19 November 2019
Once again, I restart my General Election 2019 blog. Previous blogs are here:
https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/11/01/general-election-2019-daily-updated-blog/
https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/11/06/general-election-2019-daily-updated-blog-no-2/
https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/11/11/general-election-2019-daily-updated-blog-no-3/
https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/11/16/general-election-2019-daily-updated-blog-no-4/
The “Leaders’ Debate” has just been held. I only saw extracts on the TV news, but based on that, I should say that Corbyn came over better; my subjective view, of course. Twitter reaction (for what it is worth) seems mixed, as does instant polling: Corbyn “more trustworthy” and “in touch with ordinary people”, Boris-idiot more “Prime Ministerial” (that Old Etonian gloss again?) and (it surprises me that the punters think so, though) more “likeable”
The Conservative Party leadership cadre is now infused with the deep dishonesty typical and characteristic of Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and the present Cabinet (eg the Jew Shapps, who sold members of the public dodgy business schemes and get-rich-quick plans, while posing under other names and even entering the Palace of Westminster using faked ID):
TV talking head Robert Peston saying that Corbyn “won”:
Journalist Isabel Oakeshott seems to be, reading between the lines, doing damage control for Boris-idiot, in effect.
Isabel Oakeshott, now the girlfriend of Brexit Party second in command Richard Tice, and like so many Brexit “Party” supporters (I am presuming, perhaps, that she is a supporter), seems to have one foot in Brexit Party and another in the Conservative Party. There is now little difference between the two, which is why Brexit Party is being washed down the plughole.
Retired fire chief and pro-Labour tweeter John Edwards blocked me on Twitter (before the Jews had me expelled in 2018). He said that I am “a dreadful fascist”! Yet here I am, reposting his tweet of this evening…
and from Alastair Campbell, one-time Blair spinmeister:
While only a LibDem like Tim Farron could imagine that Jo Swinson “won the debate” by virtue of not actually being there!
Update, 20 November 2019
I was reading some of what I wrote about Brexit Party earlier in the year. Well, much water under the bridge since then!
Brexit Party was polling around 12% when Farage decided to pull 317 Brexit Party candidates only 4 weeks before the election. That was followed by another 38. That, in return for a worthless promise from Boris Johnson, a man of no credibility, no integrity, a useless beneficiary of the UK’s sick political system.
Farage‘s ridiculous decision (taken unilaterally and without consultation with the candidates themselves, who had all paid to be considered as candidates) collapsed Brexit Party overnight. Farage killed his party as surely as if he had shot it in the neck.
Now, at time of writing, Brexit Party is in the polls at around 4% and, with 3 weeks to go, is not a serious contender in the General Election. Brexit Party might have won a number of seats while depriving the Conservatives (mainly) of a number of others, but now will be lucky to win even in those constituencies where it had a chance (e.g. Hartlepool).
Why did Farage destroy his own party? I am not the conspiracy theorist some imagine but I do speculate whether this is some kind of Russian operation.
Russia, we are told, wants the UK out of the EU (and, in Putin’s wildest dreams, NATO). Taking that as correct, it may be that Russian strategists were (are?) hoping for “hard Brexit” or “no deal Brexit” (real Brexit), because it weakens the EU (as part of the New World Order or “NWO”) and because a real Brexit might both cause economic/political discontent in the UK down the line and also stimulate Scottish nationalism, with the possibility that Scotland might break off from the UK, and then possibly (probably) decommission the nuclear missile submarine and air bases there. A break-up of the UK would be a stunning coup for the Russian state in terms of Atlantic geopolitics.
Still speculating, if an immediate “hard Brexit” seemed likely to be blocked by Parliament’s Remain majority in the event of another hung Parliament, then Russian strategists might have decided to strengthen Conservative Party chances by taking out Brexit Party.
Brexit Party is a dictatorship of one man, Farage. To take Brexit Party out of the General Election, Farage alone had to make that decision. He did. So the question is why did Farage take that decision? To my mind, there is no logical reason based on ordinary politics why Farage should take the word of a proven and continual liar such as Boris Johnson. On the other hand, if Farage is or has become an agent under control, then it makes perfect sense.
How do we know that Farage has not been promised (or even paid already) a large sum (£20M is good, £50M is even better) offshore? It makes sense in baldly venal terms but it also makes sense for Farage politically, if Farage has become convinced that a Boris prime ministership with a large majority would result, in a year or two, in a “hard” or even “no deal” Brexit. That way, Farage gets a secret fortune and the political result he has wanted to see since the early 1990s.
True, Farage is wealthy anyway (is supposed to be), but so what? As to whether the Russians would pay really large sums for such purposes…well, the wife of an “oligarch” paid the Conservative Party £160,000 just to have a tennis game with Boris Johnson and David Cameron-Levita. On that basis, £50M to change the whole course of British policy and strategy seems cheap at the price.
There is no direct evidence that Farage is an agent of the Russian state, but he has been shown to have close links with some leading “oligarchs” etc. The Russia of Putin is not the Soviet Union. It operates partly via the uber-wealthy who are beholden to Putin; the Soviet Union operated in this sense in a different way, bureaucratically, via the KGB and its predecessor agencies (NKVD etc), GRU and, pre-WW2, the Comintern.
As we have seen (google, or see my earlier blogs), Boris Johnson, like Farage, is or has been close to some Russian or Russian-Jew “oligarchs”. Then there is the role of Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s “adviser” (who however has been reported as having actually overruled Johnson on some occasions!). I blogged about Cummings a few months ago: https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/08/10/les-eminences-grises-of-dystopia/
There have been those who have implied that Cummings is a kind of Russian agent. My previous assumption was that he might have been an agent of SIS (British agent rather than salaried officer, perhaps, but who knows?) for a while (when he was in Russia for about 3 years after having graduated from university) but again that was just my speculative thought. Still, one would not necessarily preclude the other, especially over time. Allegiances change, people change, or are suborned, or bought, or get angry and turn coat. These things happen.
I have no evidence that Farage has been paid a huge bribe by Russia; I have no evidence that Cummings has, either. Still, I do wonder. “Thoughts are duty free”, even in the EU…
There is, of course, also the fact that the British Intelligence assessment of some connected matters is not going to be released until after the General Election. It has been held up by Johnson and Cummings. Why?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/31/boris-johnson-accused-report-russia-dominic-grieve
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-48874147
https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2016/07/19/boris-johnson-once-outed-mi6-spy-for-a-laugh
https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/boris-johnson-brexit-jeremy-corbyn-conservative-labour-1-6374964
https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/dominic-cummings-links-to-russia-1-6355329
https://dominiccummings.com/about/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/09/12/dominic-cummings-playing-dangerous-game-relying-heavily-data/
Here’s something interesting! In 1993, Corbyn was in favour of paying blacks to clear out of the UK! Well, why not? Cheap at the price, really…
A few thoughts
I was listening in the car to the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme, broadcast in part from somewhere called Sheffield College. I have now looked it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheffield_College
To say that I was appalled by the quality of the three students called upon to discuss the election etc would be an understatement. All were studying Journalism, apparently. They had all been asked to listen to the Corbyn/Johnson debate.
The least impressive of the three was a young woman whose every fourth or fifth word was “like”. She had previously favoured “Jeremy” but thought that Johnson was clearer on what he wanted. I think that she may have just meant “more emphatic”. The others at least used “like” more sparingly. The sole young man was even able to string a sentence together, though not to much effect. All three were concerned about what the first young woman called “climate” [change] but one got the impression that all three knew as much about the issues as my cat’s left ear. The young man referred to the need to do something so that “we don’t have to wade through three feet of water”, though that would be unlikely except in a flood of Biblical proportions, Sheffield itself being situated at a height above sea level of between 95 feet and 1,798 feet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield#Geography
Perhaps the reference was meant to be humorous.
Overall, I found the three students disturbing not because they seemed in any way rebellious or radical, but because they seemed to be such bland creatures. That, and the (apparent) palpable ignorance and inability to comprehend, think, or express themselves cogently. I was interested to hear that all three wanted to leave Sheffield (one said it is “boring”), though the “like…like…like” girl wanted to move to “London, Manchester or Salford”, a strange mixture. “How will you keep them down on the farm, once they’ve seen…Salford?”…Unlikely.
Politically, all were registered to vote, but none mentioned any issues that concerned them except “climate” and none had any ideas, it seemed, about that, just that it was of concern. All thought that life and career was and would be harder for them than it had been for their parents (in that I am inclined to agree, in general) but again none had any ideas about how to change that. Not one seemed to espouse any political ideology or philosophy. These were potential journalists, we were asked to believe. Depressing.
A further thought comes to mind, not for the first time. We are always being told by polling organizations and Remain whiners themselves that Remain partisans tend to be “better educated”, by which is meant “have degrees” etc. The trouble with that contention is that about half of all 18+ y o persons now go to some kind of college or “uni”. These degree mills pump out “graduates”, many of whom are in reality completely uneducated and uncultured, and in not a few cases plainly as thick as two short planks. In other words, this whole “Remain voters/supporters are better educated than people who want out of the EU” is a conclusion based on false premises.
For once I agree with faux-proletarian scribbler Dan Hodges (re. Corbyn in that debate; see below):
For my money (having seen only extracts, admittedly), Corbyn “won” because he did seem fairly ordinary, which must have been a shock to many who half-believed the fantasies of the popular Press and Boris Johnson to the effect that Corbyn is akin to Stalin, Trotsky, Lenin etc. I daresay that some viewers were surprised that Corbyn had only one head, and that it was not that of a demonic goat, complete with horns.
The laughter when Boris-idiot talked about trust and honesty said it all: Boris is not trusted, and actually not respected. He is not really treated by the public as a real Prime Minister. That means that he gets away with more, though. It works both ways.
Conservative Party lead is more apparent than real:
Update, 21 November 2019
https://news.sky.com/story/jo-swinson-risks-becoming-the-handmaiden-of-boris-johnsons-brexit-11866014
The LibDems released their manifesto to some msm publicity a day or so ago, but the interest was rather muted. It seems to me that the LibDems are becoming almost an irrelevance in this election. The retreat of Brexit Party has closed off quite a few LibDem possibilities in Con-held seats in the South of England (mainly), because the Conservative vote in those seats will have been shored up.
At the same time, the stance of the Liberal Democrats is “socially liberal, fiscally conservative”, following the lead of Jo Swinson herself, who after all held junior office during the 2010-2015 Con Coalition. That is not only the reverse of my own position, but also will not play in much of England, Wales or Scotland. I doubt that the LibDems will take many —if any— seats presently held by Labour.
In fact, under the pressure of the big-spend pledges of Lab and Con, the LibDems have loosened the reins of spending too, in their manifesto.
The LibDems have “bet the farm” on being the only significant party in the General Election to be clearly and firmly Remain (in England, that is; in Scotland, the SNP position is effectively the same).
Only about half of the voters favour Remain. Only about a third of those consider Brexit to be the most important issue in the election. So 15%-20% both favour Remain and think it the most important issue. It is noteworthy that the LibDems are currently running at between 12% and 18% in the various opinion polls. Admittedly, that is well above their polling of past months (and years).
There are seats in London and the South East where the LibDems may take a few seats, but in the big picture the LibDems are an irrelevance. I think that Leave supporters might vote either Con or Lab, whereas there are, no doubt, Remain supporters who think that Labour is sufficiently Remain to be supported, or alternatively that while the Conservatives are not Remain, they all the same are effectively so, via Boris Johnson’s BRINO (“Brexit In Name Only”) “deal”.
I wrote off the LibDems after 2011, but was only (?) 90% right. The LibDems survived like political cockroaches. I am tempted to write them off again, but they do have that ability to hang on somehow. FPTP voting is both their bane and their lifeline (as the “third choice” party).
An interesting psephological analysis about potential Conservative Party majorities, published 2 days ago:
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/general-election-polls-2019-the-big-conservative-poll-lead-isnt-nearly-as-big-as-it-looks-1303606
The Jews on Twitter have been going mad for the past day, merely because Jeremy Corbyn, at the TV debate, pronounced the name of the Jew paedophile, rapist etc, Jeffrey Epstein, correctly. He pronounced it as “Epshtine” (“tine” like River Tyne), which is correct in normal German (and so Yiddish) usage. The Jews of Twitter are claiming that the name should be pronounced in the incorrect American manner, i.e. “Epsteen”. The Beatles had a manager called Brian Epstein, and I only ever heard of him referred to as “Epshtine” or “Epstine”, never “Epsteen”. The funny thing is that broadcast msm drones in the UK, at least on the BBC, are running so scared of the Jews that today every last one of them, e.g. on the Radio 4 Today Programme, was using “steen” and not “shtine” or even “stine”.
Labour’s manifesto has been released, promising a building programme: 100,000 council houses per year for years. Well, there is a housing shortage of very serious proportions, and there is also a serious problem of abuse of the lives of tenants by landlords. However, much of the problem in this sector is caused by the migration-invasion, i.e. mass immigration, combined with births to immigrants.
Labour wants more immigration, even though immigration is running at something like 500,000 a year. Net? Officially 258,000 in 2018, but that leaves out illegals, and even the government estimates that there are 1.5 MILLION of those pests alone in the UK now! Also, “net immigration” conceals the fact that virtually all “permanent” immigrants are non-white, whereas many leaving the UK are white English, Scottish, Welsh people fleeing to Australia and elsewhere, as well as EU nationals returning home.
There is almost no point in building hundreds of thousands of houses if most will go to migrant-invaders (and so encourage even more to try to move here). Britain cannot absorb (net) a quarter of a million or more new “inhabitants” every single year, meaning a population the size of a city such as Southampton, and remain a decent or even half-decent country.
Film has emerged of aggressive “security” staff attacking a Brexit Party leafletter at a Morrison’s supermarket:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10391593/bully-morrisons-security-guard-throws-brexit-party-candidate/
Britain 2019. I suppose that the thing that surprises me most, looking at the report, is that there are still people prepared to waste their time (let alone get assaulted) canvassing or leafletting for Brexit Party.
Now that I have seen more of the Labour manifesto,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50511003
I am thinking (leaving substance aside and considering it from the electoral point of view) “why not”? Labour is in a bit of a hole in the opinion polls; it cannot do much worse (because around 25% would vote Labour even if it proposed copying the policies of Pol Pot or of Trotsky’s War Communism). Labour’s struggle is to persuade another 10% to 15% to put their crosses by Labour on the ballot paper.
On the above premise, Labour may as well be radical and own it. It just might work.
Meanwhile, “Mainstream”, the new Jewish-funded anti-Corbyn organization, has come out with a spoof ad featuring the Jewish actress Maureen Lipman. She “threatened” to leave the UK and go to Israel or the USA if Corbyn became Labour leader. Oddly enough, she is still here…still “threatening” to emigrate.
John Woodcock, the disgraced sex pest former MP, who has mental problems, is going to be, or already is, the Con-appointed “special envoy” on “countering violent extremism”, despite his completely partisan, biased ideological position. In other words, someone who is as good as an agent of influence for Israel is going to be snooping on and working against those British people struggling in the front ranks of the socio-political battle of our time. Woodcock is a leading member or supporter of “Mainstream”, which in this election is trying to weaken Labour’s chances.
Update, 22 November 2019
The Daily Mail examines the effect of Brexit Party on Labour-held seats in the North of England:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7711253/Will-Brexit-Party-help-Boris-win-Shock-poll-finds-Tories-13-points-ahead-ultra-Leave-seat.html
I have to say that, after the Brexit Party shambles during this election campaign, I struggle to see why anyone would still vote Brexit Party, but there it is. I suppose that the same mugs voted LibLabCon all their lives, so why not?
A second “Leaders’ Debate” will not now be held, because Boris Johnson has cried off. He failed to win the last one and has now blinked.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/channel-4-cancels-general-election-20931983
As I have repeatedly blogged, Labour is now the party of the non-Europeans (meaning mainly the “blacks and browns”), public service workers and those dependent on State benefits:
Naturally, it is trite to say “Mrs May and the Conservatives were ahead at this point during the 2017 General Election campaign [and therefore the Boris Johnson Con lead in this election campaign will have gone by Polling Day].” Why? Because Mrs May had built up or rather puffed up a brittle bubble around the “strong and stable” mantra. When she made a U-turn on elderly social care and seemed unable to do more than shriek “Nothing has changed! Nothing has changed!”, the whole Theresa May, Conservative Party “strong and stable” bubble just burst. Not even overnight. At once.
This time round? So far, no one defining moment of that sort. One may happen between now and Polling Day (3 weeks minus 1 day from today; 20 days), but part of Boris Johnson’s strength is that no-one actually expects Boris-idiot to be consistent, or honest, or even particularly —or at all— competent. Everyone knows that he is a liar, an incompetent, a philanderer, a money-grasper etc. It is therefore hard to see what event or behaviour would be so calamitous as to actually surprise the public. Johnson has actually weaponized his own inability to be a proper Prime Minister.
Having said the above, the Conservatives (like Labour) are piling up extra votes in seats which they were going to hold anyway. It is not impossible to see floating voters in marginal English and Welsh constituencies being interested by Labour’s policy offer. Add that to likely Con losses in Scotland and London and it is possible to think that a hung Parliament is as possible as a Con majority.
Labour cannot get a majority, in my view, but it can still prevent Boris-idiot from getting one.
Seems that Labour’s tax plans etc mean that people in the top 5% of earners will have to pay a small amount more in tax (supposedly £10 per month, which seems very modest). There has been argument over whether people earning £80,000 pa really are in the top 5%, following a Question Time spat. There has also been confusion over whether the tranche of taxpayers affected will be those only in the top 5% or in the top 50%.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/bbc-question-time-man-who-20935155https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/bbc-question-time-man-who-20935155
Twitter exploded.
If ever there is an area where the devil is in the detail it is that of taxation.
Of course, it is all too easy to feel that “I make x-amount per year and I’m certainly not rich/wealthy/affluent.” As long as ago as 2001, I myself made well over £80,000 gross (but that was that year; my income was always either “feast or famine”, the latter almost literally at times), so in today’s 2019-money-value maybe £140,000 gross (educated guess) yet I did not feel wealthy, though certainly not poor either. Today? I am genuinely near-broke! The point is that whether you feel “well-off” is very subjective (in my own case, a fairly large chunk of my earnings in late 2001-early 2002 went on just renting a quite modest detached house in the London area).
I may have been in the top couple of percent in terms of income, but did not feel wealthy or particularly privileged (and my assets were few, another important point: I had little beyond a 2,000-book library, a Rolex watch and a —rather modest— car).
“But leading lawyer Jolyon Maugham tweeted: “Fact. Earning £80,000 a year puts you well into the top *3%* of adult earners.”
He added: “£80,000 – what an MP earns – puts you into the top 3% but it doesn’t give you the lifestyle the English middle class once had.
“No private school, no comfortable house (certainly not in London), and so on. What we used to call a middle class existence is increasingly unobtainable.
“I’m not playing a violin for him – about 97% have it worse – but it does tell a story about how all the gains are going to an infinitesimally small number of people and how (in a way) everyone else can be cross with justification.” [from the Daily Mirror report]
How true. What matters is the lifestyle that comes out at the other end. The (?) relatively modest school which I (and my brothers) attended in the early 1970s now costs about £18,000 per pupil per year! (they do have bursaries etc)
https://www.rbcs.org.uk/admissions/fees-scholarships-and-bursaries/
Likewise, the semi-detached Victorian villa in the Little Venice section of Maida Vale, West London, where I spent many years (on and off) from age 19 to age 40, and which was valued at £100,000 in 1980, is now “worth” about £4 million! A 40x increase in “value” in 40 years! Hugely more than general inflation, let alone average pay, over those 40 years.
The fact is that in the UK, a tiny tiny number of incredibly rich people own almost everything and have incomes (and capital gains) in the millions and tens of millions, as well as assets in the tens of millions, hundreds of millions and thousands of millions (billions). They are a legitimate target for taxation and for at least partial expropriation.
However, it is clear that, in order to achieve social goals, any radical government will have to tax the ordinary Joe too. Ideas such as raising tax and NI thresholds are crude and help the “better-off” as much or more than the low earners. A far better way is to have no thresholds at all, and to give necessary help to the poor via other means (benefits such as child benefit, Basic Income etc). It is better to get £1 a head from a million people than £1,000 a head from a relative few. Why not both?
Recommended reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level_(book)
It may be that indirect taxation is better, but that has to be carefully handled if it is not to be retrogressive.
The present General Election exposes the rot in our society and political system. Few real ideas (that are any good) about how to deal with what must be dealt with: health, social care, alienation, funding for government, social problems generally, mass immigration. Labour’s ideas are the best of those on offer, but still either inadequate or half-baked.
General Election analysis:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/22/labour-majority-corbyn-downing-street
Update, 23 November 2019
The latest opinion poll (via Panelbase) gives intentions as Con 42%, Lab 32%, LibDem 14%, Brexit Party 3%, Greens 3%. Electoral Calculus makes that a Con gain of 4 seats overall, but still resulting in the Cons being 4 short of a majority.
The previous poll I saw, from another organization, and a day ahead of the above poll, gave the Cons a majority of 36! Yet the figures for that one were not far different: Cons 42%, Lab 30%, LibDems 15%, Brexit Party 4%. A few percent higher or lower, especially for Labour vis a vis Conservative, makes a very big difference.
The huge recent Con lead in the polls has narrowed (in both of those above polls) but the Cons are still well ahead in percentage terms, obviously. They do seem to be feeling the pace now, though: Boris refusing to debate on TV again. The previous debate might have destroyed Corbyn and so Labour. It did not do that.
It is very clear that Brexit Party is finished. I think that we have seen the end, not only of Brexit Party, but also of Nigel Farage. I am now expecting the effect of Brexit Party on the overall General Election results to be minimal. Opinion polling in a few Northern English seats seems to indicate that Brexit Party may take enough votes from Labour to let the Conservatives in here and there (eg Great Grimsby). Maybe, maybe not.
As to the LibDems, I think that they will end up on 12-13 December with fewer than 20 seats and possibly fewer than 10. Some commentators are predicting 30+ and one bold fellow has said 100! My own sense is that the LibDems will win a few seats but lose more, including those contested by most of the ex-Change UK defectors.
In the absence of a truly social-national party, the choice offered to the voters is dire, and the only parties really contesting the election in England and Wales are Lab and Con (I fully expect the SNP to win the vast majority of seats north of the Border).
Update, 24 November 2019
Ha ha! Farage says that “Labour is bombing all over the country” and that Corbyn is a poor leader. Well, there is some truth in both statements, but what strikes me forcefully is how lacking in self-awareness Farage is!
Labour may be (to some extent) “bombing”, but Brexit Party (or should that be “Farage Party”) has already bombed all over the country. It started off at 15% in some opinion polls, but is now at either 4% or 3% in all the ones I have seen. It does not have far to go to reach the 1%-vote depths of the joke “parties” such as the Monster Raving Loonies and the Christian-This-Or-Thats (not to mention the fake “nationalist” joke-parties such as “For Britain”, “Britain First” etc, though they struggle to get even 1% of any vote).
[I should add that, the last I saw, “Britain First” had been deregistered as a party by the Electoral Commission anyway, so would be unable to stand candidates under a party name]
As for “leadership”, Corbyn may be no Adolf Hitler, but Farage has just betrayed his most loyal followers by standing down about 360 of them so that Conservative Party candidates (including Remainers!) have a better chance of winning the seats that they are contesting! Is that “leadership”?
Now Farage is talking about forming yet another “party”! He says that it will be a reform party to “drain the Westminster swamp” and may be called Reform Party. Now, if only he had done that 6 months ago and joined it with Brexit Party…Had he done that then, he might have been in a different and better place now.
One can never easily write off Farage, and he sees the way the wind is blowing, but who would trust him now?
“Intergenerational Foundation report comes as 670,000 young people registered to vote in seven days” [The Guardian]
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/24/first-time-voters-hold-key-in-56-marginals-analysis-intergenerational-foundation
An interesting report. Hundreds of thousands of young people (defined as the under-35s) have registered to vote (670,000 in the past week alone) under the new stricter criteria. About half are under-25. Virtually none support the Conservative Party: fairly recent polling indicated that as few as 4% of the under-25s support the Conservative Party, and only about 15% of under-35s.
As I blogged recently, if those of all ages who do not vote, about a third of all those eligible, found a reason to vote, that might well change politics in the UK in a radical and even revolutionary way.
“Under Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system some votes really are much more important than others; in any given election only a small minority of the most marginal constituencies actually change hands,” said Angus Hanton, the co-founder of the IF. “Winning British elections is about winning marginals.” [The Guardian]
Of course, only the marginal constituencies really count, but if all the unregistered people (often discontented, or malcontents) were involved, many more seats would be marginal, though I understand perfectly well why many do not bother to vote.
“First-time voters could unseat their MP in 56 marginal seats across the country, according to an exclusive analysis of the 1.2m new electors who have come of age in England and Wales since the 2017 general election. Thirty of these seats are held by the Conservative party, 20 are held by Labour, four by the Liberal Democrats (almost a quarter of their seats) and two by Plaid Cymru.” [The Guardian]
As stated, 670,000 new voters have recently registered, many in the past few days alone. The deadline for registration is at midday on Tuesday 26 November:
https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote
Anyone 16+ can register, but only those 18+ can vote. There is therefore an uncertainty over the effect of those recent registrations, though it seems sensible to assume that most recent registrations are from intending 12 December voters.
There will be a scramble to register (which can take only 5 minutes if done online). Labour will be desperate to get as many as possible under-35s registered. The Conservatives must be hoping that few will bother. Conservative Party support is mainly from those over 65 and almost entirely from those over 45. I notice that Boris-idiot is now promising to keep the “Triple Lock” on pensions, something Philip Hammond wanted to scrap.
The 2016 Referendum had a large age division. This has now been imported into politics generally.
Those (so far) 670,000 new voters are split, very roughly, into a thousand voters per constituency. The fact that they registered recently suggests that they are intending to vote. Most (in England and Wales) will vote Labour. Few will vote Conservative.
As far as persons are concerned who have turned 18 since the last general election in 2017, they number about 1.2M people. There must be a few, perhaps several, hundred thousand still unregistered. There is a lot to play for here, in the next day and a half.
There are dozens of Westminster seats which were won in 2017 with majorities under 400: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/insights/ge2017-marginal-seats-and-turnout/
It can be seen that the effect of 1,000 or 1,500 new voters per constituency may be very significant, especially if most are going to vote Labour. It could change everything.
Not that I favour further reduction of the voting age. Switzerland began to decline once it
- allowed women the vote; but more importantly
- allowed people younger than 28 (the age is now 18) to vote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_Switzerland#Voting_qualifications
I believe that the age rubric (maybe the sex bar too) was changed in the 1990s, maybe late 1980s.
I see tweets from (mainly Labour) ladies saying such things as “my son of 12 (this was a real tweet, btw) is very political and loves Jeremy Corbyn; the age threshold should be 16.” What can one say? I was quite political and also quite intelligent at 12, but people are generally immature until they are 28. I myself was. It is not so much a question of intellect or knowledge as of commonsense and a greater or higher level of wisdom than the vast majority have at 16, 18, or 21.
However, it is interesting, though disturbing, from the sociological point of view, that there is a growing infantilization of politics. Even more disturbing is that it affects the old as well as the young.
On the “Conservative” side, one sees responses on Twitter and in newspaper comments columns to the effect that, for example, if there is poverty, “they should get a job“, when in fact much UK poverty is in-work poverty (and not everyone can get work, let alone reasonably well-paid work).
On the more “Labour” side, we see remarks, for example, to the effect that mass immigration makes no difference to pay, benefits, services etc (except to improve them!), rail, road congestion etc. There is a wilful refusal to see the truth and a wish to believe that, with one wave of his wand, Magic Grandfather and/or the State can just “magic” high pay and benefits for all. “Luxury Communism”…
See below:
The “brown” (presumably a Pakistani of some type) knows more than many (typically) weak and brainwashed pro-multikulti white British people: he obviously feels that the UK belongs to the migrant-invaders like him (whether arriving in rubber boats in Kent and Sussex, arriving as “family members” at airports, as “asylum seekers”, or just born to black/brown mothers here in the UK). The w** assumes that the white man is the unwanted minority person. Soon he will be. Wake up, British people! It is nearly too late.
That charming scene from a “British” street also tends to make my point about Labour being now largely the party of the “blacks and browns”…
Update, November 25 2019
Fed into Electoral Calculus (with SNP assumed to get 50% in Scotland), that most recent poll would give a Conservative majority in the Commons of 28 (with 21 more Con MPs, 45 fewer Labour MPs). Boris-idiot would be well pleased with a majority of 28. Having said that, most polls until now have forecast larger majorities. The forecast majorities are ever-smaller (with a few exceptions).
There is one day left (exactly 24 hours at time of writing) in which Labour might encourage students and others to register to vote; the cutoff point is 1200 hrs tomorrow (Tuesday).
As for Polling Day, 12 December, there are now 16 clear days left before the polls open. Does Labour still have a chance of heading off a Conservative majority?
The minor parties (apart from the SNP) are now where they will be. Brexit “Party” is washed up completely and is very likely either to win any seats or even to be very important either way to whether the Conservatives or Labour win here or there. The best chance is probably in Hartlepool, being contested by Richard Tice, Farage’s 2-i-c. Even there, Labour probably has a better chance.
The LibDems are stuck on or below 15%. In their case, what matters is whether they can create a Schwerpunkt (concentration of forces) in any one constituency. They have a few good chances, but I still think that they will end up with fewer than 20 seats, quite possibly fewer than 10.
Labour’s chances rely on appealing to floating or new voters in marginal seats. I would not write Labour off just yet despite the dawning realization of its supporters and the public that the traditional raisons d’etre of Labour are fast disappearing, indeed have disappeared, and with them the traditional dyed-in-the-wool loyalty of the previously monolithic Labour vote in the North and elsewhere.
Labour’s policy offers are in essence attractive to many, but Labour is held back, first by its recent (past 20 years) black/brown emphasis (personified of course by Diane Abbott), secondly by uncertainty over whether Labour can deliver. Part of that is the surely correct assumption of most voters that Labour is not going to win a Commons majority (as a bet, it now stands at 40/1 on Betfair betting exchange).
It remains possible for Labour to deny the Conservatives a majority if it can get its vote out, and if the “young” (under-35s) vote in greater percentages than heretofore. If, if, if. Even here, in terms of “getting the vote out”, the Conservatives have a built-in advantage, in that a high proportion of their vote will be postal, Conservative voters tending to be elderly or at least in late middle age.
Despite everything saying “the Conservatives will get a solid majority”, I am still not sure. The “glorious uncertainty” of Britain’s electoral system, the fact that a small number of voters in a relatively small number of constituencies will decide the matter, make this still an open contest in terms of whether Boris-idiot, surely the most egregiously ill-suited Prime Minister in modern times (since the 19thC at least), will get the real power he so richly fails to merit.
It is now after 2200 hrs, so Labour has only 14 hours in which to persuade those who support Labour, but are not yet registered to vote, to register. The election result may hang on that alone.
Update, 26 November 2019
Correction: the deadline for voter registration is midnight tonight, not midday as previously thought. This could be crucial in stopping the Conservatives from getting a majority. A million new voters have registered recently.https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50544602
The main news on Zionist-controlled msm (BBC, Sky etc) is that the Chief Rabbi has (not for the first time) declared not only himself and his immediate cabal but the “Jewish community” as a whole to be hostile to Labour. All news outlets are carrying this as the main news item.
The Chief Pharisee had the damned cheek to refer to “our country“, and even “the soul of our nation” (“our”?!), meaning the UK, despite the fact that he was born in South Africa and lived only in Israel and Ireland before coming to the UK in the 1990s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephraim_Mirvis#Early_life_and_education
Hopefully, this nasty individual’s intervention will merely increase the Labour vote and will in any case awaken many naive people to the important issue of Zionist interference in our political and social life.
Not that my opinion of Labour is very high, au contraire, but in this election, looking at the possibility of a Conservative majority and an elected Con dictatorship under Jewish and Israeli control (Boris-idiot, Sajid Javid, Priti Patel, the Jew Shapps and all other Cabinet members are Zionists; some are actual agents of Israel), Labour’s vote in this General Election must be maximized.
Historical note:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_VI_of_France#Expulsion_of_the_Jews,_1394
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Expulsion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Expulsion#Expulsionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Expulsion#Expulsion
Update, 18 April 2023
The main blog post has had a few recent hits (maybe the Jew-Zionist snoopers, who knows?), so requires a brief update:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_United_Kingdom_general_election.
In essence, the “Conservatives” did not increase their vote much; hardly at all, in fact, across the board, but the Labour vote fell by ~8 points. That was decisive. The mainly Jewish or Zionist anti-Corbyn attack campaign (bought at huge expense) worked, in the end. “Boris” ended up with a Commons majority of 80.
As for the LibDems, their popular vote increased, but they lost, overall, 1 seat, and ended up with 11. The leader, Jo Swinson, lost her own seat and has left frontline politics.
Ian Robert Millard 