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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Apr 24, 2024 22:43:49 GMT
I don't know what relevance prisoners on remand have.
Can I just point out that the actual total Parliamentary electorate on 3 May 1979 in the United Kingdom was 41,095,649, and the total European Parliamentary electorate on 7 June 1979 in the United Kingdom was 41,155,166.
(Source: British Electoral Facts ed. Rallings and Thrasher)
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Apr 24, 2024 22:29:40 GMT
The total 1979 electoral register, as first published, was 41,569,787. There were about 50,000 attainers who turned 18 between 4 May and 7 June, plus about 1,000 Peers who were disqualified from Parliamentary elections; the remaining difference would be made up of those who were resident on 10 October 1978 but were omitted from the register and made a successful late claim.
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Apr 24, 2024 15:54:29 GMT
The Lib Dems still have dreary debates about resolutions by attendees that their leaders often have to spend time distancing the party offer from but they're not exactly ratings hits even when BBC Parliament shows them. BBC Parliament doesn't show any party conference coverage. Stopped doing it in 2021.
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Apr 24, 2024 12:22:21 GMT
Old hands may recall the single issue Valley Party that stood candidates at the 1990 Greenwich council elections - protesting about Charlton Athletic still not having a ground of their own half a dozen years after they just survived their winding up scare, and urging the Labour run council to resolve this. They didn't win any seats themselves, but it is thought they caused a few Labour councillors/candidates to lose contests they might otherwise have won. And before too long they achieved their aim, with Charlton returning to their old ground during the 1992/93 season. 14 Brentford FC fans stood for Hounslow council in eight wards in 2002 under 'A Future for Brentford FC in your Community'. Most finished bottom of the poll but Luke Kirton won a seat in Brentford ward (beating future frontbencher Seema Malhotra).
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Apr 23, 2024 23:27:06 GMT
As a delegate at one of the last Labour Party conferences that was held at the Winter Gardens in Blackpool, I can say exactly why Labour stopped coming there after 2002 and the Conservatives stopped coming after 2007. It's simply not suitable as a modern conference venue.
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Apr 23, 2024 21:28:01 GMT
I’ve always thought Giles Watling was a popular local MP being an actor and that I'm unconvinced that a minor role in a sitcom that aired 35 years ago necessarily gives local popularity. He had a very long career as an actor. He's in most episodes of "Gideon's Way" (an ITC police procedural made in 1964-65) playing the school age son of the central character.
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Apr 23, 2024 20:57:38 GMT
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Apr 23, 2024 19:12:29 GMT
The region should be called Mercia. There is already a West Mercia police area covering the westernmost three counties. The former county can keep the West Midlands name, or preferably Coventry can be shuffled off back to Warwickshire and with the rest called "Birmingham and Black Country" or something (it should really be Greater Birmingham but I can only imagine the pitchforks). Even better we could abolish the regions altogether, what purpose do they serve They were effectively abolished in 2011 when the Government Offices for the Regions were abolished, and ceased to have any significant existence when the UK ceased to send Members to the European Parliament in 2020.
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Apr 22, 2024 10:53:15 GMT
If this is true it's a massive polling fail.
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Apr 22, 2024 9:17:25 GMT
There was a deliberate decision to count at county level, not district level - to stop people being able to highlight constituencies where local opinion did not match its MPs' stance on EEC membership.
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Apr 21, 2024 13:46:26 GMT
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Apr 21, 2024 13:13:58 GMT
The first systematic monitoring of local byelection results appears to have been in late 1981 when the SDP was first contesting elections, and there was no other hard evidence of how it would do at the ballot box. The SDP's newsletter reported on them. New Society also kept a list at around this time and Tribune also used to monitor local byelections in the 1980s.
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Apr 21, 2024 8:41:53 GMT
Big story in The Sunday Times today about Sarah Green getting IPSA to pay £120,699.98 to Midas Training, run by veteran Lib Dem Candy PIercy, for vague unspecified services.
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Apr 21, 2024 7:23:39 GMT
Martin Shipton has a massive chip on his shoulder and Nation.Cymru despite being in receipt of public cash is a mouth piece for pro-independence so don’t be shocked when they run pieces like this. The Welsh media really is an utter shower. 😏 We have and must protect freedom of the press, even if we don’t like the bias of particular journalists or publications. But I’m shocked that a ‘news outlet’ in receipt of public money should be so willing to publish such a partisan story just before a local by-election. Martin Shipton has always found it difficult to tell the difference between reporter and participant in politics. See also: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Ceredigion_by-election
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Apr 20, 2024 18:34:47 GMT
If the focus group is made up of disillusioned ex-Conservative voters who are undecided, then that is likely to be a group clearly on the right of the political spectrum. Scott Benton had just under 50% of the vote; the Conservatives are well down on 2019, and a lot of the ex-Conservative voters will have decided to vote for other parties. The focus group will not be drawn from the 50% who never voted Conservative nor from the est. 25% who are ex-Conservatives now voting for other parties; it'll be from the 25% most right-wing voters in the seat from the off.
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Apr 20, 2024 15:47:41 GMT
Then there's the Southern Rhodesia Liberal Party, which was the first politial allegiance of Ian Smith before the Rhodesian Front were founded, and the Liberal Democrats in Russia (Zhirinovsky's mob). The Liberal Party of Israel was a predecessor party of Likud. Liberalism is such a multifaceted ideology, that both nationalists,internationalists, drys, and social democrats can theoretically identify as such, as long as their main ideology is not socially conservative. In Israel, I suspect that more than 2/3rds of the population identifies as liberal (L or l), but the % of Israelis who’d qualify as LibDem style liberals (economically centrist, socially progressive, and internationalist) is probably closer to 7.5%. Edit: Israel does have a decent amount of people who are ideologically close to a (somewhat significantly) less internationalist version of Orange Book Liberals, but they don’t seem to really exist anymore in the LibDems party. I think it's pretty generous calling liberalism an ideology. It's a pretty generic term which could easily be applied to almost any form of political belief, as all forms of politics are about giving some element within society the power and freedom to decide how to run their lives. When we talk about 'liberal democracies' we're simply making the assumption that means freedom of the individual, but there are also plenty of groups within society which make decisions collectively for all their membership and who would also consider having that power as being part of a liberal nation.
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Apr 19, 2024 13:42:13 GMT
Anyone who wants to make an argument about requiring lengthy residence in an area in order to be elected as its representative is directed to John McCain's reply to charges of being a carpetbagger during the primary election for US Representative in Arizona in 1982.
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Apr 19, 2024 12:01:00 GMT
One of the reasons why I now favour the 'total vote' approach over the 'averages' approach when working out vote percentages in multi-member seats.
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Apr 19, 2024 11:55:44 GMT
In my experience (extensive) few who get involved in local politics see Westminster as their "end goal". I don't know why that should be. Local politics in Westminster is endlessly fascinating.
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Apr 19, 2024 8:06:19 GMT
It would mean massive competitions in seats with major maternity hospitals, and limited competition in some rural constituencies where local medical opinion strongly opposed home births.
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