UK Politics - Taking the Land Rover to Heaven

[mormont]

2 hours ago, SeanF said:

Scotland seems like a repeat of 2016, albeit on higher turnout.

On the Scottish result, I think this tweet is apt:

 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Well, just did a quick check up on the regional elections.

The SNP is +2 thus far (Picking up Ayr from the Tories and East Lothian from Labour), so at least Sturgeon is on course.

In Wales Labour has thus far lost the Vale of Clwyd (I'd be curious what auto-correct would turn that into) to the Tories. Plaid Cymru like the Tories is also on +1. Picking up Dwyfor Merionydd from another local party.

[Heartofice]

There are reports that the London Mayor race is actually very close and that Bailey is running Khan to the wire. That is really baffling if true. I know Khan wasn’t an especially strong choice but really this was a very easy election  for him to win 

[Derfel Cadarn]

I just hope Alba win fuck all

[Maltaran]

3 hours ago, Heartofice said:

There are reports that the London Mayor race is actually very close and that Bailey is running Khan to the wire. That is really baffling if true. I know Khan wasn’t an especially strong choice but really this was a very easy election  for him to win 

Who cares, we all know the important race there is Binface v Fox

[SeanF]

3 hours ago, Heartofice said:

There are reports that the London Mayor race is actually very close and that Bailey is running Khan to the wire. That is really baffling if true. I know Khan wasn’t an especially strong choice but really this was a very easy election  for him to win 

No, it's not close.  It's just that Outer London boroughs have reported earliest.  But, Bailey has done better than expected.  He'll probalby lose by about 57/43 overall.

[SeanF]

4 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Well, just did a quick check up on the regional elections.

The SNP is +2 thus far (Picking up Ayr from the Tories and East Lothian from Labour), so at least Sturgeon is on course.

In Wales Labour has thus far lost the Vale of Clwyd (I'd be curious what auto-correct would turn that into) to the Tories. Plaid Cymru like the Tories is also on +1. Picking up Dwyfor Merionydd from another local party.

In both those cases, it likely costs them a seat on the list, so no gain overall.

Edinburgh Central however, is a gain without any offsetting loss.

[SeanF]

5 hours ago, mormont said:

On the Scottish result, I think this tweet is apt:

 

Very true.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

London Mayor is gonna be a run off election if neither candidate cracks the 50% mark, right?

Oh, and in Wales, Labour picked up a seat from Plaid Cymru (Rhondda), and either the list results are coming in or they found another seat somewhere, Labour are for the moment on +1 there.

[Spockydog]

I suspect many woke-ass lily-livered libs will have gone for Binface in London, just to fuck with Lozza. Bailey gets destroyed in any runoff.

[williamjm]

6 hours ago, mormont said:

On the Scottish result, I think this tweet is apt:

 

There probably are some in the SNP who are content with continually getting comfortably re-elected without having to do the hard work of actually becoming independent.

58 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

London Mayor is gonna be a run off election if neither candidate cracks the 50% mark, right?

If nobody wins on first preference then the second preference votes get re-allocated. With the Greens and Liberal Democrats in third and fourth I suspect most of those second choice votes would be heading to Khan.

Oh, and in Wales, Labour picked up a seat from Plaid Cymru (Rhondda), and either the list results are coming in or they found another seat somewhere, Labour are for the moment on +1 there.

I've seen it pointed out that it seems to be a good time to be an incumbent government with the Tories doing well in England, the SNP in Scotland and Labour in Wales.

[Werthead]

12 hours ago, Liffguard said:

(Although, demographic changes can't account for the result in Hartlepool on their own. From 2017 to yesterday, the Conservative vote went from 14,300, down to 11,800, and back up to 15,500. I.e. overall it didn't change that much. Labour's has gone from 22,000, to 15,500, to 8,500; a dramatic collapse that massively oustrips demographic shift in the same period.

No, it's the turn-out: 29,933, 15% down on 2019 (41,037) and by far the lowest turnout since Hartlepool's first constituency election in 1974.

Whilst not guaranteed, I'd heavily guess that the overwhelming majority of the stay-at-homes were former Labour supporters disillusioned with the party, but not to the point of voting Tory or anyone else. Hell, the Lib Dems were destroyed (349 votes, down from 1,700 in 2019).

You sometimes get this with by-elections: the Tories have a massive overall majority in the HoC, this won't change anything, so a lot of Labour voters disillusioned with the party felt much more able to sit at home and not turn out. In a general election, it may have been a different story. The interesting thing is that the Tories didn't hoover up all the Brexit Party votes (or really any, they returned to where they were in 2017).

Quote

There probably are some in the SNP who are content with continually getting comfortably re-elected without having to do the hard work of actually becoming independent.

I'm wondering if there is a danger that Johnson, who has reportedly been combative in recent weeks and months over an IndyRef 2 as the opinion polls have not shifted further in the SNP's favour (and may have slunk backwards), may actually offer them a referendum if the numbers are in his favour. I can't see how Sturgeon can turn him down after agitating for one for so long.

If the SNP lose that referendum, the question is how long realistically can they wait before moving for a new vote. I suspect after two no votes in seven years, it might be, at the absolute least, a decade before they can even think about doing it again. And then you might have voters in Scotland wondering why they're voting for the SNP in Westminster elections if they're not going to change the balance of power in the country overall (whilst continuing to vote them in at Holyrood). There might be a tiny sliver of long-term hope for Labour there, if vanishingly so.

[mormont]

8 hours ago, williamjm said:

There probably are some in the SNP who are content with continually getting comfortably re-elected without having to do the hard work of actually becoming independent.

They used to say the same about the hard work of actually governing.

Make no mistake, pretty much everyone in the SNP would be delighted to have the opportunity to do the hard work of becoming independent.

6 hours ago, Werthead said:

I'm wondering if there is a danger that Johnson, who has reportedly been combative in recent weeks and months over an IndyRef 2 as the opinion polls have not shifted further in the SNP's favour (and may have slunk backwards), may actually offer them a referendum if the numbers are in his favour. I can't see how Sturgeon can turn him down after agitating for one for so long.

I can't see why Sturgeon would turn him down.

This is the second comment in a row that implies that in some way the SNP aren't absolutely genuinely keen to become independent, like, yesterday. They honestly are. There is no deft card-playing or complex timing-related strategic double bluff here. The SNP will take a referendum any time, and if they win it they'll take independence as quickly as it can be completed.

6 hours ago, Werthead said:

If the SNP lose that referendum, the question is how long realistically can they wait before moving for a new vote. I suspect after two no votes in seven years, it might be, at the absolute least, a decade before they can even think about doing it again. And then you might have voters in Scotland wondering why they're voting for the SNP in Westminster elections if they're not going to change the balance of power in the country overall (whilst continuing to vote them in at Holyrood). There might be a tiny sliver of long-term hope for Labour there, if vanishingly so.

I don't think so. This assumes there's some benefit to the Scottish left-leaning voter in voting Labour at Westminster elections. Many of those voters are just as scunnered (it's Scottish politics, I can use Scots) with Labour as the ones who stayed home in Hartlepool, but they have an option Hartlepool voters don't have.

Anas Sarwar will probably be a better leader for Scottish Labour than Richard Leonard, who seemed a nice man but was totally forgettable. But he has an uphill struggle here. Even in Westminster voting intentions, Labour are at 19%, which is exactly what they actually got in December 2019. No poll I've seen in the meantime has put them higher than 23%. The implication is they're down to the hard core Labour vote but unable to reach outside it. To get a number of Scottish MPs that would make a difference to the balance of power nationally, they need to double that at least.

[mormont]

14 hours ago, Maltaran said:

Who cares, we all know the important race there is Binface v Fox

Fortunately Fox has a backup plan: opening a pub with Richard Tice. Serving British food, showcasing right-wing comedy and ignoring COVID restrictions.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1428638/laurence-fox-latest-london-mayor-election-richard-tice-buy-pub-coronavirus-rules

There are one or two small hitches to this plan for gainful employment, such as not actually having a property in mind. and pledging to do things that would see any such pub instantly closed again. Some might say - scandalously - that this 'plan' is actually nothing more than another publicity stunt by two sad middle-aged reactionary buffoons and that they have no intention of running any such establishment nor would they have the first clue how to run one if they did. Some would say.

[BigFatCoward]

28 minutes ago, mormont said:

Fortunately Fox has a backup plan: opening a pub with Richard Tice. Serving British food, showcasing right-wing comedy and ignoring COVID restrictions.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1428638/laurence-fox-latest-london-mayor-election-richard-tice-buy-pub-coronavirus-rules

There are one or two small hitches to this plan for gainful employment, such as not actually having a property in mind. and pledging to do things that would see any such pub instantly closed again. Some might say - scandalously - that this 'plan' is actually nothing more than another publicity stunt by two sad middle-aged reactionary buffoons and that they have no intention of running any such establishment nor would they have the first clue how to run one if they did. Some would say.

The fact that there would be no covid restrictions in place by the time they were able to buy and open such a place renders their promise rather redundant also. 

[williamjm]

4 hours ago, mormont said:

They used to say the same about the hard work of actually governing.

Make no mistake, pretty much everyone in the SNP would be delighted to have the opportunity to do the hard work of becoming independent.

I agree, I'm sure the vast majority are totally committed to it. I think it's perhaps inevitable any successful political movement (and the SNP have been hugely successful in recent years) will attract a few hangers-on who are more interested in their own career than in any ideology.

[Werthead]

5 hours ago, mormont said:

They used to say the same about the hard work of actually governing.

Make no mistake, pretty much everyone in the SNP would be delighted to have the opportunity to do the hard work of becoming independent.

I can't see why Sturgeon would turn him down.

I think that's fairly obvious. Sturgeon might want to turn him down if she thinks she'll lose an independence referendum, which at the moment appears to be a more likely outcome than winning it. I have no doubt, though, that Sturgeon genuinely feels that a strong campaign might get them over the line and into a winning position, using the economic fallout from Brexit to bolster her argument. It might work, but I think the SNP were also banking on the trajectory of opinion polls increasingly going over 50% consistently continuing, instead of slumping back to under that mark. Based on the general conservatism when it comes to massive, life-changing decisions and the pandemic obfuscating the economic impact of Brexit by itself on Scotland, I think it's a significant hill to climb where you don't want the opinion polls to be consistently against you.

All of that said, of course there could be a Brexit-in-reverse thing that happens and unionist votes stay at home and the independence votes come out in force and they get over the line by 1-2%, but given the volume of tactical voting by the unionist vote that seems to have happened in this election (Tory voters voting Labour to keep the SNP out, Labour voters voting Tory to do the same thing), I don't think that will be the case. And if the SNP lose an independence vote, with nothing gamechanging like Brexit coming afterwards to at least make the case for another one, then that could be it for generations to come. The SNP trying to argue for a third referendum in ten or fifteen years will have much less backing them up (at least until they get some kind of crushing mandate like winning 100% of the seats on a clear referendum mandate).

It's the Sinn Feinn argument: they know they might only have one shot at a referendum in a generation so, despite mild calls for one sooner, they won't fully agitate for one until they're certain they can win it. They know that'd be on a knife edge now, so it's better to wait five or ten years rather than demand an opportunity to lose now (though for them it helps that the the Brexit dividend of boosted support for independence does not seem as strong as it has been in Scotland, versus long-term voting trends).

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Too early for some quick takes from this election?

 

Goverments have been rewarded in this corona election.

Labour looks on course in Wales

the SNP is looking very strong in Scotland (Go Nicola!)

and the Tories in England.

Bad result for Starmer. But to put things a bit in perspective. He really didn't have much opportunity to show himself. Corona has taken quite a bit of the dynamics out of the political discourse (still being stuck with the remain vs. leave vote to some extent) and the election happening in the midst of a more or less successfull vaccine rollout, thus offering a perspective to go back to some sort of normal was not working in his favour either.

That doesn't absolve him and Labour from all responsibility, as they are still stuck between their old socially conservative blue collar (Leave) voters and the younger progressives in the metropolitan areas. Starmer should really figure out a way to appeal to both groups of voters, if he wants to become PM. That goes a bit back to Corona having made it more difficult for an opposition party to get their message out.  Whiel it was a bad election, it mgiht just not be as bad as it looks.

[mormont]

8 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I think that's fairly obvious.

In turn, I think you're missing the fairly obvious.

Yes, the next referendum might be the SNP's one chance to win. But also, if they don't take the chance to have a referendum while it's politically possible, they might not get another chance in a generation or more. They can't outsmart themselves by trying to be cute with the timing and then lose the chance to have a vote at all, and Sturgeon knows that. In politics, you cannot assume you'll always be given another chance to do the thing you want to do.

If you really want to be all 'inside baseball' about it, there's also the angle that Sturgeon simply has too many people in the party champing at the bit to hold the referendum to resist even if she wanted to. For her to turn down a referendum offered by Westminster would break the party. Voters, activists, MPs and MSPs would all be demanding to know what the point of the SNP is if it turned down a referendum - under any circumstances.

Johnson being who he is, he might decide to gamble on a referendum (though I don't doubt that much of his party and cabinet will tell him he'd be insane to do so). But that would be a very high stakes gamble, because there is no serious doubt that the SNP would delightedly accept.

[Heartofice]

Doesn’t look like the SNP can get a majority now. ( sorry Nicola)