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Post by AdminSTB on Feb 8, 2017 0:17:14 GMT
Voted Labour all my life, but if I was in stoke - having been sent Tristram and now Snell - a career politician (politics at uni to a safe seat Cllr knowing what about the world who knows) - I'd be voting UKIP with the hope that it results in Corbyn losing the leadership. In fact the best thing UKIP would do is to use the #stokebyelection twitter tags and encourage unsure Labour voters to go UKIP to get corbyn out. Jess Phillips for Labour leader after Corbyn, the only person who could take on a very authentic and credible leader like may is someone who is salt of the earth. Welcome to the forum. Would you like to displayed as a Labour member, or perhaps just Labour leaning? |
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Feb 8, 2017 0:37:13 GMT
I like Jess Phillips. No, I really do.
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Adrian
Co-operative Party
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Post by Adrian on Feb 8, 2017 1:19:47 GMT
I saw/met Jess at the boundary hearings and yes, she is frankly a lightweight in some ways, but she seems to be good at her job. I wouldn't characterise her as thick or out of her depth as an MP. MPs should be "ordinary people who care" and she amply fits the bill.
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iain
Lib Dem
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Post by iain on Feb 8, 2017 1:53:18 GMT
I like Jess Phillips. No, I really do. I like her in that she is good value on tv and seems a funny person. Not convinced as an MP. |
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Khunanup
Lib Dem
Portsmouth Liberal Democrats
Posts: 12,012
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Post by Khunanup on Feb 8, 2017 2:16:06 GMT
It is in her best interests to write "UKIP is winning". Having been in Stoke yesterday, I can only say there is no visible sign of a UKIP surge. At all. No posters, no window stickers, no canvassers out, no conversations in the supermarket queue. Nothing. And as others have observed up thread, Stoke is not really the unmitigated post-industrial wasteland that some would portray it as. More contentiously, I would also say that I think Nuttall is a very problematic candidate for UKIP in this case. The idea is that he is a big gun, UKIP's best chance of winning a seat; but I don't think anyone outside of political nerks such as us has ever heard of him. Try asking in your supermarket queue if the name means anything to the next person. f course his profile will be higher in Stoke now, but the main story in the media has been the exposure of his non-local status through the home registration stunt. (For me it also exposes his and UKIP's incompetence on basic logistics, but I don't know if that will register much.) To my mind he is neither a local hard-working normal bloke nor a high-profile national figure, the worst of both worlds. But we will see; I just think if UKIP win it will be in spite of him as much as because of him. None of which means that lots of people aren't quietly preparing to vote UKIP and sweep them into Westminster. I just don't feel that Stoke as some sort of Labour vs UKIP Stalingrad is overblown. But the problem with Toynbee is that absolutely bloody everything is seen through the prism of the Labour party. So this story is about "can Labour fend off UKIP among White Working Class voters?" The position of other parties such as Tories, LDs or Greens is ignored, as are the peculiarities of Stoke, where City Independents are such a force in local politics. It sounds just from that that UKIP have no chance then. Living and campaigning in an area where UKIP had some considerable local success both in the Counties in '13 in Havant and here in Pompey in 2014 the real marker for their surge was the UKIP posters up all over the wards/divisions they won. UKIP voters are not backwards in sticking up in the window and making obvious their allegeience, it's a movement thing. Welsh regional party status beckons for them methinks. |
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Khunanup
Lib Dem
Portsmouth Liberal Democrats
Posts: 12,012
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Post by Khunanup on Feb 8, 2017 2:27:23 GMT
UKIP could have won Eastleigh if only they had been able to persuade Conservative voters to back them (rather than the exceptionally useless Tory candidate) to defeat the Lib Dem. When UKIP couldn't win the seat, UKIP voters returned to the Conservatives and they did. The fact that the Lib Dem vote in Eastleigh was basically unmoved between the 2013 byelection and 2015 general election is telling. There was an awful lot of churn though between the by-election and the general election though. A big chunk of that UKIP vote was ex-Lib Dem and some of ours was ex-Tory. The biggest movement between 2013 & 2015 though was UKIP to Tory but by no means the only movement. |
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Post by iainbhx on Feb 8, 2017 9:00:46 GMT
Whats wrong with Jess? She's working class and a bit of a star. She is absolutely not working class, but she makes a good stab of pretending to be. Her parents are middle class whose parents were working class. |
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neilm
Non-Aligned
Posts: 25,023
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Post by neilm on Feb 8, 2017 9:46:37 GMT
An endorsement from Julie Burchill? Is that what passes as serious support in Labour now? You'd be better off being endorsed by Hollande.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
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Post by Deleted on Feb 8, 2017 9:50:53 GMT
Whats wrong with Jess? She's working class and a bit of a star. She is absolutely not working class, but she makes a good stab of pretending to be. Her parents are middle class whose parents were working class. Scotland has loads of young middle class ladies pretending to be working class, far outnumber the males |
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The Bishop
Labour
Down With Factionalism!
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Post by The Bishop on Feb 8, 2017 11:33:06 GMT
I've really heard it all now  |
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Post by gwynthegriff on Feb 8, 2017 12:17:15 GMT
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Post by gwynthegriff on Feb 8, 2017 12:25:04 GMT
Whats wrong with Jess? She's working class and a bit of a star. She is absolutely not working class, but she makes a good stab of pretending to be. Her parents are middle class whose parents were working class. Her father was a teacher; her mother a Deputy Chief Executive of something in health. She (Jessica Rose) worked - for a while - in her parents' company. Working class? Don't make me laugh. |
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Post by Adam in Stroud on Feb 8, 2017 12:35:47 GMT
An endorsement from Julie Burchill? Is that what passes as serious support in Labour now? You'd be better off being endorsed by Hollande. OK, I started reading the Spectator piece but couldn't make it through to the end. Can anyone assure me that she really did tip Phillips as future or leader, and it wasn't just a mangled attempt to endorse J Burchill as future leader? It would be unusual for one of her pieces to be about someone else. |
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Post by Devil Wincarnate on Feb 8, 2017 13:01:10 GMT
An endorsement from Julie Burchill? Is that what passes as serious support in Labour now? You'd be better off being endorsed by Hollande. OK, I started reading the Spectator piece but couldn't make it through to the end. Can anyone assure me that she really did tip Phillips as future or leader, and it wasn't just a mangled attempt to endorse J Burchill as future leader? It would be unusual for one of her pieces to be about someone else. Given recent history, The Julie could have a shot! |
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Post by Pete Whitehead on Feb 8, 2017 13:11:18 GMT
An endorsement from Julie Burchill? Is that what passes as serious support in Labour now? You'd be better off being endorsed by Hollande. OK, I started reading the Spectator piece but couldn't make it through to the end. Can anyone assure me that she really did tip Phillips as future or leader, and it wasn't just a mangled attempt to endorse J Burchill as future leader? It would be unusual for one of her pieces to be about someone else. I can't help you - I didn't even make it to the middle |
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Post by John Chanin on Feb 8, 2017 13:21:42 GMT
She is absolutely not working class, but she makes a good stab of pretending to be. Her parents are middle class whose parents were working class. Her father was a teacher; her mother a Deputy Chief Executive of something in health. She (Jessica Rose) worked - for a while - in her parents' company. Working class? Don't make me laugh. The issue isn't whether she is working class or not. It's whether she claims to be working class (as per the ridicule heaped on Michael Meacher). As far as I know she hasn't. John Prescott when asked a similar question staunchly said he was middle-class.....(intelligent guy Prescott).
I think it's fair to say that most Labour activists of the last generation had working class parents, and of the new generation working-class grandparents. This gives/gave them a rather different view of the world from those whose middle-classness went back generations, or more often on the Conservative side claimed to be middle-class, while really being upper-class. Curiously this never seems to attract the same opprobrium, while being equally ridiculous.
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Post by John Chanin on Feb 8, 2017 13:24:21 GMT
Julie Burchill is on my list of people that aren't worth reading, so I never do. It might be the subject for a separate thread who we consider too stupid to bother with. In my case at least this is not a straight issue of political sympathies.
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john07
Labour & Co-operative
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Post by john07 on Feb 8, 2017 14:19:34 GMT
If I was a Stoke Independent I'd be a lot more interested in running the council than on being one out of 650 MPs. Easy to forget the Tories actually run Stoke... Do they? With seven councillors? |
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Post by gwynthegriff on Feb 8, 2017 16:30:40 GMT
Easy to forget the Tories actually run Stoke... Do they? With seven councillors? There is a widespread feeling that the City Independents provide the numbers with the Conservatives providing the direction. |
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Post by East Anglian Lefty on Feb 8, 2017 21:22:57 GMT
UKIP's "political space" - the ideological territory not occupied by the Conservatives, and the constituency of voters who they appeal to - is not, I think, going away in a hurry, hence the solid-ish poll ratings. But the capacity of the party to operate in that space is under threat. If the party dwindles, then I expect the poll ratings to subside as they cease to be an option for voters. I'm not so sure about that. Broadly speaking, I'd say UKIP's support falls into two groups, which overlap in large part but by no means entirely. Firstly, you've got the perpetually fed-up anti-establishment voter. They're solid now, but they are by nature not a reliable support base. Then you've got older, culturally conservative voters with low qualification levels who consider themselves working class and value tradition and plain-speaking. The sort of people who tend to be referred to as working-class Tories or Old Labour (often literally the same people, but I should probably stay on topic rather than veering off into an attack on the ignorance and amateurishness of many political journalists.) May seems like a reasonably good fit for these voters. She's talked about class (and whilst she hasn't actually done anything about this, the mood music is all most voters take in.) She represents traditionalism in exactly the way you would expect a clergyman's daughter to do so. She doesn't seem to have much in the way of ideology, but her awkwardness is well-spun enough for people to conceive of it as plain-spoken (unless the economy takes a turn for the worse, in which case it'll be reconceptualised as brittleness.) I don't think May has the answers to the reasons why this second group turned to UKIP, but I think that for now a fair few of them could convince themselves that she has. And a lot of examples of seats with what turned out to be... er... unrealistic... UKIP odds. The idea that bookmakers know any more than anyone else is absurd, but this is hardly new ground... There have been NO examples of UKIP being odds-on in any byelection before, other than the two they actually won. As they live in the real world, and not some overgrown teenage SJW internet bubble, I'm pretty sure they do know more than you, which isn't really saying a great deal as this applies to the vast majority of the popuation. Cooks make money from cookery, taxidermists from taxidermy and con artists from con-tricks. Bookmakers make money from betting. It's their job, you see. What you're staunchly ignoring is that you don't need to be an expert on a topic to run a book on it. You need to be an expert on running a book. They need to make sure that their customers do not profit unduly at their expense. They don't really care what the situation on the ground actually is (nor would they have any way of knowing, Ladbrokes not being known for their massed telephone canvassing operation), they just care that they're not horrifically exposed. When you have a certain type of UKIP activist who views putting a couple of hundred quid on themselves to be a political act, they get short odds just in case they know something the bookies don't. This doesn't mean they do. Case in point: the UKIP candidate I ran against in 2015 put down a fairly substantial sum on himself at a number of bookmakers, and followed this up by challenging the sitting MP to a £10k bet on who'd win the seat. It wasn't him. |
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