Brexit Arms

[DustyDiamond]

Welcome to the Brexit Arms!!

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At the risk of distracting the conversation around "teasplaining", I hope the tea making in this pub is better than Johnson makes it in his election broadcast that I saw on Twitter.
No attempt to brew the tea and see how much milk was needed. No teaspoon to fish the teabag out. Assume he has people to do it for him.
I successfully lost the power of good cuppa tea making so that my dh steps in and makes it for us. Maybe he's got that going on.

The Conservatives won 318 seats in the 2017 election which gave them a 42.2% share. So how could they massively increase the number of seats won and have a lower % share ?

^^ that's a maths questions , not a political one

Or should the figure be 282 not 382 ? Which would make more sense sums wise ?

frumpety it’s just how the vote share is distributed (ie concentrated in enough places to win seats).

In 1997 Labour won 418 seats with 43.2% of the vote share.

On the other hand, the SDP were polling up to 50% when it first split from Labour in 1981 but only manage to win 6 seats in 1983.

Mind you that would also mean a not insignificant loss of seats for the Conservatives ?

Above a certain level, it's not the vote share that determines number of seats, Frumpety, but the distribution. A party could record a 50% vote share nationally but it won't make any difference to how many seats it holds if all the votes are piled up high in their traditional constituencies. In the 2017 election, TM got a massive 42.2% vote share - Ed Miliband's strategy in 2015 was based at achieving a much lower 35% target - but she only managed to achieve a hung parliament because the extra votes simply bumped up the already healthy majorities of sitting Conservative MPs.

The fight is in the marginal seats.

One of the constituencies I'm watching is Loughborough because it's a bellwether seat. Bolton West was always a reliable indicator but it went off-piste once. It happens.

Ah right I see Continuity , thanks for explaining that

And SingingLily too

Walkingdeadfangirl, those latest polling figures are encouraging but also making me nervous at the same time. Shades of the snap election and all that - after all, neither the Conservatives nor Labour have published their manifestos yet, and we know how Theresa's "dementia tax and foxhunting" last minute surprises went down.

Still, the Remain Alliance thingy must be giving the LibPlaidGreens a bit of a headache with what to put in their own manifestos. Every cloud...

In the meantime, here is today's Telegraph cartoon which reflects the Sky polls as well as YouGov's. Spot Nige on his perch

It does seem a massive rise in the number of seats though if the Polls are to be believed, early days yet I guess, can't see my area not being blue tbh .

frumpety the difference is that Labour also polled 40% + in 2017. The 2 parties polling so much between them was unusual and reflected the demise of UKIP and below par LibDem performance.

In 2015 Tories got a majority on 37%, Labour 30% because UKIP polled 12% - may shed some light on why Brexit Party is not standing down in Labour areas.

Small subsample but Tory Scotland performance up to 25% in latest YouGov with SNP maintaining at 42% and LibDem and Labour both on 14%.

The overall percentages are pretty meaningless; at one extreme with just Party A vs Party B contesting a seat, the winner could end up with 99% of the vote. At the other extreme, if there were Parties A, B, C, D & E contesting a seat, the winner could get only 21% and win.

Scotland is looking interesting howabout

Love that cartoon SingingLily Comrade Corbyn in a broken-down Trabant (or is it an original USSR Lada?)

😂 Either way, the car is rusty with recycled old policies, probably held together with chewing gum and bits of string, totally unroadworthy and unreliable, Limer.

Are there seats where the swing would go from Labour to Conservative then ? Mine could swing to Lib dem and has done on the odd occasion, but never to Labour. Or are all these new Conservative seats swinging from other parties ?

Dudley North, Crewe and Nantwich, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Barrow - all wafer-thin Labour but with a big Leave vote, Frumpety. It's so hard to tell, though. Bolsover has been Dennis Skinner's personal fiefdom since Adam was a lad but even though he's been careful to make Leave noises, polling indicates it could turn blue. At the same time, Labour's own polling indicates that Islington North and Finsbury could go LibPlaidGreen and it's Emily Thornberry's patch.

The only certainty is uncertainty right now. Plus ça change.

I doubt I'll get a wink of sleep on Election night.

Most seats are Lab / Con frumpety

www.electionpolling.co.uk/battleground/targets/conservative

The South West and bits of London are the exceptions. South West not deemed to be in play for the LibDems because a lot of SW LibDems are thought to have voted Leave, however London seats currently held by Tories are.

Thanks for that link Howabout is very interesting

Most seats are Con/Lab , so does that mean the voting public doesn't see much difference between them then ?

You know the old joke, Frumpety: ask 23 different lawyers (or economists or politicians, take your pick) the same question and you'll get 24 different opinions.

I suspect it's the same with voters. We all have different priorities. There are lots of voters this time around, though, who are having to make hard choices about which party will get their vote. I don't envy them.

One of the things that gets overlooked a lot is the blue collar working class population which is vast

Middle class folk, tribal labour supporters & labour activists can be quite reductionist with their analysis & seem to tend towards the belief that 'the working classes' are all labour & anti Tory.

It's far more nuanced than that & a lot of blue collar workers are actually more inclined towards Tories as they represent aspiration (whereas labour appear to tend towards keeping people in tidy boxes)

There was a lot of support for thatcher amongst the working class (although obvs not the industrial belt)

Since labour have veered towards identity politics & ideology based rhetoric they are becoming less attractive to working class voters also, as it's typically a more socially conservative group of people

Corbyn's manifesto in 2017 was very much a middle class manifesto as well I thought.
Very little on offer for people like me & my children.

Corbyn's manifesto in 2017 was very much a middle class manifesto as well I thought. Very little on offer for people like me & my children.

So you’ve just finished a degree and you don’t think scrapping tuition fees would have helped either you or your children?

I do find it kind of fascinating that people would swing from Conservative to Labour and vice versa. Also do people not hold any store in manifestos, honestly haven't read one before voting before, just wondering if others are the same ?

frumpety I don't think many people are interested in tribal politics. The rhetoric of Tory bad / Labour good and vice versa therefore isn't persuasive.

Most people are somewhere in the middle and decide either way on a balance of self interest / view on where society as a whole needs adjusting / gut feel. Far from being single issue I think Brexit and how people voted in the Ref and feel about the subsequent 3 years similarly reflects these issues.

Nope.

I don't like what happened under Blair with the conveyer belt of school & university.

Degrees & Uni should be for 2 reasons:

1. You need a specific degree for the career you wish to pursue
2. You have a love of learning for the subject & are doing it because you want to

Either way, it's not fair that taxpayers should fund your choice to go to uni.

The tuition fees are a graduate tax, nothing more.

My children are unlikely to go to uni straight from school - maybe later in life like I did, who knows 🤷🏻‍♀️

The free tuition fees benefits the middle classes disproportionately as there are far more middle class kids who go - most kids in our area will go straight into the workforce at 18.

I read them, all of them, Frumpety, because I'm a floating voter. They are promises and intentions, no more than that. The only time I've known them to hold importance is when a party goes against a very specific manifesto promise, as Philip Hammond tried to do when he announced he was going to raise NI for the self-employed. Perhaps he hadn't read the manifesto himself but in any case, he was stopped in his tracks on those grounds.

There's a great deal in what Dusty says about blue collar workers and the lazy assumptions made about their voting intentions. You've only to look at Margaret Thatcher's first and second terms in 1979 and 1983 - her policies appealed directly to them. Labour voters flocked to the Conservatives.

By the same token, so called white collar workers upended politics again in 1997 when they swung away from John Major to Tony Blair. TB would not have won if he had not appealed directly to Tory voters.

My own view is that this election will be just as seismic, the difference being that the incumbent government are the ones looking to upend things.