Watch for the spin machine tonight:
- Norwich North result a bad blow to David Cameron's hopes of becoming Prime Minister
- Should have had at least 10,000 majority for a convincing win
- "Normal mid-term result" says Brown.
They had been spinning that a majority of 5,000 or less would represent 'defeat' for the Tories. I wonder how they will spin 7,348?
Update:
Gordon Brown in the Grauniad:
Responding to the news, the prime minister admitted it was a disappointing result but said no party could take a "great deal of cheer" from it because all three of the main parties had lost votes.
"The Conservative vote went down, the Liberal vote went down, only the fringe parties saw their votes going up," he said.
"I think it's a lesson that we have all got to observe."
I hadn't seen that one coming - the 'it's a bad result for everyone' approach. The lesson, mate, is that it was a bad result for you, and your core vote is crumbling.
I think there is a certain amount of truth in the "bad result for everyone" statement as long as you add "...who happens to be a politician" - 45% turnout and the winning candidate elected with 18% of the vote shows a high level of disenfranchisement, or a low level of support for all political parties (depending on how you wish to spin it).
ReplyDeleteDisturbingly, nearly 7000 people still voted Labour. Almost 10%. How can there be that many people stupid enough to still not understand what has been done unto them in the name of Blair, Brown and Mandelson? Arguably, that's one hell of a victory...!
If I was Gordon, I'd be working on a strategy that meant they were the only ones able or willing to vote in the next general election. And a backup strategy to fiddle some numbers to make the slghtly less stupid but still gullible folks believe that I'd dragged the UK out of recession single-handed.
If I was Mandelson, of course, I wouldn't give a monkey's what happens in the next GE as long as the Treaty of Lisbon gets ratified by Ireland and the Czech Republic beforehand. Then I'd be off to a plum job in Federated Europe under my old chum Tony before Gordon's corpse hits the floor.
Wonder whether Gordon's listening to his own delusional moral compass or the poisonous advice of Lord Peter at the moment? Either way, it is quite impressive how genuinely he appears to believe the utter nonsense he spouts. I doubt, in all honesty, that he is capable of seeing or accepting the lesson here - I can actually see him standing there (next June, no doubt - it's a racing cert that he will prolong the agony until the last possible moment), handing back the keys to No 10 with a baffled expression, waiting for somebody to explain to him what happened.
Almost 10% still voted Labour - actually, I think that is a kind of minimum that a major party will not go below. There will always be someone who votes for a party no matter what "because I always have/we always do/my parents could'nt be wrong" and so on. And then there is the monkey and pencil effect (the one that guarantees you a minimum of 25% in a multiple-choice exam) where all candidates will get some votes simply because they are on the paper - bad eyesight, errors, and so on.
ReplyDeleteAnd, of course, there is the fact that some people are just stupid. There are some people who still genuinely believe the world is flat, or that the earth was created in six days, or that feeding your children on Macdonalds is good parenting.
No, I think 10% is almost an irreducible minimum for a mainstream party. And I certainly wouldn't put it past SnotGobbler to introduce some scheme within the next 12 months (votes at 16, perhaps, which worked quite well for Wilson when he reduced the voting age to 18) which might give him a little extra edge. He has spent the last 10 years creating a client state of people who know that their benefit lifestyle depends on the continuance of a Labour government, after all.
The Labour vote collapsed spectacularly, and if I were a Labour MP right now I would be registering with Job Centre Plus and taking a plumbing course.
All humour aside, I don't disagree: 10% is both disastrous and about as low as any main party ever gets. Plus, in all honesty, voting New Improved Labour is hardly the sole benchmark for irredeemable stupidity (experience suggests the figure for that may well be significantly over 10%...). No doubt the Tory margin was equally swelled by it's hardcore of "anything with a blue rosette will do" voters.
ReplyDeleteI can't for the life of me think of an alternative democratic method that would work any better, but I do detest the way that the "party" in "party politics" almost invariably counts for more than the "politics". No doubt if Gordon was less of an utter arse, he'd still command (or have whipped) a majority for anything he decided should be law. Regardless of whether it actually benefits the constituency of any of his MPs that would be voting for it.
There again, since Labour traditionally holds few middle-class seats and seems intent on redistributing what remains of our wealth unto the red areas on the boundary map, perhaps we are actually seeing laws that benefit his MPs constituencies. Shame about everybody else in the country, but you can't run a nation into the ground without a few casualties along the way.
Damn, I can't wait to see the bloke go. And I never thought I'd see the day when my sympathies would be in the blue corner: having lived through the grimmest parts of the Thatcher years and hated that whole greed is good, cult of the self, I'm all right Jack mentality...actually, I'm pretty much sick of having the absolute piss taken out of me and mine by the central commissariat now.
If there's isn't an option for a cooperative, genuinely improved and civilised society - kind of small-government humanitarian socialism - then, frankly, I'd rather be Michael Douglas in Wall St than Ned Beatty in Deliverance.
Anything with an -ism is usually collectivism of one kind or another - socialism, communism, fascism. All big-state solutions where people better then us take our money and spend it on what they think we ought to spend it on, and tell us how to live a proper life. Contradicting myself, I'm becoming attracted to libertarianism, at least as an idea if not a political reality. Have you read Douglas Carswell and Dan Hannan's 'The Plan' yet? Worth a look.
ReplyDelete