{"id":35667,"date":"2016-12-09T06:48:59","date_gmt":"2016-12-09T06:48:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=35667"},"modified":"2016-12-09T06:48:59","modified_gmt":"2016-12-09T06:48:59","slug":"sleaford-no-effective-opposition-to-ineffective-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2016\/12\/09\/sleaford-no-effective-opposition-to-ineffective-government\/","title":{"rendered":"Sleaford: no effective opposition to ineffective government"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sleaford isn't often in the news. Yesterday's by election delivers it a brief moment of attention. And that is its probable significance. This is a constituency that is very different from Richmond Park. And it voted Conservative, heavily.<\/p>\n

Although the government is not doing well on Brexit (I think that a kind interpretation), or just about anything else, more than 50% voted Tory.<\/p>\n

UKIP, the LibDems and Labour were far behind, in that order.<\/p>\n

For UKIP this was bad news: they are offering no hard Brexit alternative where many might want that. They lost votes.<\/p>\n

For the LibDems this was quite OK: they were always 'also rans' in this contest. But they gained 5%. If I was in their HQ I would take courage from that.<\/p>\n

Labour came a good second here in 1997. They came fourth yesterday and lost 7%. That is significant: there is no evidence, yet again, that people think Labour is providing effective opposition to an ineffective government.<\/p>\n

The question is, when will they?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sleaford isn’t often in the news. Yesterday’s by election delivers it a brief moment of attention. And that is its probable significance. This is a
Read the full article…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35667\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}