Tag Archives: voting

VIDEO BLOG: Starmer’s right-wing stance is not a smokescreen. Here’s how you can tell

Yes, I’ve made a video out of the article from last week. There are good reasons for this.

Firstly, it contains excellent advice on how to vote properly. It seems people are confused about the fact that they are expected to vote for whoever has policies they think will be of benefit to the UK as a whole – not for the party they consider to be tribally theirs, even though that organisation hasn’t actually helped them in decades, and not for the party they think is best-placed to keep out another party they don’t like.

Secondly, it contains excellent reasoning on why not to vote for Keir Starmer.

Thirdly, it provides an opportunity for you all to visit the original article, which has not received anything like enough attention. It’s at https://wp.me/p4Sru1-hyZ

Watch and enjoy:


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Labour voting-intentions data can’t help harvesters because it’s probably changed now

Oh dear. It seems a Labour Party system for storing people’s voting intentions may have been compromised by people who may want to use it for mischief.

I write “may” for a good reason.

Here’s the story:

The voting intentions of millions of Britons in local authority wards across the country could have been at risk of misuse as a result of a glitch in the Labour party’s main phone-banking system, the Guardian understands.

Experts had warned that the sensitive data could potentially have been harvested via an automated program and used for targeted election interference by campaign groups or even hostile states.

More than half a million Labour party members have access to the Dialogue system, used by activists to make calls to the public for a variety of reasons, including to ascertain how they are planning to vote.

However, within just a few clicks, the glitch meant that they could also access sensitive information including postcodes, which – when combined with voting intentions – would potentially have allowed them to generate a list of millions of people across Britain.

I wonder how much use it will be.

Depending on when the information was received, and bearing in mind the way the current Labour leadership has behaved, it is entirely possible that a lot of people who said they’d vote Labour have changed their minds.

Similarly, people who said they’d vote for the Tories may also have changed their minds and opted for Keir Starmer’s slightly-less-right-wing party.

And I remember from my time on Labour’s phone banks that a few people said they’d vote one way, and then didn’t.

In fact, I don’t think any of that information can be trusted. Could it ever?

Source: Labour glitch put voting intentions data of millions at risk | Labour | The Guardian


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Labour and Tories in Scotland want tactical voting – to force out the SNP | Maximilien Robespierre

This should be political sacrilege to both Labour and the Tories.

South of the border, they are bitter enemies.

But in Scotland, they both consider the Scottish National Party to be the greater enemy – so party leaders have been calling on their followers to vote tactically in order to get rid of the SNP:


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Starmer’s bid to gerrymander Labour leadership elections is shattered – so he’s falling back on Plan B

Entitled: Keir Starmer HATES democracy and is doing all he can to remove it from the Labour Party.

Entitled types like Sir Keir always have a back-up plan to destroy democracy when their first one goes wrong, don’t they?

After the trade unions unanimously trashed Starmer’s lie that going back to an ‘electoral college’ voting system in leader elections (he had lied that it would empower the unions when in fact it would hand a huge amount of power to his crony right-wing Labour MPs), he took a different set of proposals to Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee (NEC).

It’s not a coincidence that the NEC currently consists mostly of right-wingers just like Starmer after he spent a year filling it with his cronies.

That organisation has wholeheartedly approved Starmer’s new plan to keep left-wing MPs off of leadership election ballots.

He is demanding that any candidate who wants to replace him should have the support of 20 per cent of MPs (according to the BBC; 25 per cent, according to The Guardian), rather than the 10 per cent required now.

This would effectively block out left-wingers before the wider party membership – which is broadly left-wing – could have a chance to vote for the member it supports.

The intention is clear: deprive grassroots members of the chance to have a leader they want, instead forcing them to choose between the least-worst options among right-wing Tory clones. It’s a sure-fire way to empty the party of democratic socialists.

Details are less clear on some of Starmer’s other plans to end democracy within the Labour Party.

He wants to abolish registered supporters, who pay a cut-price rate to show their support for the party and in return are allowed to vote in internal elections.

This would make party membership and participation the province of people who are rich enough to afford the standard membership fee, which isn’t cheap.

But it is not clear whether this was approved by the NEC.

He also wanted people to be in full membership for a longer period before being allowed to vote in leadership contests. This would give his perverted disciplinary system time to weed out the socialists before they had a chance to take part in internal party voting (you won’t be able to call it democracy).

Nobody seems to be saying what’s happened to that.

At local level, Starmer wanted to protect his cronies in the Parliamentary Labour Party by changing the procedure to deselect sitting MPs.

Instead of supporting democratic, open selections in which MPs would have to re-apply for the job in advance of general elections, Starmer wants a presumption that MPs will be re-selected automatically, unless more than half of constituency party members demand a contest.

Finally (as far as we can tell), he wants to restrict the number of policies that may be debated at party conference from 20 down to 12.

The fact that Starmer is proposing any of these ideas is disgusting in itself. No Labour leader should be trying to restrict popular representation.

The possibility that he might get any of them passed by conference is appalling.

Starmer has spent considerable time, in the run-up to the conference, cancelling delegates’ passes on trumped-up disciplinary charges (or security grounds, according to on-the-day reports).

And now it seems he wants to avoid full, properly-counted card voting on crucial issues such as whether his hitman David Evans will be rejected as general secretary.

A ‘show of hands’ vote would succeed or fail on whether the conference chairperson reckons a majority is for a particular side – but would not take account of the fact that each hand does not carry the same voting weight, as delegates from larger local parties and larger unions represent larger numbers of eligible votes.

None of this is acceptable.

In the name of democracy, let us all hope that Starmer is defeated on every one of these despicable offences to decency.

Source: Starmer ditches key part of plan to change Labour leader selection rules | Keir Starmer | The Guardian

Exposed: treacherous Starmer plan to make the Tories more democratic than Labour

Blairite puppet: Keir Starmer wants to return Labour to a voting system that deprives members of any power, instead giving it to his cronies in the Parliamentary Labour Party in the same way his forerunner Tony Blair rigged the party system in his own favour.

Keir Starmer really is determined to make the Labour Party toxic, isn’t he?

His latest wheeze is to turn away anybody who believes in democracy, by making leadership elections more undemocratic than those of the Conservative Party.

You don’t believe me?

At the moment, the Tories elect their leaders by a system in which two candidates are chosen by MPs (in a series of votes that whittle down the potential choices) and then the wider membership is invited to choose between them on a “one member, one vote” basis.

Labour’s current system is more democratic, in that if a vacancy arises, a candidate may be nominated by five per cent of the Parliamentary Labour Party or at least three affiliate organisations (including two trade unions) representing at least five per cent of the affiliated membership; if an incumbent is challenged, a candidate must be nominated by at least 20 per cent of MPs prior to party conference. Then the wider membership votes by preferential ballot (candidates ranked 1, 2, 3 etc). Eligible party members, affiliates and registered supporters each have one ballot.

Starmer wants to change Labour’s system back to the corrrupt ‘electoral college’ system that gives disproportionate weight to votes by the few hundred party members who happen to be members of Parliament. They would get an entire third of the vote.

The other votes would be split between trade unions, whose block vote would represent another third of the total – and Constituency Labour Parties whose officers would vote for their choice, whether it was supported by the members or not. They would take up the last third.

Rank and file Labour members would not have any say in the election of a future leader at all. Around 200 MP would have more voting power than around 400 thousand rank-and-file members.

Well, we know what that’s all about, don’t we?

It’s about keeping a bitterly unpopular leadership failure – and Tory fellow-traveller – at the top of the Labour Party even if the membership at large is desperate to remove him.

Starmer would find it much easier to keep his job if a third of the votes in a leadership election come from his right-wing (and deeply unpleasant) fellow cuckoos, many of whom were parachuted into seats during the Blair/Brown years and are closer to the Tories than to traditional Labour in terms of their political values; and if CLP executives that have been purged of left-wingers under the nightmare tenure of unelected general secretary David Evans get to impose their will on party members.

Looking into the future, the trend would then continue because genuine democratic socialists would quit in large numbers, in the realisation that Labour is now neither democratic nor socialist.

And Boris Johnson would then have a free ticket back into Downing Street for as long as the situation would last, because Keir Starmer has absolutely no interest in mounting any serious opposition to the hard-right Tory despot.

Starmer’s words on the subject are as ridiculous as you might expect: “I have said I will make the Labour Party the party of working people, I am determined that the Labour party I lead focuses on the country, on the concerns of voters, so we need party reforms that better connect us with working people.” Nonsense!

He’s making it the party of privileged right-wing MPs! This duplicitous piece of treachery would sever the connection between the party leadership and working people and Starmer knows it. He is simply trying to trick the gullible.

Fortunately, there remain a few people in the Labour movement who are prepared to oppose the Blue Abstainer.

Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said, according to the BBC: “This proposal to reduce the membership to one third of the vote, while inflating the vote of Labour MPs is unfair, undemocratic and a backwards step.

“People will remember that at their conference, Labour talked about rules not issues.

“That’s a huge error for them. We are almost trying to save them (the Labour leadership) from themselves.

“This is not the path to go down.”

And Momentum vice chair Callum Bell warned: “These rule changes would mark the start of a civil war in the party. Starmer holds the membership in contempt.”

On Twitter, Labour MP Jon Trickett led the fightback – and it wasn’t long before fellow members made the obvious point:

Fellow MP Ian Lavery has also spoken up in support of democracy:

And there are others – all from the Left of the party:

Perhaps predictably, we are yet to see opposition to this insult from the likes of Yvette Cooper, Angela Rayner, Lisa Nandy, Jess Phillips, Ruth Smeeth, Wes Streeting, and the rest of the Usual Suspects infesting the Labour side of the Green Benches.

The good news is that, unless Starmer gets support for the idea from at least two out of three major trade unions at a meeting this week (September 22), it won’t go forward.

So it’s over to you, GMB, Usdaw and Unison. Do you support worker (and member) empowerment, or are you all for the bosses dictating and the rest of us slaving? Your choice.

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Starmer’s dilemma: where does Labour go after Chesham and Amersham?

The problem, not the solution: Keir Starmer – and all his supporters – are a betrayal of the Labour Party and of Labour voters. We all know it. Labour is unelectable until they have all left the party – and they won’t go. They are the worst of all Boris Johnson’s Tory enablers.

No points to anybody who responds to the headline with “Batley and Spen”.

It would be fair to say that Keir Starmer did not expect to win the Chesham and Amersham by-election.

But the scale of his loss there – and I think it should be understood that it was a failure that Starmer owns – should make it clear to him that he has taken Labour in the wrong direction.

His party’s 622 votes – just 1.6 per cent of turnout and one-sixteenth of the number Jeremy Corbyn managed to raise in 2017 – is fewer than the number of people in that constituency’s Labour Party.

Either party members abstained or they voted for someone else, which is an offence for which they could be expelled.

(Or there could be far fewer members remaining in that constituency than Starmer is willing to admit, after the – alleged – mass exodus of members following his election as leader. If so, even if remaining members did vote for somebody else, he’ll be in a quandary over whether to carry out disciplinary procedures.)

Encouragingly, it seems almost nobody aged less than 70 voted for the Conservatives:

I’m not sure Richard Murphy is right about that, as the number of pensioners in the UK will remain very high, some way into the future (even after the ravages of Covid-19), and the Tories have a knack of duping the gullible into supporting them (or perhaps that should be bribing the gullible). Still, it suggests that the Tories’ time is running out.

That said, the simple fact is that people aged under 70 simply didn’t go for Labour, despite Starmer’s attempts to woo them by changing Labour’s direction sharply to the political right. They voted Liberal Democrat.

I draw two conclusions from that:

Firstly, Starmer’s claim that Boris Johnson’s party has enjoyed a “vaccine bounce” – resurgent popularity because of the perceived success of the Covid-19 vaccine rollout – is bunkum. Or at least, any such bounce has now petered out.

Secondly, that people prefer to put their trust in political organisations that have some consistency about them, rather than wandering around all over the political spectrum searching for votes – or very obviously trying to fool people into voting for them – like Labour under Starmer (and Miliband, Brown and Blair before him).

Some commentators are now suggesting that Labour should at least discuss the idea of a “progressive alliance” with other opposition parties like the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, to field just one candidate against the Tories in Tory strongholds, thereby making it easier to force them out. But there are problems with that…

Yes indeed; the Liberal Democrats won because they are the most similar to the Conservatives in Chesham and Amersham, not because they are a radical alternative.

So a “progressive alliance” isn’t going to happen. And dreams of getting the Tories out by using proportional representation will continue to be dreams for the foreseeable future because the Tories are in power and they aren’t going to bring it in because they know it would harm them.

What’s left? Tactical voting?

But that will just result in another hung Parliament that the Tories will probably dominate – with Liberal Democrats joining them for the sake of power if they get enough seats. We’ve already had that from 2010 to 2015.

And all of this theorising neglects one simple fact:

In order to beat the Tories, whichever party you support will need to deserve to win.

And Labour, under Keir Starmer, doesn’t.

How can left-wing voters support a party that deserts them in the way Starmer has? How can they support a party whose Parliamentary representatives no longer come from the working class but represent exactly the kind of middle-class privilege that Labour was originally created to oppose?

How can right-wing voters support a party they know only courts them in order to gain power for its own purposes? They know the Tories are untrustworthy – but only in their promises to people earning less than £100,000 a year; as long as Tory priorities are aligned with their own, they’ll carry on with Johnson’s bandits, even if it means imposing fascist-style dictatorship on the rest of us.

Starmer has been criticised because he hasn’t brought forward a single policy to replace the 10 pledges he scrapped as soon as they had won him the Labour leadership under false pretences. There is a reason for this failure: Starmer is trying to find a magic promise that will fool a majority of voters, just long enough to get himself into Downing Street.

His problem is that we all know that this is what he’s doing. He is probably the most classic example of Tony Benn’s “weathercock” ever to come forward – a career politician who doesn’t have any principles of his own but goes any way the wind blows, chasing votes according to what his focus groups tell him is popular.

And Starmer’s focus groups are disastrously out-of-touch. This means Starmer is continuously trying to tell us what we want, and getting it wrong.

So he drapes himself in the Union Flag because he has seen the Tories do it and he thinks it appeals to our patriotism – but under Boris Johnson’s fascism, we have no reason to feel patriotic at all.

So he blames Jeremy Corbyn for his failures and tries to remind us that Corbyn was accused of letting anti-Semitism into the Labour Party – when we all know that the accusations were (mostly) false (there are always a few racists in any large organisation but the leader cannot be blamed for them). Labour has just been in court defending itself against a group of former members who have brought a hugely damaging case against the party.

In all this squirming, he presents himself as entirely untrustworthy.

So we don’t trust him, and that means we don’t trust Labour:

It won’t change until Starmer is gone. I don’t mean that he should step down as leader of the Labour Party; I mean he should leave the party altogether, along with all the other cuckoos who got in under Kinnock, Blair, Brown and Miliband. You know who they are. Including party staff members who support them rather than traditional (pre-Kinnock) Labour values.

One more note: I could happily tap out a list of policies that Labour should adopt in order to win public support – it isn’t hard to do.

But there is no point while Starmer and his cronies are in charge. They would see such policies as a marketing strategy to win votes – and if it worked, they would then ditch those policies in favour of the right-wing agenda they’ve had all along.

They have to go.

The problem is, they won’t. They know they are unacceptable; unelectable. But they absolutely won’t allow anybody to lead Labour who could possibly break the deadlock.

And in the meantime, Boris Johnson gets worse and worse. Enabled by Starmer.

Tories plan to rig local elections with change from proportional representation to FPTP

The Conservatives are planning to make it easier for them to win local elections by changing the voting system to make it less representative.

Currently, elections for Combined Authority mayors, the mayor of London and police and crime commissioners are carrried out using a version of proportional representation which takes into account the preferences of people whose first choices do not have the highest number of votes.

Two candidates go through to the second round if no one gets more than 50 per cent of the primary vote.

A winner is then chosen from the remaining two by taking preferences into account from the voters who chose eliminated candidates as their first preference.

This means that everybody’s vote helps to influence the result – but the Conservatives lose out.

That’s why they want to change the system to FPTP – “First Past The Post” – in which the party winning the most votes in a single round of voting wins the election, even if it doesn’t have the support of a majority of the people.

Priti Patel announcing the plan to change the system, lied that the British people had rejected proportional representation in a referendum in 2011.

She was wrong. The public endorsed FPTP only for general elections, because the referendum was focused only on them.

The intention is clear: the Tories are going to rig local elections to ensure that they have the best chance of winning.

The London School of Economics has warned that the change could wipe out the accountability of a London mayor (for example) by removing small parties like the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party from the London Assembly, which holds the mayor to account.

And London Labour warned,

For the Tory Government to impose a change to the electoral system without first asking the views of Londoners in a follow-up referendum demonstrates their breathtaking arrogance and their utter disdain for devolution.

Fortunately for democracy, any change to electoral systems will have to be approved by Parliament via legislation, and this cannot happen before the local elections – including the London mayoral election – on May 6 this year.

Just watch how quickly the Tories try to impose the change if they lose that election!

Source: Government plans to change London mayor elections to First Past the Post : CityAM

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Should Labour and the Lib Dems go into an electoral pact?

Number 10: What strategy will put Jeremy Corbyn in the prime minister’s house?

Simon Wren-Lewis on his Mainly Macro blog raises an interesting question: with the Brexit Party making overtures to the Tories about an electoral pact, should Labour and the Liberal Democrats do the same?

He makes some good points in favour of it – there are many seats where it would make sense for either party to stand aside, allowing the other a greater opportunity for victory, and it makes no sense for the Liberal Democrats to try to block Labour, only to let the “no deal Brexit” parties have a majority in the House of Commons. Every Liberal Democrat attacking Labour is supporting a Johnson/Cummings administration.

But if the Liberal Democrats have any kind of reputation at the moment, it is for treachery. They cannot be trusted. That position will only have been strengthened – against Labour – with the defections to that party of former Labour and Conservative MPs. That will push Labour away.

And the Liberal Democrats themselves may fear that Tory propaganda painting Jeremy Corbyn as the Devil himself will put marginal Tory voters off switching to them, if they go into a pact with Labour.

So Professor Wren-Lewis is supporting tactical voting – supporting the LDs where they have a more realistic chance of winning, and Labour where that party would fare better.

But his logic isn’t perfect. He says voting for a Labour MP who supports leaving the EU will not help as such a person would not support a second referendum with remaining in the EU on the paper – but this fails to take into account the fact that such a referendum is Labour policy and it is better to have a government with such a policy, if you are a remainer, than a government former by a Johnson/Cummings/Farage “no deal Brexit” alliance.

He also says the Tories can expect around 350 seats according to current polling, but he is out of date. Current polling, it seems, suggests the Tories could only muster around 285 seats unless they win constituencies that would be far from their grip usually.

He also suggests that Labour cannot hope to enjoy the huge surge it had in 2017 because Dominic Cummings will use all the social media expertise he learned during the EU referendum campaign to undermine it. This ignores the fact that the media will have to ditch their anti-Labour bias by law, that hundreds of thousands of young people are signing up to vote just so they can support Labour, and that Labour has a thriving social media presence of its own that has made mincemeat of the Tories on that platform for years.

I mean, you’re reading This Site – right?

Professor Wren-Lewis is right to sound a note of caution – but I wonder if he is going too far.

You can read his article here.

What do you think?

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Tories vote in second round of Tory leadership contest, as candidates round on Rory Stewart

Not that confident: Rory Stewart.

The second round of the Conservative Party leadership election has begun, amid acrimony between some candidates and dark horse contender Rory Stewart.

Mr Stewart, who polled lowest among contenders who got through to the second round, has been quietly (and politely) amassing a surprising amount of momentum.

He came second in a survey of candidates by ConservativeHome, behind Boris Johnson.

He was considered the most impressive candidate in the Channel 4 televised debate on Sunday – in which Mr Johnson was “empty-chaired”.

And it seems he is thought to be the most “disruptive” candidate apart from Mr Johnson.

This could make him a danger to Mr Johnson’s own chances if they face each other in the BBC televised debate today (June 18). It seems likely that, if he does get through the current round of voting, he’ll be asking awkward questions about the promises Mr Johnson has been making.

It seems Mr Johnson has persuaded groups that have irreconcilable differences to back him and Mr Stewart is likely to ask whether this means he has been offering different things to different groups, telling them what they want to hear rather than what he intends to do.

Strangely, it seems the other candidates don’t want this to happen and would prefer Mr Johnson to have an easy time of it, as they are doing their level best to gang up on Mr Stewart.

Sajid Javid said Mr Stewart was effectively the candidate for remaining in the European Union: “I think [Stewart’s] effectively telling us that we should remain in the EU and there is a small constituency amongst my colleagues that would rather remain than leave, and I think that is part of the challenge that we have to deal with. And so I think up to a point Rory can attract that support but it’s not going to get us any further.”

It is possible the claim was prompted after Mr Stewart, who is MP for Penrith and the Border in Cumbria, commented that he was concerned about the effect of a no-deal Brexit on sheep farmers in his constituency. He has repudiated Mr Javid’s words:

There have also been rumours that Mr Stewart may have been a spy for MI6 when he worked as the British Representative to Montenegro in the wake of the Kosovo campaign in 1999. If he had been, he certainly would not admit it – and in any case, he said, the press would not be allowed to report it, according to the law.

Will this combined criticism cause Mr Stewart’s support to collapse? We’ll know very soon.

Asked how he was feeling when he cast his own vote, Mr Stewart admitted: “Not that confident.”

Possibly the most interesting comment on it has come from David Gauke, who supports the Stewart campaign. He tweeted:]

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.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/


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Tory hypocrisy exposed again: They oppose votes at 16 while letting 15-year-olds choose their leader

David Lidington stood in for Theresa May at Prime Minister’s Questions on January 31.

This is shameful, isn’t it?

If you didn’t hear the exchange between Emily Thornberry and David Lidington at PMQs, it included the following, from Ms Thornberry:

At 16, we are free from parental control, we can leave home, we can start a family, we can get married, we can start work, we can pay taxes and we can join the forces, so can he give us a logical explanation of why a 16-year-old should not have the right to vote?

To this, Mr Lidington replied thus:

it was the last Labour Government who raised the legal age for buying cigarettes to 18, raised the age for selling knives to 18, raised the age for buying fireworks to 18 and raised the age for using a sunbed to 18.

It’s a valid point – although there is an argument in that all the things for which Labour raised the legal age are potentially harmful, whereas voting is usually done in the interests of the person concerned and (it is to be hoped) the nation as a whole.

And now we learn that Mr Lidington was taking a completely false position, because the Conservative Party allows votes at 15 in its own internal elections.

Perhaps he thought it doesn’t matter so much, because the average age of his party members is 72.

David Lidington has been accused “hypocrisy” for suggesting 16-year-olds lack the “sufficient maturity” to vote in general elections, despite teenagers aged 15 and over apparently being allowed to vote in Tory leadership contests.

Under Conservative Party rules, 16 and 17 year olds are allowed to become full members of the party.

“There is no upper or lower age limit on membership, although children under the age of 15 cannot be enrolled as full voting members,” party guidelines state.

Members have rights including “one member, one vote in the election of the Leader of the Party” and “a vote in the selection of candidates for Westminster and Europe”.

It costs just £5 for anyone under the age of 22 to join while it costs £25 for anyone over the age of 23.

Source: Tory ‘Hypocrisy’ For Opposing Votes At 16 While Letting Teens Pick Party Leader


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