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General UK politics

You never can tell till you meet some of these people. Years ago my sister was on "Bob's Full House" (won it too - holiday in Barbados with her husband) and, though happy to get on the show, was expecting Bob Monkhouse to be a smarmy dickhead. She came back totally won over - said he was sharp as a pin, highly professional and really good with the contestants.

I always remember Frank Skinner saying he played in a celebrity cricket match with Jeffrey Archer and how he was absolutely gutted that he turned out to be a really nice bloke!
 
Plaid Cymru wins the Caerphilly by-election with almost half the votes. Labour absolutely destroyed in a seat it has held for over a century.
 
Plaid Cymru wins the Caerphilly by-election with almost half the votes. Labour absolutely destroyed in a seat it has held for over a century.
They need to wake up and ditch that clown Starmer before he loses more seats. Starmer is holding the party back
 
I do wonder what it was that the Labour Party were thinking during all that time in opposition.

From the outside it looks like they weren't clear. They appear hamstrung (as were the Tories) by slavishly following international 'laws' and political correctness to the point where their future looks uncertain. Each economic 'tweak' seems to compound the mess.

Before I'm submerged by the keep-the-faithers could someone explain where we are going?

Simply ditching Starmer seems fiddling at the edges to my unsophisticated political mind.
 
What political correctness do you keep referring to? All I see is a complete regression of human values. In 90s, you would never have the constant attack on minorities like Reform clown going on about over representation of blacks in ADs and keep their seat. Now, they are lauded. It’s a complete reversal perpetuated by Big Corps and mislaid protectionism. What more exactly do you want?
 
To answer the broad question, to assess what the Labour Party were thinking when they were in opposition, you can only really go back to 2019.

Remember, at that stage everyone considered them finished. Bit like the Tories now, actually.

So they would have wanted to get rid of the loons and convince people they were normal. Well, ish.

Next up, just attack the government on everything. Helped of course by the fact the government was frequently chaotic.

Suddenly there is a route to power that they didn't expect, and they could increasingly do very little and still win, which is what happened. Just don't upset anyone!

I think at that point it would have been a case of win the election, sorry about the rest later.

The main problem there is that it gives the impression everything will be better. And everything costs money to make better. And because Labour didn't want to upset anyone, they made promises on tax, promises on spending and now they can't do very much if they don't want to break those promises.

What they really should have done is to given themselves some leeway to raise money. Sure, it would have put some people off voting for them, but what is the use of a massive majority if you can't do much and everyone hates you? They would have still won the election anyway.
 
If, heaven forbid, Reform do end up in government they will have the same broad problem, by the way, but worse.

For some reason, people are actually enthusiastic about Reform. Noone was really enthusiastic about Starmer. I doubt Starmer was even enthusiastic about Starmer.

While I guess that would buy Reform a bit of time, the expectation will be huge, and given they will achieve nothing, that is a lot of people who will ultimately be let down.

They are rapidly proving that they can't even run the local Councils that they control, and it will literally be the same people. Does anyone think running a Council is harder than running a whole country?
 
If, heaven forbid, Reform do end up in government they will have the same broad problem, by the way, but worse.

For some reason, people are actually enthusiastic about Reform. Noone was really enthusiastic about Starmer. I doubt Starmer was even enthusiastic about Starmer.

While I guess that would buy Reform a bit of time, the expectation will be huge, and given they will achieve nothing, that is a lot of people who will ultimately be let down.

They are rapidly proving that they can't even run the local Councils that they control, and it will literally be the same people. Does anyone think running a Council is harder than running a whole country?

I know in our system there's a threshold where Reform basically hoover up all seats on a fairly low % just like Labour did last time, and they seem to have been above that for ages, but surely in pure vote share they can't be THAT far off being drastically underrepresented like last time, right?

Am I right in thinking there must be some narrow band of 5% or so where they'd drop from like 400 seats to about 50?

And if so, surely that's way more possible than the media are having us believe?
 
I know in our system there's a threshold where Reform basically hoover up all seats on a fairly low % just like Labour did last time, and they seem to have been above that for ages, but surely in pure vote share they can't be THAT far off being drastically underrepresented like last time, right?

Am I right in thinking there must be some narrow band of 5% or so where they'd drop from like 400 seats to about 50?

And if so, surely that's way more possible than the media are having us believe?

I think Reform are very hard to poll accurately, as they don't quite have an identifiable voter base yet (though presumably it's getting there) and their supporters are probably more likely to vote.

The polls that give indications of seats work on demographics and assumptions but that's an awful lot easier with 2 parties, and virtually every seat would essentially have had 2 parties who could win before Reform came along.

It is entirely possible that even their current polling doesn't give them a majority but the pessimist in me tells me that they are understated if anything
 
I think Reform are very hard to poll accurately, as they don't quite have an identifiable voter base yet (though presumably it's getting there) and their supporters are probably more likely to vote.

The polls that give indications of seats work on demographics and assumptions but that's an awful lot easier with 2 parties, and virtually every seat would essentially have had 2 parties who could win before Reform came along.

It is entirely possible that even their current polling doesn't give them a majority but the pessimist in me tells me that they are understated if anything

Presumably the voter base will just be the heavily Brexit voting seats?
 
Charlie must really hate Andy. His favourite uncle (cousin?) was known to enjoy the company of kids...
 
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