Afternoon music
On this day a year ago
Tweets seen
Two fakes. A “Conservative” fake, Lee Anderson, who wants to say that State benefits are OK or even too generous, and a “poverty expert” fake, “Jack Monroe”, who is making money (as the first fake truly remarked about her on GB News last year) “off the backs of the poor“, and cheating people in several ways.
“Jack Monroe”, the grift that keeps on giving…oh, no, wait… I meant to say “taking”…
…and, yes, 498 mugs are still each sending her between £3.50 and £44 (!) via Patreon every single month. One of the most successful grey-area “near”-frauds I have ever seen.
West Lancashire by-election
The result of the West Lancashire by-election has been announced. See https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11735381/Tory-woe-Labour-sails-victory-West-Lancashire-election.html.
The by-election was caused by the standing-down of incumbent MP Rosie Cooper, a poor MP in my opinion, who at one point wanted England and Wales to institute no-jury trials (“Diplock courts”, as used in Northern Ireland) for defendants accused of politically-motivated crimes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_Cooper. She was also, at one time, vice-Chair of Labour Friends of Israel.
The reason why Rosie Cooper stood down (at the age of 72) was because she will now be getting two or three times her MP salary, as head of an NHS Trust.
As to the inevitable Labour victory in the by-election, no surprise. Labour’s vote share of 62.3% compares to 52.1% in 2019.
The Conservative vote-share fell from 36.3% to 25.4%. Poor but scarcely unexpected. In fact, the last time a Conservative Party candidate won West Lancashire was in 1987: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lancashire_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2020s.
The other candidates did not shine. Reform UK got 4.4%, but there again, its predecessor Farage-vehicle, Brexit Party, scored 4.3% in 2019. The Greens and Libdems ended up more or less where they had been at the 2019 election; both lost their deposits, as did Reform UK (and the Monster Raving Loony).
What can we take away from this? That Labour remains fairly solid in at least some historically-Labour areas, that the Conservative Party is going nowhere in such areas, and that the two main System parties face no threat from Reform UK, the LibDems, or the Greens.
The most interesting fact about the by-election is that the turnout was only 31.4%; well over two-thirds of the eligible electorate could not be bothered to vote. If a party were to exist that could energize the remaining 68.6%, it might be a different story.
Incidentally, the new MP is one Ashley Dalton, about 52-53 years old, a widow who “identifies as LBGT [and as] a gay woman” [Wikipedia: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Dalton].
More music
Late tweets seen
Good news. Start with the (((you know who)))s.
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 