The beginning of the end? (For Tony Blair)

I think, nimh, especially a Green will become suspicious by the now started "vote blue, go green" message by Cameron. :wink:

Well, the Labour attacks against him started already in February - it's local election time in England.

yes it is and i should be out knocking on doors explaining to people what a veritable paradise it is living under 8 years of labour rule. But I'm not. Because for personal national and international reasons this country is not paradise. Its Crap Island as far as I'm concernced. (Except for some nice bits of coastline)

[quote="Steve (as 41oo) Its Crap Island as far as I'm concernced. (Except for some nice bits of coastline)[/quote]

And England's Other City, the one or other pub, and ... ... ...

yeah well I'm not in a good mood

It's just like British politics 10 years ago ...
... the Independent says, finishing that report with:

If there is a God in Heaven & he's watching & listening to what is going down, please remove from my sight the man Blair & his running dogs .
They couldn't organise an orgy in bordello. Power has gone to their heads. They are not to be trusted or believed.
We have 2 years before the next election is due, unless God you know better........

tony blair
the march 16 issue of the economist had a pretty insightful about the british PM .
i had to smile when i read that the economist predicts that there won't be much of a political afterlife for mr blair after he leaves number 10 .
they think that he'll have to make a living giving speeches - some former politicians are doing very well in that branch imo . hbg

...THE ECONOMIST AND TONY BLAIR...

The polls in Britain, ahead of tomorrow's local elections, seem to increasingly be all over the place, so picking any one of them is somewhat wilful. But this one below, released last week, caught my eye because it magnified a conspicuous trend. The trend in question being that Labour is being hammered - but the Tories, despite all of Cameron's energy, creativity and determined push for the centre, are doing no better.

Ipsos Mori
Client: The Sun
24 April 2006
Interviews 20-22 April

Voting intention figures exclude those who say they would not vote (9%), are undecided (10%) or refuse to name a party (3%).

Gain/loss in comparison to previous poll of 31 March (interviews 16-21 March)



Source:
http://www.mori.com/polls/2006/s060422c.shtml
http://www.mori.com/polls/2006/mpm060321.shtml

Both the big parties are left beached by voters who seem to mostly just be fed up with "all of 'em" - which should make for volatile results.

There's some tradition, there: in European elections when a similar mood gripped the Brits, the Greens (15% in '89) and the UKIP (16% in '04) hit the big time; there were actually other constituencies aside from George Galloway's one in London's Eastend where the "Muslim-Trotskyite" Respect coalition got a sound score in the last general elections; and the BNP has long started to score glaring coups in local races whenever Labour or the Tories faltered.

Then, of course, on a wholly other level, there are the Lib-Dem grassroots armies of activists, which, pounding the pavements, have time and again ensured striking scoops for the Liberal Democrats in by-elections, knocking down Labour and Tory MPs considered to have safe seats. The very heart of the Lib-Dems's third-party strength is rooted in local politics, so these local elections should give 'em a good shot.

According to the poll above, which magnifies gains and losses that are less pronounced in other polls, the spoils of alienation go half/half to the Lib-Dems and the minor parties.

In reality, the Tories will do better than national polls like these suggest, because their voters are much more likely to turn out than those of the centre-left parties, Labour in particular - especially now. But who will gain the most extra votes? Or will noone win any, with turnout simply dropping to an all-time low? All great fodder for speculation..

Meanwhile, New Labourite Michael White suggests that, if it will indeed be the small parties that benefit rather than the Tories, that is actually relatively good news for Labour. "The worst result for Labour would be an unambiguous shift to the Tories because the only way to defeat Labour under first-past-the-post voting is to vote Tory. If Labour is thumped, but the votes are scattered, Blair should be grateful," he quotes a polling analyst.

Lewis Baston, on the other hand, stresses turnout as the deciding thing to watch in interpreting the meaning of the results.

His article is really useful actually. Since there are elections in only a part of the country, and in some place they will be the first since 2002 (when Labour did OK) while in others the losses and gains will be measured in comparison to 2004 (when Labour did very badly), and since turnout is likely to be only somewhere around a third, it'll be a devillish puzzle to figure out what it all means. His article, identifying comparative benchmarks of electoral success, should be a real help.

From today's Independent:


Blair tries to head off disaster with show of power

never mind Blair trying to head off disaster, shouldnt you be heading off to the airport?

Well, results are flooding in - no London results yet, but some 1,500 councillors elsewhere have been elected already. About half of the results are in now.

The Lib Dems not doing very well; they're actually on a net loss of 1 now, on a total of 355, not impressive. They had a modest net gain until just now, when it turned out they lost 4 seats in Liverpool - to Labour - though still comfortably keeping their majority there.

Cameron's Tories got zero seats in Liverpool as it happens, the city remaining a Tory-free zone, same as Manchester. Thats bad news for his much-advertized push to win back cities, where the party's been wiped out of under Major, Hague, Duncan Smith and Howard.

But otherwise, the Tories are not doing bad at all. They've already gained 113 extra seats, becoming the strongest party in the total of councils for which results are now in. 250 seats gains in total was pundited as being a good result for the party, so being halfway through the night now they seem on course.

Surprisingly, the Tories are winning more seats than Labour is losing, and that is good news for Labour. Even if Labour would lose 300-350 seats tonight, it would merely mean they did as badly as two years ago. At the moment, they are standing at a loss of 100. Even if that number doubles at the end of the night, it means Labour actually did better than in 2004. Pundits have been identifying 200 as the benchmark; everything over 200 seats loss for Labour would be bad. But apparently, perhaps it'll even stay under that.

Other parties and independents, on balance, are losing seats, with the one exception: the British National Party. In the councils that have come in so far, the BNP had 0 seats; now it has 11 seats.

As another benchmark: Labour itself had hyped fears of a possible meltdown - in order to make a regular drubbing look like a relief - and talk was of Labour ending in third place, behind not only the Tories but also the LibDems.

Thats not happening: the Tories are at 823, Labour at 561 and the Libdems at 408.

Oh, I almost forgot! The subject of the thread: Tony Blair.

Well, the BBC (watching online) has had a prominent Brown supporter earnestly asserting concern about Labour's myriad losses and, more generally, the disappointment and alienation of voters in the government. We have to do better, he intoned, and when asked whether he thought Blair would be able to do it, he made a face and squuezed out: "well, he's going to have to". I liked him actually, he seemed sincere and at least seemed to have realised and thought about the disaffection on the street.

In the studio, on the other hand, Blairites John Reid and Tessa Jowell were spinning in rather haughty defence mode, with Jowell actively going after the press; identifying the reasons for the defeats she went on about "the headlines" that "destabilised public confidence" (in the NHS), as if (as the BBC moderator pointed out) the headlines were something unrelated to reality.

Worse, Jowell now is insisting that Blair will "serve a full third term" while Reid was picking up on an opinion poll that showed that 43% want Blair to stay until the General Elections (23%) or go on indefinitely (20%), in order to make the point that Blair is here to stay, and the only thing needed now was for the party to just unite behind Blair. Both seem very confident about their case; no sign of the election results triggering regicide as was much speculated-on.

-- Result! Oldham (urban working class): BNP did not get any seat (and theyd been really trying); and the Tories lost one and are left with one - on a total of something like 30 or 40. Interesting!

More good news for Labour: Ealing, one of the London boroughs, is what is called a bell-weather district; except for 1986, every single time the party that won Ealing in local elections ended up winning the subsequent general elections. Well, Labour kept a very comfortable (10-seat? 20-seat?) majority there now.

Plus: they reported that Labour won the local council of Enfield from the Tories, a result the reporter said he was "baffled" about. I dont know where Enfield is, but I know its where a Labour candidate, in the 1997 general elections, spectacularly ousted Tory hotshot Michael Portillo (who then had not reinvented himself as a wet yet), and where the Tory candidate won that seat back either in 2001 or last year.

But in Barking, in London's Eastend, the British National Party is proclaiming it will win up to 8-10 seats.

The BNP put up 13 candidates in Barking, and warnings were that they might win a council seat (in the last general election the BNP candidate got 17% in the corresponding constituency).

Then Margaret Hodge, member of cabinet, warned that something worse was happening - that many (3/4?) of (white working class?) voters in her district were considering voting BNP.

Was she the one to signal the drastic outcome first, or did her remarks themselves "legitimise" the urge of her constituents to vote BNP? Whichever way, the BNP is now, as results come in, already at 8 seats there...

Ooooh, if there's anyone at all out there trying to make sense of the results of these local elections, here's a cool, very clear graph of benchmarks from the Guardian on "What the figures will mean for the parties".

Going on those benchmarks, so far, considering that about 3/4s of the councillors are in, Labour (-129) is doing good, considering expectations; the Tories (+136) are doing close to OK; and the Libdems (+4) are doing almost disastrously.

But London is still largely to come in.

But some things are not quite as much not-all-that-bad for Labour as suggested.

For one, the report of Enfield going back to Labour seems to have been a mistake; and I messed up on Ealing; in fact, "local BBC sources are predicting the party could lose control of Ealing council in west London despite a 27 seat majority", according to the Guardian news blog.

Secondly, council seats totals so far may be flattered because most of London is still to come and, notes the Guardian's overview article, "The party appeared to be doing better in the north than in the south, where voters in the capital appeared to have seized on the nearest stick available to beat Mr Blair".

The article notes that, for example, "Labour .. suffered a drubbing in [Eastend] Tower Hamlets, with George Galloway's Respect party predicted to become the second largest party behind the Liberal Democrats".

In fact, in terms of percentages of the vote nationally, "voters inflicted Labour's worst local election results in terms of expected share of the national vote since the Falklands war in 1982. Labour was projecting that it was on course for 25% of the vote - worse than in 2004."

Yup, London seems to take a less conciliarory view of Labour. Take Lewisham, on the southern bank of the Thames. In the last local elections, Labour took a massive 41 of 53 seats there. Now, its lost control of the council, losing a whopping 15 seats - not to the Tories (sorry, Dave Cameron), but to the Libdems (10) and the Greens (5).

And in Eastend's Tower Hamlets, the Labour council leader apparently has been defeated, apparently by the populist-left Respect candidate.

And here's a Labour leader from Camden (edit: ooh, its Frank Dobson, he's a big name isnt he?), which has been in Labour control for several decades and where it got two-thirds of the seats last time, but which now looks like it'll be lost, and he is railing against how "local manifestations" of bad national policies have ruined the party's chances there. He gives the example of how national government policy forced or pressured the council to yield control over council housing to external/commercial management, even after residents, in a referendum, voted against that by 77%. He says a suggested Cabinet reshuffle would be like "re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic". Labour is threatened to be reduced to "an empty shell", he said: "We need a new management".

The Tories meanwhile are doing better in more suburban boroughs of London, taking Harrow (on the northern edges) from Labour, and winning enough seats in Merton to change the council from Labour to no overall control.

More mixed signals from London: the Tories took "bellweather" Ealing, leading one Tory pundit to claim that it showed the Conservatives was "the only alternative" to Labour in urban areas (raising derisive laughs among his colleagues); but in Camden, the Libdems actually apparently leapfrogged both Labour and the Tories to become the biggest party, with the Greens also winning seats.

Trevor Phillips (of - formerly? - the Commision for Racial Equality), is taking an opposite line from Dobson and is poo-poohing results as in Camden as a "middle class protest", pointing out that the minority vote came out well for Labour and guaranteed striking Labour holds in more working-class areas (in as far as those didnt go to the BNP, I assume)

(Reading along with interest, not just because of the unexpected prominence of Ealing [where I lived for a while].)