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stupid hard brexit bastards

tim walker standing down in canterbury... not an LD fan but this is class 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

think there are plenty enough actors in the UK who would like to see the labour party fail at this election...

Every adult will be entitled to six years of free study under Labour plans for a radical expansion of lifelong learning, as part of its vision for a cradle-to-grave national education service.

^big policy

some thoughts
1 this is not a fully brexit election.
2 farage move could split right vote in LAB/CON marginals
3 lab is already pulling back some ‘leavers’ w their prospectus
4 farage move will focus ‘remainer’ minds in CON/LAB marginals
5 means it is a lot easier to paint vote for BXP as vote for CONs, where ‘never tory’ a stronger cultural identity than ‘leave’
6 difficulty is it will mean polling probably now meaningless betw here and 12/12 which could have motivational impacts for LAB activists
7 BXP/CON ‘pact’ presumably massively alienating for cameroonian liberals in those LIB/CON marginals

still all to play for imo

inch by inch the conservatives are learning how to communicate on social media

following up on the discussion re the scottish dimension this time round, this article is worth a read:
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/18026376.general-election-2019-contenders-three-key-scottish-marginals-explain-campaign-techniques/

“Broadly, if you put the latest polling numbers into a seat predictor, you come up with 50 seats for the SNP. But there are many reasons to be cautious.

First, the aforementioned lack of up-to-date polling. Second, with so many marginals it doesn’t take much deviation from a national swing to cause some interesting results in individual seats.

Third, there are likely to be different campaigns and narratives running in different parts of the country. What a national predictor assumes is that all seats behave in the same way, for example that all the Tory gains in the north-east of Scotland will go back to the SNP.”

feel like the most significant event of the campaign so far has nothing to do with russian money or dodgy bar charts... but the PM shrugging off fact that several marginal constituencies are currently underwater. saw some northern papers had splashed on his “not an emergency” comment. lovely stuff

hard agree that 2019 is not a rerun of 2017. the choice is starker this time

not sure how reliable a comparison those graphs are. the european elections introduced a lot of noise to the polling which I’d expect to be clarified as this campaign progresses

would like to start seeing pictures like this from scotland, mind
https://mobile.twitter.com/meadwaj/status/1193234405013278720

and apols for any confusing posts - on phone, sadly

all CON marginals are SNP/CON contests in scotland, I think. it is very difficult to predict how the various dynamics (unionist Vs nat; leave Vs remain; left Vs right) will interact. I would expect, however, that the SNP will their vote out in these constituencies. the story of 17 in scotland was 1 extremely coordinated tactical voting by unionists + 2 the SNP vote was depressed. 1 will be confused this time, by the interplay of the other dynamics I mentioned and 2 should be less of an issue in these seats.

east ren is hard to call because it is a genuine three way marginal but it has the country’s largest jewish population so the labour vote may be impacted. which will send it to the SNP

what is difficult to predict is what happens in SNP/LAB marginals like glasgow NE, glasgow SW, glasgow central, glasgow south, cambuslang & rutherglen. if the polling you cite is right then they will go SNP. I wouldn’t be so confident tho. some of these seats went LAB in 17 and that was when labour central command were ostensibly fighting the scottish battle as an edinburgh south by-election. resources are likely to be much better directed this time round

SNP are second in those seats:

Aberdeenshire West and Kincardine

Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale

Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk

like in 2017, expect the trend in this election will be for the polls to narrow increasingly as we approach polling day. each of the LDs and BXP will get squeezed out as people face the actual choice before them. the polls never fully narrowed in 17 and they probably won’t again. what is worth keeping an eye on is labour activists’ twitter accounts. the pictures from their campaigning activity will tell an untold story that might not come through in the press - throngs of people coming out on wet and cold tuesdays to unseat tories. it will likely be like this but on steroids:

• “I heard about people being overwhelmed in a few seats, after we sent out text messages directing volunteers,” says Beth Foster-Ogg, 20, Momentum’s membership organiser. “I got a call from Cambridge, from a local organiser saying: ‘You’ve sent me too many people! We’ve sent out all the boards and there’s still loads of people flooding in, we don’t know what to do.’ It happened in Leeds North West, too – they started the day, they had so many activists that they went: ‘Right, let’s scrap our whole strategy, we’re going to just print off the electoral register instead’ – and rather than focusing on likely Labour voters, which is what you would normally do, they knocked on all the doors on the electoral register – that’s unheard of.” The seat saw a 14% swing to Labour, overturning a Lib Dem majority of almost 3,000 and replacing it with a 4,000 Labour lead.*
  
  
  
  

no way SNP win 51 seats in scotland. I’ll eat matthew goodwin’s book if they do

as for the CONs, lack of ruth D is immaterial. while she was very overrated, she was at least canny enough to see the writing on the wall. many people said it at the time (not journalists, of course, her biggest fans) the CON vote peaked in scotland in 2017 - that was their ceiling. would have needed something transformational to go above it. they’ll likely lose all their seats except bowie, jack and lamont. and even then they still might lose

it’s a distraction imo

oh my god, boris' campaign launch on the front of the telegraph..... so bad. what is their pitch to the country? "corbyn is stalin" pmsl

what odds can you get on both him and swinson losing their seats?

andrew bridgen has reversed JRM’s reverse ferret

jo swinson... is not good at this

suggest the conservatives may also want to lock JRM in a cupboard somewhere for the next 6 weeks

“LDs - harder to say. mid-30s maybe? 50 would be a GREAT night looking at the electoral map and swings needed”

stand by this from a month ago - 30 optimistic I think

both would be true if britain was a rainy fascist island no? ie corbyn will transform the UK* into a mainstream moderate social democracy, the like of which are commonplace across the EU

*scotland already part way there

by “best brexit” just mean whatever labour soft brexit starmer and co have already presumably pre-negotiated with the EU last year. I think it’s highly unlikely, though not impossible, they’d campaign for any form of brexit. it would utterly demoralise their whole activist base. that’s all conjecture tho - we’d have to see the deal.

what we do know is that a vote for labour in the GE is a vote for letting the people have the final* word on the whole sorry saga

*lol

they’re not likely to campaign for the best brexit tho, I’d reckon given:

1 how they campaigned last time (under the same leadership);
2 where the membership are on this topic; and
3 the fact that there is no brexit deal that is better than remain.

majority labour govt would deliver a second referendum. tho I concede you can argue the toss on whether that is feasible given the polls

if ‘remain’ is your overriding concern of the election (ie bigger than climate change, austerity etc) it’s probably best to: vote LD in CON/LD marginals; labour in LAB/CON marginals; SNP in SNP/CON marginals. and if you’re not thrilled about the dissolution of the UK, vote LAB in SNP/LAB marginals.

on brexit, a vote for labour is a mandate for a second referendum. unfortunately remain ultras are like the ERG on this in that they can’t take yes for an answer. imo they are actively jeopardising the one policy goal they are after. in the world of political reality, the only route to (1) a second referendum and (2) therefore potentially remaining in the EU, runs through a labour govt

I think there is already a pretty big democratic mandate for leave - but I’m willing to countenance arguments about how long that mandate endures (I’m less interested in the stuff about its legitimacy).

interesting that marr didn’t ask john mcdonnell one question about brexit

seems like a reasonable analysis on farage
https://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2019/11/is-nigel-farage-labours-new-best-friend.html?m=1

seems silly they don't also sell a 650b rear wheel only