Interesting comment from somebody who screams "TORY ENABLER!!!!" at any criticism of Sir Kid Starver... please log in to view this image
Farage's followers have failed to pick up on how this letter is telling the waffling gargoyle to **** off please log in to view this image
I think there will be a disproportionate negative impact in a lot of currently Labour boroughs - many of those on small majorities. It will certainly have an impact on London mayoral voting. The Tories and their client journos will ensure that! Personally I get the need for the scheme, but it will disproportionately hit the poorest parts of society - the lower middle and working classes whose vehicles will likely be older with higher emissions. To introduce it without some form of incentive, compensation or at least a staggered application for London residents will be as popular as the Poll Tax. It's something like the equivalent of £13 per day! Labour need to be in front of this, but as they appear to already be rowing back on other aspects of their Green agenda I cannot see them coming up with a creative policy for this. I hope I'm wrong!
I agree with most of that, I just don't think it will have that much effect on a GE, 16 months from now (and after the ULEZ expansion will already be in place). Uxbridge has never been Labour. In 1997 when Labour trounced the Tories in the GE, there was a by-election a few months later and the Tory held the seat. There's too much overreaction to this, which no doubt will be fuelled by the right wing media. Only in a country like ours with the media we have, could a party overturn the biggest majority in a constituency it ever has, 24% ffs, and the narrative is that they're in some sort of crisis. Don't believe the spin, and I'd say that as much to labour voters as the rest.
ByElections should seldom be regarded as reliable barometers for GE's, but there would seldom have been a better time for Labour to win in Uxbridge. And they still would have done had it not been for those pesky LibDems fighting the seat and taking 500 votes!
Yeh I saw those 500 lol Even if Labour had taken those and won (by about 10) the narrative would've been that they scraped it and still underperformed
Excellent point. I read that there were certainly a fair few, but as we now know, the electoral commission didn't keep a record of the local council elections! Also of note for Uxbridge is that the by-election took place out of term time so up to 20k students probably did not vote in that borough!
Oh FFS! Labour once again proving themselves to be little better than the dreadful Tory regime they hope to replace. Throwing their own Mayor under the bus, rather than stand up and explain a policy that they support - or at least provide guidance to assist him rolling it out. With friends like that....
That's the thing about the right wing: humour goes over their heads so badly you need to explain it to them like they're a toddler please log in to view this image please log in to view this image
The answers are in the thread AND responses as a whole. Labour - and Starmer in particular - have made some serious pr and marketing errors in recent weeks: Back-sliding (unnecessarily) on key policies around free school meals, two child cap and then refusing to repeal the Draconian Immigration laws were electoral disasters. And as for ULEZ, they have known for 6 weeks that this would be a likely deal breaker in the Uxbridge By-election. WTLF didn't they work out their messaging in that time? It really wasn't that hard. I despair.....
There's also a couple of other takes about Uxbridge which, of course, the Tory press will ignore - and Starmer is helping them ignore by throwing Khan under the bus to make the ULEZ theory front and centre, meaning that nobody is talking about winning Selby 1.) Brunel falls within the Uxbridge & South Ruislip boundary, and if the byelection happened in April-May there is the probability that a certain amount of the university's 15,000 students would have been on the electoral register, which (in theory) might have been enough to overcome the 495 vote difference 2.) The local party had chosen their candidate only to be told they were "wrong" and had one imposed on them by central office, which is becoming a feature of Starmer's leadership at this point, but that does beg the question whether that decision alone was enough to give 496 or more potential Labour voters reason to not bother
The latest round of "Protect Comrade Farage!!" has seen Bodger jump into the fray. He's used his column in the Daily Mail to call for the head of NatWest's CEO, Alison Rose. She's a blonde who lives in Highgate, so he's probably tried to shag her and been turned down. So that's Boris Johnson, who's best known for lying and cheating, asking for it to be punished. He's doing that in the Daily Mail, which is also well known for lying and misleading. They're doing that in defence of Nigel Farage who, you've guessed it, also indulges in it endlessly. This is clearly an organised attack on the rules against PEP bribery. It's being slung about by all the usual Culture Warriors and the Tories have picked it up too quickly. Subtlety isn't their strongest suit.
