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Category: General Election

The exit door. The state of Labour as Jeremy Corbyn departs

The exit door. The state of Labour as Jeremy Corbyn departs

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What of Labour?  This is a question that almost no one is thinking about as, almost unnoticed, Jeremy Corbyn slips out of the limelight.  Like the Magnificent Ambersons, Labour have got their comeuppance. They’d got it three times filled and running over. But those who had longed for it were not there to see it. And they never knew it, those who were still living had forgotten all about it, and all about them. That irrelevance bodes ill for Labour. …

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Events, events – how even a government with a big majority can be knocked off course

Events, events – how even a government with a big majority can be knocked off course

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Who can now remember that far off time – those few weeks between the election and Xmas – when it seemed as if the agonies of the previous three years were finally over? For good or ill, there was a government with a majority, Brexit (at least the departure) would no longer agonise the country (at least not quite so painfully and visibly), Corbyn was on his way out and there was the interesting spectacle of seeing how the Tories…

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Swing for the moment. How the country shifted at GE2019

Swing for the moment. How the country shifted at GE2019

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The Conservatives won the 2019 election decisively.  Received wisdom has it that it was won by demolishing a red wall in the north of England.  Let’s take a look at how each constituency swung, seat by seat. Before the election, I posed some questions.  One of them was whether seats would continue to sort by Leave/Remain or whether they would now swing more uniformly.  It turns out that the answer is a bit more complicated than either of those answers….

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Labour must get over its myth of 2017 if it is to win again

Labour must get over its myth of 2017 if it is to win again

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A well-timed aberration is still an aberration Keir Starmer looks well set to win Labour’s leadership election in April. After securing comfortable leads among MPs, CLPs and affiliate organisations in the previous rounds, YouGov reported this week that he holds a 22% lead over Rebecca Long-Bailey, and is more likely than not to win on the first round. If he does, it will be in no small part down to the last set of rule changes which at the time…

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For election junkies a great new resource from the House of Commons Library

For election junkies a great new resource from the House of Commons Library

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One hundred years of UK elections I suspect many PBers are like me always wanting to check details of past elections usually in order to make a point about a current situation. Well there is a great downloadable resource just out from the Commons library which has data on UK elections going back a whole century and presenting it in an attractive way. This 96 page document is available free from here and I am sure that many of those…

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Memo to Sir Keir Starmer: Unless LAB can start winning MPs in Scotland again the chances of you becoming PM are slim

Memo to Sir Keir Starmer: Unless LAB can start winning MPs in Scotland again the chances of you becoming PM are slim

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Your first big electoral test looks set to be the Scottish Assembly elections next year in a part of the UK where for decades your party was totally dominant. Recovering some of the ground lost there to the SNP might be an indicator that a general election victory could be in reach. The charts above from the Commons Library analysis of the last general election set out in stark terms how Scotland’s Westminster MP party distribution changed dramatically less than…

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Number 10’s power-grab is sowing the seeds of its own failure

Number 10’s power-grab is sowing the seeds of its own failure

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Cummings cannot re-engineer government while ignoring the human aspect Political power is notoriously nebulous. Like fairies, or the value of fiat money, if enough people belief in it, that in itself is enough to call it into being – just as the lack of belief is enough to destroy it. What then gives Boris Johnson the ability to accrete to himself and his advisors in Number Ten powers that no other prime minister has enjoyed? It’s not the size of…

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Starmer gets the best ratings from both all voters and LAB members in new large sample Ashcroft poll

Starmer gets the best ratings from both all voters and LAB members in new large sample Ashcroft poll

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He’s the only leader or deputy contender in positive territory There’s a new large sample Lord Ashcroft poll that’s been published overnight that looks back at the general election particularly the reasons for the LAB defeat and looks forward to the coming LAB leadership ballot which starts later this month. The full report is well worth downloading. The report also includes the findings of a series of focus groups which are worthy of a separate header in themself. The part…

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