2021 Mayoral and Local Elections

THANKFULLY there are no local elections here. So i can happily cling on to my council which consists of 2 tories out of 30.
 
But SURELY we’ll have a big swing to the left eventually.

If the US could go from Trump to Biden in four years then surely it’s possible.
 
Once the thick cunts have starved themselves out of the genepool by continuing to vote for the people making their lives worse, then we might start to get back on track.
 
ButterTart said:
Once the thick cunts have starved themselves out of the genepool by continuing to vote for the people making their lives worse, then we might start to get back on track.
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Or, those people will have made their lives so bad that they die, leaving only long-lived Tory voters. yay!
 
Soldi said:
But SURELY we’ll have a big swing to the left eventually.
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You'd think hints of that would be showing after 11 years. The problem is the Tories have become master political tacticians. They steal policy from the far right and play to people's worst fears.

After a decade in power they've managed to hold onto their traditional voters and steal traditional Labour voters by using the one thing they all have in common - racism and xenophobia. They've tapped into the worse possible political hook and it works.

Brexit may have passed, but they've hooked on to the 52% and that is a election win.

Plus the left are split.
 


LIB DEM gain from LABOUR in SUNDERLAND? :D
 
These council seats are meaningless, but I'm obsessed.

God I love elections. Except 2019. That can go fuck itself.
 
The swing says it all though, doesn’t it? It’s vastly more of a case of the right wing vote settling on the Tories post-Brexit. Not even all the left votes combined would have held the seat.

I’m interested to see how many Labour seats are lost to Greens and Lib Dems in traditionally left places. That’s going to be really hard to come back from.
 
Labour will almost certainly lose Batley & Spen in a few weeks too if Tracy Brabin wins West Yorkshire Mayor and resigns her seat :bruised:
 
Looking at the results coming in so far, it's not as bad as I'd feared (still not great). Lib Dems and Greens doing well, Tories only seem to be taking the UKIP share in a lot of places as opposed to making big gains from Labour.

Labour's strategy now needs to be to abandon its efforts to claw back the Kippers and start galvanising the young. We had a turnout yesterday of about 20% at my station - mostly old. This tells me that there's no great groundswell for the Tories where I live, just that Labour haven't offered enough of an alternative to incentivise younger non-voters into supporting them.
 
The worry about the UKIP swing to the Tories is that these all used to be Labour voters. Somehow the Tories have convinced the working poor that their interests are best served for by voting for a bunch of Old Etonians whose political philosophy is based on stealing as much money for themselves as they possibly can rather than anything remotely left wing. I don't understand how Labour are being accused of taking the red wall for granted and not doing enough to improve their lives when they have been out of power for eleven years. It's easy to write it off as the voters being some combination of stupid, gullible and racist, but that's not exactly going to get them back onside.
 
Labour just can't continue to exist in its current form, but first past the post forces the two fundamentally different wings of the party together. They need to swallow their pride and do the pact that should have been done in 2019. This goes for all other parties as well. The only thing they need from a pact is voting reform. Every other system is better than the current one for every party except the Conservatives now, so self-interest should really kick in, without even getting to the part where voting reform is the morally correct thing to do as well.
 
Kate said:
Yup. SIR KEITH has ZERO chance of getting da yoof on board.
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I don't know, I think it's more that Labour have absolutely no position on anything at the minute, so there's nothing aspirational or culturally enriching about voting for them. Them being the party that HASN'T killed thousands of people through incompetence and wasted £2bn of taxpayer money on contracts for their pals isn't enough of a platform, it seems.
 
dmlaw said:
The worry about the UKIP swing to the Tories is that these all used to be Labour voters. Somehow the Tories have convinced the working poor that their interests are best served for by voting for a bunch of Old Etonians whose political philosophy is based on stealing as much money for themselves as they possibly can rather than anything remotely left wing. I don't understand how Labour are being accused of taking the red wall for granted and not doing enough to improve their lives when they have been out of power for eleven years. It's easy to write it off as the voters being some combination of stupid, gullible and racist, but that's not exactly going to get them back onside.
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Do the people at the top of the Labour party represent the working poor either? I'd be fascinated to know how many Labour MPs there are who didn't go to university. The old trade union link between Labour and the workers seems to be completely dead outside of the public sector.

The scale of the defeat in Hartlepool can't be blamed on any one thing in particular, but I do think it was the wrong choice of candidate and it opened up more criticism for being out of touch.
 
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ButterTart said:
I don't know, I think it's more that Labour have absolutely no position on anything at the minute, so there's nothing aspirational or culturally enriching about voting for them.
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That is basically what I'm saying. Starmer doesn't stand for anything.
 
His weird reluctance to attack the obvious flaws of the Tories reminds me of John Smith who died.
 
Serious question for the pro-Corbyn crowd. What do you actually want to happen at this point?

I'm sadly coming around to the idea that Keir is just fundamentally not the right man for the job. He hasn't met the moment the way I hoped he would, and ultimately he isn't very charismatic.

But what - and more importantly WHO - is the alternative?

I genuinely believe Rebecca Long-Bailey would have performed just as badly if not even worse. Labour desperately need to find a way to thread the needle between the best parts of what the Corbyn era brought, while also staying far, far away from the elements that led them to the unmitigated disaster that was 2019.
 
Perhaps this was inevitable, but the UKIP vote going entirely to the Tories and then an independent with a local connection sweeping up an impressive amount of the vote suggests that maybe attempting to install a remain MP who just lost his seat elsewhere wasn't the BEST idea.
 
Party leadership is a personality game. This is where Labour falter. It's time to get a POC at the top. I declined to specifically say women, because the Labour ladies aren't exactly electoral gold.
 
To be clear, I'm not advocating for Keir to resign, I don't sense a lot of enthusiasm for that within the party anyway. It'd be a disaster. But looking further to the future, fresh blood and new faces at the top that aren't tainted by Corbynism are desperately needed.
 
VoR said:
To be clear, I'm not advocating for Keir to resign, I don't sense a lot of enthusiasm for that within the party anyway. It'd be a disaster. But looking further to the future, fresh blood and new faces at the top that aren't tainted by Corbynism are desperately needed.
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You can probably apply Blairism to that as well. That era has tainted Labour.
 
Labour needs to be a place for said fresh blood and new faces to want to join in the first place.
 
Ag said:
You can probably apply Blairism to that as well. That era has tainted Labour.
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Oh absolutely. Although weirdly Andy Burnham is emerging as maybe Labour's best asset at this point. But he's an exception, not the rule.
 
VoR said:
Serious question for the pro-Corbyn crowd. What do you actually want to happen at this point?
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For Scotland to go independent and not have to worry about the English electorate.

It's very hard not to blame the voters at times. It is observable fact the many, many failings of Johnson and the Torys, and yet people are still voting for them. A dog shit with a red rosette should be polling above the Torys and they aren't.

More seriously, I think the Corbynites have a point about voting FOR something. Corbyn was bad at leadership and made many unforced errors, but he had policies, that individually polled well. A charismatic leader that doesn't feel the need to play the Torys game of getting stuck in Culture War bullshit, and confidently projects being sensible and left of centre. Basically, Labour need a Sturgeon.
 
I note the Greens picking up quite a few seats. Grassroots politics working in their favour. Their advantage going forward is that they're untainted.
 
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In fact gets a second Green Councillor, in the same ward as Seb Flyte. Yay.

 
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I have a feeling the Greens are going to do VERY well, which should be something Starmer and co look at just as if not more seriously than the failure of his misguided efforts to win back the 'red wall'.
 
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