Friday 20th October 2023

[refitman]

Morning all.

[refitman]

Bloody hell, Labour won both by-elections. From the BBC

Here's what happened in the early hours

Thomas Mackintosh

Live reporter

It has been a busy few hours - particularly the one between 3am and 4am...

• Labour have dealt Rishi Sunak a double by-election blow after the party seized two rock-solid Conservative seats
• The seats in contention, Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth, were held by Nadine Dorries and Chris Pincher, respectively, and were considered safe with
• huge and healthy majorities
• In Tamworth Labour's candidate Sarah Edwards overturned a majority of more than 19,000
• In her victory speech, she said the result was "historic"
• It was a similar result in Mid Bedfordshire where Alistair Strathern flipped a Tory majority of nearly 25,000
• Turnout was low in both with 36% in Tamworth and 44% in mid Bedfordshire
• Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer hailed the victories as "phenomenal"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-poli ... type=share

[gilsey]

Good morning.

[gilsey]

Curtice on Toady

it was reasonable to argue 24 hours ago – that the Conservative party faces the serious prospect of losing the next general election heavily, and maybe even more heavily than they did in 1997.

Let me just give you one illustration as to why one might say that. I’ve got in front of me a list of the biggest fall of Conservative votes in byelections. Most of these, like Christchurch, North Shropshire, Newbury, Somerton and Frome – these are Liberal Democratic famous gains, both old and new. But, for the most part, they didn’t really presage anything very much.

But now nestled amongst them, whilst there is the Dudley West byelection of 1994, also nestled at the top of this list are Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth, and these are big falls in byelections where the Conservatives are fighting their principal opponents, Labour.

And the real thing to take away from these byelections is, yes spectacular byelections we’ve had before, spectacular wins by the SNP in the past, spectacular gains by the Liberal Democrats but this is spectacular gains by the principal opposition party. They don’t happen anything like so often.

[AnatolyKasparov]

Tories seem to be citing turnout a lot this morning, with the "no enthusiasm for Labour" line invariably following.

But why - to the extent this is true - *does* this lack of enthusiasm actually exist? I'm certainly not going to claim that Starmer and co are perfect or that that couldn't have done some things better, but a LARGE PART of this is a general cynicism about politics that 13 years of often short-termist and sometimes actively amoral Tory rule has engendered. A lot of people are too beaten down to think we *can* have anything better.

[RogerOThornhill]

Good afternoon.

This is just a little odd...

[AnatolyKasparov]

Yes, its really suss isn't it.

And shouldn't the Beeb be pivoting to their likely future bosses by now?

[Sky'sGoneOut]

[Sky'sGoneOut]

An interesting take here from the Spectator.

Losing Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire is a disaster for Sunak

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/los ... for-sunak/

The Lib Dems in Mid-Bedfordshire claim that they helped Labour win the seat yesterday. The theory they have posited is that, with their tireless campaigning in the more rural portions of the seat, they helped flip a score of people who were previously solid Tory voters. These would have been people annoyed at this government, but who for various reasons would never vote Labour. In other words, the Lib Dems are saying that they acted as a repository for Conservative voters to register a protest vote.

If the Liberal Democrats can act, not as a party that splits the left-wing vote across the country but rather as a ‘none of the above’ receptacle for angry Tories, then the governing party could be in line to lose scores of seats to Labour at the general election that no one would have figured even might be in play. The Tories have been somewhat banking on the idea that the Lib Dems could get in Labour’s way in a lot of places. If instead they help Labour out with their presence, that will pose a huge, unsolvable problem for Sunak.

If this theory holds, we could see constituencies in the south-east of England, in the ‘blue wall’, go Labour as Tory voters either don’t turn out – or do and vote Lib Dem in protest at the current state of the country. Not enough of this category would vote Liberal Democrat for the party to gain seats in significant numbers, but they would be aiding and abetting a huge Labour majority.

Worse for the Tories, the two by-elections have thrown up have another issue for them to deal with. In both Tamworth and Mid-Beds, the Reform vote wasn’t large – but it was bigger than the Labour majority. If every Reform vote from yesterday was given to the Tories, the governing party would have won both seats. This suggests that the previous assumption that Reform would play no big part in the general election – that Sunak had successfully bought off right-wing voters with red meat on immigration and other issues – was incorrect.

Before to last night, it had been assumed by many political pundits that the Lib Dems might harm Labour, splitting the progressive vote in places around England and Wales and allowing the Tories through the middle sufficiently to stay competitive in the general election overall. It was also taken for granted that the right-wing protest vote wouldn’t be a numerically significant issue for the Conservative party. It appears that both of those assumptions can no longer be taken for granted by No. 10.

Worse, there is nothing Sunak can do to wriggle out of this mess. If he tries to head to the right to appease the people going to Reform as a protest, he risks losing even more people to the Lib Dems. If he tries to give the ‘Lib Dem protest vote’ something to keep them happy, he could be providing even more material to Nigel Farage and Richard Tice, allowing them to pick off voters on their other flank. It’s a nightmare situation for the Prime Minister.

I wanted to finish this article with something positive to say for Rishi Sunak and his party. I wanted to find some small ray of hope to which the Conservatives could cling. But I have nothing to offer.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Well I never. Analysts find the recording the Israeli's provided of members of Hamas discussing the hospital bombing has been (crudely) digitally altered, and that whatever hit the car park came from the opposite direction the IDF is claiming it came from.

[refitman]

Lukey's.on manoeuvres