Jack
Reform Party
Posts: 8,710 
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Post by Jack on Jan 13, 2017 14:38:35 GMT
Sunderland was a strong Leave area so how are the Lib Dems, of all parties, winning a council seat there? With a massive swing to boot. Bonkers. Because it isn't the same thing. Some people have got carried away and started defining an area's politics entirely by its referendum vote. I'm taking a wild guess and speculating that this issue didn't feature much in the Lib Dem campaign. True, but the Lib Dems seem a strange party for the people of Sunderland to gravitate towards, in any election. |
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Post by anthony on Jan 13, 2017 15:24:19 GMT
Bishop will be voting for Holliday Turkeys voting for Christmas?  |
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mboy
Liberal
Listen. Think. Speak.
Posts: 23,801
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Post by mboy on Jan 13, 2017 15:37:25 GMT
True, but the Lib Dems seem a strange party for the people of Sunderland to gravitate towards, in any election. No, not really. They are just reprising their pre-2010 role as the protest vote party for all seasons. I think we Lib Dems have been caught slightly by surprise by the willingness of people who voted Leave to vote for us as a protest. There must be a fairly sizeable demographic of Leaver protest-voters who aren't willing to vote UKIP. I'd be interested to understand the nature of this group... |
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Post by bigfatron on Jan 13, 2017 15:57:35 GMT
I think we are in danger of misunderstanding why people voted Leave. We assume they are all voting Leave because leaving the EU is really important to them.
Many are, no doubt, truly ardent anti-Europeans - they will mostly support UKIP or Tories fairly consistently, and don't concern us here.
However a decent slug of 'Leave' voters seem to have made their Brexit vote principally as a way to kick the 'Establishment' in the face; to protest their general fed-up-ness at how things are going for them and people like them. Cameron, Osbourn, Clegg, captains of industry, the 'great and the good' etc were all in favour of staying in, so they were 'out'. Simple.
For those people, the main desire was to vote down the established leaders; if the vote had been about PR and Cameron/Osbourn had been got FTTP, then PR would have got their vote. The fact that they were voting 'Leave' was purely ancillary to the act of voting AGAINST.
If that's where you are coming from then the equivalent right now is voting AGAINST Tories and Labour; they will be perfectly happy to vote for the Lib Dems as the Lib Dems' Brexit stance is pretty much irrelevant to these voters - the important thing is that this is the most effective way to vote to kick the political establishment in the face again.
Very different, if true, from the likely approach of the voters of Richmond Park...
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Post by gwynthegriff on Jan 13, 2017 16:29:17 GMT
I think we are in danger of misunderstanding why people voted Leave. We assume they are all voting Leave because leaving the EU is really important to them. Many are, no doubt, truly ardent anti-Europeans - they will mostly support UKIP or Tories fairly consistently, and don't concern us here. A very important point. There were people who voted for Brexit because they feel the EU is dysfunctional, bureaucratic and ineffective. Further they believe that the nation state is the most effective form of governance. They also feel that the current situation is corrosive to the body politic. None of this makes them natural UKIP voters. I was (nearly) one of them!  |
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Post by gwynthegriff on Jan 13, 2017 18:50:49 GMT
The reaction to the Sunderland result on LabourList is fun. Splits between "it's Corbyn's fault", "it's the Blairites' fault", "it's a freak result - local circumstances - nothing to see, move along" before descending into accusations of:- "wibble" "wibble, wibble" "well you're the Queen of wibble" ... Enjoy!  |
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Post by tonygreaves on Jan 13, 2017 21:20:59 GMT
I've seen some remarkable Council by-election results over the years, but... This is the second gain from Labour when we started in fourth place.
By the way the LDs in Three Rivers are hardly a protest party - we have run the Council there for many years.
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iain
Lib Dem
Posts: 11,442
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Post by iain on Jan 13, 2017 21:53:47 GMT
I've seen some remarkable Council by-election results over the years, but... This is the second gain from Labour when we started in fourth place. By the way the LDs in Three Rivers are hardly a protest party - we have run the Council there for many years. The other, Mosborough, was a ward with a decent Lib Dem history, and a strong local party. This one is more impressive. |
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ColinJ
Labour
Living in the Past
Posts: 2,126
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Post by ColinJ on Jan 13, 2017 22:49:56 GMT
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rocky
Non-Aligned
Posts: 122 
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Post by rocky on Jan 13, 2017 23:47:50 GMT
Has anyone got pictures of any of the literature from sandhill? What did the lib dems run on to achieve that kind of swing?
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Khunanup
Lib Dem
Portsmouth Liberal Democrats
Posts: 12,028
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Post by Khunanup on Jan 14, 2017 0:27:02 GMT
No, not really. They are just reprising their pre-2010 role as the protest vote party for all seasons. I think we Lib Dems have been caught slightly by surprise by the willingness of people who voted Leave to vote for us as a protest. There must be a fairly sizeable demographic of Leaver protest-voters who aren't willing to vote UKIP. I'd be interested to understand the nature of this group... Some Lib Dems might be but I'm not. We ran pro-Remain stuff in our local election literature this year as part of our Referendum campaigning locally in Pompey knowing that some of the wards we held/were targeting were gong to vote heavily Leave regardless of the overall referendum result. We won 8 out of 14 wards including one which had two years earlier been won by UKIP where we increased our majority to over 1,000 with UKIP falling back to a distant third. 7 weeks later it voted 2/1 to leave... Even in my narrowly Remain Ward (very polarised between very pro-Remain and very pro-Brexit) my best local election polling district was very heavily Leave. |
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Post by Pete Whitehead on Jan 14, 2017 2:04:15 GMT
Gade Valley would I imagine have been one of the more strongly Leave voting wards in Three Rivers, but then as Lord Greaves has pointed out, the Lim Dem vote there is not a protest vote in the same way as that in Sunderland surely was
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Jan 14, 2017 5:56:04 GMT
I've seen some remarkable Council by-election results over the years, but... This is the second gain from Labour when we started in fourth place. By the way the LDs in Three Rivers are hardly a protest party - we have run the Council there for many years. I think the Tipton, NE Derbyshire, victory belongs up there with Sandhill. |
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Post by lbarnes on Jan 14, 2017 11:00:23 GMT
I've seen some remarkable Council by-election results over the years, but... This is the second gain from Labour when we started in fourth place. By the way the LDs in Three Rivers are hardly a protest party - we have run the Council there for many years. Tony, and everyone, a serious question. Do you think it is easier or harder for a party to come from 4% to win a safe seat that it is to begin at zero? |
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mboy
Liberal
Listen. Think. Speak.
Posts: 23,801
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Post by mboy on Jan 14, 2017 14:42:07 GMT
When there was no candidate at the previous election, you have little is what the latent level of support is. It might be 4%, it could be 14%.
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Post by Zardoz on Jan 14, 2017 15:37:17 GMT
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Post by Pete Whitehead on Jan 14, 2017 15:51:51 GMT
You are seriously citing a fucking voodoo online poll on here? |
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Post by mrpastelito on Jan 14, 2017 21:42:48 GMT
You are seriously citing a fucking voodoo online poll on here? Ban him!! |
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Post by mrhell on Jan 14, 2017 22:20:50 GMT
I spent an afternoon canvassing postal voters in Sandhill in late December. Five or six households said "It's time for a change." I don't think we went overboard about the disqualification as ill health was involved.
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Post by Adam in Stroud on Jan 14, 2017 23:04:43 GMT
I think we are in danger of misunderstanding why people voted Leave. We assume they are all voting Leave because leaving the EU is really important to them. Many are, no doubt, truly ardent anti-Europeans - they will mostly support UKIP or Tories fairly consistently, and don't concern us here. However a decent slug of 'Leave' voters seem to have made their Brexit vote principally as a way to kick the 'Establishment' in the face; to protest their general fed-up-ness at how things are going for them and people like them. Cameron, Osbourn, Clegg, captains of industry, the 'great and the good' etc were all in favour of staying in, so they were 'out'. Simple. For those people, the main desire was to vote down the established leaders; if the vote had been about PR and Cameron/Osbourn had been got FTTP, then PR would have got their vote. The fact that they were voting 'Leave' was purely ancillary to the act of voting AGAINST. If that's where you are coming from then the equivalent right now is voting AGAINST Tories and Labour; they will be perfectly happy to vote for the Lib Dems as the Lib Dems' Brexit stance is pretty much irrelevant to these voters - the important thing is that this is the most effective way to vote to kick the political establishment in the face again. Very different, if true, from the likely approach of the voters of Richmond Park... It's only an instinct, but I believe every word of this is true. (Well, possibly not the PR thing.) If so, it has two important consequences for the LDs. Firstly, while it is risky for us to take the all-things-to-all-men approach (since sooner or later we'll get called out on it) we can be as pro-EU as we like and still attract Leave voters if we convince them that we are addressing the things that made those voters pissed off in the first place. And in my view, those things are to do with loss of community and sense of being in control. As a party that has always argued that "all politics are local" there is no ideological reason why we can't do that - the problem is in coming up with workable policies to do it. Secondly, Leave parties are going to lose votes if they don't manage to distance themselves from "the establishment" (easy for UKIP, trickier for the Conservatives) and address the reasons for discontent. I've yet to see any sign that they've started. Closest, funnily enough, might be Corbyn regarding rail nationalisation and executive pay, but I'm afraid he's such a car crash it won't do him much good - especially if he can't come up with something more workable than his pay proposals. |
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