Eloise's Thoughts and Fancies

In the UK, we have a variety of local elections, for councillors and mayors, every year on a four yearly cycle, so roughly a quarter of the seats change every year. It so happens that this year in the cycle all the seats that were up for grabs were in England. In addition, there was a by-election because the former Labour MP for Runcorn had stepped down after being found guilty of assaulting a constituent. Not a good look for an MP. The big headline is that Reform UK won the Runcorn by-election. Labour losing is, perhaps, not a shock. Incumbent governments tend not to do well in by-elections, even in (formerly) safe seats like Runcorn. Turnouts are low, indeed the total votes in the by-election were lower than the votes the now disgraced MP got last year. There’s always a protest against those in power - every government has to make hard decisions and those upset people. Labour are doing that really spectacularly “well”. Removing the winter fuel allowance and the welfare reforms may ...

The headline is a historic Labour victory, with a majority of just under 300, and the lowest number of Tory MPs ever. Given the size of the Tory majority in 2019 this result is unprecedented: normally large majorities are chipped away over time; the predictions back then were that Johnson could be PM into the 2030’s and looking just at the numbers that wasn’t unreasonable. (It’s easy in hindsight to say ‘but looking at his personality, his downfall was inevitable.’) This majority is roughly the same size as Blair's first victory (slightly bigger because the Tory vote collapsed so hard) but that came from a tiny Tory majority rather than a huge one. What is notable is the collapse in the Tory vote. Yes, they lost a monumental 250 seats, and they lost them in all directions, roughly 200 to Labour (Labour also took some from the SNP), 50 to the LibDems, 5 to Reform and 2 to the Greens. They lost over 20 ministers, including four cabinet ministers (both of these are records) but they ...

In every election since I was 18, I’ve voted. General elections, EU elections, referendums, local elections, PCC elections. I don’t remember that I’ve ever had the opportunity to vote in a bye election, but I’d have done that too. At my age it’s expected that I vote but back when I was 18, just like 18 year olds today, it was more unusual. (I think this is something that is often forgotten because the people that are leading the discussions, on both sides, are politics nerds - either politicians or political journalists. While I’m neither of those, I am like them in one way: I’ve always voted, albeit for different reasons, possibly.) My voting history (I don’t remember every vote but I remember it enough to sum it up) is not one of unwaveringly party loyalty. I’m not Labour through and through, rather a term I first heard in 2015, I’m a “never Tory.” I usually vote Labour but I have certainly voted Green (I did in the last council elections for example), Liberal (back in the days befo...

The 2024 Local Elections are in, and they need a little bit of unpacking. The headline is clear: this is a catastrophe for the Conservatives. However, it’s worth remembering that the Tories had an unexpected high mark when these seats were last contested - it was just after the first vaccine rollout and they had a huge lift in the polls. Big losses were inevitable because they’re nowhere near that. That said, in most parts of the country, they’ve lost, and lost badly to Labour. In places where they were up against the LibDems, they’ve lost to them. This is pretty much business as usual for British politics. While it is tricky to generalise from local elections to general elections, it would be fair to say this pattern reflects the national opinion polls and while you couldn’t say “this means Labour will win seat X” or “the LibDems will win seat Y” with any confidence but you can suggest that the LibDems will be a threat in seats where they were second to the Tories in 2019, while Lab...

Amateur psephology time again. In, actually all of the U.K., we have local council elections every year normally, but only for about a quarter at a time. There are some weird wrinkles, England does a quarter of its seats each year but all of London is in one year (not this one). Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are all nationwide in a single year and so on. So, the seats this year were last up for election in 2019. Teresa May (remember her) was still PM although basically at the bottom of her popularity as even her own MPs thwarted her at every turn (BoJo replaced her a bit later on, then called an election just before Christmas). Jeremy Corbyn was the Labour leader and whatever you think of him, he was also at the bottom of his popularity. So there’s an argument that, for both big parties, the only way is up. Contrariwise, the Greens and LibDems, who both do well at local elections, had basically done extra well in 2019 - someone has to win each election after all. In terms of t...

Yesterday (17/1/23) the UK Government took the previously unprecedented, but legally created at the time of devolution, step of using Article 35 to refuse a bill passed by the Scottish Government to go forward for Royal Assent. This stops it becoming law. It should be noted that there are other options, I’m not sure of the exact number, I think it’s Article 33, but if there are laws passed by the Scottish Parliament and the UK Parliament thinks they have a problem at law, they can - and have - used this to challenge them in the Supreme Court (and its predecessor) and have sometimes forced either clarification or amendment of the law. You have to wonder why they didn’t take that route this time. Their critics wonder if it’s simply because they know they’d lose. Now, I’m not a lawyer, I’m not going to get into the weeds about this law proposed by the Scottish Parliament. If I did, I would certainly miss things. As I understand it - and my understanding is based largely on a statement b...

I don’t think we can really assess the premiership of BoJo yet. I’m not a historian by any stretch of the imagination but it’s taken me the best part of the last 15 years to stop wanting to throw things at the TV or radio when I hear Tony Blair’s voice. (I have never stopped shivering and wanting to throwing things when I hear Maggie Thatcher’s voice.) With BoJo we haven’t even had a proper chance to reflect and examine the actions he and his cabinet took during the Covid pandemic. They trot that out as “a great achievement” but we haven’t properly looked at the mistakes they made, the chumocracy that appointed minister’s wives to various roles - one undoubtedly highly qualified for it, the other really not. Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I think there were necessarily terrible, but I’m not saying they were necessarily wonderful either (they are saying they were). How many of the “wonderful” things they did were their ideas? How many were suggested from beneath? How many mi...

Yesterday England, technically the British Parliament but they did both happen to be English constituencies, had two by-elections. Both were caused by Tory MPs resigning in the face of a scandal. One, the MP for Wakefield, was convicted of historical sex abuses while the other, the MP for Tiverton and Honiton, resigned after it emerged he’d been watching porn on his phone in the chamber of the House of Commons. Honestly, it takes watching porn at work to a whole new level if you’re doing it at the place where people make the laws about whether it’s just to sack people for doing that… The Wakefield By-election, for all it was caused by a thankfully rare type of scandal, went pretty much as expected. The Tories won it in 2019, in something of a surprise, Labour won it back this time. The Tory spin machine is saying “nothing to see here, move along.” Broadly, that’s fair - this was a pretty marginal seat that you’d expect the government to lose in the middle of a parliament, plus it’s a...

At the very end of 2019 Boris Johnson won a general election. Because of the weirdness of the British electoral system compared to many others, he won a large parliamentary majority (80 seats) with “only” 43.6% of the popular vote. I say only in quotes, because this is the biggest share for decades, since before I was eligible to vote in fact. We can argue, forever, about the factors that won Johnson the vote and such a big margin. The message of “getting Brexit done” almost certainly had something to do with it. The Labour Party in disarray under a leader who had become isolated and successfully attacked as an anti-Semite (I think it’s complicated but not entirely untrue) almost certainly helped as well. But BoJo is also, in my opinion correctly, labelled as part of the right-wing populist movement that swept the electoral system in the late 20-teens. Trump, Boris and others of that ilk came to power, while Erdowan strengthened his grip. LePen ran off against Macron, the best the fa...