Tag Archives: result

Tories lose two by-elections – but Labour only wins by default

The ballot box: do either of Labour’s two new MPs actually have a mandate, when the vast majority of voters in both constituencies did not support them?

Once again, This Writer feels compelled to say: don’t buy what Keir Starmer is pedalling – the by-election results in Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire are not great victories for Labour.

Yes, Starmer’s party gained the Parliamentary seats in both constituencies after yesterday’s (October 19) votes – but only because 46,000 Conservative voters stayed away from polling stations or didn’t post in their choices.

And yet, once again, we’re seeing reports of huge swings toward Labour only because they are recorded as percentages of the turnout, rather than of the electorate.

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So, in Tamworth, we’re told this:

But turnout was down from 46,066 in the 2019 general election to 25,586 – a drop of 20,480. The Conservative vote fell from 30,542 to to 10,403 – a drop of 20,139. So we can see very clearly that Labour’s gain was due to Tory disaffection.

The electorate is currently taken to be 72,544 (although these figures are from 2010 and are therefore around 13 years old).

Labour had 10,908 votes in 2019 – around 15 per cent of that electorate. Yesterday the party’s vote did indeed increase in real terms – but only by 811 votes to 11,719 – around 16 per cent of the electorate.

That is hardly a thumping majority.

Some might say it is not acceptable. With turnout at just 35.3 per cent, we can see that 64.7 per cent – nearly two-thirds of the electorate – did not want any of the candidates offered to them.

How can Sarah Edwards – the apparent winner – claim to represent them or their political desires?

She can’t.

Let’s move on to Mid-Bedfordshire, where the situation is even worse, although you wouldn’t know it from what’s being said:

At 40,720, turnout was 48.3 per cent of the 84,212-strong electorate but, again, the number actually voting for the winning candidate was pitiful.

Tory voters again avoided the ballot boxes in huge numbers, with only 12,680 supporting the Conservative candidate – down a massive 26,012 from the 38,692 who voted Nadine Dorries back into Parliament in 2019.

As turnout then was 64,717 we can see that the 23,993 fall in voter numbers is entirely Conservative, with 2,019 others choosing to vote who did not take part in 2019.

So, again, Labour’s gain is due only to Tory voters turning away.

Labour’s candidate, Alistair Strathern, actually gained fewer votes than the party’s candidate in 2019, Rhiannon Meades. She collected 14,028 – around 16.7 per cent of the electorate, while he could only manage 13,872 – around 16.5 per cent.

Again, it may be suggested that, with 51.7 per cent of the electorate not turning out, and with 83.5 per cent not voting for him, the winning candidate does not have a valid mandate to represent the constituency.

But you wouldn’t think that, listening to Starmer!

“I think this really is a gamechanger,” he said, according to the BBC.

“There is a confidence now in this changed Labour party that we can go anywhere across the country, put up a fight and win seats that we’ve never won before.”

Fine words about two constituencies where Labour will almost certainly lose both its new MPs at the next general election, when the disaffected Tory voters will most likely return to do their bit to foil Starmer’s chances of forming a government!

In fairness, he did admit, “I don’t want to get carried away” and added that “every single vote on this journey has to be earned”.

Some Conservatives are being far more realistic about their own performance:

I hate to say anything positive about the Tories…

But at least Frost isn’t lying to you. Starmer’s words are disingenuous at best.

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The big lie behind the Labour Rutherglen & Hamilton West by-election swing

Well done to Scottish Labour for winning the Rutherglen & Hamilton West by-election on Thursday (October 5) – but I think some people might be overstating it a bit:

The percentage swings are all wrong, of course, because they are only ever taken as percentages of the turnout – and not of the electorate.

So let’s run the numbers. The electorate is currently taken to be 81,124 people. So in the 2019 general election, when Labour won 18,545 votes, that would have been around 22.9 per cent of the electorate.

On Thursday, Labour won 17,845 votes – around 22 per cent of the electorate.

So instead of a 20.4 per cent swing to Labour, the vote actually showed a 0.9 per cent swing away from that party; 700 fewer people supported Labour.

Now look at Beth Rigby’s comment below:

“That sort of swing, if replicated in a GE, could see Labour gain 41 seats”. Really? Losing 0.9 per cent of the vote in every constituency in Scotland at a general election will give Labour 41 seats?

I have a doubt…

Of course, the turnout for this by-election was extremely low:

Here are the turnouts for by-elections over the last two years: you can see that Rutherglen and Hamilton West had the lowest turnout of the lot – and the second biggest percentage fall…

… so Joe Pass’s comment makes no sense to This Writer. The percentage change is important, but being within the range quoted doesn’t make the point silly – it reinforces the point, because it’s the second-greatest fall.

And the greatest fall was in a constituency that still had 44 per cent turnout – that’s 6.8 per cent more than Rutherglen and Hamilton West, with an electorate of nearly 88,000 – so, around 7,000 more voters to start with, and around 8,500 more people voted. That means Joe Pass’s claim is doubly wrong – the actual number turning out is important.

This is not a “huge win” for Labour. It is a minor disaster.

It could be argued that the numbers are less important because a general election always attracts more votes, but if that just means a proportionate drop in voters, then Labour will be in even more trouble.

And there’s no evidence that this won’t happen.

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Vox Political predicts the results of the Tory leadership election

Tory twisters: it seems to This Writer that they are now trying to cheat their own party membership out of electing the candidate they want.

It seems the plan at the moment is to hold a hustings on Monday, with three candidates participating. These characters must have managed to accumulate at least 100 nominations from among Conservative MPs. That’s a five-fold increase from the 20 they had to get in the summer leadership campaign.

Of these, two will be presented to the wider membership of the Conservative Party – if two remain in the race. Remember when Theresa May became leader? The other candidate dropped out and she had a coronation instead of an election.

Boris Johnson seems unlikely to get onto the ballot paper – despite a large campaign for him among Tory members and supporters. He’s unlikely to get the 100 votes he would need. And besides, there’s an investigation hanging over his head that may possibly see him ejected from Parliament altogether.

How ridiculous would the government look if their new leader was subsequently expelled for prior misdemeanours?

As Professor Tim Wilson suggests (below), it is likely that party chairman Jake Berry and 1922 Committee chairman Graham Brady are hoping the Parliamentary party will coalesce behind a single candidate, thereby depriving party members of the opportunity to select another clunker like Liz Truss. Watch:

This theory – that a single candidate should be chosen – seems corroborated in this Sky News item:

Who does This Writer think will be crowned next week?

Rishi Sunak.

Other commentators have already commented on his silence throughout the disasters of Liz Truss’s leadership – suggesting that someone in a grey suit may have had a word with him, to sit tight and stay quiet, and he’ll get something nice further down the line.

Also, he was the runner-up in the last leadership race, so some of the Tory grandees might think it’s only fair. And he’s continuity Johnson…

Is he the right man for the job? Absolutely not.

The UK needs a general election – that much is abundantly clear. Confidence in the Tories has nose-dived; they have binned the manifesto on which they won the 2019 election and therefore they have no mandate to continue.

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Terrible night for Tories – but Labour fails to break through in local elections

Boris Johnson is facing disaster after voters turned on his Conservatives in the 2022 local elections.

At the time of writing, the Conservatives have lost more than 120 council seats after an election in which they should have expected to take large numbers of seats from Labour (the reason being that Labour had gained massively the last time these seats were contested in 2018, due to the so-called ‘Corbyn bounce’).

But Labour has failed to make the breakthrough that some party supporters predicted for it in the run-up to the poll; claims that it would gain 800 seats seem certain to be scotched with the party only 35 seats better-off at the time of writing.

Party leader Keir Starmer has been talking up the party’s success in taking the London councils of Westminster, Wandsworth and Barnet from the Conservatives, but elsewhere the party has only retained control of councils with lower majorities as voters turned away from the “tepid Tory” fake alternative.

The strongest gains were made by the Liberal Democrats, with an increase of 58 councillors to 261 at the time of writing – and by the Green Party which has won 39 seats, a gain of 23 in the seats for which results have been declared so far.

The vote share for both Labour and the Conservatives has fallen – by a significant four per cent for the Tories, and by part of one per cent for Labour. The Greens have gained the most – three per cent.

The message so far is that Boris Johnson’s leadership of the Conservatives is in the balance as voters turn away – but Keir Starmer’s Labour has not picked up enough momentum to form a credible alternative.

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#Tories retain #OldBexleyAndSidcup with massively reduced majority

The winner: and isn’t it ironic that the first member of the Party of Brexit to win an election after the UK split from the European Union was a man called Louie French?

Here’s an election that will tell misleading tales.

Conservative Louie French has been elected to take over the Parliamentary seat of Old Bexley and Sidcup from his late Tory colleague James Brokenshire – so the Tories will claim a huge victory and that confidence in Boris Johnson has not been shaken by recent scandals.

But the low turnout suggests otherwise. Fewer than half of the voters who turned out for the general election bothered this time (70 per cent of the local electorate in 2019 v 33.5 per cent this time around). That’s a drop from 46,145 votes to 21,733.

And most of those who didn’t bother coming seem to have been Tories. Brokenshire’s vote in 2019 was more than the total number of votes cast this time around, at 29,786 (45 per cent of the local electorate). French managed to scrape up 11,189 votes (just 17 per cent of voters in the constituency).

That’s a massive drop – and I don’t think we can attribute it solely to the normal fall in turnout for a by-election. French received only 37 per cent of the number of votes Brokenshire had. I think it’s fair to say that thinking Conservative voters didn’t bother coming to this party because they don’t want anything to do with Boris Johnson any more.

More importantly, the fact is that 83 per cent of people in this constituency didn’t want the Conservative, but he is still going to occupy their Parliamentary seat. If ever there was an argument for proportional representation, this is it.

But of course the corrupt Tories won’t ever accept the argument for change because the current situation benefits them.

And then there’s Labour. Keir Starmer will undoubtedly crow about his candidate, Daniel Francis, increasing that party’s vote share by 7.4 per cent. But it’s only a relative increase – that is to say, Francis received a higher share of a lower number of votes.

In fact, Labour lost 4,123 votes in comparison with the party’s performance in 2019. Candidate Daniel Francis’s share of the local electorate was just 10 per cent – a drop of six per cent from Dave Tingle’s share of the constituency’s available vote in 2019 (16 per cent). That’s how 6,711 votes compares with 10,834 votes when the total local electorate is taken into account, rather than those who bothered to vote.

Starmer might be happy that his candidate lost fewer votes than the Tory – but when the best you can do is discuss relative falls in the number of votes you’ve received, you’re on shaky ground.

Looking at the other parties, the Liberal Democrats continued their decline. In 2019, Simone Reynolds received 3,822 votes (5.8 per cent of the local electorate). This year the same candidate scraped up only 647 votes (less than one per cent of the local electorate – a 4.81 per cent drop).

Perhaps the big shock of the by-election was the fact that the Green Party’s Jonathan Rooks didn’t scoop up support from disillusioned Labour voters, as the party has in local government by-elections since Starmer became party leader.

He picked up 830 votes – down from Matt Browne’s 1,477 in 2019 (1.27 per cent of the local electorate v 2,23 per cent). Again, the relative figures show a swing of 0.6 per cent upwards for this party when in fact its support has fallen.

Finally, we should discuss the popularity of Reform UK (formerly the Brexit Party) and its candidate Richard Tice.

Former prime minister Gordon Brown demanded an investigation into this party’s finances in May 2019, after concerns were raised that it was receiving foreign money, possibly from hostile governments that were trying to destabilise the UK’s political system – like that of Russia.

Tice had insisted that all donations to his party were in Sterling but this referred to its PayPal account and was therefore unpersuasive; if a person or organisation opens a PayPal account in the UK then payments into it will be in UK pounds.

The party’s website had no safeguards to ensure that donors were eligible to support UK political parties and a Mirror investigation found that it was possible to sign up as a Brexit Party supporter under the name of Vladimir Putin, giving the address of the Kremlin.

Well, if foreign countries have been bankrolling Reform UK, it hasn’t worked – although Tice did make a big splash for a small party candidate, with 1,432 votes, equivalent to 2.2 per cent of the local electorate.

None of the other candidates had more than 300 votes.

Incidentally, a quick poll by This Site after the vote was closed showed that Vox Political readers correctly predicted a Conservative victory, but the comments suggested they agreed with This Writer about the reasons for it – that only the most tribal Conservatives would pay this by-election much interest.

“If Boris Johnson had s**t on the paper and shoved the pencil up his bleached anus Tories would have politely pinched their noses, licked the pencil tip and put an ‘x’ in their box cos they think someone else’s ballot was accidentally s**t on and not theirs,” tweeted one person.

Looking at the result, who can argue with that?

AFTERWORD: the following tweet is satirical, but maybe it should be shown to all the voters in Old Bexley and Sidcup who didn’t bother to vote in yesterday’s by-election, as it tars them with the same brush as all those who voted for the new blue suit:

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GCSE results: Were exams traditionally DOWNgraded for non-private/grammar school pupils?

Exams: they didn’t happen this year or in 2020, and under teacher assessments, grades shot up. And after last year’s results, assessments by independent/grammar school teachers shot up further than those by teachers in state schools. Are millions of pupils, past and present, the victims of a national downgrading scam?

This Site received a very interesting – and worrying – comment on this year’s A-level results which I want to share with you.

It said:

“Surely, the BIG story is that this year probably reveals that lots more pupils should have done well in previous years, as well as in this year, but the exam system deliberately DOWNGRADED pupils so that numbers and quotas for college places etc would not be exceeded.

“In reality, before now, many pupils would have done well enough for a University place but, given a lack of enough places, the exam results were “doctored by algorithm” so that, by some mysterious process, the number of suitable pupils was almost exactly the number of college places available!

“The remnant 11-plus system in Kent or Glos works in the same way, producing enough pupils to fill the Grammar school places available, but then “failing” many others who, in other years, would have “passed” with exactly the same exam results.

“But this year, the teachers just made honest assessments of pupil progress and achievements and did not consider things like deliberately downgrading some results so that college places would not be under pressure.

“The big losers are , surely, the thousands of pupils in previous years who did just as well as this year’s, but were then downgraded to mean that they no longer hoped to go on to University.

“Public school kids, like Clarkson, didn’t have to worry about all this as they were set up for life anyway.

“Once again, it would have been the working-class pupils, who flogged their guts out to do well, expected some good results, but were then dismayed to find that ,somehow, they hadn’t done well enough.

“And, in the way this system always works, the victims end up blaming themselves and wish they could have worked harder or were, “more intelligent” etc.”

Looking at this year’s GCSE results in comparison with last year’s, that comment seems very close to the mark – although This Writer doesn’t think it’s about denying college places to people from state schools.

It’s about lying that state school pupils don’t deserve college places and independent/grammar school pupils do.

Look at the way top grades – over all candidates – have shot up by almost half since teacher evaluation was used instead of examinations – from 22 per cent of the total in 2019 to 30 per cent in 2021.

To me, that doesn’t indicate a sudden improvement in pupil performance and it certainly doesn’t indicate that exam conditions have a bad effect on grades.

It tells me that pupils at examinations have been traditionally and habitually marked down, if they were from state schools.

Further evidence is in the way teachers at independent and grammar schools, seeing last year’s results, have marked their pupils up in order to maintain their lead.

What, you think the quality of their teaching or the abilities of their pupils have suddenly shot up by three percent since last year (for grammars) and 14 per cent since 2019 (for independents)?

That isn’t realistic.

And, coupled with the rise in A-level grades over the same period of time and for the same reason, it gives me reason to suggest that state school pupils who took exams in 2019 and at any year before need to get angry.

We should be demanding to know why our results were so low in comparison to the grammars and the independents.

What were the criteria used in marking our papers?

Was there inbuilt bias against state schools? If so, who demanded it?

Any such bias will certainly have -arbitrarily – blighted our careers ever since, and that is utterly unacceptable.

Realistically, we won’t get honest answers from a system that is biased against us. We’ll be fobbed off with lies.

So how about an experiment?

Let’s demand a new system in which exam papers are anonymised – pupils are given numbers to put on their papers, and then the papers are mixed up centrally before being sent to examiners who have not been told any details of their origin.

Then they would have to mark honestly, and then we might learn what has really been going on in the UK’s education system.

As one of millions who are likely to have been penalised on the basis of the school I attended, I’m up for it.

How about you?

Source: GCSE results: pupils achieve record numbers of top grades in England

Trump acquitted in second impeachment trial – but not by the court of public opinion

Did anybody think Donald Trump would be found guilty by the Republican-dominated US Senate?

Impeached for the second time in his presidency – for inciting the Capitol riot in January that led to the deaths of five people – the evidence was considered by the 100-strong Senate, whose membership is evenly balanced between Republicans (Trump’s party) and Democrats.

For Trump to be convicted, a simple majority was not enough; the rules state that two-thirds of the Senate would have to find against him.

And here’s the result:

Final vote tally 57-43 but Senate fails to achieve two-thirds majority needed to convict former president of incitement.

Seven Republicans voted against their now-former president but it wasn’t enough. The others supported Trump.

It is suggested that they would have done so, no matter what evidence was put before them. That is a matter for their consciences.

The court of public opinion is another matter, though.

And the reaction of the people seems clear:

 

 

“The only thing easier to buy in the USA than a gun is a Republican Senator.”

Fair comment?

Source: Donald Trump acquitted in second impeachment trial | Donald Trump | The Guardian

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Tories have Commons Twitter account banned from tweeting vote results

He fought propagandists – but did he expect his own party to become the enemy? Churchill’s statue stares toward Parliament. If it was the man himself, it would probably turn its back in disgust.

Can you believe this? The Tories have contrived to have the House of Commons Twitter account stopped from tweeting vote results – because Johnson’s party said it was biased against them.

The House of Commons Twitter account has been banned from tweeting the results of votes after Tory MPs complained it was breaking impartiality rules when one tweet went viral.

During the passage of the trade bill, intended to pave the way for post-Brexit trade deals, the Commons Twitter account shared the outcomes of votes on amendments and new clauses: a 326-263 defeat for a clause relating “to parliamentary approval of trade agreements”, and approval without division for amendments about “sharing information and ministerial functions relating to trade”.

The descriptions were taken from the explanatory statement written by the MP who proposed the motion, and the tweet about new clause 17 was no different. That clause, the tweet said, was “intended to protect the NHS and publicly funded health and care services in other parts of the UK from any form of control from outside the UK”, explaining that it had been defeated 340 votes to 251.

The defeat allowed Labour to argue that Conservative MPs had voted against protecting the NHS from overseas control. The tweet itself was a key piece of evidence, which is why it gained 5,000 likes and almost 17,500 retweets in less than 24 hours.

That drew the attention of Tory MPs, who were bombarded with questions from constituents about why they had voted against such protection. The day after, MPs from the party made a complaint to the clerk of the House, the politically neutral civil servant who oversees the work of the support staff, including the social media team.

They argued that the tweet was in breach of the Commons’ requirement for impartiality. By the end of the day, the Commons team had deleted it and posted an apology.

So it was perfectly permissible for the offending words to be published in the explanatory statement by the MP who proposed the motion; the Tories just didn’t want them to get to the public.

What does that tell us about the Conservative government?

That they don’t want us to have full information about what happens in Parliament?

That they think Parliamentary media should not provide information to the public?

That they want such media to offer pro-Tory propaganda instead?

Johnson and his cronies have really taken the Josef Goebbels method to heart.

But the act has been a huge turn-off to the public – including This Writer (but you’d expect that, I’m sure):

I would have thought the answer was obvious: a would-be fascist dictatorship. But Johnson’s Tories are even failures at that.

Source: Commons Twitter account banned from tweeting vote results | Politics | The Guardian

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Tory corruption: why hide results of inquiry into NHS Covid-19 deaths?

Sufferer: Did any NHS staff member realise, when the Covid cases started coming into hospitals, that they could end up occupying the same beds as the people they were treating?

Who will benefit from the decision to keep secret the findings of a government review of Covid-19 related deaths of NHS staff?

The deceased won’t; they are beyond worrying about these things.

Their families won’t; it’s in their interests to have any mistakes made public, to get justice for the deaths of their relatives.

Other NHS staff won’t; it’s in their interests to have any mistakes made public, to ensure that they are not repeated, possibly harming them.

No, the only people who will benefit from this decision are the decision-makers themselves; secrecy will hide any mistakes they made, obscuring any responsibility they may have for the deaths.

And who are the decision-makers?

Matt Hancock. Boris Johnson.

The Conservative government.

This stinks of Tory corruption.

Source: Coronavirus: Cover-up fears as reviews of Covid-19 deaths among NHS staff to be kept secret | The Independent

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Project Yellowhammer – and the consequences of ‘no deal’ Brexit – explained!

“Stop Brexit!”: Even British comic legend Andy Capp has a reason to fear it.

This was on a friend’s Facebook page so I make no guarantees as to authenticity.

That said, it makes about as much sense as anything we’ve had from the Conservative government.

See what you think:

Yellowhammer summary for those who haven’t read it but want to know what it says explained by someone with a vague idea.

(Note: This is currently being called the ‘Reasonable Worst Case Planning Assumptions’ It only has that title because of Gove being caught lying about it to the select committee, and had to retract that it is, in fact, the base scenario. In many areas I’ve got business experience of, this is optimistic).

1) Most businesses aren’t ready. Big companies are likely to be more ready than smaller companies because they’ve been paying idiots like me to do so for the past months/years.

So some companies will struggle.

2) Leaving in October means also having our national inability to deal with any weather that isn’t moderate.

3) We leave around the time of half-term school holidays, which isn’t great.

4) We hope Ireland won’t cut supply of power to NI. but we can’t make them keep it going

5) Goods through Dover will drop by half. It will be slightly better in a few months. If you have family in Kent, you’ll need a helicopter to visit them at Christmas

6) If you’re going abroad (in the EU), it will take longer to get through customs. Hopefully not US Border durations.

7) Energy costs will go up, some energy companies might (will) go bankrupt.

8) We’ll have a shortage of some medicines. This also includes Vet medicines needed for animals that farmers might want to export.

9) Do you like fresh food? Shame about that. Come back in six months. Also less choice of food in general, and Christmas might be chicken in a tin.. Also we (govt) are saying we can’t assess how bad it is, despite all the unions and businesses telling us, so it’s not our fault when it’s worse than we’re saying here.

10) We think we’ll all have clean water. .Maybe a few hundred thousand people won’t. They might need bottles, or street bowsers, or rain water, rain water is good.

11) Financial Services companies might be fucked. Good job they’re not one of our biggest contributors to GDP and tax or anything.

12) International criminals and terrorists are in for a bonanza.

13) If you’re a Brit living in Europe, err, we don’t have a clue, hope the country you live in is better than us.

14) If you’re an IT company, travel company or anyone who has to send data back and forth with Europe then, err, bollocks. Not looking good. We’re not really sure.

15) Gibraltar’s fucked

16) Riots, public disorder, more homeless, people stealing bread, good job we haven’t slashed police numbers or anything, isnt it?

17) The Dartford crossing could be blocked by the traffic from Dover, which means fuel supplies in Kent, London and the SE in general might all run out. Also about 2000 job losses from refineries closing, and weeks of fuel shortages.

18) Insurance companies (that haven’t mitigated it, ahem) are going to have some problems.

19) If you’re poor, you’re going to be worse off. Actually if you’re poor, struggling, middle class or anything but rich, then you’re going to be worse off.

20) Northern Ireland is more fucked than Gibraltar. Job losses, food shortages, protests, dissident groups etc.

21) Cod Wars mark 2

22) Care homes could collapse en masse. Like, lots of them.

As you can see, nothing to worry about, certainly not all the things they also haven’t included.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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