Tag Archives: Conservatives

elections, MPs, Party Politics, Uncategorized

Impressions of The System Parties in the UK in 2018

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The System in the UK is like a rotten wooden building, perhaps a termite-riddled one in the tropics. It stands until a storm or strong wind knocks it down. In the purely political sense, the building is the “three party system”, while the storm or strong wind (which has not yet hit) is a revolutionary situation, a radical movement, or a war.

Introduction and the LibDems

We have just had the three main-party conferences. I include the Liberal Democrats out of custom and long practice, though they have surely come to, or close to, the end of the line now. They still have 12 MPs (peak was 62, from 2005-2010, under the egregious Charles Kennedy, then 57 MPs under the ghastly hypocrite Nick Clegg from 2010-2015), but there is every reason to think that (as I predicted since 2011) the LibDems are really washed-up this time. Best advice is that the projected 2022 boundary changes would leave the LibDems with, on present voting, 4 MPs.

LibDems think back to the superficially-similar trough of the 1950s (sub nom Liberal Party) and imagine that another “revival” can occur. I doubt it. Politics has moved on from vague “centrism”.

I did not follow the recent party conferences closely. I saw news reports, Twitter reports etc. The major difference between the Labour and Conservative conferences was in terms of attendance and the median age of attendees. The Labour conference was well-attended and seemed to be more mixed in terms of age than the Conservative equivalent, where the average attendee was about ?80 years of age (young by comparison to most “Conservatives” in the constituencies, though, where the norm may be 85 or 90).

The Conservative Party

The Conservative Party is now a “virtual” party, where the facade is maintained via millions of pounds from “City of London” (often Jewish) donors, and which has few members: it still claims 100,000, but many suspect that the true number is maybe 40,000 or even 20,000, with active members even fewer, which is why,  a few years ago, the Jew Shapps [Grant Shapps MP] put together the ultimately disastrous Conservative Party “Road Trip” bus jamboree, organized by the degenerate and now (politically, certainly) washed-up Mark Clarke and his slut girlfriend India Brummitt (whose jaw was once dislocated during their, er, private play).

Clarke was banned for life from the Conservative Party and as a Conservative candidate for elected office; he was also, a couple of years later (in 2018) effectively sacked (he resigned, notionally) by his employer, Unilever, over an unrelated sexual scandal. India Brummitt was sacked from her job working for thick/ignorant Claire Perry MP [Con, Devizes], but is presently climbing the managerial-bureaucratic ladder in the NHS (see note, below; Clarke’s wife is a doctor in the NHS). As for the Jew Shapps, he resigned from his ministerial post. Another Jew, Robert Halfon MP, a one-time Director of Conservative Friends of Israel, and who (despite being a semi-cripple) had been conducting an affair with another Conservative slut-activist in the same clique, also had to resign as minister a little later.

The point is that those goings-on occurred because the once-solid Conservative Party, which in the 1950s had as many as 5 million members, had shrunk to a few tens of thousands of members, and most of those very aged, infirm, and incapacitated. The vacuum sucked in trash, from Halfon and Shapps to Clarke and India Brummitt (and others of the same ilk). There were other, unrelated scandals (does anyone now remember crass one-time MP Brooks Newmark, yet another “Conservative” Jew MP?).

The Brexit debacle has surely put paid to the (never based on reality) notion that the Conservatives are competent. I supported Brexit and still do, for social-national revolutionary reasons, but there is no doubt that the present government and its immediate predecessors have royally failed to perform with even basic adequacy in regard to Brexit or anything else. Meanwhile, large sections of the population have no decent standard of living, travel, roads, schools, hospitals, pay, housing; and the migration-invasion continues unabated.

Labour

Corbyn has saved the bacon of Labour, but only up to a point. He has increased the membership to over 500,000 and is not an outsider now for next Prime Minister, perhaps as leader of a minority administration, but there are masses of people who will never vote Corbyn-Labour or any Labour. Labour might become the largest party in the Commons, but its chance of gaining an overall majority is slight. The blacks and browns mostly vote Labour and their numbers are increasing fast. The British people have no-one for whom to vote.

The Labour Party under Corbyn promises much and may be unable to deliver. However, there is this: do the voters as a whole prefer a party which promises much and may be unable to deliver to a party which promises almost nothing? Do the voters prefer a Labour Party which may well prove itself to be incompetent to a Conservative Party which has surely proven itself so? “Those who live will see”…

Labour’s millstones round the neck are mostly racial-cultural: immigration (though, again, the Conservative Party has not made good on its promises); the ethnic minority deadheads and freeloaders on its shadow ministerial team (flagship: Diane Abbott…).

SNP

The SNP is pretty much a System party (pro-Zionist, kow-towing to the “holocaust” narrative etc) but will continue to pull in quasi-nationalist votes in Scotland, enough to create or maintain a bloc of MP seats.

The most likely scenario after the next general election is a hung Parliament.

As Hitler said of the Soviet Union in 1941, “all we have to do is kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come tumbling down!” He was very nearly right, too. We need a party or movement which can do the kicking, first.

Notes

” As of 2015, [Mark Clarke] was reported to be a senior marketing analyst at Unilever, but left the company in March 2018 after claims of sexual harassment were made against him. Clarke was the subject of a formal investigation by Unilever in respect of the sexual harassment matter, but resigned before that investigation was concluded.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Clarke_(politician)

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tory-activist-claims-woke-up-6887551

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3817531/Tatler-Tory-s-mistress-Commons-party-storm-Mark-Clarke-s-lover-sparked-outrage-turning-Gorge-Osborne-s-cocktail-bash.html

https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/96912/curry-casual-sex-and-pole-dancing-inside-the-sordid-tatler-torys-activist-outings/

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/india-brummitt-64958967

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_(UK)#Near_extinction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Halfon

Addendum 14 October 2018

It should be noted that “the curse of Mark Clarke” left others in his cabal damaged too. This blog post was not intended to touch on the case of Clarke etc more than peripherally, but it might be noted that one of his closest cronies (and sometimes described as the most seriously “weird”), Sam Armstrong, was prosecuted for rape, the alleged offence having been committed after-hours and in the office of the MP who employed him at the time (in the end he was acquitted at trial, despite the evidence presented against him).

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/samuel-armstrong-westminster-rape-allegation-cleared-conservative-party-aide-tories-craig-mackinlay-a8123401.html

It is incredible to me that the once-great Conservative Party should have fallen into the hands of such as these, though. It is possible that, had Armstrong not fallen into scandal, he might have been selected as a Conservative candidate to be an MP in time, despite his underwhelming academic background (grammar school followed by a mixed politics/history degree from Nottingham University) .

Likewise, had Mark Clarke not lost the election at Tooting in 2010 (various scandals about him having come out during the campaign), there is every chance that, as a semi-“ethnic” person and one who was partly brought up in a council house (and so notionally not “remote” from the masses), he might have been fast-tracked into government and by 2017 been at least a Minister of State! As it was, he was dropped from the list of Conservative candidates and described by David Cameron-Levita as “a nightmare”; yet he was still appointed to head Road Trip 4 years later! A Conservative Party slut “peeress” (former councillor) from Buckinghamshire seems to have been involved, but it is all very murky. The larger point is that the present UK political system is very flawed, leading to the selection of unsuitable and shallow candidates who then often become MPs and ministers. I shall blog about this separately.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooting_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2010s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Newmark

Update, 13 August 2020

Well, nearly two years have elapsed since the last update to this article. The sinister little Con Party activist, Sam Armstrong, somehow managed to get a job as Communications Director at the “interventionist”, pro-Israel, pro-NWO lobby group, the Henry Jackson Society [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Jackson_Society]: https://henryjacksonsociety.org/staff/samuel-armstrong/

At time of writing, his latest tweet was this:

His lucky escape at the rape trial is of course not noted on his Henry Jackson profile.

As to the rest of my article, well…I  have seen nothing about Con “activist” Mark Clarke for years. He seems to have sunk without trace after Unilever sacked him. His girlfriend at time of the writing of my article, India Brummitt, is now “General Manager, Medical Specialties” at the NHS trust that runs Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Hospitals in London: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/india-brummitt-64958967

I have occasionally seen tweets or comments by another of Clarke’s little cabal, one Andre-something or other, a scribbler for some online news outlet.

On the wider picture, the vagaries of the British electoral system and the lack of enthusiasm for Labour resulted in a Con majority of 80 at the 2019 General Election. The result was that Boris Johnson, a part-Jew, part-Turk public entertainer, is now posing as Prime Minister.

Finally, it was recently announced that there will not now be any reduction in the number of Westminster constituencies, and so in the number of seats, from 650 to 600. There may be boundary changes in 2023, but so far there has been no legislation to that effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Periodic_Review_of_Westminster_constituencies

https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/boundaries2023.html

 

Party Politics, Uncategorized

Which Way Politically After Brexit?

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It seems to be a virtual certainty that, during 2019, “Brexit” will –at least in name– take place. What that means is still uncertain. It has just been revealed that Theresa May and others have been secretly working to undermine the substance of Brexit and to make it appear as if Britain has left the EU while in reality tying it ever closer.

As soon as the EU Referendum was held, when the result favoured Leave, I assumed that the ZOG/NWO cabals would attempt to subvert it. The Referendum was planned as a public relations exercise, cleverly channelled so that “the people” would rubberstamp the UK’s continuing EU membership. David Cameron (aka David Cameron-Levita) miscalculated. As punishment, he was booted out under the figleaf of resignation, and is now an obscure fringe figure in British politics.

The Theresa May government has little legitimacy. Theresa May inherited her mantle as PM, and then lost credibility during and after the 2017 General Election. She now clings to power by juggling the House of Commons votes of her own rebellious MPs and those of the Democratic Unionist Party (which latter have been, in effect, bought).

Fate now takes a hand. As with Cameron-Levita, Theresa May has few of the attributes necessary to be a Prime Minister. She has made a mess of both the Brexit negotiations and her own plot to “leave” the EU while really staying in it. As a result, she has become something close to a laughing stock with the public.

It is possible that the UK will leave, or as Remainers always say, “crash out” of the EU on the basis of World Trade Organization [WTO] rules. It is possible, though unlikely, that the UK will “leave” the EU (but in effect stay) under the “Chequers” plan of Theresa May. It is possible, though very unlikely, that not even a nominal Brexit will happen.

I do not here want to examine the possible economic consequences in detail, but to look at the political future in the short to medium term.

There has already been a backlash from the public in the 9 days since the Chequers plan was announced. In the old phrase, you can fool some of the people some of the time but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Was that Mark Twain? According to my brief Internet query, no. Abraham Lincoln.

The opinion polls are already starting to move against Theresa May and the Conservatives vis a vis Labour. Labour has pulled a couple of points ahead for the first time in months. The revelation (which only burst upon the public prints yesterday) that Theresa May has been presiding over a secret plot to nullify Brexit will sink her and her party, in my opinion. So far, the Conservatives have been able to rely on the Corbyn Factor (which includes the Diane Abbott Factor etc) to put many voters off voting Labour. Now? Those people might or might not vote Labour, but many will not vote Conservative. They might abstain, they might vote Labour, they might even vote UKIP, which has experienced a rare poll boost in the past week or so.

UKIP is washed up, as I have been tweeting and blogging since 2014. However, it will still stand a small number of candidates in any general election held in 2018 or 2019 and those candidates will take the edge off the Conservative vote. The same is true of any candidate who is anti-EU.

The present weak Conservative government can surely only decline in popularity from here. As I have recently (and previously) blogged, the voters at present are mainly voting against parties rather than for them. A voter may abstain from voting Conservative or make a protest vote rather than voting Labour (or LibDem, bearing in mind that the LibDems are pro-EU).

The electoral mechanics in the UK are such that the result of any general election mirrors the “glorious uncertainty” of the racecourse. However, the present likelihood is that no party will have an overall majority, or that either Labour or Conservative will have a very small majority. That would be not dissimilar to the present situation, where in 2017 the Conservatives won 317 seats; however, a formal majority would require a party to win 326 seats but in fact (because Sinn Fein’s 7 MPs do not attend and so do not vote) 320 for a bare practical majority. Theresa May is 3 MPs short; hence the DUP arrangement.

My present feeling is that, while Labour will never be able to get a working majority in any election in the next couple of years, it could end up as (probably marginally) the largest party and so be able to form a weak minority government of some kind. This would be the best outcome for social nationalism, so long as a credible social national movement can emerge.

On the above premises, a half-cocked Brexit might lead to continuing mass immigration (including non-white immigration), economic slowdown, general malaise and administrative chaos. People will be dissatisfied, and disgusted by the System. On those premises, a real social national movement could gather strength enough to challenge the System by 2022.

ethnostate, Party Politics, safe zones, Uncategorized, white flight

Formation of a Social National Party in the UK

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Background

For a number of years, I have watched the socio-political scene in the UK with increasing feelings of concern. The System parties have done terrible things (and omitted to do the right things) without any regard for the national interest, without compassion, without even logic:

  • disastrous foreign wars and other interventions, backing the United States and NATO and (in reality) Israeli interests and the plans for a “New World Order” [NWO];
  • financial madness caused by globalist economics and neoliberalism, not least the inability to tax effectively huge transnational enterprises;
  • gradual takeover by Zionists of strategic areas of society;
  • quite fast increase in the Muslim and other non-European populations of the UK;
  • inflicting appalling hardship and persecution upon the poorer section of the UK population (eg unemployed, disabled) via spending cuts, cruel bureaucratic systems, outsourcing;
  • allowing the NHS to decline steadily in all areas;
  • importation of many millions of immigrants even since 1997, with subsequent births to those immigrants, resulting overall in strain on NHS, roads, trains, housing; schools, prisons, social security, pensions;
  • policies on farming and landowning which do not prioritize wildlife and the environment  in general;
  • crises in care of the elderly;
  • decline in real educational levels covered up by meaningless “degrees” and award inflation;
  • inability to adequately and aesthetically house the population.

The above is not even a complete list of how the System parties have let down the British people.

System Parties

Conservatives

The Conservative Party has inflicted terrible damage on the UK via, inter alia, spending cuts and a coarsening of political converse generally. It might have suffered a huge defeat in 2015, but in the event was saved by the vagaries of the First Past the Post electoral system etc. It has now been saved, for the time being, by the implosion of the Labour Party.

Labour

The Labour Party becomes increasingly less relevant. Even mainstream commentators have woken up to it now. Labour introduced the hateful, dishonest and incompetent ATOS company to persecute the disabled. Labour was the party that decided to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. Labour is infiltrated, indeed pervaded, by the Jewish-Zionist lobby and its agents. True, so is the Conservative Party, but Labour claims to speak for what were once known as “the workers”. That, of course, is Labour’s problem: the bedrock of the “proletariat” has been replaced by the shifting sands of the (increasingly raceless and cultureless) “precariat”. So Labour seems to speak on behalf of metro-liberal “snowflakes”, “antifa” rentamob idiots, employees of the collapsing public sector; above all, perhaps, the “black and brown” ethnic minorities.

Example: in Stoke on Trent, Labour recently won the Stoke Central by-election by 2,500 votes. 62% of the electorate did not vote; of those that did, about 7,500 voted for Labour, 5,000 for both UKIP and Conservative. The constituency has 12% non-English voters (half of them Muslim). Virtually all voted Labour. In other words, the “ethnic” vote swung it for Labour. Educated guess: of the 7,500 Labour votes, virtually all were from ethnic minority (mainly Muslim) voters.

The SNP supremacy in Scotland has taken away about 50 MPs from Labour.

The redrawing of boundaries for 2020 will mean a House of Commons with 600 MPs. Labour is now polling at 25%, concentrated in a relatively few seats. Labour will have 100-200 MPs out of 600. It will be unable to form even a minority government.

Labour is gradually deflating to nothing.

Liberal Democrats

The 2015 debacle has killed the LibDems. The party may be getting “dustbin” or “protest” votes from disaffected Labour/Conservative voters, but its upsurge in 2010 will never be repeated. The Con Coalition mortally wounded the Liberal Democrats and they were lucky not be wiped out in 2015.

Non-System Parties

UKIP

UKIP was founded in 1993 and in the nearly 24 years since then has done well to get MEPs elected but has never come even very close to getting a Westminster MP, except for free-market crazy Douglas Carswell, who after all was already a Conservative MP and may well revert to being one.

UKIP failed badly at Stoke Central and Copeland and those failures reflected its lacklustre performance in local and Westminster by-elections since its peak in or around 2014.

Brexit has shot UKIP’s fox, both on the EU and on EU immigration. UKIP seems unwilling to engage on non-EU immigration and, in general, on race and culture; it seems afraid of being called “racist”. UKIP might have forged ahead had it gone social-nationalist in 2014, but it failed to do that and is now just a (sort of) Conservative joke party again.

UKIP has come to the end of the line except as a dustbin for some white English votes.

Other non-System Parties

There are none, really. Yes, there is “the solitary Green” at Westminster, who will be gone by 2020. The Greens are polling nationwide at 3% or below. As for the BNP, after its rise in 2008-2009, it has all but vanished. Its vote at Stoke Central was 124.

Political Vacuum

It is clear that there is a political vacuum in England. The Conservatives are riding high but only by default, Labour is imploding, UKIP is effectively dead as a party with actual MPs; LibDems may well have no MPs by 2020.

At the same time, real incomes are stagnating or declining in value, immigration continues at about half a million (perhaps 250,000 “net”), housing is inadequate and expensive, young people cannot have a decent life or future, the elderly are neglected, the unemployed and disabled persecuted.

There will never be a better or more auspicious time for social nationalism. However, only if there is a physical instrument, a political movement. I have blogged about the need for safe zones for social nationalism. However, there must also be a movement, part of which must be a political party.

Party

Party Funding

New parties always face financial difficulties. Dependence on donors is not easy yet hard to avoid. A basis of firm finance is essential. It may be that the only way for a small party to grow will be for its members to sacrifice a percentage of their income to the party. On that basis, a party of even 1,000 people can have an annual income of over £2 million (based on average net income of a very modest £20,000 and on a “tithe” of 10% of that).

Party Democracy

In an ideal world, a party should be (arguably) “democratic”, but experience shows that the enemy, particularly the Zionist enemy, is skilled at exploiting cracks and fissures to create factions which eventually destroy the party. It happened to the National Front in the 1970s, it happened (it seems) to the BNP in more recent times. It is happening to UKIP too, despite its doormatting where Israel is concerned, despite its wayward errors in respect of race and culture.

In view of the above, the party leader must have the final say.

Strategy

The way to go is for the new party to target first and foremost seats within the “safe zones” which will attract more and more people from across the UK. Thus the first thing is to create those safe zones.

Further Thoughts and Update (26 July 2018)

The only aspect of the above which requires rethinking is the role –and prospects– of the Labour Party. The bubble of the Conservative Party burst in the final weeks of the General Election 2017 campaign. Labour benefited. That I did not anticipate until the last week or two of the campaign. I see no great revival of Labour fortunes; rather a further deflation of Conservative fortunes. The likely result (in any general election in 2018 or 2019)? Hung Parliament and weak minority government, probably Labour.

As for the rest of my blog post, safe zones etc, all that still applies.

Update, 15 July 2023

“Man proposes, God disposes“, as they say. The Jewish-lobby attack on Corbyn-Labour, combined with Nigel Farage shooting his own Brexit Party in the back, and the wall of lies put up by “Boris” Johnson, resulted in an unexpected and considerable Conservative Party win at the 2019 General Election.

There was another factor underpinning the Conservative Party win of 2019— the fact that so many Labour Party voters “voted with their feet”, a few defecting to vote Conservative, but most simply not voting:

The Conservative vote-share increased only marginally across the country (more in a few seats), but the Labour share fell by 8 points. Had the Jewish lobby not trashed Corbyn-Labour on a daily basis for several years, and had Nigel Farage really fought for Brexit Party, the 2019 result would have been very different.

As for social nationalism, still no credible party anywhere to be seen./

by-elections, elections, MPs, Party Politics, Uncategorized

Copeland By-Election: Watershed?

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Three weeks ago, I wrote a preliminary blog post about the upcoming Copeland by-election

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2017/01/02/the-copeland-by-election-the-blog-before-the-blog/

in which I examined the history of the constituency. I also took a look at the factors influencing the present by-election. The time has now come to attempt a prediction with reference to wider political trends.

The Copeland constituency has been in existence on its current boundaries since 1983. The previous constituency, Whitehaven (created during the electoral reform of 1832), was rock-solid Labour (often over 60%) from 1935 until the boundaries were changed in 1983

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehaven_(UK_Parliament_constituency)

The Copeland constituency has continued Labour since its creation: the Labour vote reached its high-water mark in 1997, in the Tony Blair landslide. In that year, the Labour candidate achieved a vote of over 58%:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copeland_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_1990s.

His successor, Jamie Reed, started off in 2005 with a Labour vote of 50.5%. However, the Labour vote share has steadily declined since then, most recently to 42% in 2015

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copeland_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2010s

The Conservative vote has been more volatile, ranging in various elections from 29% to 43%. The Conservatives achieved nearly 36% in 2015, only one point down on their 2010 showing.

The UKIP vote in Copeland has mirrored in a modest way that of much of the country: 2.2% in 2005, 2.3% (beaten by the BNP, which got 3.4%) in 2010, jumping to 15.5% in 2015.

The Liberal Democrats have never done very well in Copeland, their vote share flickering around the 10% mark, not exceeding that in 2010 (one point down from their 2005 showing in fact), then crashing to 3.5% in the 2015 debacle.

In 2010, the Green Party stood for the first time since 1987 but received a vote of less than 1%. That improved to 3% in 2015.

There are several factors which do not bode well for Labour:

  • Jamie Reed may be seen as a “rat leaving the sinking ship”, having taken a potentially lucrative position with the company which operates the constituency’s largest employing entity (by far), the Sellafield nuclear plant. That may seep into perceptions of Labour MPs as a whole;
  • recent polling shows Labour nationally as having the support of only 25% of voters;
  • the same polling shows that Jeremy Corbyn is seen as a potential Prime Minister by only 16% of voters;
  • Copeland voted heavily for Leave in the EU Referendum;
  • Copeland is believed to be hostile to the mass immigration which Labour and its embattled leader seem unwilling to criticize, let alone promise to halt.

Labour has now selected as candidate a local councillor, Gillian Troughton, a former medical doctor and supporter of the nuclear industry, in which her husband works. That may help Labour’s campaign, as will her support for the NHS and the local hospital, but Labour’s problems locally stem from its general decline nationally and its generally pro-EU, pro-mass immigration positions.

Traditionally, the Conservative vote in Copeland comes from particular communities along the coast and inland and that vote seems to be rather solid. There is no reason to suppose that the Conservative vote will not hold up fairly well, bearing in mind Theresa May’s recent stance on Brexit and also the immigration question.

Recently-stagnating UKIP can probably expect a surge in its vote, though it seems that the party will probably not be able to do well enough to win, which would require its 2015 vote to increase by at least 50% and probably more. However, UKIP will probably be able to garner votes from disaffected 2010 and 2015 Labour voters.

Turnout is key. In 2015, the Labour vote was 16,750, the Conservatives received 14,186, but UKIP’s vote was only 6,148. It is quite likely that former Labour voters will not so much vote Conservative or even UKIP, but simply stay at home and refuse to support Labour. If turnout slumps, particularly among those former Labour voters, then the Conservatives might well pull ahead of Labour , especially if the UKIP vote increases .

Prediction

Conservatives to win Copeland, with UKIP second and Labour third.

Effect

Only once in 35 years and twice in 60 years has a by-election seat been lost by the official Opposition party. If that happens in Copeland (even leaving aside the result of the simultaneous by-election at Stoke-on-Trent Central), Labour will go into a tailspin.  If Labour is pushed into third place, that effect will be magnified immeasurably.

Corbyn has made it clear that he will not resign whatever happens. Failure at Copeland would lead either to a second attempt to depose Corbyn via leadership challenge or (more likely) to a mass exodus of anti-Corbyn careerists, Blairites, Brownites and Zionists following Jamie Reed and Tristram Hunt out of the House of Commons and possibly out of the Labour Party. If that exodus, in turn, leads to the loss of further Labour seats, then it is hard to see Labour recovering. Ever.

We may be seeing the death of one of the two major (i.e. long-established, sometimes governing) political parties, something that has not occurred since the collapse of the Liberal Party in the 1920s.

Update, 3 March 2019

Well, two years on, looking at the article and its predicted result, I can feel content that I did OK. The Conservative Party candidate, Trudy Harrison, did win, as I thought at the time she would, getting a 43.3% vote. Labour’s candidate, Gillian Troughton, came second on 37.3%. A major factor was the collapse in the UKIP vote, from 15.5% to 6.5%. The vast majority of those votes probably went to the Conservatives.

The Green Party got a 1.7% vote at the by-election, the two Independent candidates 2.6% and 0.4%; none stood at the 2017 General Election.

The contest was reprised only 4 months later, at that 2017 General Election. The “main” (LibLabCon) or System parties ran the same candidates with a similar result: the Con vote increased to 49.1%; the Lab vote however also increased considerably, to 45.1%. The LibDem vote slumped, from 7.2% at the by-election to 3.3% at the General Election. UKIP’s vote slumped too, from 6.5% to 2.5%.

Copeland is now a fairly tight Con-Lab marginal. It could go either way next time.

Update, 5 June 2020

Well, since the last update, there has been another general election, the General Election of December 2019. In that election, the sitting Conservative Party MP, Trudy Harrison, retained her seat, and increased her vote-share to 53.7% (from 49.1% in the 2017 General Election). The Labour Party vote fell back by over 5 points. The other two candidates (LibDem and Green) both scored under 5% of the total vote; both lost their deposits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copeland_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2010s

Notes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copeland_(UK_Parliament_constituency)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copeland_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2010s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trudy_Harrison

Update, 26 January 2025

Trudy Harrison stepped down ahead of the 2024 General Election, the Copeland constituency then being abolished and replaced by a different constituency on different boundaries.