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Post by matureleft on Oct 16, 2023 10:33:49 GMT
But I sense a deeper Labour strategic point that’s being made which is essentially that the Lib Dems should stick to territory that is comfortable for Labour Why should the Lib Dems "stick to territory that is comfortable for Labour"? Other than perhaps as a quid pro quo in return for something Labour had done for the Lib Dems? No reason at all other than their own calculations. No party has the resources for too wide an area of genuine activity. Labour I suspect hopes to demonstrate that this is a reach too far for your party and that they should be satisfied with Labour stepping back in Shropshire and Somerset. The Lib Dem war chest isn’t huge. |
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graham
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Post by graham on Oct 16, 2023 10:44:54 GMT
A bit out of the blue - Peter Bone likely to face 6 week suspension from Commons on grounds of sexual harrassment. Labour- held 1997 - 2005 - and 1964 - 1969.
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Post by woollyliberal on Oct 16, 2023 10:51:39 GMT
Why should the Lib Dems "stick to territory that is comfortable for Labour"? Other than perhaps as a quid pro quo in return for something Labour had done for the Lib Dems? No reason at all other than their own calculations. No party has the resources for too wide an area of genuine activity. Labour I suspect hopes to demonstrate that this is a reach too far for your party and that they should be satisfied with Labour stepping back in Shropshire and Somerset. The Lib Dem war chest isn’t huge. Equally, Labour doing both Tamworth and Mid Beds could turn out to be a reach too far. Your party could have been satisfied with winning one seat each, rather than risking a Tory hold. |
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Post by matureleft on Oct 16, 2023 11:09:35 GMT
No reason at all other than their own calculations. No party has the resources for too wide an area of genuine activity. Labour I suspect hopes to demonstrate that this is a reach too far for your party and that they should be satisfied with Labour stepping back in Shropshire and Somerset. The Lib Dem war chest isn’t huge. Equally, Labour doing both Tamworth and Mid Beds could turn out to be a reach too far. Your party could have been satisfied with winning one seat each, rather than risking a Tory hold. Labour has the resources to do both and (I suspect - I have no evidence) genuinely doesn’t want a Lib Dem success here and is prepared to accept a Tory win as a price for that should Labour fall short. There’s also some merit for both parties not to be seen in explicit partnership - that puts off some voters. As has been remarked Labour does have a genuine interest in part of this seat post boundary changes and simply leaving it to the Lib Dems would have made a future campaign harder. |
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Post by woollyliberal on Oct 16, 2023 11:13:45 GMT
Equally, Labour doing both Tamworth and Mid Beds could turn out to be a reach too far. Your party could have been satisfied with winning one seat each, rather than risking a Tory hold. Labour ... genuinely doesn’t want a Lib Dem success here and is prepared to accept a Tory win as a price for that should Labour fall short. Which takes us back to the original question. Should Labour be complaining about the Lib Dems fighting an election and risking "letting the Tories through" if Labour are prepared to risk "letting the Tories through" as the price for stopping the Lib Dems winning? |
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Post by gwynthegriff on Oct 16, 2023 11:20:53 GMT
Clinical Commissioning Groups I assume? (And reluctantly and sparingly I suspect.) Perhaps Crimson King can advise? Ha! CCGs are so last decade. I think it’s Integrated Care Boards now - at least it was when I went to bed last night. (one possibly relevant point is that they have a bigger footprint eg the old Bradford CCG area is now within the West Yorkshire ICB. To answer the question though it is (as you might imagine) a bit complicated and depends on the situation. It’s also worth remembering that no one builds GP practices, they build premises that GP practices could work in. The ICB will likely have a view, even a plan, as to where these should be built, but it needs doctors to want to go and base themselves there. Often the demand will come from doctors who want to replace old, not fit for purpose premeses. In the situation where there is a new town then not only does someone have to put up the building (which could be a straightforward commercial decision to build and then rent out, or more likely would have some state involvement but still requires the tenants to provide income to justify the investment) but also there needs to be doctors and others wanting to move in. This is less simple if the practices are currently happy in reasonable premises at some distance from the new site I thank the Hon Member for his reply. (I do not thank him for reminding me that ICBs are the latest alphabet soup. I am still scarred by the effect of this latest change on the funding of the charity I chair; perhaps I had blocked it out.) |
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Post by matureleft on Oct 16, 2023 11:29:42 GMT
Labour ... genuinely doesn’t want a Lib Dem success here and is prepared to accept a Tory win as a price for that should Labour fall short. Which takes us back to the original question. Should Labour be complaining about the Lib Dems fighting an election and risking "letting the Tories through" if Labour are prepared to risk "letting the Tories through" as the price for stopping the Lib Dems winning? I think you’ll find no complaint from me! This is an election. All sides will employ a variety of tactics. These Lib Dem ones are familiar and can be effective. They can prompt cynicism or ridicule but I’m sure your people price that in. The only things I’ve ever objected to in opposition literature is straightforward deceit about something that I or my party have done. I did extract a public apology after the event from some Liberal/Social Democrat Alliance guys in Cambridge for that once. But otherwise I’m pretty easy going. |
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Oct 16, 2023 11:31:38 GMT
Labour and Lib Dems should just back SV and have done with it. It helped Labour win the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough mayoralty in 2021 after all.
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Post by timrollpickering on Oct 16, 2023 11:49:02 GMT
I thought the one thing that unites almost everyone on electoral systems is a dislike for SV?
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CatholicLeft
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Post by CatholicLeft on Oct 16, 2023 12:16:16 GMT
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Chris from Brum
Lib Dem
What I need is a strong drink and a peer group.
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Post by Chris from Brum on Oct 16, 2023 12:24:14 GMT
I thought the one thing that unites almost everyone on electoral systems is a dislike for SV? Pretty much. It's a half-arsed non-solution, designed to placate advocates of AV but failing, in that it requires voters to guess who's going to be in the top two before casting their second vote, and if they get it wrong (or deliberately vote for a candidate that they're sure won't make the top two) then their vote doesn't count. Also there's a lot of misunderstanding of the ballot paper evident. At the last WM count there seemed to be many people who thought that putting an X in both boxes for their favoured candidate would count twice.
AV allows preferences to be expressed in full, so everyone's vote can count (in as far as the voter expresses their preferences). A single column of boxes, number your candidates in the order you prefer them, job's a good'un.
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Post by timrollpickering on Oct 16, 2023 12:43:57 GMT
I thought the one thing that unites almost everyone on electoral systems is a dislike for SV? Pretty much. It's a half-arsed non-solution, designed to placate advocates of AV but failing, in that it requires voters to guess who's going to be in the top two before casting their second vote, and if they get it wrong (or deliberately vote for a candidate that they're sure won't make the top two) then their vote doesn't count. Also there's a lot of misunderstanding of the ballot paper evident. At the last WM count there seemed to be many people who thought that putting an X in both boxes for their favoured candidate would count twice. There have actually been campaigns that recommend doing that. They were aiming to ensure people cast a valid first preference and found this approach was the best. The spoil rate was about the highest. Newham did experiment with a numbered ballot paper for the 2006 mayoral election but it was deemed a failure. |
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stb12
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Post by stb12 on Oct 16, 2023 13:08:29 GMT
The Lib Dems have stuck to their strategy of only seriously fighting where they can win. They're not putting a lot of effort in to Tamworth, nor did they in Selby. It is a strategy that is yielding results for them. Labour didn't really try in Tiverton, nor in Chesham. They did try in North Shropshire though. Labour are also trying hard in Mid Beds. It shows that there isn't co-ordination between the parties. Whether you think there should be co-ordination depends on what your top priority is. If it is defeating the most Tories, then yes. If you think it is winning the most seats for yourself, then maybe not. Yes, but my point is that both sides seem to saying 'you shouldn't be fighting this one' - which implies they think there should be some negotiation. Just - as your sentence that I've highlighted says - that isn't happening. I’d guess it’s purely a tactic to win votes rather than either side genuinely believing the other should stand aside |
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Oct 16, 2023 13:15:37 GMT
But STV is worse, since you can have candidates winning with 3rd, 4th, etc preferences. As someone elected under SV despite an opponent winning 99 first preferences to my 93, I think it's a joke. SV is much more sensible because in the vast majority of seats, third parties are largely irrelevant. The Lib Dems and Greens are responsible for Brexit since they split the opposition to Corbyn Labour in many seats. By all means, oppose SV, but do you honestly think we're going to get STV on the statute books, or any other crappy system for that matter? I'm all in favour of fair votes, but we've already got a system that we used for years and years. The Tories abolished it because they know it can be used to defeat them, cf the Cambridgeshire and West of England mayoral votes. SV > STV > AV > FPTP.
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Post by Adam in Stroud on Oct 16, 2023 13:40:15 GMT
Yes, but my point is that both sides seem to saying 'you shouldn't be fighting this one' - which implies they think there should be some negotiation. Just - as your sentence that I've highlighted says - that isn't happening. I’d guess it’s purely a tactic to win votes rather than either side genuinely believing the other should stand aside Yeah, I suspect there's a degree of unspoken co-operation rather than formal negotiation - you don't need to come to a deal to work out that there's not a huge point in us trying to win in Uxbridge or of Labour trying to win in Frome, you'd probably take those decisions on a simple cost-benefit analysis even if you thought the other guys had no hope. I think "you shouldn't fight" doesn't so much imply "we wanted a deal" as is an attempt to convince the voters that the other side have no chance and should have worked it out for themselves. And in Mid-Beds I genuinely think No-one Knows. Anyone thinking there should have been a deal logically would have to think what would be offered in exchange. |
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Post by East Anglian Lefty on Oct 16, 2023 15:00:30 GMT
I think in Mid Bedfordshire nobody knows for certain, but none of the tea leaves we have point to the LDs being the predominant challenger - all constituency polls have had them in third and they've steadily fallen back in the bookies odds. The first has a poor track record and the latter has none (so far as I can tell, it only seems to have become an argument when the LDs have previously used it to argue for them being the main threat in by-elections), but they're what we have.
The LD belief is that neither of those are definitive enough and that they can and will win over voters Labour can't. From an outsider's perspective, I can't say if they're right or not, but I think it is worth pointing out that whilst all the public evidence we have is poor, none of it points in the Lib Dem direction.
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Post by uthacalthing on Oct 16, 2023 17:27:09 GMT
The last two pages of this thread make the best case, and arguably the only case, for voting Conservative.
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batman
Labour
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Post by batman on Oct 16, 2023 17:38:42 GMT
shan't
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Post by eastmidlandsright on Oct 16, 2023 17:57:10 GMT
The last two pages of this thread make the best case, and arguably the only case, for voting Conservative. Were I voting in this election I would have a difficult decision as no one seems to be able to tell me if it is the Conservatives or Labour who are best placed to beat the smug yellow bastards. |
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Post by stodge on Oct 16, 2023 18:09:46 GMT
I see that here, and elsewhere, we have reached a stage of Labour and the LibDems sniping at each other over who had the 'right' to be the challenger here, who has said what in their election materials, and whether the voting system is fair. So I infer that neither side is confident of winning (although perhaps both are confident of beating the Cons? And that would be great of course). One or both sides are going to be disappointed by Friday morning. So the question I'd ask as an outsider whose optimal outcome is the Cons getting as widely hammered as possible is, 'What are you going to do about it?' Whether you win, lose to the others (LD/Lab), or let the Cons slip through the middle, what are you going to do to minimise the chances of this happening again, perhaps in many seats? Electoral "pacts" or "understandings" don't usually work. In 1997, there was no pact - the electorate made their own pact voting forn the candidate most likely in their view to defeat an incumbent Conservative. It wasn't perfect nor 100% accurate but effective. The amout of work done on the ground in a constituency is a clue but not just in the election campaign - it's the record of activity over the preceding months and years which establishes the credibility of the challenger not six frantic weeks before polling day. |
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