Just as Labour had barely won Copeland in 2015 (I don't know where this safe seat business comes from; is that just because it's "Up North"?), so the Conservatives barely won Copeland last night.
But they did win, and they did so on Theresa May's left-of-Ed-Miliband programme.
Meanwhile, UKIP died at Stoke Central, and its only MP appeared on Question Time to say that that was because it was not, "A traditional working-class party of Keir Hardie."
This country's sinistrisme is complete.
Between them, there is nothing that cannot now be enacted by two Party Leaders who are respectively a Left Christian Democrat and a Left Social Democrat.
Opposed only by the MPs who signed the anti-Bercow motion.
And there are all of five of those.
Five.
Out of 650.
The BBC notes: Theresa May this morning finds her grip on British politics hugely strengthened. It will be taken by her supporters as a vindication of her hard-edged drive towards Brexit.""
ReplyDeleteQuite so.
Another vindication was the fact that the combined Tory/UKIP vote in Stoke (which overwhelmingly voted Leave) was over twice that of the vote for the Remain-campaigning anti-women misogynist Snell.
As the pollsters confirm, Labour is finished.
Professor John Curtice, of Strathclyde University, said the Copeland result was the best by-election performance by a governing party in terms of the increase in its share of the vote since January 1966.
It's been a Labour seat since 1935.
Brexit? If most people never hear the word again, then it will be too soon. A high proportion of those who voted in the referendum did not, do not, and will not vote in elections, including these elections.
DeleteThe Right died last night. Copeland ended any possibility of a challenge, or even a critique, of Theresa May from that wing of her own party, so she now has a completely free hand there. And Stoke Central ended UKIP altogether.
Based on May's staggeringly left-wing domestic programme, the centre is now whatever Jeremy Corbyn says, just so long as she still gets to be rude about him personally while reading out the policies that two years ago were peculiar to him and John McDonnell. And the death of UKIP means that there is no one to object from the Right. Her reading out of Corbynism in the style of Margot Leadbetter is now as far right as British politics goes.
She has entirely accepted Corbyn's terms of debate. And the capture of Copeland (hardly Bolsover, but even so) cannot be seen as anything other than a vindication of that. That is now what Britain is, a country in which the Christian Democratic Left seeks to enact as much as possible of the Social Democratic Left's programme while holding it up as a bogeyman for electoral purposes. It seems to be working.
Do you think the sitting MPs resigned in the hope Labour would lose and Corbyn would be ousted?
ReplyDeleteYes. But that would only have worked if Labour had lost both seats.
DeleteIndeed. It shouldn't be forgiven though.
DeleteIt won't be.
Delete