Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[garbon]

I guess Lib Dem gains are from people not knowing who else to vote for?

[Josquius]

I guess Lib Dem gains are from people not knowing who else to vote for?

Lib Dems are the only explicitly anti brexit national party (Well. And the greens.).

Good and bad news in Sunderland as the council remains in labour hands despite a significant swing towards the lib dems. What message does the Labour Council leader take from this obvious sign people are upset about brexit, labours support for the tory coup and lack of support for a confirmatory vote?
That people are punishing Labour for not supporting brexit and for supporting the peoples vote.....
Lexiters truly are the worst. At least with the nazis their logic makes a bit of sense.

[Agelastus]

Good and bad news in Sunderland as the council remains in labour hands despite a significant swing towards the lib dems. What message does the Labour Council leader take from this obvious sign people are upset about brexit, labours support for the tory coup and lack of support for a confirmatory vote?
That people are punishing Labour for not supporting brexit and for supporting the peoples vote.....
Lexiters truly are the worst. At least with the nazis their logic makes a bit of sense.

Looking at the result on the BBC Labour lost 12 councillors.

4 to the Lib-Dems and 1 to the Greens (the "remainer" parties.)

4 to the Conservatives and 3 to UKIP (the "carry out the referendum result" and "leaver" parties.)

Now, the BBC results page does not show vote percentages which you may have from other sources, and without this I do not know if the swing to the Lib Dems was higher than the results show.

Given the data I can see though how do the above results square with your comment? Labour lost more to leavers than it did to remainers. In fact, the seat loss (58% to leaver, 42% to remainer) is pretty close percentage wise to the referendum result of 61% leave/39% remain.

Labour seems to have shed their voters in proportion to the referendum result - presumably these voters being mainly from the "swing" group of voters in Sunderland rather than the more "tribal" group of voters*.

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*Is there a better term than "tribal" these days to describe voters who will vote for the same party "come-what-may"?

[garbon]

I guess Lib Dem gains are from people not knowing who else to vote for?

Lib Dems are the only explicitly anti brexit national party (Well. And the greens.).

Good and bad news in Sunderland as the council remains in labour hands despite a significant swing towards the lib dems. What message does the Labour Council leader take from this obvious sign people are upset about brexit, labours support for the tory coup and lack of support for a confirmatory vote?
That people are punishing Labour for not supporting brexit and for supporting the peoples vote.....
Lexiters truly are the worst. At least with the nazis their logic makes a bit of sense.

If that's the reason for Lib Dems surging up, then it is really odd that everyone is spinning the Con/Lab results as a sign that people are frustrated that Brexit has not been delivered.

[Tamas]

IIRC Labour predominantly lost ground in Leave areas, so I think they are getting punished for not kicking the status quo in the nuts enough.

[Tamas]

I don't know if politics presently are just funny here or downright dysfunctional, but right now the supposed general frustration has resulted in triumph for the pro-Remain outsider, but in a month we will have a Farage landfall, and supposedly both will happen for the same reason.

BTW I gave up on voting local elections after the first time we went: there was no ID check of any kind, and you had PENCILS to mark your vote. If the authorities can't bother to take this seriously, I am not going to either.

[Agelastus]

If that's the reason for Lib Dems surging up, then it is really odd that everyone is spinning the Con/Lab results as a sign that people are frustrated that Brexit has not been delivered.

I don't actually disagree with Tyr that being the main party of remain is helping the Liberals, I just don't see this reflected in the Sunderland results.

There's still just under half of the results to come in.

(a) The Tories were on a high with this set of seats - regardless of the polls one would expect them to lose seats. By the end of the day they should have lost about 1000 seats, probably 2/3 of which can be laid down to the collapse in support that the national polls have shown following the failure to push the Brexit deal through.

(b) Conversely, given the polls and the results last time for these seats, Labour should not be losing seats. This is actually a bad sign for them.

(c) More interestingly even than the improvement in Lib Dem fortunes (and Green, but how much of this is natural increase and how much due to Brexit is uncertain - the Greens have been rising for most of the recent local election cycles) is the massive increase in "independents"; the number of genuine independents has been going down in local councils since the war. Superficially this looks like a shuddering reversal of this trend but I do wonder how many of these independents are "in-name-only" (which is something I have discovered from a poster on another forum who is deeply involved in Lib-Dem local politics is something the Tories are famous for in some parts of the country.)

I'm also not impressed with the Beeb's reporting at the moment - the national news has been grouping the two parties together in a phrase that goes roughly "the Conservatives, and Labour, have lost "hundreds of seats" which implies both parties have suffered equally. This is not true, Labour have had a bad day for the "party of the next government" but they have so far lost less than a 100 seats.

[mongers]

I don't know if politics presently are just funny here or downright dysfunctional, but right now the supposed general frustration has resulted in triumph for the pro-Remain outsider, but in a month we will have a Farage landfall, and supposedly both will happen for the same reason.

BTW I gave up on voting local elections after the first time we went: there was no ID check of any kind, and you had PENCILS to mark your vote. If the authorities can't bother to take this seriously, I am not going to either.

Agreed on first paragraph, but Tamas your second deserves a

Those are tokens representing a well functioning democratic system built on mutual trust.

The whole voter fraud OMG theme, is one that the Trumpists, tea party and hard right have banged on about; be wary of the company you keep on certain issues.

[Valmy]

Victory for the Liberal-Democrats!

This is Gladstone smiling:



Anyway it is probably just one of those protest votes that occasionally swells the ranks but it is heartening when it happens.

[Threviel]

I don't know if politics presently are just funny here or downright dysfunctional, but right now the supposed general frustration has resulted in triumph for the pro-Remain outsider, but in a month we will have a Farage landfall, and supposedly both will happen for the same reason.

BTW I gave up on voting local elections after the first time we went: there was no ID check of any kind, and you had PENCILS to mark your vote. If the authorities can't bother to take this seriously, I am not going to either.

Agreed on first paragraph, but Tamas your second deserves a

Those are tokens representing a well functioning democratic system built on mutual trust.

The whole voter fraud OMG theme, is one that the Trumpists, tea party and hard right have banged on about; be wary of the company you keep on certain issues.

He is from eastern europe, his criticism is well founded if you've been brought up in an autocracy pretending to be a democracy.

[crazy canuck]

Victory for the Liberal-Democrats!

This is Gladstone smiling:

[Tamas]

Basically the argument to dismiss concerns on the ease of voter fraud is that it is on such miniscule scale that it doesn't infihence anything.

I am sorry but all citizens have equal votes. If some random vote that got falsely entered is dismissed as irrelevant then All votes are irrelevant.

[Tamas]

So yeah, Mongers, I perfectly understand your point and in fact it is what I respect and adore most in the UK. But just because it is a good thing doesn't mean it should be let to slide to dangerous naivety and a disrespect of institutions.

[Josquius]

Good and bad news in Sunderland as the council remains in labour hands despite a significant swing towards the lib dems. What message does the Labour Council leader take from this obvious sign people are upset about brexit, labours support for the tory coup and lack of support for a confirmatory vote?
That people are punishing Labour for not supporting brexit and for supporting the peoples vote.....
Lexiters truly are the worst. At least with the nazis their logic makes a bit of sense.

Looking at the result on the BBC Labour lost 12 councillors.

4 to the Lib-Dems and 1 to the Greens (the "remainer" parties.)

4 to the Conservatives and 3 to UKIP (the "carry out the referendum result" and "leaver" parties.)

Now, the BBC results page does not show vote percentages which you may have from other sources, and without this I do not know if the swing to the Lib Dems was higher than the results show.

Given the data I can see though how do the above results square with your comment? Labour lost more to leavers than it did to remainers. In fact, the seat loss (58% to leaver, 42% to remainer) is pretty close percentage wise to the referendum result of 61% leave/39% remain.

Labour seems to have shed their voters in proportion to the referendum result - presumably these voters being mainly from the "swing" group of voters in Sunderland rather than the more "tribal" group of voters*.

-----------------

*Is there a better term than "tribal" these days to describe voters who will vote for the same party "come-what-may"?

Sunderland has always had a solid 5-10% lumpen crowd who would vote ukip/bnp/scumbag party de-jour come what may. There's a bit of a misrepresentation about that they've come out of nowhere since they haven't bothered with local elections in the past in the city. The seats they won were largely on a pretty naff turnout, in keeping with the huge drop in their support around the country.
Checking the results myself I'm surprised to see the lib dems didn't even run in every seat (thats a known huge problem with the greens, but surprising to see from lib dems) but did pretty well where they did.
Will try to find the original post I was referring to, IIRC it was phrased in terms of %s.


Also of course Labour in Sunderland have other issues. These are local elections afterall so not everyone was voting with brexit in mind. Theres been some local dodginess from the council in Sunderland lately with the ongoing Vaux site saga.

Its a mistake to read the elections as a ringing blow against brexit, but bizzare that some are reading them as supportive of it.

[Tamas]

He is from eastern europe, his criticism is well founded if you've been brought up in an autocracy pretending to be a democracy.

Also one more thing: that is of course true to the present situation in Hungary (I very much doubt the last elections were fair) but the rules seem to had been far more rigorous there than here.

The way it works (used to and still does, nowadays the only difference is that all the checks against abuse and cheating are controlled by a fascist government):

Basically for a national election, first of all everyone has a national ID card and if they are resident under an address, that's also registered and they have a residency card for that. So the election authority knows each and everyone who is eligible to vote. In preparation to the election everyone would receive information on how to vote when, plus what we called their "knocking slip" which was basically a paper of endorsement that you could sign and give to the candidates (or their representatives) who would usually go around knocking and asking for it (hence the name). This is because candidates and parties had to get X number of these to be eligible to run.
There would be frequent TV and radio adverts warning you about all this and advising you to report to your local council if you have not received the above by X date.

Then on election day (always a Sunday), when you go to vote you'd need to present your ID card so your identity could be confirmed. Your ballot papers you'd put into an envelope and into to he box, and that's about it.


So yeah, I get that most of this is unnecessary if we assume that everyone is aware of everything and nobody wants to cheat, but you must admit, that such a system puts a bigger gravity on an individual vote. More than "well yeah a few might be fraudulent but what does one vote matter?"