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A reminder that getting out the vote is crucial – politicalbetting.com
A reminder that getting out the vote is crucial – politicalbetting.com
I’ve only just woken up so not had time to properly analyse the early results but the by-election shows why every little helps when it comes to winning.
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To me this suggests the anti-Reform vote is very strong. Voters are still willing to vote tactically to stop a party they dont like. Well done to Reform UK all the same.
Honestly I thought Reform would walk it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn8vey9355po
I also thought Reform would walk it.
Starmer needs to stop the “smash the gangs” rubbish as quite clearly it’s making no difference. Reeves needs to go. And we need to start having an honest conversation about the NHS and whether there is a “better way”.
Badenoch - well, she’s quite useless. She won’t be around for much longer I think.
Apart from that, really fascinating time in politics
Farage is still bigging up Musk and by implication Trump despite both having categorically failed to cut anything.
As I said a few days ago, I still think things will look very different by 2029.
As for Labour’s policy on the boats, I think they’ve got to make a deal of some kind with France and perhaps look at other changes to the law.
I really do not like the idea we leave the EHRC though. I’d like somebody to explain why we must do that to solve this problem.
Realos vs. Fundis. It's always been a problem on the left- some people want everything and hence end up with nothing. Right-wingers have tended to be more pragmatic, which is why they win more often.
It's what makes the rise of Reform (who have Fundi-right as their core) so discombobulating. Especially when coupled with a Labour government which is mostly about grim pragmatism.
Husband - John Cryer, former Labour MP
Father in law - Bob Cryer, former Labour MP
Mother in law - Ann Cryer, former Labour MP
And Jenkyns, as a former minister with her own power base, and known stroppy character, is clearly going to be trouble for Farage.
Bugger.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
I really hope Putin and his acolytes one day meet a very sticky end, and they are haunted for eternity in purgatory.
Environmental Greens, Nimby Greens, Trot Greens and Hamas Greens are all different.
What Labour seem to have blissfully forgotten in office is that statistics are not reality - they disguise reality. So many people can't see a GP and the queue for a scan to get onto a waiting list is in itself lengthy. So when they are they told that actually we're added another half a million GP appointments actually, they get rightly insulted.
Labour's biggest ever majorities have all been won by lawyers.
I'm surprised that 20% of the vote was spread across no hopers - that actually gives Reform more hope than anything else - in an election when only 2 parties could win 20% of voters actually went out and voted for no chance candidates.
But if we go back to Tuesday I pointed out that 45-49.9% for reform at 8 was unlikely and that Labour at 4 was value. Got to say both statements were true because although Labour lost it was only 4/7 voters in it
What this by-election does show is that Reform is a real and obvious risk to Labour. But the good news is they have levers to pull should they want to. Or it might get a lot worse.
The real risk for the Tories is they become irrelevant.
Well, no, because Starmer will retire before the election so the next PM will be Labour, but Jenkyns could be the one after that.
Reform could win the next election while Nigel Farage loses Clacton, a destination not in his satnav, a constituency he has largely ignored, holding (it is alleged) no surgeries there.
If that happens, and if Dame Sir Andrea has stood as an MP, then she would be probably the most experienced Reform member, having been a whip and junior minister under Boris and Liz Truss.
However, let's rememember this was Labour's 16th safest seat. It is amusing to think of a similar General Election result leaving them with 15 MPs.
< blockquote class="Quote" rel="Taz"> Many Reform voters are lapsed Labour voters. Certainly in my area. They won’t want to vote Tory either. Their voting Reform partly as NOTA and partly for the reasons Rochdale outlined, certainly around here. They’re not all thick, stupid, gullible, racist. Many just want a better life, tidier streets, less petty crime, less potholes and some civic pride.
Reform may surprise on the upside (trademark PB) or not, but in Durham labour were shit, the coalition were shit, so why not give them a go.
Cos I’m up for that.
But that level of service isn't the same everywhere and worse GPs are private organisations not quite the NHS. So it's hard to change things..
The party are now a genuine electoral force and the main parties are going to have to, in their own ways, work out how to deal with them. However, it’s also correct that Reform in charge in places could put a dampener on the Party’s advance if they’re shown to generally make a mess of things.
Culturally, everyone needs to understand you are responsible for wealth creation, personally, and for making your own way in the world.
Unless you reimagine the welfare state in its entirety and make some surgical cuts to the cost of living, what you proposed creates a massive recession as circulating cash collapses which buggers local economies and makes the crumbling ruins of our towns collapse even faster.
I do think Labour run a real risk of thinking statistics will make people feel better even if they don’t. A similar mistake to what the Democrats did.
They really need to show some progress on things.
I thought the fly tipping policy was one of their better “unique” ideas.
I’ve really enjoyed @RochdalePioneers’ analysis as it fills in a lot of blindspots for me and they seem to have got little wrong so far.
Brainless.
There is a strong case for AV in these elections. Mind, if there had been, Reform may have won in Donny and N Tyneside.
At the moment they don’t have sole charge of any councils . I hope they win at least one so can put their plans into operation and then can be judged . We’ll see where the cuts are going to happen and what locals think of them .
I always wondered why they put forwards the Eagle sisters too.
Go into a home, Roger.
Many are, but most aren't. There was a rather near report into Reform-curious Labour voters recently. Some details in this thread;
Firstly, to understand Labour/Reform switching it's important to put it in perspective.
Historically speaking, Reform voters are not ‘Labour’s lost voters’. 74% of Reform 2024 voters have not voted Labour in a single election since 2005. It's mostly an anti-Labour vote.
https://bsky.app/profile/steveakehurst.bsky.social/post/3lnua73au2c27
There’s three parties pretty much in a deadlock, each around the mid 20s (in recent months with Reform perhaps a touch higher and the Tories a touch lower, but not a tremendous amount in it).
A national picture like that isn’t going to throw up one party winning everything.
What jobs?
But, Reform look set to take Staffs and Lincs
I half suspect Reform will win a council possibly Kent (for obvious reasons which are irrelevant to the election that has just been fought). And will then discover that all the council's money is spent on legally required items (social care, planning, libraries, bins) so there is very little they can do.
Hence Reform will fail the way every other council will as social care eats more and more of the total budget up and nothing can be improved.
It was Cleverly's gig at the last election, and I have some respect for whoever volunteers to go over the top into the guns. A lot just go to ground.
I think they're just totally boxed in and socially incapable of squaring the circle.
The Greens were odds-on favourites to win the West of England mayoralty, led opinion polls, but finished third behind Labour and Reform.
People who are sufficiently motivated (facing homelessness) will find a way to get work, even if it starts small with temporary jobs or part time work.
Rejoin EU candidate = 129 votes
Vote Rejoin, get Reform.
"Aw, bugger..."
Two routes Labour could take:
"We know the NHS is a terrible mess in many areas. We're going as fast as we can to get appointments working everywhere - and national figures show we're making some progress. The Tories left a fragmented and broken NHS which is why the service you get may well still be very poor. We're on it"
or
"Thank's to the decisive leadership of Keir Starmer we've actually added half a million GP appointments in 6 months, which has actually transformed the NHS from the broken mess left by the Tories"
Guess which line Wes Fleetingintelligence is taking?
Sorry for the interruption. Please continue.
Its more like £20 / hr, and say you work on 10% margin, that means that member of staff needs to be making you £200 / hr in gross income.
I see skills as a massive problem, and whilst improved education is a fix for that, it is also incredibly laggy. For this reason I'd like to see adult education funding significantly increased, and perhaps even some benefits being dependent on it - though that would be massively controversial. But again, that would be laggy.
A modest and self effacing chap last week advised backing Labour to win the West of England mayoral race at 9/2.
Ladbrokes have some markets up on the various mayoral races (including ones not in the screenshot) and based on these polls from YouGov I wonder the value might be backing Labour to win the West of England race
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2025/04/25/dame-andrea-jenkyns-your-time-has-come/
But the longer this standoff with Reform goes on for, the more likely it is that they’re eventually going to collapse.
Don't.
Once the Conservatives failed to strangle Faragism at birth, something like this was fairly likely to be the endpoint.
The Tory situation is currently hopeless - with neither ideas, good communication to us nor articulation of principle and a terrible track record and no-one listening - and this will take time or a party revolution to alter.
With Labour really only actual current delivery and competence and top quality communication are going to count. They are middling at best in all three; Runcorn etc shows, I think, only how firm is the 'anyone but Reform' vote.
That said he's got to wait three years but If the ball came loose from the back of the scrum before then.
As any business owner will tell you, running a business is an opportunity to get kicked in the nads repeatedly. You have to have a perverse desire for pain to do it - and so many small businesses in their growth phase do not make enough profits to pay their own bills, never mind a salary which pays the employee's bills.
As for Deliveroo etc, these are transitory and illusory. Non-businesses which won't be here long term as there's no way to make an army of slaves business viable on modern wages. All we're seeing now is the battle of VC investors to bankrupt the competition (the collect underpants phase) before they go bust themselves.
Like you I want more capitalism in action. Businesses are great, but you can't just shove people onto the street and say "start a business". Because we've already seen that in action in the form of our national crime wave.
That will go one of two ways. Remember that for populists it is always someone else’s fault. If they can’t do much of any note because it’s legally required, they’ll make loud noises about the fact that they need to change the law to allow them to do so.
It doesn’t necessarily work as a strategy - and I said upthread it’s still an opportunity for the other parties to put them under some genuine scrutiny now - but that surely has to be the way they’ll play it. And it might work.
By the time you add on employers NI, holiday pay, sick pay, employers pension contributions and any training costs then you're looking at over £16 per hour cost to the employer.
Reform seem to have done for Labour in the more industrial parts of the county.
Hence Reform will fail the way every other council will as social care eats more and more of the total budget up and nothing can be improved.
- Quote break here - not mine above
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Kent is about to be abolished, so not the best example