(Just for some explanation for starters... I never did finish that Mrs T post because the whole death and funeral thing became rather a media circus and in the end I was just glad it was all over. So there probably won't be a "Part 2" to that post. Sorry about that. )
The big news this week is the rise of UKIP to a major player in local government, going from 8 to 147 councillors in the local elections (held mainly in the predominately Tory "shire counties"). The Tories lost 335 seats which was poor, although not disastrously so for a governing party. Labour won 291 seats which was good but not spectacular (see Luke Akehurst on LabourList for a good summary of the results from a strategic Labour perspective). The Fib Dems, like the Tories, performed badly but not catastrophically. The Green Party gained 5 seats for a total of 22 - steady if unspectacular progress, including 2 very good wins in Essex, which was very pleasing. I was also pleased to see gains for Mebyon Kernow and the Old Liberals (that classic "70s washing powder" logo for the Liberal Party is the best thing in British politics today, without a doubt).
The good professors Rallings and Thrasher at Plymouth University (sounds like a classic comedy double act) have worked out a projected national vote share based on the county council election results. Now, some caveats to this:
(a) it's hard to tell much about the areas where elections didn't take place - most of Wales, all of Scotland, and most of the English cities and urban areas - from the county results, so it's not clear how accurate a national picture this is;
(b) local turnout is almost always much lower than general election turnout (unless you have local and general elections on the same day) so there are a huge number of people who will be involved in a general election who simply don't take part in the locals, making extrapolation to a general election vote difficult;
(c) people may be voting on different issues locally to nationally;
(d) the UKIP surge makes things even more unpredictable than usual because there is very little previous data to go on.
Anyway with that in mind, Rallings and Thrasher suggest vote shares as follows:
Labour - 29%
Tories - 25%
UKIP - 23%
Fib Dems - 14%
Other - 9%
Feeding these into the election calculator at UK Polling Report produces a Labour majority of 20 which, oddly enough, is roundabout my gut feeling for the outcome of the next election: Labour with a small, but workable, majority. Having said that, the UK Polling Report calculator isn't much good for these purposes as it doesn't even allow disaggregation of "Other" into UKIP plus smaller parties.
Can UKIP manage 23% at a general election? I doubt it, although even 10% - a far more achievable goal - would most likely make a huge difference compared with 3.1% which was what they scored in 2010. Looking at the political situation now one gets the feeling that a huge proportion of the electorate is hacked off, and likely to stay hacked off for years, if not decades. UKIP's strength is that it can do that peculiarly English combination of Colonel Blimp authoritarianism, anti-Europeanism and smoking-room libertarianism better than the right wing of the Tory party can. And in Nigel Farage, it has the most articulate of the 4 main party leaders. Yes the manifesto isn't that coherent; yes, some of the candidates are questionable. But then, much of the same critique could be levelled at the other parties - and they lack the excitement generated by Farage.
The key question for the outcome of the next election, as well as how high the UKIP vote share can go, is how much of their vote comes from the Tories compared with Labour. Looking at today's YouGov poll - which shows UKIP on 12% - their support comprises 19% of the people who voted Tory last time (about 7% of all voters on my calculations), 5% of the people who voted Labour last time (about 1.5%) and 8% of the people who voted Lib Dem (about 1.5%). That makes 10%, so presumably the other 2% of support is people who voted UKIP last time (or didn't vote at all). In other words Tory switchers to UKIP are outnumbering Labour switchers to UKIP by almost 5 to 1. This pattern of UKIP support makes it much, much easier for Labour to come out ahead of the Tories in the general election. Ed could secure a majority with a vote share somewhere in the low 30s.
Of course, this would be an artefact of a truly ludicrous electoral system rather than a vote of confidence in the Labour Party. If Labour won an overall majority with (say) 32% of the vote - equal to its 1987 vote share under Neil Kinnock, when the Tories had a majority of over 100 - does anyone think the country would be stable? Does anyone think the right would take that as a legitimate result? I think the Powers That Be would foment some kind of uprising and take control by force.
The UKIP surge, on the face of it, means that rather than the Polly Toynbee-esque "progressive majority" in UK politics, there is actually a reactionary majority - and it's growing. If we take the latest YouGov poll and optimistically assume that Labour's 40% plus 2% for the Greens is the "progressive vote", then the right-wing vote comprises 30% Tory plus 12% UKIP plus 11% Fib Dems - that's 53% for hard-right politics, right there. Staring You In The Face. It's true that some people who are voting UKIP may actually be hard left on certain issues; for example UKIP claims it's going to massively increase spending on local services while cutting taxes, and it may be that some people are voting for the spending increase part of that equation (despite the fact the policy is totally incoherent). But Farage, of course, is hard right (although not fascist IMHO).
So, UKIP: potentially a shot in the arm for Ed Miliband's electoral chances in the short run, but in the longer run a harbinger of a very nasty shift in UK politics to something much more right wing than we have seen at any point in the univeral suffrage era. Centered around three planks: opposition to immigration, opposition to the EU, and a Tea Party-esque dislike of the "Westminster bubble". Be Very Afraid.
One last point: if Labour does get in on 32% or something not much more than that, Tories are going to be ruing the day they campaigned against AV in 2011. AV would have contained the UKIP threat right there, as the majority of UKIP voters would have had Tory as second preference.
Showing posts with label local elections. Show all posts
Showing posts with label local elections. Show all posts
07 May 2011
Thanks Nick Clegg - you've united the left for the first time in 30 years
More left bloggers have been drinking the Kool Aid overnight over Labour's performance in the local elections - for example, Adam Lent at the RSA, and Polly Toynbee at the Guardian. It's weird how these memes take hold. Most of what we've been told for the last year from the left commentariat consists of repeated insistence that Dave Cameron is on probation within his own party after failing to secure an overall majority against Brown in 2010, how the government was in a weak position, and so on. Now - after the referendum and local elections - the same people are going around saying that Cameron is some sort of genius, the Tories will be in power forevermore, and the situation is hopeless.
Well I'm sorry people, but I'm just not buying it. Have a look at the voting patterns and a very different story emerges.
The Fib Dem vote collapse was quite amazing... a fall of about 10% from last year's elections, not quite as bad as the 13% fall which recent YouGov polling would suggest, but bad enough. (I'm using figures from Jeremy Vine's election commentary on the BBC yesterday, not the weird figures that came out of Tory central office and have been picked up by most of the press and run as neutral commentary(!?)) Meanwhile the Labour vote went up by about the same - 10%. The Tory share of the vote was more or less unchanged from last year.
So the gainers - in terms of vote share - are Labour. Not the Tories.
I'd argue that what's really happening here is that the Lib Dems have completely changed their electoral strategy and Labour is reaping the rewards. Ever since the formation of the SDP in 1981 (and possibly as far back as the Liberal upsurge of the early 1970s), the Left vote in the UK has been split, with a significant proportion going to a third party - the Alliance (and more recently, the Lib Dems). For sure, the third party took some votes from the Right as well. But not as many, which gives a very good explanation for why the Tories won majority governments in 1983, 1987 and 1992, despite declining vote shares each time - the Left vote was split, and that's fatal under First Past the Post. (I'll admit that if there had been a hung parliament in 1983 a Tory/Alliance coalition was probably more likely than a Labour/Alliance coalition due to Labour '83 being perceived as off-planet Marxists, but in later elections, this wasn't the case). In the 1980s and early 1990s political commentators spent much of their time lamenting the split in the British left.
It wasn't until Tony Blair came along in the mid-1990s that Tony Blair hit on an alternative strategy for victory, despite the split on the left; he made incursions into the Right's vote share by shifting policy so far to the right that by 2005, the Lib Dems were in many ways more left-wing than the Tories. This reaped electoral dividends in 1997 and 2001 (though less so in 2005), but at the expense of creating a political environment where it would be much easier for a future extreme right govt to come along and destroy much of our social fabric (which is what's happening right now). Thus, it wasn't a long-term sustainable strategy.
But following the election of Nick Clegg and the ConDem government deal of 2010, the "Fib Dems" have helpfully reunified the British Left - or started to, at any rate - by exiting stage Right. The Lib Dems, based on their official policy position, are now a right wing libertarian party, to the right of the Tories in some respects. Clegg has made it clear he's not interested in attracting left wing voters from Labour. Thus, he's thrown away a crucial part of the Lib Dem voter base and handed it on a plate to Labour.
And THAT, more than anything, explains yesterday's local election results. And it's good news for Labour. Because for the first time since 1966, there is the potential for a left-wing government in the UK with a substantial majority which doesn't have to pretend to be a Conservative government to get elected.
There is only the POTENTIAL for such a government, mind you, and no guarantees that Labour will actually get elected. That depends on a number of factors, e.g.:
Well I'm sorry people, but I'm just not buying it. Have a look at the voting patterns and a very different story emerges.
The Fib Dem vote collapse was quite amazing... a fall of about 10% from last year's elections, not quite as bad as the 13% fall which recent YouGov polling would suggest, but bad enough. (I'm using figures from Jeremy Vine's election commentary on the BBC yesterday, not the weird figures that came out of Tory central office and have been picked up by most of the press and run as neutral commentary(!?)) Meanwhile the Labour vote went up by about the same - 10%. The Tory share of the vote was more or less unchanged from last year.
So the gainers - in terms of vote share - are Labour. Not the Tories.
I'd argue that what's really happening here is that the Lib Dems have completely changed their electoral strategy and Labour is reaping the rewards. Ever since the formation of the SDP in 1981 (and possibly as far back as the Liberal upsurge of the early 1970s), the Left vote in the UK has been split, with a significant proportion going to a third party - the Alliance (and more recently, the Lib Dems). For sure, the third party took some votes from the Right as well. But not as many, which gives a very good explanation for why the Tories won majority governments in 1983, 1987 and 1992, despite declining vote shares each time - the Left vote was split, and that's fatal under First Past the Post. (I'll admit that if there had been a hung parliament in 1983 a Tory/Alliance coalition was probably more likely than a Labour/Alliance coalition due to Labour '83 being perceived as off-planet Marxists, but in later elections, this wasn't the case). In the 1980s and early 1990s political commentators spent much of their time lamenting the split in the British left.
It wasn't until Tony Blair came along in the mid-1990s that Tony Blair hit on an alternative strategy for victory, despite the split on the left; he made incursions into the Right's vote share by shifting policy so far to the right that by 2005, the Lib Dems were in many ways more left-wing than the Tories. This reaped electoral dividends in 1997 and 2001 (though less so in 2005), but at the expense of creating a political environment where it would be much easier for a future extreme right govt to come along and destroy much of our social fabric (which is what's happening right now). Thus, it wasn't a long-term sustainable strategy.
But following the election of Nick Clegg and the ConDem government deal of 2010, the "Fib Dems" have helpfully reunified the British Left - or started to, at any rate - by exiting stage Right. The Lib Dems, based on their official policy position, are now a right wing libertarian party, to the right of the Tories in some respects. Clegg has made it clear he's not interested in attracting left wing voters from Labour. Thus, he's thrown away a crucial part of the Lib Dem voter base and handed it on a plate to Labour.
And THAT, more than anything, explains yesterday's local election results. And it's good news for Labour. Because for the first time since 1966, there is the potential for a left-wing government in the UK with a substantial majority which doesn't have to pretend to be a Conservative government to get elected.
There is only the POTENTIAL for such a government, mind you, and no guarantees that Labour will actually get elected. That depends on a number of factors, e.g.:
- the economy getting stuck in a 'lost decade' as Osborne's growth projections fall apart completely (highly likely);
- Labour's policy review actually providing policy solutions relevant to people's lives in the post-crash world (I really don't know enough about who's involved in the policy review or what options are being considered to know if this is a realistic hope or not);
- the Labour Party getting behind Ed Miliband as a strong choice for Prime Minister (again, seems a no-brainer to me, but unfortunately a lot of people in the Labour party seem to have less than no brain);
- the Lib Dems not drastically reversing position - and this is a real worry because it's completely out of Labour's hands. In one way it would be fantastic to see someone like Tim Farron (or even Chris Huhne) wallop Clegg for the party leadership, dissolve the coalition, and go to the country as "the man who beat the Tories"; but that of course puts the Lib Dems squarely back on the Left and could leave the way open for a repeat of the election results of the 1980s, due to our daft electoral system.
- no alternative Left force emerging to drain votes from Labour. The Green Party could start to emerge in some areas as a serious drain on Labour's FPTP vote share in the same way that UKIP has for the Tories. More serious in the short run for Labour is the huge shift to the SNP in Scotland - it's not clear whether this would be repeated at a general election but if it is, it would make a majority Labour government very difficult.
So, big challenges here for Labour to be sure - but commentators who are arguing that we are looking at a rerun of the 1980s, or even the 1930s, need to cease and desist. The current situation isn't really that much like either of those eras - although it could become so. But only if Labour is especially unlucky, or makes big mistakes. For now, the 2011 local election results represent a real comeback for Labour, and, combined with Nick Clegg's big favour in reunifying the Left, should be a cause for modest celebration rather than despondency.
06 May 2011
Local elections: will Labour bloggers pls refrain from the Kool-Aid...
Well, most local election results, and the Scottish and Welsh results, are in now (but not the AV referendum - that's announced tonight) so time to have a round up. In fact, I'll focus on English local elections and probably follow up about Scotland and Wales separately (if I feel I can contribute anything sensible to what's already been written on those elections).
The first thing is that despondent Labour bloggers thinking of drinking the Kool Aid (the worst example of this I've found so far is on the terminally pessimistic - and misnamed - Labour Uncut) need to take the bottle back to the shop, buy half an aspirin instead, suck on it, and think things over.
Yes, the Tory vote held up at about where it was in last year's election. But the Fib Dem vote has collapsed. We've gone from a 3-party system in local government to 2 parties and a bit player (plus the Greens, who made some tremendous advances).
So what did you expect? Huge decreases in the Tory vote? That would be more likely if Labour and the Lib Dems were knocking spots off the Tories. We'd probably have seen that if this was a minority Tory govt.
But instead we have a Tory-led govt with Fib Dem collaborators - and the collaborators were punished. The net effect of all the switching between different parties was that the Fib Dems were down by about 10% from last year, Tories unchanged, and Labour up 10%.
And that's a great result.
If Labour gets (say) 39% of the vote at the next general election, and the Tories get 36%, it will emerge as the largest single party - and probably win a small overall majority. Even with the boundary changes, and even with the reduction in the number of seats.
What more do Labour supporters want?
Well, plenty more, of course, and it would be foolish to deny that the Labour machine is not firing on all cylinders yet - Sunny Hundal identifies a lot of the problems in this excellent post for Liberal Conspiracy. My own interpretation of why Labour didn't do even better would stress the following:
- the party is still largely a policy-free zone. The policy review is scheduled to run until autumn 2012, at least. If you haven't got much of substance to put to the electorate, it puts you at a disadvantage.
- You can win a big protest vote even if you don't have detailed policies - but you need to give people a sense that you're on their side to do that. Huge numbers of people are pissed off about virtually every aspect of this govt. UK Uncut and False Economy have been leading the fight against the ConDems; Labour has dipped a toe in the water, but hasn't really done anything of substance, and indeed has sometimes been openly hostile to the anti-cuts movement. So, not surprisingly, Labour is still part of the problem, not the solution, for many people.
- Many Labour bigwigs were out campaigning for No2AV - in open opposition to Ed Miliband, and in support of Dave Cameron. Remember the classic game Downfall? "Be careful - you could be helping your opponent as well as yourself!" Probably a couple of percentage points of that Tory result, at least, is due to the hard work of misguided Labour politicians and activists. Well done guys and girls...
- There is still a huge debate going on within Labour about whether to target the Fib Dems or the Tories as the enemy. I'd like to think that political activists were capable of fighting on 2 fronts at once, but maybe not. So, although the Tories took quite a lot of flak at the time of the VAT rise and the Budget, the crossfire seemed to thin out in the campaign itself. Again No2AV had a lot to do with this because their obvious enemy was Nick Clegg and hence this spilled over into the local election campaign.
Of these points, if the policy review is any good it will put paid to the problem of having no policies(!) And it's in Labour's own hands whether it provides a convincing 'Plan B' alternative to the cuts or not. Neither of these will happen overnight, but the direction of travel needs to be a lot clearer - and I believe, WILL be a lot clearer - by May 2012. The No2AV effect of confusing the campaign and boosting Cameron is a one off, presumably - even the most dunderheaded No2AV activists will now return to the fold.
Which leaves the question of whether to attack the FibDems or Tories. BOTH, obviously (doh!) but bear in mind that the lower the Fib Dems go, the higher the Tory support will be - other things being equal. And of course vice versa. Fib Dems at 15%, Tories at 36, Labour at 40 or so is a little tight for winning a majority at the next general election, but still fine for Labour. Labour at 40 with the Tories on 30 and Fib Dems on 20 would be much better under first past the post (which we're stuck with), of course, but at the moment that Fib Dem vote is the softest vote (so it seems), and better to win by annihilating the Fib Dem vote (even if the Tory core vote is rock solid) than to try to appeal directly to floating Tories, fail miserably, watch the Fib Dem vote creep back up and end up with a rerun of 1992 or something close to it. You take votes from whereever the hell you can get them. It's as simple as that.
So, by no means a perfect night for Labour in England. But a good one, whatever people try to tell you.
02 May 2008
Local election disaster - Brown is lame, and it shows
Well, on current trends it looks very much like Gordon Brown is going to "do a John Major", but sadly, without emulating Major's teeth-pulling election victory of '92 first. Brown is going straight down, and taking the Labour party, all the way from the hard left to the Blairite crypto-Tories, with him.
For the first time since 1992 the Conservative party is getting a projected national vote share (44%) which would win an overall Tory majority if repeated at a general election, even given the biases in the electoral system. It's a savage prospect for sure, and Gordon is not in danger of overturning the nightmare any time soon. Indeed, his speciality is finding new holes to dig with one hand while his other hand digs the increasing number of existing holes deeper. And deeper.
Here's the condensed Gordon Brown guide to becoming Prime Minister:
The problem is that the worst predictions of the dreadful anti-Brown crypto-Tories who surrounded Blair - Matthew Taylor, Phil Collins (not the singer, sadly) etc. are coming true. John Hutton famously said that Brown would make "a f***ing awful Prime Minister", and whilst he's almost never right about anything, that statement seems to be an exception.
Some of this is due to the dire position which ten years of Blair/Brown dual control of UK plc has left us. With the UK economy pumped up by an unsustainable asset and debt boom, when the credit crunch hit, we were stuck up slack alley with no reverse gear... just waiting for the economic collapse. When you've spent ten years talking about stability, to see it suddenly whipped away like the most flimsy house of cards in history must be a tough gig to handle.
Equally, the lunacy of many of the Blair/Brown public sector reforms - which involve paying as much money to private sector consultants and infrastructure companies as possible, to deliver badly built, overpriced schools and hospitals, and management consultancy whose productivity impacts are, if anything, negative - has now swallowed up so many of our tax pounds that, when it's combined with rampant inflation in essential goods like food and fuel, people are feeling the pinch.
Notice I've said "Blair/Brown" rather than "Blair" above and that's very important. The current crisis is partly due to the idiocy of Blair, but Brown was a willing participant in all of this (and in some cases the initiator of these crazy policies - tube PPP, for instance). That's why it's very difficult for him to make a clean break with the failures of the Blair years.
It would mean having to undergo a Blues Brothers - like instant conversion to radical politics - this could perhaps be stage-managed at the next Labour conference. A shaft of light appearing say, a third of the way through another lumpen Gordon speech, and then suddenly, he's a changed man. Out goes that f***ing awful blue tie and back comes the red tie of the 2003 Conference speech ("we're best when we're labour" etc.) He needs to start by emulating Nikita Kruschev at the 1956 Soviet Party Congress. Kruschev's denunciation of Stalin set the tone for the Cold War's "detente" years and Brown could spark a similar new era by jettisoning the whole Blair legacy in one fell swoop. The speech needs to go something like this:
Only a total relaunch - in policy and people terms - can save the Nu-Lab project now. What is least likely to save it is yet more sanctimonious, dunderhead b.s. about "listen and lead" (Speak and Spell?) and "tough decisions in difficult times". I know we live in environmentally conscious times but please, someone change the f***ing record on Gordon. The public are sick to death of hearing a Budget speech that was stale as far back as 2000, with the nouns slightly changed each time according to the policy area being discussed. And can we ban any talk of "Britishness" please? The BNP performed spectacularly poorly. So that's enough of that, then.
I could turn the situation around so that in 18 months' time Labour would have a narrow poll lead or at least level pegging - starting with that conference speech. But I won't. Partly 'cos they'd never give me the job anyway, and partly 'cos I wouldn't take an adviser job even if it were on offer. So go on Gordon... lose big time. See if we care. RIP.
(By the way... my earlier prediction of a Ken victory looks to have been pretty damn wrong, so I'm sorry if I spread false hope. All hail Boris the blond bombshell. So glad I got the hell out of London in 2000 now. Around the time that Gordon speech started to grate... more on London soon when we have the actual results, god help us.)
For the first time since 1992 the Conservative party is getting a projected national vote share (44%) which would win an overall Tory majority if repeated at a general election, even given the biases in the electoral system. It's a savage prospect for sure, and Gordon is not in danger of overturning the nightmare any time soon. Indeed, his speciality is finding new holes to dig with one hand while his other hand digs the increasing number of existing holes deeper. And deeper.
Here's the condensed Gordon Brown guide to becoming Prime Minister:
- spend a few months tweaking round the edges of your predecessor's policies whilst wandering about on camera trying to look hard.
- when your poll rating inexplicably rises, toy with the idea of a general election (preferably for so long that even your best friends and advisers get bored).
- At the first signs of a political response from the Conservative party, run back to the red corner with your tail between your legs.
- Do an impression of the most tongue-tied, complacent moron possible.
- Repeat until dead.
The problem is that the worst predictions of the dreadful anti-Brown crypto-Tories who surrounded Blair - Matthew Taylor, Phil Collins (not the singer, sadly) etc. are coming true. John Hutton famously said that Brown would make "a f***ing awful Prime Minister", and whilst he's almost never right about anything, that statement seems to be an exception.
Some of this is due to the dire position which ten years of Blair/Brown dual control of UK plc has left us. With the UK economy pumped up by an unsustainable asset and debt boom, when the credit crunch hit, we were stuck up slack alley with no reverse gear... just waiting for the economic collapse. When you've spent ten years talking about stability, to see it suddenly whipped away like the most flimsy house of cards in history must be a tough gig to handle.
Equally, the lunacy of many of the Blair/Brown public sector reforms - which involve paying as much money to private sector consultants and infrastructure companies as possible, to deliver badly built, overpriced schools and hospitals, and management consultancy whose productivity impacts are, if anything, negative - has now swallowed up so many of our tax pounds that, when it's combined with rampant inflation in essential goods like food and fuel, people are feeling the pinch.
Notice I've said "Blair/Brown" rather than "Blair" above and that's very important. The current crisis is partly due to the idiocy of Blair, but Brown was a willing participant in all of this (and in some cases the initiator of these crazy policies - tube PPP, for instance). That's why it's very difficult for him to make a clean break with the failures of the Blair years.
It would mean having to undergo a Blues Brothers - like instant conversion to radical politics - this could perhaps be stage-managed at the next Labour conference. A shaft of light appearing say, a third of the way through another lumpen Gordon speech, and then suddenly, he's a changed man. Out goes that f***ing awful blue tie and back comes the red tie of the 2003 Conference speech ("we're best when we're labour" etc.) He needs to start by emulating Nikita Kruschev at the 1956 Soviet Party Congress. Kruschev's denunciation of Stalin set the tone for the Cold War's "detente" years and Brown could spark a similar new era by jettisoning the whole Blair legacy in one fell swoop. The speech needs to go something like this:
(pointing to picture of Blair forming the conference backdrop) "see this guy here? You remember him from a couple of years back? Well, he was WRONG! And so was I. WE WAS WRONG!!! (huge red cross is superimposed over backdrop, which fades into collage of many of the dictators of the past - Stalin, Mao, Maggie Thatcher, Rupert Murdoch, Richard Bowker, etc.) From now on it's NEW New Labour! Let a thousand flowers bloom. PUBLIC SECTOR PENSIONS FOR ALL! AN END TO PFI! etc. etc. etc.Personnel changes would also be essential. The Blairite detritus currently clogging up the cabinet table would be summarily dismissed. Hutton, Blears, Purnell... all for the chop. And demotions for rubbishy Brownites like Ed Balls and Alastair Darling. Promotions for solid and trustworthy performers: Denham, Benn, Ed Miliband. Most importantly of all, a senior cabinet job for John Cruddas - I recommend Home Secretary. A replacement for Darling at No 11? It's got to be Alan Johnson. Trusted, respectable, comprehensible to people from the South.
Only a total relaunch - in policy and people terms - can save the Nu-Lab project now. What is least likely to save it is yet more sanctimonious, dunderhead b.s. about "listen and lead" (Speak and Spell?) and "tough decisions in difficult times". I know we live in environmentally conscious times but please, someone change the f***ing record on Gordon. The public are sick to death of hearing a Budget speech that was stale as far back as 2000, with the nouns slightly changed each time according to the policy area being discussed. And can we ban any talk of "Britishness" please? The BNP performed spectacularly poorly. So that's enough of that, then.
I could turn the situation around so that in 18 months' time Labour would have a narrow poll lead or at least level pegging - starting with that conference speech. But I won't. Partly 'cos they'd never give me the job anyway, and partly 'cos I wouldn't take an adviser job even if it were on offer. So go on Gordon... lose big time. See if we care. RIP.
(By the way... my earlier prediction of a Ken victory looks to have been pretty damn wrong, so I'm sorry if I spread false hope. All hail Boris the blond bombshell. So glad I got the hell out of London in 2000 now. Around the time that Gordon speech started to grate... more on London soon when we have the actual results, god help us.)
06 May 2007
Reflections on various polls
Not my best post title, but it's (reasonably) late and I'm severely lacking energy.
News has just come in that Sarkozy has just won the French presidential election. It may well turn out to be a moment similar to the election of Thatcher in 1979 in the UK, or Reagan in 1980 in the States, with similarly calamitous consequences. Then again the guy might just be a complete hick who fails to accomplish anything and is voted out at the first possible opportunity. His general demeanour reminds me of Jose Mourinho, which can't be a good thing at any time. It's too early to say yet - more on this one as it pans out. A shame about Segolene Royal, who seemed OK. But then we seem to be in a nasty, vicious phase in international politics where 'seeming OK' is the easiest way to lose an election. How else to explain how a small-minded bastard like John Howard in Australia, for example, can win about 4 times in a row?
Meanwhile, the post-mortem from the local elections for Labour continues. It's hilarious to hear Tony Blair going on the radio and saying it wasn't that bad a result. In huge swathes of England it was atrocious. For example, in my neck of the woods in Braintree the Tories went from 27 councillors to 42 out of a total of 60. I've no particular liking for the Conservatives - they are, as Hunter S Thompson said about the Republicans, "cheap greedy killers" - but Gordon Brown had better hope this is a 'kick Tony Blair out the door' result, a big mid-term protest, and once the electoral cycle swings round to 2009, things will improve. It's not clear that'll happen, though. I can't see that the economy's going to be doing much better 2 years from now and it might well be doing worse. All the polls asking how people will vote when Brown takes over from Blair show a shift away from Labour, not towards. And there seem to be very few 'big ideas' in the pipeline short of stopping the crazy dismantling of key public services in the name of 'reform'. Actually, just doing that - stopping Tony Blair's crazy sabotage programme - might be enough to win next time. That, plus the fact the electoral system is ridiculously biased against the Tories.
Of course the interesting thing is that who you vote for in local elections seems to make very little difference in terms of how the locality is run. A key case in point: fortnightly bin collections to encourage recycling. The Daily Mail is up in arms about this - as with everything else. Fair enough - in a well-functioning democracy, one might think that at election time, one party (or parties) would be saying "let's have fortnightly bin collections and charge you less council tax" and another party (or parties) would be saying "let's have weekly bin collections and charge you more". What you find instead is that there is no coherent pattern at all in terms of which councils have introduced fortnightly bin collections, which parties are backing them and which are pledging to reintroduce weekly ones. The Mail likes to blame fortnightly collections on Labour but Braintree council was already run by the Tories (with independent support) when they were introduced! All the election literature which came round (and only 2 parties bothered to, or could afford to, produce any) concentrated completely on national policies with no mention of local policy. I couldn't name a single local issue where I knew that the Tories in Braintree had an identifiably different policy from Labour - and I actually take the trouble to read this kind of stuff (most of the time). Is it any wonder people can't be bothered to vote except as far as it shows two fingers to Tony Blair?
News has just come in that Sarkozy has just won the French presidential election. It may well turn out to be a moment similar to the election of Thatcher in 1979 in the UK, or Reagan in 1980 in the States, with similarly calamitous consequences. Then again the guy might just be a complete hick who fails to accomplish anything and is voted out at the first possible opportunity. His general demeanour reminds me of Jose Mourinho, which can't be a good thing at any time. It's too early to say yet - more on this one as it pans out. A shame about Segolene Royal, who seemed OK. But then we seem to be in a nasty, vicious phase in international politics where 'seeming OK' is the easiest way to lose an election. How else to explain how a small-minded bastard like John Howard in Australia, for example, can win about 4 times in a row?
Meanwhile, the post-mortem from the local elections for Labour continues. It's hilarious to hear Tony Blair going on the radio and saying it wasn't that bad a result. In huge swathes of England it was atrocious. For example, in my neck of the woods in Braintree the Tories went from 27 councillors to 42 out of a total of 60. I've no particular liking for the Conservatives - they are, as Hunter S Thompson said about the Republicans, "cheap greedy killers" - but Gordon Brown had better hope this is a 'kick Tony Blair out the door' result, a big mid-term protest, and once the electoral cycle swings round to 2009, things will improve. It's not clear that'll happen, though. I can't see that the economy's going to be doing much better 2 years from now and it might well be doing worse. All the polls asking how people will vote when Brown takes over from Blair show a shift away from Labour, not towards. And there seem to be very few 'big ideas' in the pipeline short of stopping the crazy dismantling of key public services in the name of 'reform'. Actually, just doing that - stopping Tony Blair's crazy sabotage programme - might be enough to win next time. That, plus the fact the electoral system is ridiculously biased against the Tories.
Of course the interesting thing is that who you vote for in local elections seems to make very little difference in terms of how the locality is run. A key case in point: fortnightly bin collections to encourage recycling. The Daily Mail is up in arms about this - as with everything else. Fair enough - in a well-functioning democracy, one might think that at election time, one party (or parties) would be saying "let's have fortnightly bin collections and charge you less council tax" and another party (or parties) would be saying "let's have weekly bin collections and charge you more". What you find instead is that there is no coherent pattern at all in terms of which councils have introduced fortnightly bin collections, which parties are backing them and which are pledging to reintroduce weekly ones. The Mail likes to blame fortnightly collections on Labour but Braintree council was already run by the Tories (with independent support) when they were introduced! All the election literature which came round (and only 2 parties bothered to, or could afford to, produce any) concentrated completely on national policies with no mention of local policy. I couldn't name a single local issue where I knew that the Tories in Braintree had an identifiably different policy from Labour - and I actually take the trouble to read this kind of stuff (most of the time). Is it any wonder people can't be bothered to vote except as far as it shows two fingers to Tony Blair?
11 April 2007
Arse through the letterbox
Not literally (it would have to be a very small person for their posterior to fit through our letterbox), but rather, the 'election communication' from Braintree Conservatives.
Nothing about anything that's actually going on in Braintree district, except a few photographs of new local amenities under the heading 'Work completed so far'. One of the amenities is Braintree swimming pool, which, as you'll see, is still very much under construction rather than 'completed'. Nice work, guys.
The critique of Labour, focusing entirely on national rather than local issues, has to be read to be believed. I'm reprinting it below, with annotation:
I'm posting this garbage back to Tory campaign HQ with some choice comments attached to tell them exactly what I think of it. Still, at least they've bothered to send something through. I've had sweet F.A. from Labour. Or the Lib Dems. We haven't even had a bleedin' poll card.
Local elections give me some difficulty as the Green Party doesn't normally have enough money to put up candidates for the district council so we are left with the standard three parties. I normally vote Labour, if only to try to keep the Tories out of the council. It's a bit hopeless here though. This is an affluent part of Essex, and anyone could stand on the Conservative ticket and get elected - for example Peter Sutcliffe, or indeed Jeremy Bamber, the guy who is doing time for killing his family in Tolleshunt D'Arcy, just down the road from us. In (very) idle moments, I sometimes wonder if Battlestar Galactica actor Jamie Bamber, who plays Lee Adama, is distantly related to Jeremy? He is English, although he has an American accent in the series. Which is weird, because James Callis, who plays Baltar, is allowed to have an English accent. But then why would anyone in the "12 tribes of Kobol" speak English anyway? I guess that just shows the extent of American influence.
The fact that 'a long time ago in a galaxy far far away' English just happened to be spoken is a key issue for Star Wars as well, although not for Star Trek - although I'm always amazed the number of civilisations the Enterprise encounters who speak perfect English. Then again, a 45 minute episode of unintelligible alien languages wouldn't be very entertaining. But they could always subtitle or dub it. Sorry, this has gone way off the point... 'arse in a letterbox 16:9 ratio', anyone?
Nothing about anything that's actually going on in Braintree district, except a few photographs of new local amenities under the heading 'Work completed so far'. One of the amenities is Braintree swimming pool, which, as you'll see, is still very much under construction rather than 'completed'. Nice work, guys.
The critique of Labour, focusing entirely on national rather than local issues, has to be read to be believed. I'm reprinting it below, with annotation:
"Since Labour came to power this Government has increased taxes [to pay for public service investment which the Tory leadership says they will maintain], controlled immigration seems to be a thing of the past [actually this government has introduced even more draconian immigration laws than the last Tory government], our countryside has been bulldozed over, the roads move towards gridlock [anyone apart from me sense a contradiction in acting building in the countryside whilst simultaneously saying we need more roads?] and our Police have their hands tied with red tape [oh for the good old days of the seventies when the cops were free to beat up homosexuals and ethnic minorities with impunity]. The march towards a federal Europe carries on regardless of what people think. [The first vaguely true thing they've said - but are the Tories planning to pull us out of Europe? No.] ... It's time for Tony Blair to go in the national interest." [amen to that... but what's it got to do with the local elections?]
I'm posting this garbage back to Tory campaign HQ with some choice comments attached to tell them exactly what I think of it. Still, at least they've bothered to send something through. I've had sweet F.A. from Labour. Or the Lib Dems. We haven't even had a bleedin' poll card.
Local elections give me some difficulty as the Green Party doesn't normally have enough money to put up candidates for the district council so we are left with the standard three parties. I normally vote Labour, if only to try to keep the Tories out of the council. It's a bit hopeless here though. This is an affluent part of Essex, and anyone could stand on the Conservative ticket and get elected - for example Peter Sutcliffe, or indeed Jeremy Bamber, the guy who is doing time for killing his family in Tolleshunt D'Arcy, just down the road from us. In (very) idle moments, I sometimes wonder if Battlestar Galactica actor Jamie Bamber, who plays Lee Adama, is distantly related to Jeremy? He is English, although he has an American accent in the series. Which is weird, because James Callis, who plays Baltar, is allowed to have an English accent. But then why would anyone in the "12 tribes of Kobol" speak English anyway? I guess that just shows the extent of American influence.
The fact that 'a long time ago in a galaxy far far away' English just happened to be spoken is a key issue for Star Wars as well, although not for Star Trek - although I'm always amazed the number of civilisations the Enterprise encounters who speak perfect English. Then again, a 45 minute episode of unintelligible alien languages wouldn't be very entertaining. But they could always subtitle or dub it. Sorry, this has gone way off the point... 'arse in a letterbox 16:9 ratio', anyone?
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