Westminstenders: Election Special 3

[RedToothBrush]

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Random, I worked in Glasgow for a year so travelled the route often. It feels like one help of a drive between the city and the border as it's not really populated. It skews perception.

We love the wind farms though.

Soon we won’t have the luxury of deciding what we should debate; we’ll be forced to act on extreme weather events and worsening air quality.

Completely agree with this. Within years climate change and the damage humans have wrought on this planet (the plastics nightmare for a start) will demand ever-increasing attention whether we like it or not, whether there are trade deals to be done or whether people believe in it or not.

Greta Thunberg has it right - you don't stand and watch as a speeding car heads towards your child - you act fast. We're already on the back foot with this, will the Tories prioritise it? Another thing for their already very full 'to do' list.

@Deadsouls, that FB quote is spot on. But you'll find Brexit-champions saying it's not up to them, it's up to the politicians and the politicians don't care if they lied / can't do it.

Apparently there's an issue with illegal election posters on Teeside for this election which were being investigated by the police and, I assume, the relevant bodies. I don't know if anything will come of it or not (well, I do really, it won't).

*Where do posters consider the south starts?
*
As a Yorkshire lass turned southern I'd say ... a bit up from Watford.

So St Albans is south -making Herts south. But Milton Keynes/ Bedfordshire is Midlands? So the south starts somewhere below Luton/Bedford on the Herts/ Bedfordshire Border?. Although Luton airport is London -Luton so Bedfordshire is confusing.

Then I'd say Midlands start at Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire , Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire plus going West Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire, and Worcs?

Cambridgeshire is the East?

I think southerners (me) realistically think of the south as London; Home Counties and the shires.
And therein lies the problem.

As we work together with the EU, as friends and sovereign equals, tackling climate change and terrorism, in building academic and scientific co-operation, redoubling our trading relationship

Hang on Boris, you are talking about what we already have ?

Where is he going with this do you think ?

My DD spent 18 months working in Aberdeenshire and used to come back to visit me in the SW Midlands every couple of months. She drove overnight, it took 8-10 hours depending, she considered the first half of the journey was to the Scottish border, the other half the border to Aberdeen.
She did the journey in a Smart car which eventually blew up one night at 01:30 on the M6 near Preston (she replaced it with another Smart car, thankfully used for only one commute).

Where is he going with this do you think ?

I'm not a good enough strategic thinker for this politics lark.

But Johnson must have a strategy. He is making one nation noises.Where he goes doesn't depend on his own beliefs as he's a mercurial fickle Borisist.

Where he is going depends on his advisers? and where the new MPs are on the Eurosceptic spectrum.
How many of the new incumbents are ERG wannabes?

I always thought the ERG succeeded - agitating for the ref and holding out for their elusive Brexit vision because of their money and years of persistence and power. May was always summoning IDS and co for their approval.

But what gave the ERG their festering power over both Cameron and May was the fragile or non existent working majority wasn't it? So now they have less power unless new recruits double the ERG numbers to 80.

So his words suggest he might go soft unless persuaded by Singapore type arguments. But Cummings, Crawford Falconer, Singham are still advising and they're on the hard end of the spectrum?

From Twitter:

Ian Dunt
@IanDunt

Today would be a good day to join the Labour party. Not in a bid to control its political direction, but as a democratic imperative.

Boris is essentially a lazy, not particularly bright person so my worry is that he’ll rely on his advisors to do the work for him and his advisors are hard brexiters. I’m really scared tbh, think our economy will be screwed in 5 years time.

On another point, the poorest in society often don’t vote. It’s simply not on your radar if your life is chaotic. Best friend works in a school in a deprived area and most of the kids didn’t even know the EU referendum was happening, let alone care about it. A lot felt that there was no point in voting as it made no difference to their lives.

I genuinely think Boris has no strategy, he just wanted to consolidate his power.

But Johnson must have a strategy.

I am sure someone has.

Mother they think the EU has taken their jobs away and is the reason they are poor.

They blame the behaviour of MPs in Parliament for the last 3 years and things not moving forward

They see other people having a good life and there's is pretty shit.

They see a PM who gives them hope. They see a PM who says the words they want to see. Who has managed to convince him of his 'Get Brexit Done' message and that things will change for teu good after this.

They voted for a better future.

You can't really blame people. The brainwashing of the newspapers has been going on for years. Who has challenged it? Who has called it out?

You've got to give Boris credit where credit is due - hes played a blinder.

We'll see next week with the cabinet he chooses how serious he is.

*It is incomprehensible to me
*
I know I repeat myself but I really do think our unique obsession with class and hierarchy is a huge factor.

There's this engrained almost genetically inherited belief that the guvnor will do right by you if you're good and cooperate. The higher up the hierarchy the guvnor is the better.

Shrewdly the Johnson family of immigrants nailed the acquisition of an English aristocratic air and education.

two Ronnie sketch on classs*

And now I need to start believing in Unicorns

Oh someone will have a strategy but it won’t be Johnson. Strategies require actual work

That's what I keep shouting at the telly mother!

However, I guess we have to remember some 'lifelong Labour voters' are doing so out of tribalism or tradition, not actually policies (back to the 'bigoted woman' again) and so aren't anywhere near being socialists I guess. Or they may well be of the age that they have voted Labour since Blair days and that's not really Labour.

I really don't know where that leaves the party. I think lifelong Tories are far less likely to be muddled about their core beliefs and so , once Brexit is done, know where they belong.

I guess some people need 5 years to realise the Tories don't give a shit about them to drift back again. Awful thought.

Mt friend has tried to get me to join a Facebook group so I can see it posts ( The 'United Social Alliance'). It reveals the utter disunity of belief amongst committed supporters about what direction the party should go in and who should lead.

What does anyone think will happen about foreign policy and the Middle East for the Labour party after the anti semitism debacle? I would hate it if no one felt able now to speak up about Palestine. Or has it just become a political non issue?

Bedford is the South : they'd be horrified to hear you say otherwise. Sometimes called South Midlands and the telly is Look east. Attitudes are not east Anglian. East Angular starts at St Neots.

Luton is absolutely the South.

The Watford Gap is a good 30 odd miles north of Bedford.

I think the cabinet will be godawful and we’ll sadly get the country this vote deserves. So expect lots of promises for the NHS, education etc whilst in reality money will be quietly taken out of them. Which is what Cameron did tbh. Like promising 30 hrs free childcare whilst not actually effectively subsiding it so that everyone with a child under 3 ends up with massive nursery bills. So not actually government funded.

I can see them doing things like paying for the extra nurses for the NHS (although god knows where they’ll find them) by taking the money from elsewhere in the health service eg infrastructure, IT, drug costs etc. Public will lap it up without realising they have less access to services. This is my predicted theme of the Bojo government- promising big things, giving some token gesture whilst quietly taking resources away in the background.

Mother

I wonder how many actually did vote Conservative, as opposed to just not voting.

Isn't the figure something like the Conservative Vote rising by far less than the Labour vote falling?

People are given little choice at elections ...

Labour asked people to vote for a Leader who

• had a history of talking with the IRA and other terrorist groups
• didn't openly state a position on Brexit
• had no history of managing things
• was a posh person telling working class people how they should live their lives
• was mired in anti-semitism

We can discuss all day whether this was a fair portrayal or not.
The point is, we went into a GE with all those issues unaddressed are the level of messaging.

It's a massive ask to get voters to vote positively for that.

They will look at all that, then the policies, and then weigh up whether that person really is capable of delivering that manifesto.

On this thread, we argued that

A hung Parliament would compensate for Corbyn's failures
A hung Parliament would reign in the excesses of a Corbyn programme
The Civil Service would manage lack of experience
The Tories were a bigger threat
Johnson was a bigger security risk

That's all quite grim, choice wise.

Given that even we were relying on enough people to vote against Labour in order to manage a Corbyn programme it's not surprising to see a lot of people just not voting for it.

I'm very, very sad.
And, frankly, I can't quite get to the place where I empathise with people who put their 'X' in the Conservative box.
Not with everything we know about austerity and the Johnson agenda.

But there really are very good reasons why people didn't vote for a Corbyn-led Labour Party.

And they are not silly/irrelevant reasons.

And it wasn't all down to Brexit.

I know you didn't say that - I'm going off on a tangent.

I think putting it down to 'silly people who wanted Leave more than the NHS' is not correct.

We're going to hear a lot of that in the coming days.

And a lot of it is going to come from the Corbyn Left.

It will be dressed up as 'Labour made a mistake not pursuing a pro-Brexit policy' - but the assumption will be the same: working class people wanted Brexit more than bread.

It still won't be true.

There were many issues behind this loss.

I think Red and others are right about huge splits in the demographic Labour targets, and the emergence of new political identities.

Corbyn was popular enough with young people, BAME voters, & 'the new precariat' - or rather, popular enough to overlook other issues.

With other sections - particularly those outside large urban centres - he bombed.

My hope is that Labour looks past the Brexit thing, looks past the desire to defensively hang in to loyalty to Corbyn as a defence of progressivism, and really examines what went wrong with this election.