As the FT notes this morning:
Labour has lost more than 40 per cent of the council seats it has defended in by-elections since the general election, in a further sign that the party's popularity has plunged since July 4.
The party's vote share has fallen in 80 per cent of local authority by-elections, and in almost half, its vote share fell by at least 10 per cent, according to a new analysis of its performance in council ballots.
Bizarrely, most of the losses are to the Tories. Others have gained, but the Tory recovery is almost as shocking as the rapid Labour decline.
The survey covered 101 by-elections.
Politics, as usual, looks as though it might survive for a while. We are all losers as a result.
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The Tory bounce back is inevitable. Badenoch will form the next government.
Yes, I noticed one opinion poll yesterday that gave the Tories a lead over Labour. The first since Badenoch became leader.
It is difficult to know what this really says about politics in the UK, other than the usual about how FPTP could deliver a minority right wing, public sector hating, market libertarian, wannabee fascist to power, if Labour continues to mess up.
Are voters just punishing Labour? Or do they really believe that Badenoch, who is bad enough, so bad in fact, that she makes Liz Truss look like a genius, should have power?
She would dismantle public services, and no doubt sell off much of the state to Tory friends.
She would make things dire. If you think it’s bad with Labour now, just wait and see what Badenoch has in store for us.
I expect in the next few years, she will be Trump’s biggest fan. She will be taking “efficiency” lessons from Elon Musk.
Manhattan Project 2. Certainly explosive.
But Labour have only themselves to blame if they think playing the same game as the Tories will ultimately reward them.
It won’t. History shows that they are just keeping that seat of power warm for the likes of Badenoch.
And then what? Labour make the same mistake as the Democrats over the pond?
A failure to address the real economic concerns of people, and offer a real alternative to the perpetual cycle of austerity that neoliberalism has produced?
It’s called having a vision.
Badenoch and Trump do have a vision. It’s a hateful, nasty vision that will hurt a lot of people, if they take it to its logical conclusion.
And that’s ironic, because today, the 13th November, is World Kindness Day.
Thank you, Richard, for highlighting something the MSM and Starmer only fans have ignored.
Within weeks of her election and days from her support for the withdrawal of the winter fuel allowance, the local Tories began to target the Labour MP for my constituency, Vale of Aylesbury. David Miliband’s rich little helper has a majority of 500 odd and is likely to lose when the Tory voters turn up and Reform voters vote switch.
Amen to that. Less of life decided by politics. We vote them in, then we vote them out, and we end up in the same place being better off by nowt.
You would think that 40 years of neo-liberal Thatcherite policies would make the Tories unelectable.
And since the Labour response continues much of it, they would be unelectable too.
Where is the Left in all of this?
You’d think (or at least hope) so, but if voters only engage once every few years for elections and receive their information on sensible policy limits and what ‘serious’ people believe from the mainstream media then there will be no consequence for decades of failure, as long as that failure convenes to the Very Serious Person policy prescriptions.
The second issue is that many individuals, families and constituencies benefitted personally from many of the policies that have immiserated later generations. This voting bloc is active and will take a while to be outvoted if current patterns of disenfranchisement and lack of engagement persist.
Lastly, the internal knife fight for power across all the parties is vicious and elevates some truly pathological individuals to leadership positions. When we do get a conscientious, pro-social aberration like Corbyn they will be isolated, sabotaged and briefed against by more ruthless actors.
Unless we can build some form of continual, active pressure from below to drive policy across a long and sustained period of time, we’ll get nowhere. This is especially a problem with the heavily centralised nature of the UK’s political and economic decisionmaking, meaning that local wins cannot often translate well to regional or national improvements, but the smallest national level decision can crush and reverse local outcomes.
Most citizens have a combo of short memories, are badly informed, incapable of thinking for themselves.
I offer some very recent examples from the USA of people that were…. make your own decision on them – it will be something similar in the UK:
1. The guy complaining that the Affordable Care Act was going to be rescinded. He posted that he relied on ACA for his medical treatment and had only voted to repeal Obamacare. When it was pointed out to him that Obamacare WAS the ACA, he complained about how evil the Democrats were for giving their bill 2 names to confuse the population. No one pointed out that it was the Republicans who called the ACA ‘Obamacare’.
2. Various men who’d been disinvited to family Thanksgivings around the US. Apparently they couldn’t understand why some women weren’t happy to invite and cook for Trump supporters.
3. The guy who was laid off because his firm’s orders had dropped off as contracts were having to be renegotiated due to the tariffs that weren’t anticipated to arrive in Spring not being in the original quotes.
4. The Sisters who won’t attend their Grandmothers’ family events because the Grandparents voted Trump. One of the Sisters was LGBTQ. Their Mother was backing them up. The Trump voters couldn’t understand why ‘this time was different’ as voting was an issue for the individual..
All resonate
That was your 2,000th comment here
“That was your 2,000th comment here”
Congratulations mike!…but what has been achieved by it all?
Troll warning, Mike
Thanks for pointing this out Richard!
And thank you Mike for your immensely valuable contributions day after day after day…..
Message to ‘Clive’
It’s not what Mike does here that matters, it’s what he’s doing elsewhere which is no doubt his best, you silly boy.
The really depressing thing is that Starmer seems incapable of playing any other tune. If his plans were going to produce good solutions to the plight of ordinary people (or even just to the climate crisis), one could admire his gritty determination to ride out the dip, but the reality is that it’s not a dip, it’s a realistic and permanent disappointment about his policies. And it’s not gritty determination either, it’s just a lack of any better ideas.
We watched ‘Nye’ over the weekend. That’s the kind of tough vision that the country needs right now.
It’s hard to know what to say when you read things like this.
As my mate Milan Kundera would say ‘ Man’s struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’. Forgive me, but it cannot be said enough.
I struggle – as many do – to look kindly on those who forget.
Maybe as Mike suggests, they did not understand in the first place.
Two observations then if I may:
1. The Development of the ‘Carceral State’
‘Yes, the carceral state encompasses the formal institutions and operations and economies of the criminal justice system proper, but it also encompasses logics, ideologies, practices, and structures, that invest in tangible and sometimes intangible ways in punitive orientations to difference, to poverty, to struggles to social justice and to the crossers of constructed borders of all kinds.” – Ruby Tapia, U-M English and Women’s Studies
What we are looking at is a punitive state system that will abate the fears of an already abused electorate (abused and brutalised by austerity) and which Badenoch is offering a supposed solution to. I first came across the concept of the Carceral State in Tim Snyders book ‘On Freedom’ (2024). In such a state it is easy to turn eco-protesters into criminals and refugees too and see these as the source of our ills. Co-opting the innocent and legitimate into criminality is one way of looking at it.
2. ‘Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips (Betsy Sparrow et al, ‘Science’ Issue 333 pp.776-778 (2011).
I came across this piece when doing my MBA in 2014 on Knowledge Management. The thesis is that we are more likely to remember how to use a computer to find what we want know than remember or recall what we know. Written in 2011, the implications of this thesis are huge because it means therefore that whatever is shoveled up to us by our search engines can become what we think we know. This is how online dis-information basically works and I think the Alt Right etc., and modern extractive capitalism knows all about this stuff. Human cognition and memory is being subordinated to learning how to use technology, rather than remembering facts and figures?
Just some ideas to make ‘the forgetting’ of our fellow human beings at least bearable to those of us who will not. And I certainly won’t.
I sometimes pride myself in forgetting how to use tech, because it is usually just someone else’s idea as to how it should work.
Thanks
Is Morgan McSweeney no longer a genius?
Trump’s executive team is shaping up to be the team to implement Project 2025. Hopefully the disaster that will follow will be so large that it will impinge on the shallow understanding / memory of so many of the UK electorate that the Badenoch offer in 4 years time will prove unacceptable.
That said, the state of this country by then could also be pretty dire. Streeting (& privatiser mate Milburn) are setting the NHS up to collapse. The latest idea of league tables and sacking of managers will create a perfect storm of horrendous bullying and loss of staff. It is the very last thing the NHS needs.
I’m out of ideas. I am genuinely lost.
People in the ‘developed’ world really are feckless eejits.