Oh well. More chance of Os giving Starmer a wristy then getting a tankie to defend an utterly bizarre political opinion
I see Mike Waltz has danced off into the sunset. It will be interesting to see whether this is the start of Trump's team being picked off. I feel that Kennedy maybe next as Bird Flu starts to get a grip and seeing that Hegseth appears to be made of teflon. I would like his chippy blonde spokeswoman to get some grief too. Fingers crossed.
Yep, looked them up on YouTube. Not my type of music, so didn’t really expect to like them; didn’t expect they’d be quite so atrociously bad though.
Got to give Labour credit, it really is impressive how many voters they've lost in the space of a year.
They didn’t really have that many to begin with, they shouldn’t have been winning a huge majority with 33% of the vote, now Reform are a huge threat because it’s becoming possible to win an election with only quarter of the electorate behind you. They need to get their head out of their arses about FPTP but it won’t happen.
They have been losing loads of members since they replaced Corbyn with Starmer. More voters chose Corbyn in 2016 than any other leader but this did not equate into seats unfirtunately. I still think Labour will be reelected. The Libs and Greens will take votes off each other as will the Conservatives and Reform. We will see how Reform councils perform . Reform will implode at some point.
Which makes their losses stand out even more. Tories were obviously going to be destroyed, but Labour losing as many seats as they have, plus losing the by-election to Reform (even if by just 6 votes!) is pretty disastrous less than a year after a landslide GE win. Like you say, Reform are a huge threat now.
It's been obvious for ages that Reform will do very well next election. People are in denial if they think they're support is only small/isolated. I do think that will be their peak though.
It is akin to the success of the Liberals in 2010. I feel that Farage is due a big fall at some point. He will make big gaff and that will be the end of him and Reform. They are purely a protest vote and will be unable to govern.
To be fair we are at like 10% of results so far, obviously Labour are now the incumbent which comes with its own challenges but it is very largely a Conservative defence today and I expect the broad picture to be Conservative seats piling over to Reform, with the Lib Dem’s and Greens getting involved too. Labour are getting hit as incumbents, but the bigger story will be that the Conservative Party is basically dead, I would be surprised if the scale of defeat basically ensures Badenoch is done already. My main worry with Reform is that if they are going to be in government at some point they need some time as the official opposition first, a party jumping from 5 MPs to government would be a catastrofuck, they would have absolutely no idea what they are doing.
This round of elections will not give a very good indication of the state of the nation, too many of us have been denied the opportunity to vote.
Once the dust has settled the Electoral Reform Society will make sense of the results in light of the FPTP distortions. If my memory serves me well the then tory government changed the London mayoral voting system from PR to FPTP in a vain attempt to skew the result.
So looking at the opinions of politics geeks online (not the most legit voice I know), I’m seeing quite a bit of the following so far. Reform - Doing better than expected. Labour - Mixed, by-election obviously is a big blow, but they have retained mayors in some areas where they were on the edge and are expected to gain councillors overall. Conservatives - Doing worse than expected. Lib Dem’s and Greens - TBC Picture seems to be that most of Reforms growth is largely being driven by massive transfer of Conservative vote to themselves.
Yup. The results so far are feeding the Reform line that - despite the numbers in parliament - they're now the real opposition. I think they'll start to flip the script on the Conservatives and point to some of the higher profile results like the Mayoral elections where Labour have just held on and say the remaining Conservative voters should switch to Reform. I don't know if the next election will be their peak because I think we could get a really chaotic result next time around that means we end up with another election soon afterwards.
To start off I haven’t seen the outcome of yesterday’s elections but, as I understood it (I might be wrong) the majority of the seats up for grabs in the elections are primarily in blue areas, so not a major concern for Labour. With regards to the by-election in Runcorn they should be majorly concerned because for all the good things they have achieved and are putting into place the only things that are getting reported and listened to are the own goals they keep scoring - The funding cuts to disabled people, the winter warmer payments, the lack of support for WASPI women and probably more I can’t recall. Tory supporters who are taking joy in this need to realise one thing. The reason why so many Labour voters have turned away from the party is because they are acting too much like the Conservative Party. Labour need to understand this and spend the next 4 years trying to win the voters back by, yes I’m going to say it, introducing several of the vote winning policies that Corbyn put on the table, policies that were liked by voters across all the parties. They also need to keep banging the drum about Reform, as proved by Farage’s historic comments, that it is anti NHS and anti worker.
still a few marbles left to lose. "Mayors used to be elected via the Supplementary Vote. With the Supplementary Vote, you mark down your first and second choice for Mayor. If no candidate gets over 50% of the vote, the top two candidates continue to a run-off and all other candidates are eliminated. If your favourite candidate gets through, your vote is counted for them in the run-off. If they didn’t, but your second choice did, your vote goes to them. The run-off candidate with the most votes is declared the winner" "The government used the Elections Act 2022 to change the way we elect our mayors so that we have to use First Past the Post. First Past the Post removes the need for a candidate to win broad support to become the mayor, instead they can now win on any level of support." https://electoral-reform.org.uk/cha...plicates-thinking-for-independent-candidates/
