Why a Massive Labour Majority, plus Corbyn, Galloway & Farage Could Provide Good Entertainment

 

Looking ahead to the election, the only thing we can be sure about is that Labour will win. Literally, nothing else is certain. The polls are all over the place, so I would sooner rely on my own instinct: at least that way I only have myself to blame if things turn out to be different than I anticipated.

Labour's manifesto provides us with very thin gruel. That is important looking ahead as a manifesto pledge is aking to a magic bullet for the government as the House of Lords will not challenge a government bill that is from the manifesto. 

If Labour has a massive majority, that could become a problem as Sir Keir Starmer was elected as Labour leader on the basis that he was the heir to Corbyn, and then proceded to sling old Jezza out of the party. Quite what Sir Keir does believe in is anyone's guess, but he is certain to alienate a chunk of his party whatever it is, given the putative massive majority that he expects to get. We could be looking at all sorts of fun as Labour dissidents provide the main opposition to the Labour government.

Three men have the potential to make Sir Keir's life very difficult indeed. In no particular order, they are Jeremy Corbyn, Nigel Farage and George Galloway, so let's look at each one and assess how well they might do.

Jezza is standing as an independent in Islington North, the seat he has held since 1983. He is very popular in the area and should win handily. The problem is that about two weeks ago his activists began to make excuses for his defeat, saying that they did not have access to any electoral data so did not know where their supporters lived.

That statement is ludicrous, since data is obtained by sending an army of canvassers out to knock on doors and ask people if they will vote for a particular candidate. That information is collated and on election day, the cars are sent out to ferry those supporters to the polling place.

Jezza, it seems does not have that army. He has plenty of people who will turn up to his rallies, but not enough who will do the donkey work of identifying his supporters. That has created an extra problem, in that low-information voters do not know that he is no longer the Labour candidate. In this final week of the campaign, where his team has finally got some canvassing organised, the teams are still having to tell people to vote for Corbyn and not Labour. That's right, after all this upheaval an awful lot of voters still think that he is the Labour candidate and plan to vote using the Labour logo on the ballot and "Labour Party Candidate" as the description on that paper. For these reasons, Jezza is now the least likely of the three to get elected next week.

George Galloway is probably the most likely to be returned to the Commons for his Rochdale seat. The Workers' Party of Britain which he leads is an alliance of Pakistani Muslims and British claimants, mainly in the Northern English mill towns. Living in one of those towns over a decade ago, I was amazed at how well organised the Pakistani political factions were on election days. If those factions that were lined up under the colours of Labour and the Lib-Dems are now united behind the WPB, the party could do very well at the election.

However, there must be a fear that an overwhelmingly Pakistani activist base will not play on the British council estates. If Galloway has managed to recruit British activists then his party could do very well. If he hasn't, then there is a cap to its vote as it will be made up almost entirely of Pakistani voters, dragooned by their clan leaders. 

Galloway should win his seat, if he was in any doubt he would not have spent last weekend in London canvassing for the WPB there. I have no idea if his party will win one seat or a dozen, and neither does anyone else, but we need to keep an eye on the mill towns next week.

Finally, we have Nigel Farage, the gadfly that terrifies Labour so much that the party's candidate in Clacton was told to stop campaigning, which means Labour is giving the Tories a free ride to take on Farage, the Reform leader and its candidate in Clacton. Farage's vote is spread evenly thoughout the country, which tells against his party under our electoral system. It helps Galloway a lot as his vote is geographically concentrated, but Farage does not have that advantage. However, this time he seems to be running a tight campaign that concentrates on a very few target seats, especially his own. He is odds-on to win Clacton, but how many others he takes is impossible to estimate. My guess is between one and three, but that is pretty much a wild guess.

Let's put all this together. We could have a Labour government, elected on a low turnout with a lower share of the vote that Jezza got when he lost in 2017 and 2019. That government will be headed by a man who is neither popular in the country nor in his own party. If the majority is massive then the opportunities for discord will be enormous. Corbyn, Farage and Galloway are just the men who could take advantage of any such discord and help turn any bad situation for Sir Keir Starmer into a shits & giggles one for us.

Will the Tories Become the Third Party in the Commons?

 

With a week to go until the polls open the only thing we can be clear about is that Labour has won. For the rest, all is chaos, including the scale of the Tory defeat, a defeat that could see them reduced to third party status in the new House of Commons. The polls are all over the place, with one yesterday predicting Reform to take 18 seats and another telling us that Nigel's gang will get just three.

The only thing that the parties are stirring up is apathy. Here in Edinburgh North & Leith, I have received a grand total of five leaflets from three parties - and there are ten standing in this constituency. Labour managed to send out three of those, the Lib-Dems one and the SNP also one. Only Labour and the SNP have sent out an election address using the free postage that all candidates can use - if the other candidates cannot even be bothered to do that obvious way to reach the electorate they clearly don't care if we vote for them or not.

Calling friends all around the country, I found the same story. Just one person reported a solitary canvasser knocking on his door, with the rest getting a derisory amount of political leaflets across the board. Is it any wonder that we still cannot say for certain that the Tories will be the main opposition party next week?

Can The Two Main Parties Continue?

 

There are a lot of reasons why political parties are vital, but the one that I want to concentrate on is that they allow people to participate in the political process without becoming political geeks. The average man in the street can choose a party that more or less reflects his views and then leave matters to that party as he gets on with his life.

Labour had its affiliated industrial unions, so could keep its finger on the pulse of popular opinion, or at least the opinions of its voting core which was the industrial working class. The Tories had a very large membership that was not expected to do very much, but it came in handy for mothers who were looking for suitable suitors for their elegible daughters. Amidst the social whirl, the MP and party chairman could take soundings from the middle class in general, so an organic link existed for both main parties to ordinary people rather than just unrepresentative activists.

Those links have now been broken. Labour because industrial Britain and its unions no longer exists and the Tories because they introduced that democracy thingie to their internal workings which meant that a political party that was largely made up of people who were not really interested in politics has now become, like Labour, something for political anoraks to fight over.

The end result of all this is that people have disengaged from politics and turnout at elections drops. Occasionally there is an upsurge, such as the fact that Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader lost in 2017 and 2019 with more votes than Tony Blair won with in 2005, but it was a false dawn. Both main parties seem to be content tootling along, competing for votes amongst the diminishing pool of people who are willing to vote.

Voter apathy is one marker that a political realignment is needed, or may be about to start. The division in Britain is very clear, but that division is not represented by the parties in any clear way. On the one hand we have people who are rooted in the areas where they live, and who did not go to university. Many are council tenants and claimants, but many have skills that gives them decent wages in the private sector. As a group, they voted from Brexit and are mostly opposed to immigration.

On the other side, we have people with degrees, often from the former polys and colleges of higher education that are now allowed to degrade the name university. They work in the public sector, if such activity can even be called work, as it is neither productive of any finished good and is subsidised by the taxes levied on the private sector workers. Many of these people have no connection or loyality to the areas where they live, and were likely to have voted for the European Union and high immigration in 2016.

As things stand, Labour is the voice of that second group, and Boris Johnson created an alliance of the first which gave him a magnificent victory in 2019. That victory was frittered away, which is why the Tories are about to receive a kicking of note next week.

If the new Tory leader can rebuild the Borisian coalition, then the Tories may find that they can rebound at the next election. If he can't, then the realignment will be delayed, turnout will continue to fall and the country will mark time until eventually either a new party emerges to take over from the Tories, or that party finally comes to its senses and starts to aggregate the votes of the anti-Labour section of the electorate.

The Pakistani Parties May Surprise Britain Next Week

 

 

 

 

The election campaign goes on, with the bulk of the population oblivious to it. Speaking to friends across Britain and none of them have been canvassed directly by a party activist who has knocked on their door. Some have received party leaflets, but most have arrived in a bundle with rival parties' material and and adverts for kebab houses and curry shops. It looks to me as if the parties are hiring the small companies who deliver advertising leaflets and getting their messages out that way. The problem is that most such additions to the letterbox clutter are thrown directly into the bin unread. People want to be spoken to directly, and that is no longer happening.

Thus, my window poster is still the only one around in my area, but at least it gives me a chance to repost the photo of my front garden and boast about my potato plants which are really coming on a treat. Eighteen plants should give me enough spuds to keep my belly full until the next harvest arrives in 2025. To be honest, I am more interested in how many pounds of potatoes I get from each plant that in who wins the election in my constituency.

However, if you go into Northern England, to those mill towns that have had their culture thoroughly enriched by people from Pakistan, then you will see election campaigns in full swing. Labour and the Lib-Dems are basically Pakistani factions that take elections very, very seriously. They know that politics is about how resources are allocated, so if your machine wins, you can expect goodies from your party and its leadership.

I was amazed when I lived in Nelson, Lancashire, from 2010 to 2013 to see the Pakistani activists being active on election day. Young men talking self-importantly into their mobiles, cars that were festooned with party posters ferrying people to the polls, houses that had Labour or Lib-Dems posters in the windows: this is how elections used to be fought in my day back in the 1980s.

However, in the British parts of Nelson, it was very different. No, posters, no activists getting out the vote, all was quiet. People voted or they didn't, but the parties didn't seem to care one way or the other.

British people seem to have completely disengaged from politics, something that I will write about tomorrow, but for the here and now, with just over a week to go until polling day, it looks to me as if George Galloway and his Workers' Party of Britain along with the plethora of Islamic independents who are standing may very well end up doing better than anyone expects.

They are the only ones who give a shit.

Ken's Second Law of Politics Helps Nigel Farage

 

Ken's First Rule of Politics states that when the people have decided that they are not gonna vote for you, any old excuse will do. Take Neil Kinnock, who to this day believes that it was his speech at a rally in Sheffield which cost him the 1992 election.

It wasn't that speech that did for him. What did for him is that he was a lightweight tosser and the British people did not want a tosser leading the country. If Sheffield had not happened some other excuse would have been trotted out to provide a justification for the change of heart.

Millions of British people take no interest in politics, which is why in Islington North there are voters who still believe that Jeremy Corbyn is the Labour candidate. That is why Sir Keir Starmer keeps trotting out his my old man's a toolmaker line: politics is a minority sport that most people are indifferent about.

So, in the week or so before an election they watch a bit of TV coverage, read the above the fold part of a newspaper or have a brief natter in the pub, and they quickly concluded that Neil Kinnock was not for them.

Ken's Second Law of Politics is that if people have decided to vote for you, then you could be caught with a smoking gun in your hand and a dead body at your feet and they will still cast a ballot for you on polling day.

This rule applies perfectly to Nigel Farage and explains why all the mudslinging directed at him does not stick. First, the media went trawling through the backgrounds of the Reform candidates and thought they had struck gold with a few comments made by some of them years before. Instead of adopting a grovelling posture, Farage just shrugged and the stories died a death. Then, the media decided that Farage was a supporter of Vlad Putin and that could be used to destroy him. He isn't, he just has no interest in a nasty border conflict in the Great Slav Wasteland anymore than I do, and he was right to say that NATO expansion eastward provoked Russia's actions. Good fun though the sidetrack into foreign policy was, it did not influence the voters one way or the other as support for Reform continues to rise.

I do not know how many votes Reform will get, probably a minimum of 15% and a maximum of about 20%. That is more then enough to help do over the existing party system, give Reform a few MPs and ensure that politics as before is dead and buried.

The Stamp Fairy Scandal

 

I was planning to take the weekend off since I figured that no fresh Tory shit could hit the fan, I was right about the Tories but wrong about the shit as the SNP stepped up to the crease to give us our Sunday political giggles.

Members of the Scottish Parliament are given an allowance of £5,500 a year for stationary and stamps. The purchases can only be used for parliamentary business, so cannot be used for election campaigns. Needless to say, the SNP seems to have been using thousands of stamps for this election - in fact the party may have drawers full of stamps that are kept in storage to cover election postage. Not only that, but they boast about it online so there is a wonderful paper trail which goes right up to John Swinney, the SNP First Minister of Scotland:

In case you are wondering, Elaine Wylie works directly for John Swinney, so this one goes right to the top.

This is not exactly Watergate, and neither is the insider betting scandal that is hitting the Tories, but both scandals are what happen with political parties that have been in power for far too long and who preside over crap oppositions.

All the more reason to get the Tories out of government and to give the SNP a serious kicking in Scotland.

That's the reason why I cast my postal vote for Labour the other day, and the reason why I urge you to do the same, either by post or in person on the day.

All the Parties Fail in This Election

 

Today is the longest day of the year and it is also the day that my postal vote form arrived through my letterbox. By mid-afternoon I had ticked the box for Tracy Gilbert the Labour candidate and put the sealed ballot paper into an envelope and put it into a postbox. That's it for me, the election is over.

The ballots started to go out in Edinburgh on the 19th of this month so most postal voters will have their ballots by now. Most will cast their ballots within 24 hours of receiving the papers, so for a sizeable chunk of the electorate their involvement has come to an end. For a much larger chunk who are glued to their televisions watching the Euro 2024 finals or are in Germany cheering on the team in person, the elections probably never started, but never mind that. They are still hors de combat.

As more people vote by post, the parties have developed a strategy to maximise their vote by getting letters out to the postal voters as near as possible to the day that the ballot papers arrive. Too early and the voters have junked the leaflets; too late and they will already have voted. The sweetspot is to get the party propaganda delivered along with the ballot papers, but since that is almost impossible to guarantee, the sensible position is to get the leaflets out no more than two days before the ballots are delivered. Labour and the Liberal-Democrats managed that as their leaflets arrived on Wednesday but no other party bothered to try.

Here in Edinburgh North & Leith, nobody I know has heard a thing from the SNP who are defending the seat. I hear reports that they are concentrating on the part of Leith that has been gentrified and where the students live, but I have not spoken to anyone who has actually seen SNP canvassing teams out. As for the Tories, they have a candidate, but damned if I know anything about her.

My ballot paper also has six Mickey Mouse candidates as well. Some Greenie woman, a fellow from the Scottish Family Party which opposes abortion, a Communist and a Socialist Labour wallah, both of whom work at that hotbed of militant proletarianism otherwise known as the Unversity of Edinburgh and a Reform UK man who I was going to vote for until I realised that his email was out of order and that he had no plans to fix it and he didn't have a mobile telephone. I don't know why that is, he may think that are a tool of the Devil for all I know, but all told it makes him look a very unserious candidate to me. The final minnow is an independent who is supposedly standing for Edinburgh People, a party so new that it is not registered with the electoral commission, so its candidates have to call themselves independents.

With the honourable exception of Labour and the Lib-Dems, none of this shower has even sent out a leaflet so far, and if they do send one they are wasting their time with the postal voters as we have almost all voted by now. So what is going on?

My theory is that as party politics become more and more of a game for a coterie of middle class people, they have decided to compete with each other in the shallow pool of voters who are committed enough to carry on voting. Of course, this means that turnout will continue to decline, but so long as the parties can get enough people elected, they are not going to bother about that.

They seem to think that if we cannot be bothered to search them out, they cannot be bothered knocking on our doors to ask for our votes. So they won't get our votes as we will concentrate on the football instead.

That attitude is very bad for democracy and the health of the party system, but I don't think they care so long as enough of their candidates are elected.