To think Starmer will be gone by the end of Friday? Or will it be Monday evening?

[SingleSexSpacesInSchools]

Whoever you are voting for today, it's probably not Labour - they might loose 2,000 seats.

How long exactly will it be before he resigns?

You all need to be thanking Keir Starmer we’re not at war with Iran and your kids aren’t in danger from
bombs as a result! Most of the other leaders were saying we should join Trump. Other leaders are also saying no one should work from home! Keir Starmer is a good man, with a pure heart and he deserves more gratitude and grace!

Current projections are losses greater than 50% for Labour.

But even if they’re ‘only’ 50%, Starmer’s in deep trouble. Losing in Wales and Scotland will put him in the red zone, and those losses are nailed on.

if they lose 50% or less I shall eat, dunno, something awful. I think we are looking at 75% plus.

It’s been 75% in local by-elections so you might be right.

😂

I’ve lived through worse times than this but I’ve never seen the population so feeble. I’ve had members of my family long term unemployed, unemployment rate of 25% in my area, a national number of unemployed above 3 million and rising (thatcher 80s up north). Also member of family lost their home, interest rates 15%, hundreds of thousands of repossessions (major 90s down south). The financial crash of 2008 was worse than now.

FFS we aren’t even in a recession. Unemployment is under 5%, interest rate under 4%, net migration is down. Yes productivity is low at 1% but hardly surprising given world events. Yes prices are an issue and could get worse before it gets better (thanks Trump). So is housing. But the black mirror of despair it is not.

Locals aren't great predictors for a general election though. I think you'll see lots of tactical voting to keep Reform out of government when the GE rolls around. Whatever people say, large swathes of the left, centre ground and moderate conservatives understand how dangerous Reform in government would be. Better the devil you know and all that.

I'm voting Green today, because the excellent (incumbent) independent (former Conservative) isn't standing. Local man, does absolutely loads of positive work in the local area - a shame he's pulled out as he'd definitely have won.

Around here, Labour don't stand a chance and neither do LibDems. I'd even consider voting Conservative (never voted Conservative in my life before) to keep Reform out if I knew what their candidate stood for, but he's an unknown quantity who appears to have been parachuted in for the sake of fielding a candidate - so I can't vote in good conscience that he'll be good for the local community. I don't know him. So I'll go with my heart for the candidate who is closest to my own values (not a perfect fit) and might just challenge Reform.

You do know this isn't a general election, right?

How to tactically vote against Green and Reform?

You could be right, but PollCheck's projections based on current opinion polls point to a loss of 53% of their seats in total across England, Scotland and Wales. Including the Scottish parliament and the Senedd, Labour are defending 2,354 seats today. They would have to lose 1,766 seats for your prediction to be correct. That takes us well outside the range projected by PollCheck.

It may be that the opinion polls are all wrong or that there will be a lot of anti-Labour tactical voting, but the polls suggest that any tactical voting is more likely to be anti-Reform.

Apart from all other election stuff, FPTP is such a blunt instrument for a General Election. If only we had Proportional Representation, we might get a more accurate picture of how the country feels. I think they have a form of it for the devolved parliaments, but not for Westminster elections.

The libdems forced a referendum on a kind of voting reform in coalition, but the voters voted against it, so I think we're stuck with FPTP for the foreseeable.

A word on Burnham. He's great in Manchester. He wasn't so great in government, he always ran with the hare and hounds and was mediocre at best. He may not be the magic everyone craves. He has also stood as Labour leader twice before and been rejected.

Should be tried again. But it suits Labour and Tory so I doubt it will be mooted any time soon. I don't actually think many of the electorate actually understand how it works. So I can't blame them for rejecting it in favour of the devil you know. It needs to be explained in detail. It obviously favours smaller parties so as I said I doubt anything will happen any time soon. Pity though, it is so democratic, but the FPTP system, IMV is not.

By-elections so far don’t match it, they’re at 75%. I wonder why that is.

That just isn't true. If you can't argue your point with facts - you don't have a point.

There's loads wrong with Starmer. LOADS. You don't have to make shit up.

Even if the ‘government’ wrote the speech - which I personally doubt, or at least I doubt that Charles’s advisers wouldn’t have re-written it - what’s that got to do with leaden-prosed Starmer? It clearly didn’t come from his pen.

Ah - the moving goal post strategy. Whether he personally wrote it or not, he certainly would have read it, and the foreign office, No 10 and other department heads would all have had input. It's Starmer's government, and the speech reflects the views of that government. Yes, Charles would have had input as it needed to sound like his voice.

They were still making amendments on the flight over with amendments being made by Charles, his private secretary and Yvette Cooper - there was nothing in that speech that wasn't government approved!

Macron and Starmer’s double act about Greenland? Fuck me, you’d have to be very gullible to believe that those two had any effect on Trump.

Two separate events - In February 2025 when Trump started on about tariffs and Ukraine and had that awful meeting with Zelensky when Trump and Vance behaved appallingly, there was a crisis summit held in France with European leaders https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/17/europe-at-turning-point-as-leaders-meet-in-paris-to-discuss-ukraine-crisis

Shortly after, Macron went the the US and gave his firey speech about Ukraine on surrendering, while Starmer went all in nicely nicely and offered Trump the state visit to the UK.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2025/02/24/trump-hosting-macron-says-putin-would-accept-european-peacekeepers-deployed-in-ukraine_6738519_7.html

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-meeting-with-president-trump-27-february-2025

In March 2025, Starmer hosted a summit of European leaders in the UK following which the policy about Europe re-arming itself and reducing its reliance on the US for defence started to be rolled out. Several other summits in various European countries followed.

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/experts-react/how-european-leaders-are-responding-to-trumps-approach-to-ukraine-and-europe/

After Trump announced at Davos in January this year that there were plans in place to make an agreement over Greenland, Starmer led the response on behalf of Europe and hosted the Danish prime minister to develop the key responses.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/greenland-keir-starmer-washington-trump-prime-minister-b2902595.html

You can believe what you like about whether it actually had any impact on Trump, but you can't deny that it happened or that Starmer is playing a key leadership role with his European colleagues. International diplomacy clearly works or we would have all been wiped out years ago!

What you 'believe' is the outcome or what you 'doubt' or don't 'doubt' means absolutely nothing beyond your own opinion when you can't back it up with evidence.

And those things can’t be achieved without political stability.

No voting system is perfect. FPTP can allow a party to get an overall majority with only around 30% of the votes. PR, on the other hand, means permanent coalitions and allows minority parties to force through policies opposed by most voters.

If we look at the period since WW2, the Tories and Labour have generally got 30%-40% of the vote at general elections with the LibDems or their predecessors getting around 10%-20%. That has resulted in the Tories and Labour each spending roughly 50% of the time in power, whilst the LibDems have only been in power for the 5 years of the coalition. If we had used PR, the LibDems or their predecessors would have been in power for 100% of the time and would frequently have been able to act as kingmakers, determining which of the major parties would be able to form a government. They would have been able to demand the adoption of policies opposed by both major parties as the price of going into coalition.

I am not saying FPTP is a good system, but it isn't clear to me that PR is better.

I think there a lot of people feeling economically squeezed - and have been for a while at same time watching services disappear or get cut - and are fed up with the general political malaise and almost apathy towards many voters.

Not sure they are looking at benfits cuts or thinking productivity just change hopefully in a forward direction or at least williness to try for it.

I think it's been 27 years in Wales in charge of education and NHS - both do worse than other regions -saw a recent interview when they pleaded for more time - wtf.

I don't know if anyone else will be better or if they will be much worse but I think many here think it may well be worth finding out.

Worryingly that is what I think Trump rode twice to power in US but hopefully UK is at least post brexit more cynical about all politicians and our system may actually have some check and balances.

That's the $64,000 question I guess.

I would hope that things will start to improve - NHS waiting lists are coming down, as is the percentage of those who are economically inactive - but it is not fast enough.

We have been conditioned to think of government spending as if it is the same as household budgets, but its not, its more akin to property investment and improvement while improving wage earning potential.

The only way to really increase productivity is to drastically improve both infrastructure, health and education - which requires a Keynsian rather than Milton approach to economics.

This Labour government are barely tinkering around the edges with that, and their lack of action coupled with just how bad things are makes me fear that things are too far gone to get back on track any time soon.

But when you look at what is being proposed by the alternative, then something is better than nothing. I just keep consoling myself with the bus analogy.

I would go back to labour if Andy burnham gets in .Im lending my vote to green for now.

Proper proportional representation wasn't on the ballet though - if it had of been, it would have won.

They put the crappy AV compromise through instead - because no matter how much people like to blame the Lib Dems for the coalition decisions, they really didn't have that much power.

I think by-elections tend traditionally to be more anti incumbent government and local issues mixed in.

Council elections tend to be mix of local issues, good councils and councillors and national poltics and welsh and scottish parliments have their own issues and different voting systems in place.

It's very hard to extrapolate to anything else but polls do try and sort through it all.

I think everyone thinks it will be a series of poor results for Labour but how bad we all just have to wait and see.

I presume you are looking at by-elections over the last 12 months. Since October, Labour's polling has stabilised at around 18%-19% whereas Reform have gone down from around 31% to around 25% (individual polls may, of course, disagree with this). Also, council by-elections tend to have very low turnouts and don't necessarily reflect what will happen when a lot of seats are up for grabs.

I am not saying definitively that Labour will not lose 75%+ of their seats. It may happen. But that is not what is being suggested by current opinion polls.