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19/03/2011



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Wow at the Richmond result! Goldsmith out, LibDems won, and Labour lost their deposit.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... dApp_Tweet

That's spectacular. Mostly due to Goldsmith being for a hard Brexit in a place that voted 70+% to Remain, I expect.

Richmond Park result:
LDEM: 49.7% (+30.4)
ZAC: 45.2% (-13.1)
LAB: 3.7% (-8.7)

Very happy Labour didn't split the vote to the point where Goldsmith got in.

Also, how small is May's majority in the Commons, now?

She's down to 9 or 10 now I believe, which isn't danger territory insofar as the Tories are pretty good at whipping, but also in the zone whereby concessions may have to be given to the more extreme MPs to help keep them orderly.

Listened to Farron's chuckle in tbe background on R4 just now as Rees Mogg is reminded that 9 libdem MPs is the same number as Tory majority. Made me laugh.

The Lib Dem fightback begins. Hooray!

The Labour candidate, Wolmar, writes very interesting and readable books on railways.

Regarding Tory MPs, arch-Eurosceptic Peter Bone lost his rag slightly with Eddie Mair on 'PM' yesterday, preferring to repeatedly complain about 'BBC Bias' rather than answer a question about Brexit.

Yes, that was quite amusing.

That's including the DUP, right? Because the Conservatives won 330 seats in 2015, which is a majority of five, and it's at least one less now.

Dunno, it was Farron's snigger in tbe background that amused me.

I think the figure of 9 comes from ignoring the seats held by Sinn Fein.

It's a marker for previously Lib Dem seats that went blue - talking to friends in Kingston and they seem very annoyed to have been conned (as they feel) into voting Tory. Strongly suspect that seat will be yellow at the election, no matter what.

Bone was a bit of a twat on PM yesterday. I also thought Rees-Mogg was somewhat ungracious this morning.

Yay for lib dems!

Boooo! Hiss! *blows raspberries at MrChris*

/whispers in ear 'it's Zac Goldsmith you daft old twat'

er, hooray! Yay, go Lib Dems!


Seriously though, this is good news.
One in the eye for the so-called 'radical' (read: xenophobic) Right is alright with me. It's all good.

I don't feel it will be any more than that, Though
.

By far the biggest contributor of the 2015 result was a LibDem swing to Conservative, particularly in a large number of marginal seats. The Labour-Conservative swings, on a seat by seat basis, where minimal. Viewed through that lens, it's interesting to wonder how the thinking about possible early general elections has moved in the Cabinet this morning.

On that note, from Twitter, analysis of how many seats might swing based on tactical voting for Not-Brexit:

Give us the non-genius version of that graph please Doc.

The further to the right your dot is, the more safe Tory the seat is, the higher up, the more the people voted to stay in the summer. So if you are above the line, and you care more about staying in the Euro than voting Tory, and you do it to the same level as in Richmond, the to rise may lose the seat in a general election

Of course, there is a similar effect that may be seen in other seats that voted to Leave, and there are more of those than there are that voted to Remain.

Which is why May is treading a fine line. Any significant loss puts them out of direct power and into a coalition at best. Go too pro-Europe and UKIP can take seats in a backlash, go too anti-Europe and there are enough potential LD seats to remove the majority.

If Labour had any form of coherence right now they would be trying to make May fuck this up, and to look to take seats based on the clear lack of vision on Brexit. But they don't, so May is handling it okay so far despite not really doing anything (which is how she became PM, so fair play).

Thanks, man. Needed that.

Why on Earth would the Tories want to call an early election? They have Corbyn, don't they?

Teresa May could come noisily marching into Parliament every day complete with one-woman oompah band get up - hand cymbals, harmonica, B-flat tuba, vintage car horn, the works - it would make no difference. Her relative credibility would still be light years ahead of Corbyn and his strabismus- and tropia- afflicted (half empty) Shadow Cabinet.

Corbyn: he's the gift that just keeps on giving. Long may he reign.

I think that to draw such (or pretty much any) conclusions from a by-election (as so often the vehicle for the protest/'fuck you' vote) is a little silly.
I say that as someone who's glad Goldsmith lost.

I didn't think Governments can "call an early election" any more - I think they need either a 2/3 majority or to fail vote of No Confidence. It's not something a PM can call tactically anymore.

Unless the PM tactically calls a vote of no confidence and asks her side to vote against her.

But I don't see it happening.

She can repeal the Fixed Term Parliaments Act.

So, Italy then. The delamination of the EU continues apace.

Why couldn't they have just stuck with the EEC and a common trading area, which was working just fine, instead of, like, really bad ideas like the Euro and political union. Whirlwind being reaped?

I have read a fair bit about the details of the constitutional reform the Italians were voting on and it appears to have very little bearing on Italy's relationship with the EU, being instead focused -- as far as I can see -- on restructuring the role of central vs regional governance within the country. Can you explain why this is "delamination of the EU", please?

Listening to the radio this morning they made that point but also seemed to be saying that it was another vote against an established party of government with eurosceptic far right populists as the cheerleaders.

Exactly this. That's politics.
I would say that Doc is ignoring the concept of the protest vote, and I certainly think that's true - but there's more to it than even that. The zeitgeist across Europe is very rapidly changing, and not for the better, either.

It's being reported as that, for some bizarre region. Mainly by people disappointed they can't write about the election of a far-right loon in Austria, I suspect.

What, the Austrian election where said far right loon won only 47% of the vote you mean? The country who actually gave us Hitler, well within living memory?

This complacency has much to answer for IMO, though I fell into the same trap with Brexit to be fair.

He did, but most were expecting and gleefully forecasting a win.

Wow, we're setting the bar really low these days.

Not sure of the point you're making. If it's "the tabloid press are twats", well, yeah.

Personally I'm totally appalled and mortified at 47% and feel the situation is beyond critical... What, so if Nick Griffin secured 47% of the national vote, you'd all be saying 'phew... crisis, what crisis, at least he was 3% shy of a majority everyone!' ..?

... A plague on all the houses of those who devised self evidently fatally flawed vanity projects such as the Euro, open and unfettered borders and political union. As ever, the end game will be the very opposite! Such irony, then... even as people like you guys refuse (still) to even believe it's happening at all.

I don't refuse to believe what is happening; I just don't see that there's a lot I can do to stop it.

If Murdoch prints "Muslims are my baby and the EU is to blame" and disseminates that viewpoint on a daily basis to millions and millions of people, there's not a lot I can do to stop the madness than ensues.

Look at the States. A website made up that a particular pizza restaurant was being used by Hillary as a child abuse den. One of Trump's cabinet endorsed the fake news and now a nutter with several guns went in and fired shots there, surrounded by families, because he believed it.

Not sure where all of this can lead, but it is unlikely to be a good place.

Well, regardless of the outcome of this week's hijinks at the Supreme Court, hopefully it'll remind people that not only do we have a constitution but that it matters.

I had an amble round the building last year when killing time in London. Not normally a fan of mock gothic but it was quite charming in its way (and kept me out of the rain for an hour or so). The gift shop wasn't very good, however.

Yeah, i know a bloke who wasn't very impressed with the shop. He showed his displeasure by nicking a calendar. He got twelve months.

Get out.

By the way, the nasty Austrian Nazi chap did get around 46.7%, but this was a re-run of the past election that was annulled. In the original he got 49.7%. So his vote share decreased, which is a good thing.

Interesting article in light of the Casey report.

See, this is the thing I just don't get.

On the one hand, people can get very hot under the collar at times over, say, very mildly inappropriate and even wholly inadvertent use of mere language here (say, some unintended mildly sexist faux pas or other; a 1980s anachronism perhaps), with all sorts of ensuing "twit-storms" or whatever....... yet some fucking Neo Nazi *just* misses being elected head of state, right on our doorstep in *Austria* of all places, and Italy's government falls on the same day, and the response is pretty much "meh"...?

I suppose it's an overload/this does not compute moment. Me? I can't see the first thing "good" about it, and just because I personally can't do much about it as an individual surely does not mean it's not even worth discussing? I pretty much can't influence anything at all in politics, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about this stuff.

You reap what you sow. Note that I will never, ever, EVER excuse anyone for using their democratic, hard fought for and hard won vote to vote for an extreme Right (or Left) candidate, regardless of perceived or actual provocation. But it surely *is* clear that the terrible backlash is coming from years of quite ordinary people being force-fed bullshit - that they're damn well going to like things they never wanted or asked for like the Euro, full political union, open borders, unfettered immigration - and if they don't, well, they're somehow evil fascists or whatever. So yeah, under the circumstances, somewhat ironic, huh...

So in short, I very much blame the utterly perverse, clueless political vanity of the Europhile Left for this dangerous situation whose tipping point is surely now well exceeded. People are angry.

I think it's come about largely by people being force fed bullshit by the overwhelmingly right wing media. People are pissed off about a situation that is, in many respects, a work of fiction. Mainstream right wing parties spent decades playing up to that and then when the far right seized the initiative they lost control of what they had created. Reap what you sow indeed.