I have to admit to surprise at the Eastleigh election result.
I did not think the Lib Dems could hold on.
I thought the Tories might just win.
I did not think the UKIP surge was as strong as it was.
I got Labour right.
What can it mean? In my opinion a number of things.
First the Tories will move sharply to the right. Hard to imagine, but under pressure from UKIP where else can they go?
Second, there will be more than a taxi load of Lib Dems in the next parliament after all.
Third, Labour has to communicate what it is about, and soon.
Fourth, if Osborne does not change tack on the deficit at this next budget then he and his party are finished whatever they do.
Fifth, and I hate to say it, the chance of coalition again after the next election is real despite Labour's big opinion poll lead.
Who would have thought Nick Clegg might be the ultimate survivor? Perhaps they were right last time when they said "I agree with Nick". Given what his party has done to the NHS, on benefits and much else, it's not a prospect I find appealing.
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I think the Lib Dems thought that the Tories would not be as extreme and work together as they do on many local councils. Obama made the same mistake in thinking he would be able to ‘work with’ the Republicans.
The Tory press treat them as enemies.
It’s possible that the noe-liberal wing of the LIb Dems will lose control. There is nothing wrong in changing position as circumstances change and experience teaches. I hope the Lib Dems will re-position themselves away from the Tories.
If they had secured AV it would have been a lot simpler to build such a coalition.
This might signal that there’ll be more than a taxi load of Lib Dems in the next Parliament, but I suspect not that many more. In Eastleigh they benefit from having a very strong and respected local base (i.e. the local council) and their candidate was one of that group.That doesn’t hold for every Lib Dem MP, so with a loss of support of the scale they’ve seen for this constituency (minus the Chris Huhne factor) they are still on to loose and load of seats.
There will, of course, be a rapid trun to the right by Cameron, but they were on that road anyway. The Lib Dems reaction to this will be key to the extent of their own survival, I think. If they are as pathetic as they’ve been so far (e.g. look at what’s emerged this week regarding the value of Tory ‘promises’ and Lib Dem safeguards on further privatisation of the NHS)then there’s still plenty of time for any bounce from Eastleigh to be more than wiped out.
And I agree with you entirely on the issue for Labour. They can rely on the unpopularity of the Tories when all we hear in the news is based on the hum and spin of Westminster. But when it comes to delivering a message to real people on the ground the cupboard is pretty bare.
There is good and bad news in this result. The LibDems won despite the attempts by some of the tabliods like the Daily Mail to portray them in a very disprortionate, negative way. The electorate are seeing some distinction in policies between the coalition partners. This means the Tories are unlikely to win LibDem seats in their core places like the South West. A Lib-Dem melt-down would mean more Tory seats in such areas.
But lets not forget the Lib-Dems are a ‘proxy’ for Labour in these seats. Few talked about ‘tatical voting’ last night but its in our blood in such southern seats; we vote Lib-Dem to stop the Tory and I am sure some Labour voters did that last night as they did in 2010 in such seats. Despite everything we are still giving Glegg’s lot some benefit of doubt. Lets hope the left of the LibDems can be more dominant now.
Finally the rise of UKIP is frightening as if immigration & the EU are issues which will get us back on track. I guess all 26 other EU countries voted for the Banker’s bonus cap but the Cons & UKIP were able on Question Time to turn it into a Brussels attack on London. Labour were weak & inarticulate in response- for goodness sake the 2008 banking crisis brought the world to its knees, has affected the economies and banking of our societies ever since. Labour could not remind people that the bonus is an incentive to investment bankers to behave dangerously; could not remind us that in few weeks they will be getting a top band tax handout
As we all know now from the Guardian video there was no tory candidate.
What is depressing is that there is some evidence of rejection of all three mainstream parties, but the alternatives on offer are not yet taken seriously. Many still hold out hope for a change within their own party allegiance, and many are “apathetic” because they do not think they can do anything about the current situation. But within that there are still concerning signs:
The fact is that there is a substantial body of people in England who do not want “one nation” anything: not “one nation conservatism” or “one nation labour”, and not even, I think, “one nation little england”. There is no consensus in the UK, and there is no compromise. We are ruled by ideologues who make decisions on the basis of their plutocratic creed.
This is not a phenomenon confined to the UK. The election results in Italy show that a great many people are apparently alienated from their political process and if the reports are accurate that also arises from the fact that all the mainstream parties subscribe to the neoliberal economic analysis: it seems to be much the same story in Greece and in Spain. Yet faced with the various responses to that in these different countries the response is to scold the electorate and point to the effect on “the market”. It does not seem to occur to them that that is the problem, and it is not likely to persuade the people to be more “responsible”, as they term acceptance of TINA and of increased poverty and desperation for the people on behalf of big corporate interest.
The capture of politicians across Europe is largely complete. This is not democracy and the people are gradually coming to realise this. As yet there is no obvious alternative and so there are different manifestations of the true split: which is not between political parties but between the wealthy and the rest. An altermative will arise and the chances are we will not like it. But to me that is inevitable, and it will end in blood.
This article, curiously focussing on Labour, which has no base in Eastleigh, is irrelevant. UKIP is seen as an alternative and did well: like Golden Dawn in Greece and Five Star in Italy.
I do not wish to be interpreted as suggesting these are all totalitarian parties, though Golden Dawn is. What they have in common is not that: they are seen, in their different ways, to express the very large body of dissent to the ruling plutocracy, and each will reflect their particular culture in doing that. The plutocrats have broken our faith in democracy, because they have broken our democracy.
I fear you cannot polarise society in this way without it ending in war or revolution: which depends on who is seen to be to blame. In this country it will be johnny foreigner, and I do not know enough about other countries to know which way they will jump. But I do know that we need to re-establish a consensus in order to avoid that outcome: or at least that is how I see it
I fear you can, and there are more than enough current and historical examples to support this.
That’s what class war is all about and the belligerents have a lot of experience in how to go about it.
Cameron,for instance has played his only political blinder over europe, which will further bind us to the market/cargo cult monster of corporate central planning.
(Check out the possibilities of the euro/US free trade treaty to ‘reduce trade irritants’)
Globalisation, the normalisation of third world arrangements will then proceed apace.
The dozing partner in the tripartite coalition seems quite happy to assist in the marginalisation of the majority and the transformation of the public sector into buy to let britain.
You do not think this will lead to war? How are the coporates going to continue to make money without stimulus? They oppose sensible stimulus and so reduce their options: war is a great stimulus and it has the added advantage of getting people to accept austerity as essential to the war effort. Win-win for the plutocrats: who do not, as it happens, tend to pay the blood price any more than they pay the poverty price
I fear it
And fascism
Often
War with who?
We have already destroyed iraq, libya, afghanistan and syria is the current victim of our attentions.
War is part of our every day life.
At home we have a goldsteinian assault on the working and workless poor.
The vivisectionists at the ECB are successfully cracking heads in Greece, Spain, Portugal and have stunned, prior to execution, Ireland and Italy.
The peripheries of the new europe, latvia, bulgaria et have been ponzied and are now basically clearance zones.
The public sector is being gutted like so much railway copper, yet corporate rents seem to be holding up extremely well.
An elite can, and does, happily prosper amongst a downtrodden majority.
We, the lumpen, do not matter.
Looking at the Lib Dems’ share of the vote, it went down by about 15 percentage points. That’s roughly in line with their decline in a recent ComRes poll from 23% of the vote at the 2010 election to 8% now. So, on that basis, they were polling in line with a uniform national loss of votes – so much for “local strength”. If it hadn’t been for the swing to UKIP (something that is unlikely to be repeated in a general election IMHO) the Lib Dems would have been beaten by the Tories. (And in fact I think they probably will lose the seat to the Tories in 2015).
The Labour result was disappointing but I think it shows that voters like actual policies rather than just nice mood music. If it puts more pressure on Labour to come up with some actual policies that could do some good in the next parliament then it may be a blessing in disguise. John O’Farrell is a nice guy but he said virtually nothing of interest during the 2 weeks he was campaigning as far as I could see. And that is the Labour problem in a nutshell.
Coming-up with good polices this far from an election is not that reasonable a thing to do.
Poaching vote-winners is an easy thing to do.
The conservatives, under Call-Me-Dave, are running on a dividing line between left and right (some would say on the left side).
Offering them any “good” ideas to run with, as opposed to them selling the family jewels to their mates, is not that good an idea !
Offering good ideas to the voting public would be a good idea, the unpleasant truth is they do not have any.
Do you really think the conservative government would run off with policies oreinted towards full, living wage employment?