If Labour really does jump from 44 per cent in 2010 to 60 per cent or more on Thursday, and that in a constituency half of which is half of Sale, then all other political forces really will be finished in the North of England where the House of Commons was concerned.
Moreover, UKIP will be in serious trouble in the North West, where it has high hopes for this year's local and European elections. Overall, for the European poll that UKIP has spent five years saying that it was going to top, it is now five points behind the Conservatives and a whopping 15 points behind Labour.
In the early hours of Friday morning, even Nigel Farage and Paul Nuttall, who are good at it, would have trouble spinning fewer than one in five votes cast as any kind of victory.
Especially since the media increasingly do not find Farage amusing anymore. His "English Aid" policy was lifted directly from a comment, not even a particularly well-articulated one, made by a member of last week's Question Time audience.
Perhaps the Conservative and Labour activists who regularly turn up in that audience, and who would certainly know each other well enough in the same locality to be able to organise this, might compete to slip in suggestions with a view to their becoming UKIP policy?
In the early hours of Friday morning, even Nigel Farage and Paul Nuttall, who are good at it, would have trouble spinning fewer than one in five votes cast as any kind of victory.
Especially since the media increasingly do not find Farage amusing anymore. His "English Aid" policy was lifted directly from a comment, not even a particularly well-articulated one, made by a member of last week's Question Time audience.
Perhaps the Conservative and Labour activists who regularly turn up in that audience, and who would certainly know each other well enough in the same locality to be able to organise this, might compete to slip in suggestions with a view to their becoming UKIP policy?
Furthermore, the call for some kind of Civil Defence Force against the floods is, well, just plain mad. Farage and UKIP are clearly as far out of their depth, so to speak, as is David Cameron, who is too weak even to sack Owen Paterson, with his equine lasagne, his goalpost-moving badgers, and now this.
There is almost, but not quite, something reassuring about the fact that, in a Cabinet otherwise comprised entirely of characters created by George MacDonald Fraser, there also sits a character created by P. G. Wodehouse. Alas, he is neither Jeeves nor Lady Constance Keeble.
Bringing us back to Farage. There are whispers among UKIP activists in the North West that he has deliberately sabotaged the campaign at Wythenshawe and Sale East in order to keep the party's centre of gravity in his own South-Eastern citadel, its ideology Thatcherism-in-Exile.
Farage himself is already muttering unspecifically about postal voting fraud. Trying to get his excuse in before the thing needing to be excused. Bless.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, will use their old stand-by at all Commons by-elections, since it has been so very long since they last won one. "This," they will insist, "is not our natural territory." Where, exactly, is their natural territory?
They have long since managed to convince themselves that they never did win seats in the North of England, or in Scotland. They have bizarrely managed to convince themselves that Scottish secession would put them in government permanently, which is an historically illiterate, and an innumerate, proposition.
Therefore, a party with the word "Unionist" in its name now actively desires the secession of Scotland while defining itself in terms of the dismantlement of everything that inspires loyalty to the British State, anywhere outside the South of England until recent weeks, and even right into the Home Counties as of this week.
Truly, they do have no natural territory. They have caused what little that they had retained to be washed away.
It hardly seems worth mentioning their Coalition partners, whose candidate is guaranteed is lose her deposit at Wythenshawe and Sale East. Except to say that, not being very good at politics, the Lib Dems missed a trick by not demanding, as the price of giving the Bullingdon Boys their birthright keys to Downing Street, reform of the system for electing English local authorities.
They would have been pushing at an open door. The only internal Conservative opposition would be from people who just did not want to be in a party that existed in Inner London, in the provincial cities and in the old industrial belts. If they had wanted that, then they would have joined another, obviously identifiable, party. But such people could easily have been defeated.
Having learned their lesson from Scotland, where their Holy Grail of the Single Transferable Vote for multi-member constituencies delivered the Lib Dems a reduction in the number of their council seats (oh, I do enjoy writing that), they should instead have insisted on voting for one candidate, with the requisite number elected at the end, and with the strange urban practice of almost-annual elections discontinued in favour of the election of the whole council simultaneously every four years. If some way could then have been found to hold all English local elections on the same day, then the joy of party activists across the spectrum would have been impossible to contain.
But the organisational base of the Labour Party would have been devastated. In place as part of the first Queen's Speech of the next Parliament, Labour would still have been reeling from it by next year's General Election. Yet it was not to be.
It will certainly never happen in any of the next three Parliaments, at least, since those will have comfortable Labour majorities with deep, deep roots in the muncipal machines and in the trade unions that serve, and are served by, those machines.
Upper-metropolitan commentators are now suggesting that Labour, of all parties, might introduce Proportional Representation, of all things, for local government, of all structures. Quite that level of naivety is almost charming.
Rather like imagining that Labour might lose the Wythenshawe and Sale East by-election. Or might not win the 2015 General Election outright.
Bringing us back to Farage. There are whispers among UKIP activists in the North West that he has deliberately sabotaged the campaign at Wythenshawe and Sale East in order to keep the party's centre of gravity in his own South-Eastern citadel, its ideology Thatcherism-in-Exile.
Farage himself is already muttering unspecifically about postal voting fraud. Trying to get his excuse in before the thing needing to be excused. Bless.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, will use their old stand-by at all Commons by-elections, since it has been so very long since they last won one. "This," they will insist, "is not our natural territory." Where, exactly, is their natural territory?
They have long since managed to convince themselves that they never did win seats in the North of England, or in Scotland. They have bizarrely managed to convince themselves that Scottish secession would put them in government permanently, which is an historically illiterate, and an innumerate, proposition.
Therefore, a party with the word "Unionist" in its name now actively desires the secession of Scotland while defining itself in terms of the dismantlement of everything that inspires loyalty to the British State, anywhere outside the South of England until recent weeks, and even right into the Home Counties as of this week.
Truly, they do have no natural territory. They have caused what little that they had retained to be washed away.
It hardly seems worth mentioning their Coalition partners, whose candidate is guaranteed is lose her deposit at Wythenshawe and Sale East. Except to say that, not being very good at politics, the Lib Dems missed a trick by not demanding, as the price of giving the Bullingdon Boys their birthright keys to Downing Street, reform of the system for electing English local authorities.
They would have been pushing at an open door. The only internal Conservative opposition would be from people who just did not want to be in a party that existed in Inner London, in the provincial cities and in the old industrial belts. If they had wanted that, then they would have joined another, obviously identifiable, party. But such people could easily have been defeated.
Having learned their lesson from Scotland, where their Holy Grail of the Single Transferable Vote for multi-member constituencies delivered the Lib Dems a reduction in the number of their council seats (oh, I do enjoy writing that), they should instead have insisted on voting for one candidate, with the requisite number elected at the end, and with the strange urban practice of almost-annual elections discontinued in favour of the election of the whole council simultaneously every four years. If some way could then have been found to hold all English local elections on the same day, then the joy of party activists across the spectrum would have been impossible to contain.
But the organisational base of the Labour Party would have been devastated. In place as part of the first Queen's Speech of the next Parliament, Labour would still have been reeling from it by next year's General Election. Yet it was not to be.
It will certainly never happen in any of the next three Parliaments, at least, since those will have comfortable Labour majorities with deep, deep roots in the muncipal machines and in the trade unions that serve, and are served by, those machines.
Upper-metropolitan commentators are now suggesting that Labour, of all parties, might introduce Proportional Representation, of all things, for local government, of all structures. Quite that level of naivety is almost charming.
Rather like imagining that Labour might lose the Wythenshawe and Sale East by-election. Or might not win the 2015 General Election outright.
As your first paragraph is demonstrably wrong I didn't bother with the rest of it I'm afraid...
ReplyDeleteWell done on still posting comments even as the waters wash you away while you continue to cry out, "We need smaller government! We need smaller government!"
ReplyDeleteYou are the greatest political blogger in Britain. No, scratch that. You are one of the finest commentators in Britain, as good as or better than numerous people on contracts with the papers.
ReplyDeleteThe floods had nothing to do with "small government" but with a Leftist quango of tree- huggers led by a Labour peer which refuses to dredge.
ReplyDeleteDave has obviously spent too long cooped up in his village, reading Labourlist.
Tell it to the voters of his Thames Valley constituency.
ReplyDeleteBrilliant! I do get (an optimistic) feeling that Farage is really one of those little robot toys whose batteries are just...about...to...run..out..
ReplyDeleteNever mind being a blogger, the medium is not the message. You are one of the four or five best commentators in Britain today, head and shoulders above most of the salariat-commentariat.
ReplyDelete