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UK Politics: Trumpy Cat Trumpy Cat Where Have You Been?


mormont

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1 hour ago, Which Tyler said:

Sorry, I can't let that slide... I don't believe you.

It's like 'I'm sorry to have to point this out' or 'with the greatest of respect', a polite conversational fiction that we all pretend to believe. ;)

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12 minutes ago, Hereward said:

Labour should count themselves lucky that Tories in Stoke didn't vote tactically. They've got away with a disaster instead of a catastrophe.

Actually, I think it would have been better for Labour if they had.  Two losses must surely have prompted them to remove Corbyn.

Anyway, you were right, and I'm out of pocket.  I believe that Copeland was the Conservatives' best result in a by-election, in government, since 1879, when they won Worcester from the Liberal on a similar swing.

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Just now, SeanF said:

Actually, I think it would have been better for Labour if they had.  Two losses must surely have prompted them to remove Corbyn.

I can't see how. His supporters don't seem amenable to political logic. 

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Labour have now lost vote share in each of the 5 Parliamentary by-elections since the Brexit referendum.  Even under William Hague, the Conservatives increased vote share in by-elections more often than they reduced it.

If the Copeland result were repeated nationally, the Conservatives would win 397 seats to 166 for Labour.

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I think Corbyn would have resigned if he'd lost both. I suspect that talk of wobbles and sounding out potential replacements a few weeks ago was a contingency plan for that eventuality, which seemed quite possible before UKIP blew themselves up. Right now Labour can sell this as a victory of sorts, saying that Copeland was going to go anyway (it wasn't) and they held Stoke because of Corbyn's immense leadership skill and subtle political mastery (nope).

I think it's put Corbyn on notice that Labour is headed for a catastrophe and he either needs to come up with a viable plan to turn things around or he needs to go. In particular, he needs to think about why Momentum show up in force whenever his leadership is in doubt but aren't out hitting the streets, campaigning for the party as a whole.

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15 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Right now Labour can sell this as a victory of sorts, saying that Copeland was going to go anyway (it wasn't) and they held Stoke because of Corbyn's immense leadership skill and subtle political mastery (nope).

I am not sure how on earth they can spin this with a straight face. Given the Tories and their Brexit calamities, and their NHS fiasco unfolding, Labour as the main opposition party is supposed to pick up seats, and not to lose them to those Tories. Copeland had been a Labour seat for how long? 80 years or so? 

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30 minutes ago, Notone said:

I am not sure how on earth they can spin this with a straight face. Given the Tories and their Brexit calamities, and their NHS fiasco unfolding, Labour as the main opposition party is supposed to pick up seats, and not to lose them to those Tories. Copeland had been a Labour seat for how long? 80 years or so? 

82 years. So yeah, it's a pretty significant loss. 

According to some news reports, the tactic will be for Cobynistas to blame passive-aggressive actions like popular MPs running out on the party in their hour of need and the media (of course) and everything under the sun rather than their leader and their failure to go after the Conservatives on the ground where they are weak.

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Had a good laugh watching the news tonight. There is literally no good Labour can take from either of the results. They both flag up a massive list of different and compounding problems which have little hope of being solved, barring a change as drastic and unlikely as the one which got them into this mess in the first place. But there they are, cheering in the streets, woo hoo, we didn't lose both seats, good job gang. Carnage. 

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2 hours ago, Werthead said:

I think Corbyn would have resigned if he'd lost both. I suspect that talk of wobbles and sounding out potential replacements a few weeks ago was a contingency plan for that eventuality, which seemed quite possible before UKIP blew themselves up. Right now Labour can sell this as a victory of sorts, saying that Copeland was going to go anyway (it wasn't) and they held Stoke because of Corbyn's immense leadership skill and subtle political mastery (nope).

It might the only thing saving Corbyn at the moment is Nuttall's dead imaginary friends, Labour must be hoping they don't have to defend any more by-elections because they can't rely on their challengers self-destructing again (although if it's a UKIP challenger it's quite believable).

The results are probably even more of a disaster for UKIP than Labour, if they aren't going to win a by-election in Stoke where are they going to be able to win?

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I don't think Nuttall's little difficulty over Hillsborough did him any favours. But look at the turnout in Stoke. It was very low: 38%. UKIP got 5233, down from 7041 - a slightly increased share of the vote but 1800 fewer votes. Labour bled more than 5,000 votes, over a third of their vote at the general election: a catastrophic performance, but they still won. UKIP, as I said before, were just never going to find the extra votes they needed to beat Labour. If they'd turned out every single UKIP voter from the last election they'd still have lost. So I'm not putting this down to Nuttall's dead imaginary friends and UKIP shooting themselves in the foot. I'm putting it down to UKIP simply not being strong enough to win FPTP seats, except where a sitting MP defects.

Labour's problem is not traditional supporters defecting to UKIP: it's traditional supporters staying home. Labour voters, by and large, don't want to switch to UKIP. But they don't want to vote Labour right now either.

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Emily Thornberry is a problem for me. She causes my blood pressure to spike, but yet everytime she speaks she costs Labour support. But today, On Newsnight, she actually claimed that fake news had given the impression that Corbyn was anti-nuclear. I had assumed she was wrong but principled, but that is Trump like bollox.

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There's very little comfort for Labour in the Stoke result, really.

From 1950 to 1979, they never polled less than 60% in the seat, and still polled 48% in 1983.  They gradually recovered to 66% in 1997.  On Thursday, they polled 37%.

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15 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

The Russians did it in the US and are doing it Europe.

And now it turns out one of the billionaires behind Breitbart, Robert Mercer, created a manipulative internet ad campaign for the Leave side in the UK Brexit vote, that actually created unique ads depending on their analysis of your Facebook page. And donated the work to the Leave campaign, which the Leave campaign did not report.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/us-billionaire-mercer-helped-back-brexit

Carry on.

To be fair, Brexit has been stewing for over 20 years and has been coming to the boil in the last couple. No facebook campaign is going to change that.

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