impressive academic, business, community and local credentials... these are the kinds of MPs who could easily have been conservative. Then you think well, it the Tories go down the Reform/Populist rabbit hole there is an actual conservative party to vote for- moderate decent, pragmatic, hard working, reasonable and sensible. Everything that the Tories used to claim to be.
At this point the Lib Dems only need to take 26 MPs in order to push the Tories into third place or 29 if you took the Tories and Reform together, and yes I know this is a mildly specious argument but under FPTP but there are 72 Lib Dem MPs and only 5 RefUK. However, Truss and now Jenrick saying they support Trump is absolutely lethal, totally lines them up with Farage in the Petin camp and could actually trigger a hard core of the Tories to defect since they completely loathe both Trump and Farage. Local Tories often get on well with local Lib Dems, and we could certainly see emergence of the Lib Dems as the centre right party that many Tories say they are or want to be (but are actually not and definitely would not be as allies of Trump).
Most LDs neither want nor would accept being a centre right party, the social democratic wing of the party would defect en masse to Labour if it tried as effectively happened in 2015 when Clegg's centre right LDs in Cameron's coalition govt got just 8% of the vote
It really takes a special kind of person to lecture someone who has been a member of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats for over 45 years, and who has been pretty active over much of that time, as a candidate, both Parliamentary and local, as an organiser and as a very regular conference attender about what the membership of the party is and what it is not.
I know my party and you, sir, do not.
You don't, you only know the Liberal wing of your party not the Social Democratic wing clearly.
If Orange Book Liberalism was so popular it would not have got just 8% of the vote in 2015 would it? The only examples of Liberal parties being the main centre right party in western nations are in Australia (where they have effectively always held that position in coalition with the conservative Nationals), Japan, where the LDP has been dominant for decades and arguably the Netherlands which is a much more socially liberal nation by culture than the UK is.
If the LDs became a centre right party the social democrats who are heirs of those like Jenkins and Williams and Owen who defected from Labour in the 1980s ie those who make up the Democrats part of the LDs would defect en masse back to Labour which under Starmer would be closer to the old SDP than a centre right Orange Book Liberal party would be
Much as I like you @hyufd, you really aren't right on this one and @Cicero is. We do know our party and you don't. There is no conflict within the LDs between Liberals and Social Democrats. Much of the time even we don't know which colleagues are which. I remember having this discussion at a LD party after the election where we were comparing opinions. I couldn't have told you before those discussions if other members were from one wing or the other, because we just don't have those wings even though some of us are clearly liberals and some of us are clearly social democrats.
Looking at the 2015 election result is daft. We didn't lose because we were Liberals and not Social Democrats. Nobody believes that. We lost because of the coalition and things like Tuition fees. If you asked any voters they couldn't have told you whether we were mainly Liberals or Social Democrats in 2015 and they couldn't now. Only anoraks like us know there is a difference.
And see my other post re being able to win more seats. Here is a bit of info for you. In Guildford in the build up to the election we knocked on 31,000 doors and sent out regular leaflets. During the election we knocked on 32,000 doors. That is nearly everyone twice. 13 leaflets or letters went out and several hundred posterboards went up during the election, although many of those letters were targeted so not to everyone.
There are plenty of Tory seats we could have done that in but didn't have the resources to do so. So we targeted ruthlessly. There are now the next batch of seats to go for and resources we can move from the last lot of targets we have won,
Now that may not happen. The Tories may recover and we may be defending ruthlessly and targeting nowhere. But if it stays the same we will be have many more Tory seats next time as well as some labour ones to go for.
History is on my side. For example, in 1945 the Liberals got just 9% on a centrist or even centre right liberal platform and the Liberals never got over 10% of the vote until Grimond got 11% in 1964, before falling back to 8.5% in 1966. In Feb 1974 Thorpe's Liberals did admittedly peak at 19% (though that was partly a result of his being more charismatic than Heath and Wilson) before falling to 13% under Steel in 1979 after Thorpe's scandals emerged.
Only the social democrat wing of the Labour Party leaving to form the SDP under Roy Jenkins and then forming the Alliance with the Liberals at the 1983 general election got the combined Liberals and SDP over 20% on a centre left platform to 25% and then 22% under Owen in 1987.
The merged parties which formed the LDs then never ceased to get under 15% of the voted from 1992 to 2010, peaking at 22% in 2005 under Charles Kennedy on an even left of Blair's Labour platform never mind just left of the Tories and 23% in 2010 when Clegg pledged to scrap tuition fees before moving right and backing increasing them in government as you say.
After going into coalition with the Tories in 2010 however the LDs collapsed to just 8% in 2015 and although they have got back over 10% since by appealing to hardline Remainers who opposed Brexit they have still not got over 15% again.
If the LDs became a centre right party they would also lose most of the Labour tactical votes that helped win them southern seats from the Tories last month and also have no chance in Labour seats Kennedy won in 2005
The Conservatives however have never polled lower than 30% in a General Election (we know they have in local elections and European parliamentary elections) until July 4th when they polled 24% and won 121 seats, their worst performance since the Reform Act of 1832 so applying historical parallels when we are in uncharted territory seems a little like hopecasting. The last time they polled anywhere near this (1997, 30.7% and 165 seats) they were out of Government for 13 years.
24% was still double the 12% the LDs got.
In 1997 Labour under Blair got 43%, 10% more than the 33% Labour under Starmer got
Your problem with that is that it illustrates two things - the potential for Tory revival at the next election, and the potential for oblivion.
Your opponents winning big without actually doing that well comes with a huge, flashing warning sign.
Only if the rightwing vote is effectively split again
What about the last few days makes you feel the right is coming together rather than splintering further?
Farage shifting to target working class Labour seats now and Jenrick, likely next Tory leader, shifting towards what Reform voters want to hear. Indeed you could well have Reform focusing on working class Labour seats the Tories normally can't reach and the Tories focusing on middle class Labour and LD seats Reform normally can't reach
Jenrick would be a terrible choice of leader and the conservative party only hope of recovery is to divorce entirely the idea if will accommodate Reform
HY has this sussed. An inevitable Labour collapse to Reform in the RedWall and the inevitability of Jenrick recovering the BlueWall gives us a glorious RefCon coalition. But, if the seats are equally shared, who is PM. Jenrick or Farage
Neither, Boris would come back and take the glory of course after they did all the hard work!
lee harpin @lmharpin Only the SWP could stage an “anti racism” demo where many Jewish participants, including myself, felt absolutely no sense of solidarity with those organising. Thankfully the far right haven’t showed up.
I live in East Finchley and there probably isn't a worse place in the country to hold a far right demonstration. It's Indians and Jewish people across all of Finchley. If more than two Nazi demonstrators turned up I'd be shocked.
Doesn't that depend on what variety of far right ?
There are certainly the equivalents of far right in both India and Israel.
I think if the British far right, Israeli far right and the Indian far right all turned up at the same place for a fight it would be very confusing.
I'm not sure any anti far right protesters need to get involved. They could just leave the 3 groups to fight it out amongst themselves.
I must find the video of the RSS that a friend sent. Marching in literal, actual, black shorts.
Heil Spode!
That doesn't sound like the Royal Statistical Society I know...
Jenrick turned up for a very quickly arranged Chinese dinner last night. Fluent presentation but the usual hard-right shtick to entice the membership. Hey that worked so well in 1997-2005. I berated him for his open support for Trump (well, what a surprise) to which he replied that the GOP is our "sister party".
No chance of his getting my vote but I fear he'll win. What then after almost 50 years party membership?
Next week it's drinkkies with Mel.
So not only does he support Trump, but he does so for a facile reason. If he is the best the Conservatives can come up with they really might be toast.
More to the point, when you go through the CVs of the new Lib Dem MPs, Lots of ex military, lots of really impressive academic, business, community and local credentials... these are the kinds of MPs who could easily have been conservative. Then you think well, it the Tories go down the Reform/Populist rabbit hole there is an actual conservative party to vote for- moderate decent, pragmatic, hard working, reasonable and sensible. Everything that the Tories used to claim to be.
At this point the Lib Dems only need to take 26 MPs in order to push the Tories into third place or 29 if you took the Tories and Reform together, and yes I know this is a mildly specious argument but under FPTP but there are 72 Lib Dem MPs and only 5 RefUK. However, Truss and now Jenrick saying they support Trump is absolutely lethal, totally lines them up with Farage in the Petin camp and could actually trigger a hard core of the Tories to defect since they completely loathe both Trump and Farage. Local Tories often get on well with local Lib Dems, and we could certainly see emergence of the Lib Dems as the centre right party that many Tories say they are or want to be (but are actually not and definitely would not be as allies of Trump).
Most LDs neither want nor would accept being a centre right party, the social democratic wing of the party would defect en masse to Labour if it tried as effectively happened in 2015 when Clegg's centre right LDs in Cameron's coalition govt got just 8% of the vote
It really takes a special kind of person to lecture someone who has been a member of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats for over 45 years, and who has been pretty active over much of that time, as a candidate, both Parliamentary and local, as an organiser and as a very regular conference attender about what the membership of the party is and what it is not.
I know my party and you, sir, do not.
You don't, you only know the Liberal wing of your party not the Social Democratic wing clearly.
If Orange Book Liberalism was so popular it would not have got just 8% of the vote in 2015 would it? The only examples of Liberal parties being the main centre right party in western nations are in Australia (where they have effectively always held that position in coalition with the conservative Nationals), Japan, where the LDP has been dominant for decades and arguably the Netherlands which is a much more socially liberal nation by culture than the UK is.
If the LDs became a centre right party the social democrats who are heirs of those like Jenkins and Williams and Owen who defected from Labour in the 1980s ie those who make up the Democrats part of the LDs would defect en masse back to Labour which under Starmer would be closer to the old SDP than a centre right Orange Book Liberal party would be
Much as I like you @hyufd, you really aren't right on this one and @Cicero is. We do know our party and you don't. There is no conflict within the LDs between Liberals and Social Democrats. Much of the time even we don't know which colleagues are which. I remember having this discussion at a LD party after the election where we were comparing opinions. I couldn't have told you before those discussions if other members were from one wing or the other, because we just don't have those wings even though some of us are clearly liberals and some of us are clearly social democrats.
Looking at the 2015 election result is daft. We didn't lose because we were Liberals and not Social Democrats. Nobody believes that. We lost because of the coalition and things like Tuition fees. If you asked any voters they couldn't have told you whether we were mainly Liberals or Social Democrats in 2015 and they couldn't now. Only anoraks like us know there is a difference.
And see my other post re being able to win more seats. Here is a bit of info for you. In Guildford in the build up to the election we knocked on 31,000 doors and sent out regular leaflets. During the election we knocked on 32,000 doors. That is nearly everyone twice. 13 leaflets or letters went out and several hundred posterboards went up during the election, although many of those letters were targeted so not to everyone.
There are plenty of Tory seats we could have done that in but didn't have the resources to do so. So we targeted ruthlessly. There are now the next batch of seats to go for and resources we can move from the last lot of targets we have won,
Now that may not happen. The Tories may recover and we may be defending ruthlessly and targeting nowhere. But if it stays the same we will be have many more Tory seats next time as well as some labour ones to go for.
History is on my side. For example, in 1945 the Liberals got just 9% on a centrist or even centre right liberal platform and the Liberals never got over 10% of the vote until Grimond got 11% in 1964, before falling back to 8.5% in 1966. In Feb 1974 Thorpe's Liberals did admittedly peak at 19% (though that was partly a result of his being more charismatic than Heath and Wilson) before falling to 13% under Steel in 1979 after Thorpe's scandals emerged.
Only the social democrat wing of the Labour Party leaving to form the SDP under Roy Jenkins and then forming the Alliance with the Liberals at the 1983 general election got the combined Liberals and SDP over 20% on a centre left platform to 25% and then 22% under Owen in 1987.
The merged parties which formed the LDs then never ceased to get under 15% of the voted from 1992 to 2010, peaking at 22% in 2005 under Charles Kennedy on an even left of Blair's Labour platform never mind just left of the Tories and 23% in 2010 when Clegg pledged to scrap tuition fees before moving right and backing increasing them in government as you say.
After going into coalition with the Tories in 2010 however the LDs collapsed to just 8% in 2015 and although they have got back over 10% since by appealing to hardline Remainers who opposed Brexit they have still not got over 15% again.
If the LDs became a centre right party they would also lose most of the Labour tactical votes that helped win them southern seats from the Tories last month and also have no chance in Labour seats Kennedy won in 2005
The Conservatives however have never polled lower than 30% in a General Election (we know they have in local elections and European parliamentary elections) until July 4th when they polled 24% and won 121 seats, their worst performance since the Reform Act of 1832 so applying historical parallels when we are in uncharted territory seems a little like hopecasting. The last time they polled anywhere near this (1997, 30.7% and 165 seats) they were out of Government for 13 years.
24% was still double the 12% the LDs got.
In 1997 Labour under Blair got 43%, 10% more than the 33% Labour under Starmer got
Your problem with that is that it illustrates two things - the potential for Tory revival at the next election, and the potential for oblivion.
Your opponents winning big without actually doing that well comes with a huge, flashing warning sign.
Only if the rightwing vote is effectively split again
What about the last few days makes you feel the right is coming together rather than splintering further?
Farage shifting to target working class Labour seats now and Jenrick, likely next Tory leader, shifting towards what Reform voters want to hear. Indeed you could well have Reform focusing on working class Labour seats the Tories normally can't reach and the Tories focusing on middle class Labour and LD seats Reform normally can't reach
Jenrick would be a terrible choice of leader and the conservative party only hope of recovery is to divorce entirely the idea if will accommodate Reform
So right. The choice is crush or accommodate. It's possible candidates for leader have to lean to accommodate to win the leadership, and will snap back. But it is complete madness. The only strategy is to crush.
Tories only got 24%, that is never enough to win under FPTP, with Reform however the combined Tory and Reform vote was 38% which certainly is.
Jenrick could reach out to Reform voters, maybe even do a deal with Farage while still not repelling 2019 Conservative voters who went Labour or LD in a way Patel would. So he would also be better able to exploit any unpopularity for the Labour government
Do you ever take notice of the wide political census that you are just wrong to combine the Tory and Reform votes
It was my second visit. My first was as a student. Going with family is a different experience. It's a very pretty city, but in trying to give the kids a bowdlerised highlights-in-one-day package on a baking day in August, it quickly starts to feel like every otger capital city: hot and crowded and peppered with angry Arabs and pride flags and American candy stores and graffiti and luxury stores and tat, and the beauty you came to see quickly fades into the background. Even an inspired lunch choice from oldest daughter brought only temporary respite. I mean, we had a nice day. But I was finding it hard to feel as well-disposed to the place as I did last time I visited.
And then, at oldest daughter's polite insistence, we did this. And it was terrifying and brilliant and turned the day into one I will never forget: https://youtu.be/GjgD0cfcmV0?si=DxwfR2xLb2flgUcP
It helps that this is in Noord Amsterdam - a fiveminute ferry ride away from central station, but completely different in feel and
That looks fun
Can I ask why you chose Holland and Amsterdam? It is not what it was
Because I'm not very adventurous and somewhat impecunious.
Holland, because: We have done Cornwall for the last 8 years. East side of the Camel estuary. And it is perfect, and I'm slightly sad not to be there, but we have done everything there now and one year's memories are starting to blur into another. And while I could spend all day on a good beach, that's not true of all my family. And my oldest won't necessarily be holidaying with us for many more years, and wants to see a bit of the world. But also, we're pasty northerners who don't do well in the heat, and flying in the summer holidays as a family of five is prohibitively expensive. And every time we've been to France it's been cold and wet - and while I try to be open minded about abroad I find France just far too French, Breton cider aside. And many people have recommended this spot to us - it's a holiday park within striking distance of the sea, with all sorts on site. It's genuinely good - has the best aquapark I've ever been to. I wouldn't rule out coming again. But holidaying in such a crowded corner of Europe does feel odd. And Amsterdam because we're here so may as well go and take a look. I have however solved the mystery of where all the families of five holiday. This place is full of them. I've been considering other Northern European destinations should we elect to do something similar next year: Germany and Poland on the Baltic coast, perhaps.
Jenrick turned up for a very quickly arranged Chinese dinner last night. Fluent presentation but the usual hard-right shtick to entice the membership. Hey that worked so well in 1997-2005. I berated him for his open support for Trump (well, what a surprise) to which he replied that the GOP is our "sister party".
No chance of his getting my vote but I fear he'll win. What then after almost 50 years party membership?
Next week it's drinkkies with Mel.
So not only does he support Trump, but he does so for a facile reason. If he is the best the Conservatives can come up with they really might be toast.
More to the point, when you go through the CVs of the new Lib Dem MPs, Lots of ex military, lots of really impressive academic, business, community and local credentials... these are the kinds of MPs who could easily have been conservative. Then you think well, it the Tories go down the Reform/Populist rabbit hole there is an actual conservative party to vote for- moderate decent, pragmatic, hard working, reasonable and sensible. Everything that the Tories used to claim to be.
At this point the Lib Dems only need to take 26 MPs in order to push the Tories into third place or 29 if you took the Tories and Reform together, and yes I know this is a mildly specious argument but under FPTP but there are 72 Lib Dem MPs and only 5 RefUK. However, Truss and now Jenrick saying they support Trump is absolutely lethal, totally lines them up with Farage in the Petin camp and could actually trigger a hard core of the Tories to defect since they completely loathe both Trump and Farage. Local Tories often get on well with local Lib Dems, and we could certainly see emergence of the Lib Dems as the centre right party that many Tories say they are or want to be (but are actually not and definitely would not be as allies of Trump).
Most LDs neither want nor would accept being a centre right party, the social democratic wing of the party would defect en masse to Labour if it tried as effectively happened in 2015 when Clegg's centre right LDs in Cameron's coalition govt got just 8% of the vote
It really takes a special kind of person to lecture someone who has been a member of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats for over 45 years, and who has been pretty active over much of that time, as a candidate, both Parliamentary and local, as an organiser and as a very regular conference attender about what the membership of the party is and what it is not.
I know my party and you, sir, do not.
You don't, you only know the Liberal wing of your party not the Social Democratic wing clearly.
If Orange Book Liberalism was so popular it would not have got just 8% of the vote in 2015 would it? The only examples of Liberal parties being the main centre right party in western nations are in Australia (where they have effectively always held that position in coalition with the conservative Nationals), Japan, where the LDP has been dominant for decades and arguably the Netherlands which is a much more socially liberal nation by culture than the UK is.
If the LDs became a centre right party the social democrats who are heirs of those like Jenkins and Williams and Owen who defected from Labour in the 1980s ie those who make up the Democrats part of the LDs would defect en masse back to Labour which under Starmer would be closer to the old SDP than a centre right Orange Book Liberal party would be
Much as I like you @hyufd, you really aren't right on this one and @Cicero is. We do know our party and you don't. There is no conflict within the LDs between Liberals and Social Democrats. Much of the time even we don't know which colleagues are which. I remember having this discussion at a LD party after the election where we were comparing opinions. I couldn't have told you before those discussions if other members were from one wing or the other, because we just don't have those wings even though some of us are clearly liberals and some of us are clearly social democrats.
Looking at the 2015 election result is daft. We didn't lose because we were Liberals and not Social Democrats. Nobody believes that. We lost because of the coalition and things like Tuition fees. If you asked any voters they couldn't have told you whether we were mainly Liberals or Social Democrats in 2015 and they couldn't now. Only anoraks like us know there is a difference.
And see my other post re being able to win more seats. Here is a bit of info for you. In Guildford in the build up to the election we knocked on 31,000 doors and sent out regular leaflets. During the election we knocked on 32,000 doors. That is nearly everyone twice. 13 leaflets or letters went out and several hundred posterboards went up during the election, although many of those letters were targeted so not to everyone.
There are plenty of Tory seats we could have done that in but didn't have the resources to do so. So we targeted ruthlessly. There are now the next batch of seats to go for and resources we can move from the last lot of targets we have won,
Now that may not happen. The Tories may recover and we may be defending ruthlessly and targeting nowhere. But if it stays the same we will be have many more Tory seats next time as well as some labour ones to go for.
History is on my side. For example, in 1945 the Liberals got just 9% on a centrist or even centre right liberal platform and the Liberals never got over 10% of the vote until Grimond got 11% in 1964, before falling back to 8.5% in 1966. In Feb 1974 Thorpe's Liberals did admittedly peak at 19% (though that was partly a result of his being more charismatic than Heath and Wilson) before falling to 13% under Steel in 1979 after Thorpe's scandals emerged.
Only the social democrat wing of the Labour Party leaving to form the SDP under Roy Jenkins and then forming the Alliance with the Liberals at the 1983 general election got the combined Liberals and SDP over 20% on a centre left platform to 25% and then 22% under Owen in 1987.
The merged parties which formed the LDs then never ceased to get under 15% of the voted from 1992 to 2010, peaking at 22% in 2005 under Charles Kennedy on an even left of Blair's Labour platform never mind just left of the Tories and 23% in 2010 when Clegg pledged to scrap tuition fees before moving right and backing increasing them in government as you say.
After going into coalition with the Tories in 2010 however the LDs collapsed to just 8% in 2015 and although they have got back over 10% since by appealing to hardline Remainers who opposed Brexit they have still not got over 15% again.
If the LDs became a centre right party they would also lose most of the Labour tactical votes that helped win them southern seats from the Tories last month and also have no chance in Labour seats Kennedy won in 2005
The Conservatives however have never polled lower than 30% in a General Election (we know they have in local elections and European parliamentary elections) until July 4th when they polled 24% and won 121 seats, their worst performance since the Reform Act of 1832 so applying historical parallels when we are in uncharted territory seems a little like hopecasting. The last time they polled anywhere near this (1997, 30.7% and 165 seats) they were out of Government for 13 years.
24% was still double the 12% the LDs got.
In 1997 Labour under Blair got 43%, 10% more than the 33% Labour under Starmer got
Your problem with that is that it illustrates two things - the potential for Tory revival at the next election, and the potential for oblivion.
Your opponents winning big without actually doing that well comes with a huge, flashing warning sign.
Only if the rightwing vote is effectively split again
What about the last few days makes you feel the right is coming together rather than splintering further?
Farage shifting to target working class Labour seats now and Jenrick, likely next Tory leader, shifting towards what Reform voters want to hear. Indeed you could well have Reform focusing on working class Labour seats the Tories normally can't reach and the Tories focusing on middle class Labour and LD seats Reform normally can't reach
Jenrick would be a terrible choice of leader and the conservative party only hope of recovery is to divorce entirely the idea if will accommodate Reform
HY has this sussed. An inevitable Labour collapse to Reform in the RedWall and the inevitability of Jenrick recovering the BlueWall gives us a glorious RefCon coalition. But, if the seats are equally shared, who is PM. Jenrick or Farage
Neither, Boris would come back and take the glory of course after they did all the hard work!
How ironic that the paper that has sown so much hate and division comes out with a front page that’s applauding those counter protesters . I expect normal service to resume soon !
Jenrick turned up for a very quickly arranged Chinese dinner last night. Fluent presentation but the usual hard-right shtick to entice the membership. Hey that worked so well in 1997-2005. I berated him for his open support for Trump (well, what a surprise) to which he replied that the GOP is our "sister party".
No chance of his getting my vote but I fear he'll win. What then after almost 50 years party membership?
Next week it's drinkkies with Mel.
So not only does he support Trump, but he does so for a facile reason. If he is the best the Conservatives can come up with they really might be toast.
More to the point, when you go through the CVs of the new Lib Dem MPs, Lots of ex military, lots of really impressive academic, business, community and local credentials... these are the kinds of MPs who could easily have been conservative. Then you think well, it the Tories go down the Reform/Populist rabbit hole there is an actual conservative party to vote for- moderate decent, pragmatic, hard working, reasonable and sensible. Everything that the Tories used to claim to be.
At this point the Lib Dems only need to take 26 MPs in order to push the Tories into third place or 29 if you took the Tories and Reform together, and yes I know this is a mildly specious argument but under FPTP but there are 72 Lib Dem MPs and only 5 RefUK. However, Truss and now Jenrick saying they support Trump is absolutely lethal, totally lines them up with Farage in the Petin camp and could actually trigger a hard core of the Tories to defect since they completely loathe both Trump and Farage. Local Tories often get on well with local Lib Dems, and we could certainly see emergence of the Lib Dems as the centre right party that many Tories say they are or want to be (but are actually not and definitely would not be as allies of Trump).
Most LDs neither want nor would accept being a centre right party, the social democratic wing of the party would defect en masse to Labour if it tried as effectively happened in 2015 when Clegg's centre right LDs in Cameron's coalition govt got just 8% of the vote
It really takes a special kind of person to lecture someone who has been a member of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats for over 45 years, and who has been pretty active over much of that time, as a candidate, both Parliamentary and local, as an organiser and as a very regular conference attender about what the membership of the party is and what it is not.
I know my party and you, sir, do not.
You don't, you only know the Liberal wing of your party not the Social Democratic wing clearly.
If Orange Book Liberalism was so popular it would not have got just 8% of the vote in 2015 would it? The only examples of Liberal parties being the main centre right party in western nations are in Australia (where they have effectively always held that position in coalition with the conservative Nationals), Japan, where the LDP has been dominant for decades and arguably the Netherlands which is a much more socially liberal nation by culture than the UK is.
If the LDs became a centre right party the social democrats who are heirs of those like Jenkins and Williams and Owen who defected from Labour in the 1980s ie those who make up the Democrats part of the LDs would defect en masse back to Labour which under Starmer would be closer to the old SDP than a centre right Orange Book Liberal party would be
Much as I like you @hyufd, you really aren't right on this one and @Cicero is. We do know our party and you don't. There is no conflict within the LDs between Liberals and Social Democrats. Much of the time even we don't know which colleagues are which. I remember having this discussion at a LD party after the election where we were comparing opinions. I couldn't have told you before those discussions if other members were from one wing or the other, because we just don't have those wings even though some of us are clearly liberals and some of us are clearly social democrats.
Looking at the 2015 election result is daft. We didn't lose because we were Liberals and not Social Democrats. Nobody believes that. We lost because of the coalition and things like Tuition fees. If you asked any voters they couldn't have told you whether we were mainly Liberals or Social Democrats in 2015 and they couldn't now. Only anoraks like us know there is a difference.
And see my other post re being able to win more seats. Here is a bit of info for you. In Guildford in the build up to the election we knocked on 31,000 doors and sent out regular leaflets. During the election we knocked on 32,000 doors. That is nearly everyone twice. 13 leaflets or letters went out and several hundred posterboards went up during the election, although many of those letters were targeted so not to everyone.
There are plenty of Tory seats we could have done that in but didn't have the resources to do so. So we targeted ruthlessly. There are now the next batch of seats to go for and resources we can move from the last lot of targets we have won,
Now that may not happen. The Tories may recover and we may be defending ruthlessly and targeting nowhere. But if it stays the same we will be have many more Tory seats next time as well as some labour ones to go for.
History is on my side. For example, in 1945 the Liberals got just 9% on a centrist or even centre right liberal platform and the Liberals never got over 10% of the vote until Grimond got 11% in 1964, before falling back to 8.5% in 1966. In Feb 1974 Thorpe's Liberals did admittedly peak at 19% (though that was partly a result of his being more charismatic than Heath and Wilson) before falling to 13% under Steel in 1979 after Thorpe's scandals emerged.
Only the social democrat wing of the Labour Party leaving to form the SDP under Roy Jenkins and then forming the Alliance with the Liberals at the 1983 general election got the combined Liberals and SDP over 20% on a centre left platform to 25% and then 22% under Owen in 1987.
The merged parties which formed the LDs then never ceased to get under 15% of the voted from 1992 to 2010, peaking at 22% in 2005 under Charles Kennedy on an even left of Blair's Labour platform never mind just left of the Tories and 23% in 2010 when Clegg pledged to scrap tuition fees before moving right and backing increasing them in government as you say.
After going into coalition with the Tories in 2010 however the LDs collapsed to just 8% in 2015 and although they have got back over 10% since by appealing to hardline Remainers who opposed Brexit they have still not got over 15% again.
If the LDs became a centre right party they would also lose most of the Labour tactical votes that helped win them southern seats from the Tories last month and also have no chance in Labour seats Kennedy won in 2005
The Conservatives however have never polled lower than 30% in a General Election (we know they have in local elections and European parliamentary elections) until July 4th when they polled 24% and won 121 seats, their worst performance since the Reform Act of 1832 so applying historical parallels when we are in uncharted territory seems a little like hopecasting. The last time they polled anywhere near this (1997, 30.7% and 165 seats) they were out of Government for 13 years.
24% was still double the 12% the LDs got.
In 1997 Labour under Blair got 43%, 10% more than the 33% Labour under Starmer got
Your problem with that is that it illustrates two things - the potential for Tory revival at the next election, and the potential for oblivion.
Your opponents winning big without actually doing that well comes with a huge, flashing warning sign.
Only if the rightwing vote is effectively split again
What about the last few days makes you feel the right is coming together rather than splintering further?
Farage shifting to target working class Labour seats now and Jenrick, likely next Tory leader, shifting towards what Reform voters want to hear. Indeed you could well have Reform focusing on working class Labour seats the Tories normally can't reach and the Tories focusing on middle class Labour and LD seats Reform normally can't reach
Jenrick would be a terrible choice of leader and the conservative party only hope of recovery is to divorce entirely the idea if will accommodate Reform
HY has this sussed. An inevitable Labour collapse to Reform in the RedWall and the inevitability of Jenrick recovering the BlueWall gives us a glorious RefCon coalition. But, if the seats are equally shared, who is PM. Jenrick or Farage
Neither, Boris would come back and take the glory of course after they did all the hard work!
Oh dear - you and Boris are little different to Doris and Boris and completely out of touch
It was my second visit. My first was as a student. Going with family is a different experience. It's a very pretty city, but in trying to give the kids a bowdlerised highlights-in-one-day package on a baking day in August, it quickly starts to feel like every otger capital city: hot and crowded and peppered with angry Arabs and pride flags and American candy stores and graffiti and luxury stores and tat, and the beauty you came to see quickly fades into the background. Even an inspired lunch choice from oldest daughter brought only temporary respite. I mean, we had a nice day. But I was finding it hard to feel as well-disposed to the place as I did last time I visited.
And then, at oldest daughter's polite insistence, we did this. And it was terrifying and brilliant and turned the day into one I will never forget: https://youtu.be/GjgD0cfcmV0?si=DxwfR2xLb2flgUcP
It helps that this is in Noord Amsterdam - a fiveminute ferry ride away from central station, but completely different in feel and
...intensity, and an area I hadn't been to before - so I had no preconceived notions for it to live up to. But the activity: I'm a hard man to frighten, but it was one of the scariest things I've ever done. Which is pretty brilliant in itself. I also now have a photo I will forever treasure (I thought they'd sting you for it but you can download it for free) of me and youngest daughter from behind, dangling improbably above the Amsterdam skyline. It's hard to believe it's not greenscreened.
Aside from all that, the best thing about the day was Dutch public transport, which was thrillingly punctual and well connected.
Go to south l'Aveyron!
Honestly, it is the Gallic Garden of Eden. Provence before Peter Mayle and the plebs. Gorgeous towns and villages everywhere. You have brilliant kayaking, wild swimming, hiking, climbing, zipwiring (often over the kayakers). There are endless places to picnic, there is fishing to be done, there are entire valleys to explore with barely anyone else
There are tiny film festivals in the villages. There are cafes in sun splashed squares with Aperols for the adults. There are little museums and galleries and there are big cities not so far away, Lyon, Toulouse, if you insist. Rent a house (they are still incredibly cheap compared to Provence or the Dordogne). Go see Templar towns with real life artisanal cutlers in the ramparts with proper burning forges. Listen to mad boho jazz bands in the very very French village fetes. You will probably be the only non-French people
It is idyllic. I was there with my older daughter and we had superb fun - but a part of me was weirdly yearning to be a Dad with three kids, introducing them to this paradise
It is one hour drive from Rodez, 90 minutes from Montepelier. Amazing
I like the sound of all that, except perhaps for the heat! I am by instinct a doer rather than a seeer on holiday and that sort of thing suits my temper much more.
It was my second visit. My first was as a student. Going with family is a different experience. It's a very pretty city, but in trying to give the kids a bowdlerised highlights-in-one-day package on a baking day in August, it quickly starts to feel like every otger capital city: hot and crowded and peppered with angry Arabs and pride flags and American candy stores and graffiti and luxury stores and tat, and the beauty you came to see quickly fades into the background. Even an inspired lunch choice from oldest daughter brought only temporary respite. I mean, we had a nice day. But I was finding it hard to feel as well-disposed to the place as I did last time I visited.
And then, at oldest daughter's polite insistence, we did this. And it was terrifying and brilliant and turned the day into one I will never forget: https://youtu.be/GjgD0cfcmV0?si=DxwfR2xLb2flgUcP
It helps that this is in Noord Amsterdam - a fiveminute ferry ride away from central station, but completely different in feel and
That looks fun
Can I ask why you chose Holland and Amsterdam? It is not what it was
Because I'm not very adventurous and somewhat impecunious.
Holland, because: We have done Cornwall for the last 8 years. East side of the Camel estuary. And it is perfect, and I'm slightly sad not to be there, but we have done everything there now and one year's memories are starting to blur into another. And while I could spend all day on a good beach, that's not true of all my family. And my oldest won't necessarily be holidaying with us for many more years, and wants to see a bit of the world. But also, we're pasty northerners who don't do well in the heat, and flying in the summer holidays as a family of five is prohibitively expensive. And every time we've been to France it's been cold and wet - and while I try to be open minded about abroad I find France just far too French, Breton cider aside. And many people have recommended this spot to us - it's a holiday park within striking distance of the sea, with all sorts on site. It's genuinely good - has the best aquapark I've ever been to. I wouldn't rule out coming again. But holidaying in such a crowded corner of Europe does feel odd. And Amsterdam because we're here so may as well go and take a look. I have however solved the mystery of where all the families of five holiday. This place is full of them. I've been considering other Northern European destinations should we elect to do something similar next year: Germany and Poland on the Baltic coast, perhaps.
Understood. And all fair
But I think you’d love l’Aveyron. It is considerably cooler than the med - because altitude - but still gets the amazing sun. Think Cornwall on a perfect day. 26C then 16C at night - no rain
And if you do get hot you just dive in one of the rivers. Everyone does it. Then have a beer that you’ve cooled in the waters
I can honestly say in all my travels I have never so firmly felt: my god, this is the place to come for a family holiday
It was my second visit. My first was as a student. Going with family is a different experience. It's a very pretty city, but in trying to give the kids a bowdlerised highlights-in-one-day package on a baking day in August, it quickly starts to feel like every otger capital city: hot and crowded and peppered with angry Arabs and pride flags and American candy stores and graffiti and luxury stores and tat, and the beauty you came to see quickly fades into the background. Even an inspired lunch choice from oldest daughter brought only temporary respite. I mean, we had a nice day. But I was finding it hard to feel as well-disposed to the place as I did last time I visited.
And then, at oldest daughter's polite insistence, we did this. And it was terrifying and brilliant and turned the day into one I will never forget: https://youtu.be/GjgD0cfcmV0?si=DxwfR2xLb2flgUcP
It helps that this is in Noord Amsterdam - a fiveminute ferry ride away from central station, but completely different in feel and
Go to Amsterdam in winter or late autumn.
Uncrowded.
Completely different.
The darkening light and maybe some fog adds to the atmosphere. Everywhere you look there are high windows with lights and candles. Empty canal sides.
It was my second visit. My first was as a student. Going with family is a different experience. It's a very pretty city, but in trying to give the kids a bowdlerised highlights-in-one-day package on a baking day in August, it quickly starts to feel like every otger capital city: hot and crowded and peppered with angry Arabs and pride flags and American candy stores and graffiti and luxury stores and tat, and the beauty you came to see quickly fades into the background. Even an inspired lunch choice from oldest daughter brought only temporary respite. I mean, we had a nice day. But I was finding it hard to feel as well-disposed to the place as I did last time I visited.
And then, at oldest daughter's polite insistence, we did this. And it was terrifying and brilliant and turned the day into one I will never forget: https://youtu.be/GjgD0cfcmV0?si=DxwfR2xLb2flgUcP
It helps that this is in Noord Amsterdam - a fiveminute ferry ride away from central station, but completely different in feel and
That looks fun
Can I ask why you chose Holland and Amsterdam? It is not what it was
Because I'm not very adventurous and somewhat impecunious.
Holland, because: We have done Cornwall for the last 8 years. East side of the Camel estuary. And it is perfect, and I'm slightly sad not to be there, but we have done everything there now and one year's memories are starting to blur into another. And while I could spend all day on a good beach, that's not true of all my family. And my oldest won't necessarily be holidaying with us for many more years, and wants to see a bit of the world. But also, we're pasty northerners who don't do well in the heat, and flying in the summer holidays as a family of five is prohibitively expensive. And every time we've been to France it's been cold and wet - and while I try to be open minded about abroad I find France just far too French, Breton cider aside. And many people have recommended this spot to us - it's a holiday park within striking distance of the sea, with all sorts on site. It's genuinely good - has the best aquapark I've ever been to. I wouldn't rule out coming again. But holidaying in such a crowded corner of Europe does feel odd. And Amsterdam because we're here so may as well go and take a look. I have however solved the mystery of where all the families of five holiday. This place is full of them. I've been considering other Northern European destinations should we elect to do something similar next year: Germany and Poland on the Baltic coast, perhaps.
Understood. And all fair
But I think you’d love l’Aveyron. It is considerably cooler than the med - because altitude - but still gets the amazing sun. Think Cornwall on a perfect day. 26C then 16C at night - no rain
And if you do get hot you just dive in one of the rivers. Everyone does it. Then have a beer that you’ve cooled in the waters
I can honestly say in all my travels I have never so firmly felt: my god, this is the place to come for a family holiday
And rodez is pretty cheap to get to from the uk
I shall investigate and propose to the family for next year!
Jenrick turned up for a very quickly arranged Chinese dinner last night. Fluent presentation but the usual hard-right shtick to entice the membership. Hey that worked so well in 1997-2005. I berated him for his open support for Trump (well, what a surprise) to which he replied that the GOP is our "sister party".
No chance of his getting my vote but I fear he'll win. What then after almost 50 years party membership?
Next week it's drinkkies with Mel.
So not only does he support Trump, but he does so for a facile reason. If he is the best the Conservatives can come up with they really might be toast.
More to the point, when you go through the CVs of the new Lib Dem MPs, Lots of ex military, lots of really impressive academic, business, community and local credentials... these are the kinds of MPs who could easily have been conservative. Then you think well, it the Tories go down the Reform/Populist rabbit hole there is an actual conservative party to vote for- moderate decent, pragmatic, hard working, reasonable and sensible. Everything that the Tories used to claim to be.
At this point the Lib Dems only need to take 26 MPs in order to push the Tories into third place or 29 if you took the Tories and Reform together, and yes I know this is a mildly specious argument but under FPTP but there are 72 Lib Dem MPs and only 5 RefUK. However, Truss and now Jenrick saying they support Trump is absolutely lethal, totally lines them up with Farage in the Petin camp and could actually trigger a hard core of the Tories to defect since they completely loathe both Trump and Farage. Local Tories often get on well with local Lib Dems, and we could certainly see emergence of the Lib Dems as the centre right party that many Tories say they are or want to be (but are actually not and definitely would not be as allies of Trump).
Most LDs neither want nor would accept being a centre right party, the social democratic wing of the party would defect en masse to Labour if it tried as effectively happened in 2015 when Clegg's centre right LDs in Cameron's coalition govt got just 8% of the vote
It really takes a special kind of person to lecture someone who has been a member of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats for over 45 years, and who has been pretty active over much of that time, as a candidate, both Parliamentary and local, as an organiser and as a very regular conference attender about what the membership of the party is and what it is not.
I know my party and you, sir, do not.
You don't, you only know the Liberal wing of your party not the Social Democratic wing clearly.
If Orange Book Liberalism was so popular it would not have got just 8% of the vote in 2015 would it? The only examples of Liberal parties being the main centre right party in western nations are in Australia (where they have effectively always held that position in coalition with the conservative Nationals), Japan, where the LDP has been dominant for decades and arguably the Netherlands which is a much more socially liberal nation by culture than the UK is.
If the LDs became a centre right party the social democrats who are heirs of those like Jenkins and Williams and Owen who defected from Labour in the 1980s ie those who make up the Democrats part of the LDs would defect en masse back to Labour which under Starmer would be closer to the old SDP than a centre right Orange Book Liberal party would be
Much as I like you @hyufd, you really aren't right on this one and @Cicero is. We do know our party and you don't. There is no conflict within the LDs between Liberals and Social Democrats. Much of the time even we don't know which colleagues are which. I remember having this discussion at a LD party after the election where we were comparing opinions. I couldn't have told you before those discussions if other members were from one wing or the other, because we just don't have those wings even though some of us are clearly liberals and some of us are clearly social democrats.
Looking at the 2015 election result is daft. We didn't lose because we were Liberals and not Social Democrats. Nobody believes that. We lost because of the coalition and things like Tuition fees. If you asked any voters they couldn't have told you whether we were mainly Liberals or Social Democrats in 2015 and they couldn't now. Only anoraks like us know there is a difference.
And see my other post re being able to win more seats. Here is a bit of info for you. In Guildford in the build up to the election we knocked on 31,000 doors and sent out regular leaflets. During the election we knocked on 32,000 doors. That is nearly everyone twice. 13 leaflets or letters went out and several hundred posterboards went up during the election, although many of those letters were targeted so not to everyone.
There are plenty of Tory seats we could have done that in but didn't have the resources to do so. So we targeted ruthlessly. There are now the next batch of seats to go for and resources we can move from the last lot of targets we have won,
Now that may not happen. The Tories may recover and we may be defending ruthlessly and targeting nowhere. But if it stays the same we will be have many more Tory seats next time as well as some labour ones to go for.
History is on my side. For example, in 1945 the Liberals got just 9% on a centrist or even centre right liberal platform and the Liberals never got over 10% of the vote until Grimond got 11% in 1964, before falling back to 8.5% in 1966. In Feb 1974 Thorpe's Liberals did admittedly peak at 19% (though that was partly a result of his being more charismatic than Heath and Wilson) before falling to 13% under Steel in 1979 after Thorpe's scandals emerged.
Only the social democrat wing of the Labour Party leaving to form the SDP under Roy Jenkins and then forming the Alliance with the Liberals at the 1983 general election got the combined Liberals and SDP over 20% on a centre left platform to 25% and then 22% under Owen in 1987.
The merged parties which formed the LDs then never ceased to get under 15% of the voted from 1992 to 2010, peaking at 22% in 2005 under Charles Kennedy on an even left of Blair's Labour platform never mind just left of the Tories and 23% in 2010 when Clegg pledged to scrap tuition fees before moving right and backing increasing them in government as you say.
After going into coalition with the Tories in 2010 however the LDs collapsed to just 8% in 2015 and although they have got back over 10% since by appealing to hardline Remainers who opposed Brexit they have still not got over 15% again.
If the LDs became a centre right party they would also lose most of the Labour tactical votes that helped win them southern seats from the Tories last month and also have no chance in Labour seats Kennedy won in 2005
The Conservatives however have never polled lower than 30% in a General Election (we know they have in local elections and European parliamentary elections) until July 4th when they polled 24% and won 121 seats, their worst performance since the Reform Act of 1832 so applying historical parallels when we are in uncharted territory seems a little like hopecasting. The last time they polled anywhere near this (1997, 30.7% and 165 seats) they were out of Government for 13 years.
24% was still double the 12% the LDs got.
In 1997 Labour under Blair got 43%, 10% more than the 33% Labour under Starmer got
Your problem with that is that it illustrates two things - the potential for Tory revival at the next election, and the potential for oblivion.
Your opponents winning big without actually doing that well comes with a huge, flashing warning sign.
Only if the rightwing vote is effectively split again
What about the last few days makes you feel the right is coming together rather than splintering further?
Farage shifting to target working class Labour seats now and Jenrick, likely next Tory leader, shifting towards what Reform voters want to hear. Indeed you could well have Reform focusing on working class Labour seats the Tories normally can't reach and the Tories focusing on middle class Labour and LD seats Reform normally can't reach
Tories would be well advised to concentrate on trying to win seats they previously held for over 100 years, such was their defeat.
You get the impression the Tories still don’t get it.
Just for a bit of fun, regarding the Olympics Medal table, I assigned 3 points for a Gold, 2 points for a Silver, and 1 for a Bronze:
G S B Total points United States 81 70 32 183 China 75 46 17 138 France 39 34 21 94 Great Britain 36 34 20 90 Australia 54 24 11 89 Japan 36 12 13 61 South Korea 36 16 7 59 Italy 27 20 8 55 Netherlands 27 10 6 43 Germany 24 10 5 39
. So many anti racists have turned up to drown out the far right racists. The Faragists are in deep retreat. Who'd have thought! Well done GB. Well done Starmer
We haven't had any opinion polls yet. Calling them Farage Riots is just metropolitan echo chamber stuff and could actually backfire.
Are the rioters invoking Farage? No Are they waving Reform placards? No Do most Reform voters support them? Not even close
Anyway two cheers to the anti racists. I'll only give them three when they start taking antisemitism seriously.
I’m very glad we liberated ourselves from our religious nut-jobs and forced them to moderate into the fairly harmless institutions we have today. Our conservatives, too, deserve credit for moving with the times and accepting the changed reality. They don’t stay on the wrong side of history for very long.
I fear, in much of the non-western world, the conservatives are entrenching their power, using technology and democracy to take back control.
Comments
@jonsopel
·
3h
Have seen queues like this at Trump events over the years, but at a Dem rally? Never happened with Biden or Hillary Clinton. There is something stirring…..
https://x.com/jonsopel/status/1821227655741514228
Either Vance goes to bars to drink beer or he doesn't.
People drinking beer in a bar will often end up talking to each other.
I did the main line train to Blaenau (along with basically the whole main line network in Wales), but haven't done the narrow gauge lines.
Got some excellent recipes for fruit wines off it.
There are certainly the equivalents of far right in both India and Israel.
Reform voters aren't Tory voters being cheeky.
Just because the SWP/Far Left oppose the far right doesn’t make them the good guys by default. The lesser of two evils is still an evil.
"Eight people have been arrested for assaulting emergency workers, possession of offensive weapons and other offences.
More arrests will follow, we will provide a full update shortly."
https://x.com/metpoliceuk/status/1821281495870230701
We also got off at the end of the Talyllyn and went up the old incline to explore the Bryn Eglwys quarries and their buildings and the quarriers village at Abergynolwyn, but no idea how the state of forestry, access, etc. is now. Edit: or even if it is safe in the state of the ruins, plant cover, and so on.
Yuk
I'm not sure any anti far right protesters need to get involved. They could just leave the 3 groups to fight it out amongst themselves.
With that level of awareness. you'd half expect Bath and Hebden Bridge to appear on the list next.
.
https://x.com/eurosport/status/1821244810079916292?s=61
Universities as we know them will be gone within 20 years max, probably a lot less. It will have very little to do with my personal contempt for their politicisation, and a lot more to do with brutal collisions between technology and finance
Their presence will put off many people from participating.
Imagine how desolate I'd feel if I'd been on the point of orgasm about it.
Edge City. Like a cock caged cuck.
Heil Spode!
https://x.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1821282360597561596
Moving to a different university?
He claims to have 1000s of paid subscribers to his substack, I presume its £5 a month (never looked), but he is absolutely coining it in. I can actually believe it, there are people doing millions of revenue on substack from a similar approach of a small amount from lots of people.
https://www.landmarktrust.org.uk/search-and-book/properties/coed-y-bleiddiau-50127/#Overview
You are letting your wishes get ahead of you. The people who are queueing for Harris are not swing voters, not independents, as they would be if they were queueing for Trump. Normal voters don’t stand hours in line waiting to hear a candidate speak.
I recall they were very put out when the Snackbarists said they hated them just as much as other Western infidels.
I'll try again:
a) Unlike the Tories and Labour although we all have different views (as you know I am a Liberal rather than a Social Democrat) that doesn't really register within the party itself very much. I have no idea what most of the people I campaigned with are. Unless I get into a discussion I am unaware whether a fellow member is a Liberal or Social Democrat. Although individually we are one or the other to some extent, we don't actually have such wings, unlike Labour and the Tories.
b) if you canvas someone (try doing this?) and they tell you they are voting LD, try asking them whether they are Liberals or Social Democrats. Except for the odd person like me you will get a blank response. If you ask which wing a Tory voter or Labour voter is on, many will know.
Don't assume because you have these wings in the Tory party they exist in the same way in the LDs.
However if we went to PR, I do agree and think that split would happen.
It was my second visit. My first was as a student. Going with family is a different experience.
It's a very pretty city, but in trying to give the kids a bowdlerised highlights-in-one-day package on a baking day in August, it quickly starts to feel like every otger capital city: hot and crowded and peppered with angry Arabs and pride flags and American candy stores and graffiti and luxury stores and tat, and the beauty you came to see quickly fades into the background. Even an inspired lunch choice from oldest daughter brought only temporary respite. I mean, we had a nice day. But I was finding it hard to feel as well-disposed to the place as I did last time I visited.
And then, at oldest daughter's polite insistence, we did this. And it was terrifying and brilliant and turned the day into one I will never forget:
https://youtu.be/GjgD0cfcmV0?si=DxwfR2xLb2flgUcP
It helps that this is in Noord Amsterdam - a fiveminute ferry ride away from central station, but completely different in feel and
"BREAKING:
Iraq’s Parliament takes the first step to lower the legal age of marriage for girls from 15 to 9.
The new personal status law being discussed is based on Sharia Law."
https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1821132104056410207
Can I ask why you chose Holland and Amsterdam? It is not what it was
Aside from all that, the best thing about the day was Dutch public transport, which was thrillingly punctual and well connected.
Jenrick could reach out to Reform voters, maybe even do a deal with Farage while still not repelling 2019 Conservative voters who went Labour or LD in a way Patel would. So he would also be better able to exploit any unpopularity for the Labour government
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/politics/market/1.176878927
b) Social Democrat voters certainly knew they weren't centre right in 2015, hence those that voted LD in 2010 went Labour in 2015.
If we went PR all the main parties would likely split to some degree yes
Furthermore immigration will be a substantial issue going forward
https://x.com/AaronParnas/status/1821246162017435828
Hillary, I seem to recall, skipped WI ?
Honestly, it is the Gallic Garden of Eden. Provence before Peter Mayle and the plebs. Gorgeous towns and villages everywhere. You have brilliant kayaking, wild swimming, hiking, climbing, zipwiring (often over the kayakers). There are endless places to picnic, there is fishing to be done, there are entire valleys to explore with barely anyone else
There are tiny film festivals in the villages. There are cafes in sun splashed squares with Aperols for the adults. There are little museums and galleries and there are big cities not so far away, Lyon, Toulouse, if you insist. Rent a house (they are still incredibly cheap compared to Provence or the Dordogne). Go see Templar towns with real life artisanal cutlers in the ramparts with proper burning forges. Listen to mad boho jazz bands in the very very French village fetes. You will probably be the only non-French people
It is idyllic. I was there with my older daughter and we had superb fun - but a part of me was weirdly yearning to be a Dad with three kids, introducing them to this paradise
It is one hour drive from Rodez, 90 minutes from Montepelier. Amazing
Big Nige has posted a whiny message about how unfair it is that he has been linked to the riots.
Meanwhile trending on Twix
#FaragesRiots
Silly question - @HYUFD - I am not wrong
Holland, because:
We have done Cornwall for the last 8 years. East side of the Camel estuary. And it is perfect, and I'm slightly sad not to be there, but we have done everything there now and one year's memories are starting to blur into another. And while I could spend all day on a good beach, that's not true of all my family. And my oldest won't necessarily be holidaying with us for many more years, and wants to see a bit of the world. But also, we're pasty northerners who don't do well in the heat, and flying in the summer holidays as a family of five is prohibitively expensive. And every time we've been to France it's been cold and wet - and while I try to be open minded about abroad I find France just far too French, Breton cider aside.
And many people have recommended this spot to us - it's a holiday park within striking distance of the sea, with all sorts on site. It's genuinely good - has the best aquapark I've ever been to. I wouldn't rule out coming again. But holidaying in such a crowded corner of Europe does feel odd.
And Amsterdam because we're here so may as well go and take a look.
I have however solved the mystery of where all the families of five holiday. This place is full of them.
I've been considering other Northern European destinations should we elect to do something similar next year: Germany and Poland on the Baltic coast, perhaps.
Her husband asked why the fuck and the data kids said we don't need to be there says the computer.
Disaster.
A more secure communication channel is required.
Remember that last time Blackberry Messenger was the medium of choice amongst the rioters.
“Hold on. The courts are going to handle that part of it. What we’re going to do is beat him in November.”
https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1821273340868489255
I really hate to say this, but I think they are going to win.
But I think you’d love l’Aveyron. It is considerably cooler than the med - because altitude - but still gets the amazing sun. Think Cornwall on a perfect day. 26C then 16C at night - no rain
And if you do get hot you just dive in one of the rivers. Everyone does it. Then have a beer that you’ve cooled in the waters
I can honestly say in all my travels I have never so firmly felt: my god, this is the place to come for a family holiday
And rodez is pretty cheap to get to from the uk
Uncrowded.
Completely different.
The darkening light and maybe some fog adds to the atmosphere. Everywhere you look there are high windows with lights and candles. Empty canal sides.
It is pure noom.
You get the impression the Tories still don’t get it.
The icing on the cake would be Farage sharing a cell with Tommy Robinson.
Meanwhile this looks like bad news for Jenrick. If you miss the zeitgeist time to leave the stage
Are the rioters invoking Farage? No
Are they waving Reform placards? No
Do most Reform voters support them? Not even close
Anyway two cheers to the anti racists. I'll only give them three when they start taking antisemitism seriously.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iraq-women-campaigners-condemn-amendments-could-see-children-married
Deeply unpleasant.
I’m very glad we liberated ourselves from our religious nut-jobs and forced them to moderate into the fairly harmless institutions we have today. Our conservatives, too, deserve credit for moving with the times and accepting the changed reality. They don’t stay on the wrong side of history for very long.
I fear, in much of the non-western world, the conservatives are entrenching their power, using technology and democracy to take back control.