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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Corbyn’s relaunch week ends with the LDs takeing a LAB council
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Corbyn’s relaunch week ends with the LDs takeing a LAB council seat in one of its heartlands on a 36% swing
The 2017 council by-election season has opened with the Lib Dems taking seats from both CON and LAB on big swings. The results are above.
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*In the popular vote.
Liam Doogan @liamdoogan
Replying to Britain Elects
Is there a local context to this result?
Dan Kelly @ObiDanKelnobi
Local people think Labour are shit, would be my guess.
I'm calling it now, we're going back in time, and it's Tories versus the Liberals from now on.
An idea for a thread,
Labour, a century long experiment is now over, what next?
Gladstone progressive effort such as his work with prostitutes and Lloyd George's contribution to House of Lords reform.
In cse anyone hadnt forgotten the Lib Dems have 9 MPs. It's for a reason - 70% of their voters considered them abject traitors to their own supposed ideals. I doubt their memories are that short.
"Extra incentive to go to the constituency is that the local trains are Mark 2 coaches hauled by class 37 locomotives, with DBSOs on the rear end. The locals may be getting a bit tired of the unreliability, but they’re really nice trains when they’re running."
That said, I'm always reticent about reading too much into local council by-elections. And my own combination of Labourscepticism and pessimism still suggests to me that Labour probably won't fall far short of 25% even in a truly dire general election. Because anything even lower would be too good to be true, and when things look too good to be true they usually are.
The Labour brand is too strong, and has only been broken in Scotland where truly extraordinary circumstances were in play. Labour's certainly neither indestructible nor possessed of a God given right to exist - but if it is going to be worn down and pushed into third place in England then this could take a very long time indeed...
What goes up can come down, but what goes down can come up. There is nothing any more inevitable about Lib Dem failure than there was Lib Dem success.
Corbyn and Brexit have provided an instant-detox to the Lib Dem coalition years. Look at Corbyn, look at Brexit (if you're a continuity Remain voter) and look at student fees as a junior partner of a coalition and which looks least worse?
UKIP will condemn her for betraying Leavers no matter she proposes, whilst the Lib Dems will say she is doing the wrong things.
The Tories can well afford to ship the five or six remaining seats that they both won from the Lib Dems in 2015, and where there were a majority of Remain voters in the referendum - if they can also use a split Opposition to charge through the middle in 40 or 50 Labour seats. That, I suspect, is what the plan is at Tory HQ.
Lib Dem was NOT the tactical or any other vote here.
Read all about it in the gazette's travel section.
Hope for the kippers needs more than wishful thinking and a bald scouser as leader.
I saw Class 37s top and tailing a train at Norwich a few months ago, along with a pair of brand new 68s doing the same
I don't expect Ukip to disappear any time soon because they appear to have evolved a genuine base, but I remain to be convinced that they are capable of making real progress - especially post the damp squib that was their GE2015 result.
HOWEVER... the total number of 2015 Labour voters crossing in the other direction is sufficient to negate all of the Lib Dems' losses to other parties. If the churn of voters from Labour to Lib Dem, relative to that moving in the opposite direction, were to increase significantly from where it already is then the Lib Dem recovery in the polls ought to accelerate accordingly.
The main issue for me is that, as Labour sinks down to around the 25% mark, I think that the Lib Dems will start to find exploiting what's left of the Labour vote a lot tougher. A lot of the soft-Left Remain voters will already have crossed over, and what remains will be committed Lefties (who like Corbyn, think the Lib Dems are too soft, have not forgiven them for the Coalition, or all three,) along with other groups who are much less likely to be amenable to the yellows and their policy positions than the Metro left-lib vote: staunch Labour cultural/habit voters, the traditional white working class more generally, left-leaning students, BAME voters in the lower half of the income distribution, and the very poor.
I believe that there is the possibility of an eventual crossover and the return of some form of liberal party as the main Opposition. But Labour is still too strong: I don't see that sort of change coming any time soon.
While Sunderland council has been solidly Labour, lets not forget 2004-2011 when the Lib Dems ran Newcastle.....
WRRRRRONNNNNGGGGGG21st Century Socialism Sweeping the nation.It didn`t take them long to realise that if you want to have a liberal society, the best thing to do is vote Lib Dem.
https://twitter.com/CllrStopp/status/819470021789437952 Must be a 7-hour trip each way.
It's a neglected group, Labour centrists, as there's always been a strange assumption on the left that centrism is a political posture aimed at another group - swing voters. You see this when people like Owen Jones assume that centre-left Labour voters either don't exist outside the PLP and commentariat or will stay with a Labour Party engulfed by their madness out of loyalty and a shared tribal hatred of the Tories. That tribal dislike means they won't ever vote Tory, but they're damned if they're going to support a leader who'd be equally as bad. There may be nowhere else to go but it doesn't matter anyway as you're choosing between the deliberately rubbish and the accidentally rubbish out of delusion and incompetence.
All three that made the shortlist are based in Cumbria, at the very least.
"The British Labour Party is in meltdown. After reviving the center-left in the 1990s, and then dominating British politics until 2010, Labour now faces the gravest challenge in its 116-year history. One of the oldest social-democratic parties in the world is fighting to survive; there is no guarantee it will."
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/opinion/old-labour-new-labour-no-labour.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&smtyp=cur&_r=0
I mean, I know there are people out there who only get their news from social media and don't believe in polls and their friends only share results when they when win a parish council, but there must be a bunch of reasonably sophisticated people at the centre; What's their game-plan?
What's more Remainers have only one choice of party whereas Leavers have several
To most Remainers that I know there is nothing in British politics which comes close in terms of importance which inevitably means voting Lib Dem.
But the rebels massively massively messed up by going too soon. It was silly to think the electorate would have changed its mind in under a year having given Corbyn such a landslide previously.
If they'd just given at least a pretence of support - ditched the anonymous briefings - then they could argue they gave him a chance.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/13/justin-trudeau-under-fire-again-after-using-aga-khans-helicopter
The helicopter stuff seems like small beer, hoisted by own petard...but cash for access stuff is more serious.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jan/12/bbc-sets-up-team-to-debunk-fake-news
We haven't had the usual 'But... but Farron's doing an awful job as leader...' comment yet.
As it is when the leadership goes there will be a salvagable part of the party still in place to take over
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38605842
Obviously sad, hope it doesn't happen, etc. However the following: made me wonder if the residents of Jaywick would want to go back after he evacuation ...
It might be cold but at least you've got the sea.
I talked to a very lefty acquaintance about this immediately pre-Brexit. He's an intelligent chap, married to an intelligent woman, but both are just-about-managing group (there's a handy term for this which I've annoyingly forgotten).
He's in his mid-thirties and a lifelong Labour voter who - apparently (*) - was not too keen on Blair, but at least it meant Labour was in power.
As far as he's concerned, there's something wrong if he works as hard as he does, with a good job, and yet they are just about managing. They cannot afford to buy a house in this area. Much of their income is going on rent.
In fact, the same arguments as many people make about why people voted Kipper or for Brexit. In the case of UKIP / Brexit, the problems are the immigrants. In his case, it's the nebulous grouping of 'the rich'.
In both cases, it's the fault of the others.
Corbyn should tap into those feelings about an unequal society well, as UKIP tapped into immigration. There's some truth in it. But I'm far from sure he does.
(*) I don't believe him. I bet he was cheering from the rooftops in 1997, 2001 and 2005.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF6rFpyXwbY
The emerging divide in politics nowadays appears to be about the future for a small-l liberal society, and Labour finds itself trying to straddle the divide. Its recent attempted line about speaking for the whole country rather than one side or the other of the EU debate sounds too reminiscent of the LibDems 'not one thing or the other' positioning during the 2015 election, and it is hard to see it working out well? If it were just the EU, they could I guess sit and wait for the issue to fade away (quite a few years off IMHO) but if Brexit is symptomatic of a new fault line emerging in politics across the world then that approach isn't going to work for Labour.
It may be that too many previous Lib Dem voters thought that the values of the Coalition were safe in the hands of that very nice man, Mr Clegg...
It would be an awful mistake for any of us to assume, based on a sample consisting of our own social circle, that all voters are both massively politically engaged and determined to fight trench warfare over this referendum.
I reckon that most of the people who voted last June did so pragmatically, accepted the result immediately (even if they were on the losing side and thought it misguided,) and moved on.
I also suspect that many, and probably most, of the "48%" are not obsessed by Europe. They don't sit at the breakfast table each morning, thumbing through their copies of The New European whilst discussing how Article 50 might be bogged down in the House of Lords, the chances of engineering a second vote, and waxing lyrically about the lonely heroism of Gina Miller or Jolyon Maugham.
Certainly most centre-right Remain voters are liable to be much more concerned about any remote prospect of Jeremy Corbyn laying a hand on the levers of power than they are about leaving the EU. Especially given that the next general election is liable to take place in 2020, and after the country has already left the EU, they'll be vastly more interested in electing a halfway sensible Government than in wasting their vote making a futile protest over a referendum held four years previously.
Labour still has a chance to come back from this, but it does all depend on what the anti-Corbyn element does over the next few years. If they resign themselves to defeat in the next election and wait for the mass membership to come to its senses then they're probably on a hiding to nothing.
Number of votes cast last time the seat was contested: 5,987
Votes cast in by election: 1,832
So turnout in the by election was 30.6% of that of the last election.
For someone who works in Advertising Roger has a charming, if misplaced, impression that voters/viewers give a shit about what we're saying are giving this their undivided attention - or indeed any attention at all.
More anecdata - maybe 2% of my Facebook friends are banging on endlessly about the evils of Brexit, most are going back to their previous activity of posting visits to the opera, first steps of their toddler, restaurant recommendations and holiday snaps. And of those 2% 'something must be done' its very far from clear what something if anything involves......at a guess another three years of moaning about the Tories, and that's about it.
This contrasts completely with, for example, the Falklands war (in the years before the internet) where it was the morning coffee topic of conversation with people surreptitiously playing portable radios in the office so they could keep abreast of the news.....each new rumour rippling through the office as it came.....that had people's attention.
With the Tories looking like a party set on car crash hard Brexit there is real space in the centreground.
They've been through a lot over recent years, and probably won't enjoy the next few years either.
Amazing swing to the LibDems in an iconic 'Leave' area.
I suspect this is simply down to them becoming the non-offensive 'none of the above' option once more. It also helps that many LD councillors are actually not too bad at their job, certainly compared to UKIP.
Most voters don't know what the LD position even is on Brexit - or even the name of their leader - and, of those that do, they consider it irrelevant in a local by election.
What are the turnout figures here? If low it doesn't say that much.
Well the second placed party was virulently anti-EU.the fourth placed party was the most pro-EU of the lot and they leapt from 4% to 45%. So, maybe a teensy bit of evidence?
(*) Except not many (any?) people were using this excuse on here before this morning ...
What sort of electoral results would make you think otherwise?
1. That the Lib Dems are soaring and not just at the expense of an enfeebled Labour Party but from the Tories too
2. I heard Question Time last night and I found the lady from the Open University convincing and it was clear from the audience reaction that nothing came close to exercising them more than the referendum.
Small straws in the wind but i haven't seen anything to suggest that everyone's just shrugged their shoulders and moved on as you and Carlotta suggest
so if you are not voting for the Labour candidate (due to blaming the cuts on Sunderland's Labour Leadership), you vote for the next least worst candidate, and that is likely to be the Lib Dem...
As Sunderland's voters very unkeen on supporting Remain last summer, Farron is going to have his work cut out trying to square the circle.