This polling is why I don’t expect Galloway and his party to make much of an impact at the general election coupled with the lack of media coverage during the election campaign. TSE
Perhaps I am being harsh on Sunak and it is not hypocrisy but impotence by Sunak. Contrast Starmer’s brave and correct decision on removing the whip from Jeremy Corbyn. TSE
That chart above is quite stark, the Tory Party is now the Party of Pensioners. The Tories at their best is about aspiration and helping workers move up the ladder but now it is about featherbedding (home owning) pensioners. Why I do not think it is sustainable long term for the Tories is that you cannot continually tax workers until the pips squeak to pay for a largely economically inactive pensioner client vote, particularly when in large swathes of the…
I grew up in Rochdale. The town is classic ex-cotton Lancashire. Deindustrialised with little other than shopping and warehousing left – and the shops are largely gone. The town itself isn’t that big. Much of “Rochdale” is the communities that surround it – Littleborough, Milnrow, Whitworth, Heywood. The council dubbed these “townships”. In the 1980s. Yeah… Just as I grew up in the “township” of Wardle, communities of people originally from India, Pakistan, Kashmir and Bangladesh clustered into their own…
Note: This article rightly chooses to ignore the Bristol South East by-election of 1961 due to the unique if not farcical situation of that by-election Bad Leaders of the Opposition in the last 63 years such as Michael Foot and Jeremy Corbyn lost seats they held in by-elections to the governing party. Sir Keir Starmer joined that infamous list in 2021 but there was a lot of mitigation in that, that by-election took place in the midst of the vaccine…
This morning Galloway was the favourite this morning to win the by election but as we can see now Azhar Ali, the official but disowned Labour candidate, has become the favourite but the betting markets can often be wrong. I remember the 2006 Dunfermline and West Fife by-election where when the candidates walked on to the stage Labour were the overwhelming favourites at close to 1.01 on Betfair and yet when the results were announced the Lib Dems won by…
Mike Smithson
If the betting is correct then overnight George Galloway will become an MP again, this time for a fifth different constituency. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a result similar to the 1992 Inverness, Nairn, and Lochaber result where the winning candidate won with 26\% of the vote and a mere 3.4% covered the top four candidates. If he does become an MP again then it will be fantastic to have an MP with such a great gasp of foreign…