Westminstenders: The only way forward is up.

[placemats]

A new thread as the other one is getting full. I'm enjoying the post election discussion. Every view is listened to and welcomed.

Brexit is happening, but what kind of Brexit will it be?

New leaderships for both Labour and the LibDems.

Most importantly, will Britain be Great in 2024?

Yes @ Red.

Thanks placemats. Hope you are able to be with your lovely mum soon

I'm sure Milliband had something about protections for renters in 2015. The sad reality is not enough voters give a fuck.

With regard to workers' and renters' rights - Labour included that in the manifesto

I am intrigued to see how the Conservatives manage to solve the housing crisis, build more houses, solve social care, leave inheritance tax alone and don't touch corporation tax whilst leaving the EU and negotiating trade deals with the rest of the world.

Oh - and redevelop the North of England which means working closely at local level with people outside of Whitehall.

The £8 billion we save from the EU won't go that far....

We need the wonder that is Red on the car for that, BigChoc.

I saw a great bar chart about a Labour support as regards small towns, large towns, cities, rural areas the other day and I thought, 'Red would love that.'

But did I copy it? No.

It was what Red hypothesised: larger density = more support for Lsbour.

RTB can I ask you you voted for in then end?

I’m pretty sure it wasn’t LD or Labour so that leaves AN Other or Tory

You can ask but I won't openly say on here.

I genuinely could see arguments for putting a x next to all three parties and even bigger arguments against all three. I don't feel I voted FOR anyone.

Indeed DH was very upset the night before the election because he felt circumstances had made him lose his free choice FOR a party in a vote. It was about it being the least worst option in the longer term in the bigger picture for him. He felt it was very removed from the ideal of democracy and participation in supporting a vision for your country.

I find it hard as I often feel not genuinely in any one camp politically or socially. I have a great deal of sympathy for the 'Somewhere' tribe and the concept of taking a village to raise a child, a lot of empathy for the 'hard left' and the desire to address inequality and really dreadful poverty, and the I both like and despite some of the 'progressives' for some of their ideas which I share but anger at their complete lack of awareness, and then understand the frustrations of the 'young kind capitalists' who want the rewards of hard work. The one I struggle with most is the hard right. Spoken like a proper centrist I guess.

The thing is no one really has much vision and is prepared to admit reality at the moment in politics and that's what we need for success. Johnson certainly doesn't have both.

Housing/renting is such a huge issue.

It's correlated with age, of course. Renting is far more of an issue with younger voters, while the older voters are more likely to own a second property they are renting out.

Solving that one will be an issue.

But, of course, no-one really expects the Conservatives to solve that sort of thing. 🤷‍♀️

If they do, they may start to win over younger voters.

But they don't need those younger voters yet, it would seem.

(And May never need them, if voting changes are brought in ..)

I hope that Labour does work on getting the nearly 30% of people - even more in some areas - who don't vote to vote next time.

Find out who they are. Find out what they want. What they are looking for. Persuade them to vote. It worked in the EU referendum.

So many people don't vote. There are constituencies which are safe Labour seats, those that are safe Conservatives and those that are marginals.

In order to get power, you need those marginals. Just a slight shift in those marginals is enough.

Labour need to learn from the Conservatives. From Cummings.

The electorate is getting older. It's no good getting lots of support from one group if that group is concentrated in specific areas - not in a FPTP system.

I am sure that Labour knows this. Getting the student vote is great - but only helps where there are lots of students.

Use the data, Know the electorate in the target seats. And the electorate has changed.

I saw a great bar chart about a Labour support as regards small towns, large towns, cities, rural areas the other day and I thought, 'Red would love that

These hexagon charts are interesting. They need to be 3d though.

One shows the change of party.

We had upwards of 800 volunteers in some areas trying to talk to people, getting them to register, getting them to vote, Chomalungma.

Really!

You see, that's what Momentum are absolutely amazing at. They walk the walk and really believe in direct engagement.

Transport is false equivalence. Ordinary folk can make a living in Manchester. Terraced house for 100k wouldn't get you a garden shed in London. Yes there is plenty of poverty in the big cities but the "real" left behind are in the smaller towns - poor infrastructure, lack of opportunities in general.

Still costs you £4 to get a bus in a small town. Assuming of course there is one.

If there isn't it doesn't matter how much a house costs to buy as you haven't got a job to pay for one and therefore your issues with the cost of renting as similar.

If you've got fuck all money it doesn't matter if the rent is £800 a month or £8000.

And £4 for the bus versus £1.50 for the bus starts to matter at this point.

We had upwards of 800 volunteers in some areas trying to talk to people, getting them to register, getting them to vote

What reasons do people have for not registering to vote? I am always stunned by the turnout and the number of people who don't even bother voting.

I know that in the EU referendum, it was getting people who had never bother voting before to vote that helped a lot.

The cost of a home and - for families - childcare costs are 2 major issues dragging down so many people to an extent that I don't see in comparable economies

Could any party survive advocating even a gradual planned reduction in house prices to a more sensible multiple of average incomes ?
Yes, I know Northern prices are cheaper, but the average price in 2019 was 235k

With regard to paying taxes to subsidise childcare,
maybe it could be presented as making it easier for British families to have kids and hence reduce the need for immigration in future years

Ghost asked a few pages back why the LDs weren't being taken to task.

The results were disappointing, but in terms of seats won in 2017 and 2019 we lost one overall, but increased our vote share in every region. Additionally, I have only checked 8 of the results, we got good majorities - highlights for me Oxford West and Abingdon getting a majority of 8943 compared to 816 last time, Richmond Park, Zak Goldsmith's 45 majority being oveturned to give a majority in the region of 7,000. Tim Farron - on the ropes last time, with an increased majority. So disappointing but not a big staying at home or possibly desertion as Labour has seen.

As for Swinson - she was a newly elected leader - Corbyn was leading his party and has two electoral losses to his name.

The Cohen article is interesting Red and having been brought up in northern English or Welsh predominantly working class towns, it says a lot, but I don't know why he dragged the LibDems into the argument for towns which haven't been Liberal since Lloyd George's day.

The Coalition was nothing to do with me - I only joined after the Referendum when I got so sick of Nicola Blackwood that I wanted to do what I could to get her out. If I lived in a different area, I might have joined a different party.

BigChoc - I too know about rural poverty - really grim. One bus a week on market day if you are lucky- that sort of grim for public transport. My Doctor's surgery used to hold a special 'country' surgery on said market day, for the patients who could only get in on that day. Who would then have to wait around for the evening bus home. It was no wonder that me and my friends learnt to drive the minute we were 17 and bought a cheap car asap. At university, London based friends were amazed. Why did we country people from 'oop north' i.e. anywhere north of the home counties, all know how to drive, why didn't we get a cab?

Yes, Red. That was what Lisa Nandy said.

Chomalunma Loads of reasons. Top one being insecurity of tenure. People are forced to move again and again and again. On top of working and other responsibilities, it just gets harder and harder to keep getting all the documentation together to register.

From Twitter

Lisa Nandy
@lisanandy

'People do want radical change, and many of our policies were well liked, but we, and our future leader, must be trusted to deliver it.'

---

I think that's an overture to Momentum.
I really, really hope they'll listen.

I genuinely could see arguments for putting a x next to all three parties

I'd dearly love to know what the arguments were for voting Tory - unless a person is wealthy.

'People do want radical change, and many of our policies were well liked, but we, and our future leader, must be trusted to deliver it.'

And will they deliver it, now that it's been entrusted to Johnson. Even those who stayed at home and couldn't vote for anyone, must have realised the danger of letting Johnson in.

peregrina One advantage of rural poverty is that I grew up very fit, walking miles
Yes, we had a twice weekly bus into the next town, but I couldn't afford that

In my late teens, I would occasionally walk nearly 2 hours into town and 2 hours back, along many roads without pavement, so that required fast reflexes

I had exactly zero activities after school, but as we couldn't have afforded to pay, transport costs were irrelevant
Fortunately, we all had a free school bus then

I couldn't afford to start lessons until after my PhD - I was 28 by the time I got my licence and an old 895 cc Polo

No, Peregrina, I don't think many of them did.

I have a theory that Cumming's realised that democracy as realised through elections has some serious weak spots.

And complex, not immediately relatable to day to day experience, information is one of those weak spots.

PMK

My school couldn't put on after school activities because so many pupils had to be bussed in.

As for driving lessons - it was often a 17th birthday present, topped up with a lot of sessions from parents - who in many cases would teach bad habits.

And everyone knowing everybody - this has good and bad points - but for a young person, it can be so stifling.

And complex, not immediately relatable to day to day experience, information is one of those weak spots

3 word soundbites are much easier to get a message across.

It's working for Trump.

How do you get past that?

peregrina Tories would be the better choice for me personally and would have been for the last 35 years - if I selfishly didn't care about anyone like poster surviving

Not that I'm longterm wealthy by any means, just childfree, always worked at a decent enough job and hence never qualified for any benefits after uni

Millions like me

Income tax cuts would always be an advantage for me - although IHT wouldn't as I inherited nothing.

I agree with the suprise/shock about turnout being down! Really?! It was though, the figures are clear, not by much but it was. At one point I thought the “Youthquake” was going to have a big impact, maybe I spent too much time looking at Twitter?

The Labour “post mortem” I am happy to leave mostly to “died in the wool” Labour supporters and the party itself but suffice it to say from my own POV that I have voted for Labour more than once in the past at a GE and felt I couldn’t in 2019.

One thing I would say is that I think Labour first needs to recover the status of an organised, disciplined, functioning opposition. I think Labour in opposition from 2017 to 2019 was actually surprisingly effective but I think there is a risk that it will decend into infighting anD won’t fulfil this vital role well in the short term.

I have long held the view that if as many people as in June 2016 indicate they want something, then it is untenable for their elected representatives to stand in the way of delivering it. I do feel vindicated on that point by the results of Thursday night.

Returning to the situation of young people. I do think it is beyond doubt that a majority of them are unhappy with Brexit as an outcome and that this poses a fundamental challenge for our politics. I think there are 2 major risks , incoming “terrible generalisation” alert!

One is with young voters who may disengage as Labour moves on from Corbyn and the Conservatives totally ignore them because they don’t vote for them in significant numbers anyway.

Second one is the voters Boris has attracted to the Conservatives. Whatever people’s view of the likelihood of this in reality, my take is that this new government must deliver for them, not just on Brexit but on loads of other things. Failure to do that would not just be electorally costly but I do think it could potentially be genuinely dangerous.

I have, in the past, been rather dismissive, in thought if not in word of those who have claimed that the imminent rewakening of facism is on the cards. However, I do think that a second party letting down those “left behind” voters has the potential to be catastrophic in terms of people’s levels of trust in electoral politics. If the outcome is apathy that’s very undesirable but not a huge risk, but it could be worse.