The Daily Mail were the first to suggest it was a possibility and I don’t know if their bias is towards Ukip or Conservative in this election.
My local Labour councillor has suggested that Oxford East is too close to call. It might be an attempt to make sure I vote Labour (I don’t think he knows how disillusioned I am with his party) but if he’s right then it looks like the Green party might have a real chance here.
I think he may well be exaggerating- Yougov have them safely ahead.
That makes far more sense, but I’m still a little confused about his comment. Ukip and the Conservatives have no chance here, and if my sources are correct the LibDems have lost a lot of voters, mostly to the Green party.
Wasn’t that Evan Harris’ old seat?
He always seemed like a decent MP.
Checks…
Oh, that was Oxford West. Never mind.
No, he was Oxford West.
He lost at the last election because the local LibDems focused on trying to win Oxford East, and didn’t worry about him because he was certain to win. By the time they realised they were mistaken it was too late.
I think that’s just political reflex action. Nobody on a campaign will ever say that they’re well ahead because they want to maintain turnout of potential supporters. And if they suspect you’re leaning green, pulling the old “two-horse race so stop the tory” trick is so common that it’s a standard feature of election leaflets.
Because overall, that’s what the main parties are doing nationally. Labour want to squash down the Green vote to maximise their chances in marginals and the Tories want to do the same thing to the Farageists. And worryingly for the overall outcome, the Tories have more potential voters to scare back to their side. It’s relentlessly negative strategy, but they do it because it works.
Fucking Hell!
Can we say unfree election?
Nice non-establishment Labour candidate, there. I’m sick of this political dynasty shit.
Yeah, it looks like the rest of the family didn’t really get the whole point of disclaiming a peerage. Or they have a particularly strong love of irony.
Oh man I’d love too. In fact…
Self service bingo card creator where you just upload a list of items? Sharable? Leader boards?
I have two lists here:
Liberal Democrats
http://www.mediafire.com/view/86dpbjctkzvi18f/LibDemBingoListv2.txt
Scottish Labour (including Falkirk as Eric Joyce was elected as a Labour candidate)
http://www.mediafire.com/view/sjen6dq9fkfv7cc/ScottishLabourBingoListv2.txt
Can anyone see any mistakes? I tried to make sure that all commas were removed from candidates names and constituencies.
I’m taking another break from the news, while it looks like not a lot is happening.
Something I haven’t heard this election is some minor celebrity threatening to leave the country if Labour get elected. Have I missed someone? http://www.wewilldrivethemtotheairport.co.uk/ hasn’t been that successful, has it?
Didn’t that Hopkins person say they’d do that?
Seems as though you get the same on this side of the pond, with lots of people threatening to move to Canada, and without much understanding of the immigration policies of said country.
*High five
Did anyone watch the debate thing yesterday?
Scotland continues to sound interesting.
http://lordashcroftpolls.com/2015/04/latest-scottish-constituency-polling/
I am intrigued to see how this all pans out. I expect the largest single party to be the Tories, just, but a minority Labour government in formal coalition with a Cleggless LD party, relying on SNP votes to push things through.
It seems like Sturgeon is really pushing on Miliband, but I can’t see how as a party the SNP can do much else in Westminster other than vote against the Tories anyway - although I do wonder how they resolve that with voting with them in Edinburgh.
Well, that’s the sort of thing that serves them both well. Sturgeon has to show how much they can drag Labour to the left to win votes, and Milliband has to show how he won’t get pushed around for votes. Even if they both know they’ll end up cooperating, the sound and fury serves both of them well in terms of votes.
Once they’re in parliament, and Labour are a minority they’ll have to cooperate, and the nationalists will have huge leverage if they choose to use it. Labour will need to accept their input on most votes, or they won’t be able to get it past the Tories, who will be voting almost anything they propose down. They can still keep Labour in office by voting for them on confidence votes, but without their approval, and votes, Labour won’t be able to get any bills passed.
(Incidentally, this is another reason why Clegg is a pathetic, spineless weasel. Part of his justification for selling out so cheaply was that “The smaller party obviously has less influence”. Wrong! In a hung parliament, small parties wield hugely disproportionate influence, which means that he went along with the Tories because he wanted to.)
One exception, of course, is Trident, which the Tories will be happy to back, Which is itself then a massive trap for Miliband, because that leaves the issue of collaborating with the Tories on Trident wide open for the next Scottish elections.
But they don’t do that- They have a majority in Holyrood, so they don’t need votes from anyone else. And before that, when they were in a minority administration, they tended to rely on the greens and the lib dems more often. The only thing I can remember them getting tory support for was funding extra police.
I don’t follow Scottish politics very closely, but I thought there was more co-operation with them than that. I imagine that they’d fit better with the greens and LDs though, so that makes sense.
And anyway, if they work together than that’s good - I like consensus building and small parties working together on an issue basis. That’s how it should work.
This article suggests that:
Goldie won deals from Salmond on extra police officers, new drug rehabilitation programmes, extra cash for rundown town centres and zero business rates for small businesses.
As far as Trident goes, get rid of the ludicrous thing. Pissing billions down the toilet for something we can’t use is ludicrous. And I am particularly sick of ‘small government’ parties being obsessed with keeping/increasing defence spending. Makes me sick.
Oh, absolutely. I’d want to be rid of that pointless obscenity as soon as possible. I just think it isn’t likely when Westminster will have a Tory/Labour/LibDem coalition in favour of it.
As well as that, the only party talking about defence spending in this campaign is UKIP. Of course, they’re saying the exact opposite of what I’d want- they want a minimum of 2% of GDP spent there, whereas I think that 2% should be the maximum to spend, apart from during an actual war. But generally, the exact opposite of whatever the kippers are proposing is a fairly good place to be.
