|
Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 17, 2023 13:09:26 GMT
To keep us entertained before the Parliamentary ones come in.
|
|
|
Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 17, 2023 13:04:52 GMT
In 2019 Driscoll polled only a third of the vote, and won his election with a margin of 17,000 votes out of 182,000 cast (electorate something like 580,000).
|
|
|
Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 17, 2023 11:57:11 GMT
Yes everyone knows its official name is Hove Actually I thought it was Hove too? That’s what the Brighton boatman called it! A bit like the joke about the man who thought there was a place called "Southampton Nil" after hearing it mentioned on the football results so often.
|
|
|
Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 17, 2023 9:59:04 GMT
No they didn't. They used optical vote recognition and scanning machines in 2000. Why does no ward breakdown exist - is it because the results weren't collated or because they weren't published in that format. Dunno. They were certainly never published and I don't think even the borough breakdown was published.
|
|
|
Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 17, 2023 9:24:44 GMT
Outside of the three major parties (and Ken Livingstone in 2000), only one minor party candidate has ever won a ward in a London mayoral election. Lindsay German won the Spitalfields and Banglatown ward in 2004 for Respect. Even then, the only time the Liberal Democrats won a ward was winning Bermondsey and southwest London wards in 2004. The slight caveat with this is - ward data doesn't seem to exist for 2000; however I think it can be safely assumed that no minor party was close to winning a ward then unless I can be told otherwise. Breakdowns for wards don’t exist for 2000 because then they did the count properly: by hand, in each constituency separately, instead of using the diabolical scanning machines which can see the barcodes for each ward. No they didn't. They used optical vote recognition and scanning machines in 2000.
|
|
|
Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 16, 2023 22:00:12 GMT
In fact the NF's offshoot, the National Party, won 2 seats in Blackburn, whereas the NF itself did not, indeed it has never won a seat on a principal authority. One was of course, the party's leader John Kingsley Read who had been heavily involved with the infighting in the National Front.
The other was a guy called John Frankman who was fined £100 for acting as a councillor while disqualified. He had received a suspended sentence in 1973 for stealing a ceramic spoon from a Chinese restaurant in Nuneaton (I am not making this up) and was therefore ineligible. He resigned as a councillor soon after his election, and then appealed the 1973 sentence so that he could stand again. He lost his appeal.
Not the most bizarre incident of shoplifting involving a 1970s far right politician, though. That was the one and only Colin Jordan's visit to Tesco in Coventry.
|
|
|
Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 15, 2023 9:56:20 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 14, 2023 23:14:28 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 14, 2023 16:25:10 GMT
Apparently there is a shortlist of two for the Liberal Democrat nomination. Rob Blackie: robblackie.comChris French: www.lambethlibdems.org.uk/news/article/lambeth-liberal-democrats-announce-chris-french-as-the-parliamentary-candidate-for-vauxhallBoth are from Lambeth. French has already been selected as Assembly candidate for Lambeth and Southwark (and Parliamentary candidate for Vauxhall - presumably to be assigned to the new Vauxhall and Camberwell Green seat). However it's quite striking that neither has any elected position - French missed out by about 70 votes on becoming a Lambeth councillor for Waterloo and South Bank ward in 2022, while Blackie was much further back in Herne Hill and Loughborough Junction ward.
|
|
|
Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 14, 2023 13:48:51 GMT
"The son of a bitch isn't going to resign on me, I want him fired" (Harry Truman on Douglas MacArthur, 1951)
|
|
|
Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 14, 2023 8:07:16 GMT
With the electorate of Ealing Acton being much smaller than the other two constituencies in the borough, the Commission initially proposed to shuffle the boundaries round - moving Ravenor and West End wards (Greenford and Northolt) from Ealing North to Ealing Southall, moving Northfield and Walpole from Southall to Acton, and then Hanger Lane ward from Acton to Ealing North. That made three seats all with electorates in the 66-69,000 area.
The report notes "A number of those present introduced party politics into the discussions at the inquiry and we considered this to be unfortunate as it could have tended to lead some to suppose that such matters were a consideration taken into account during the review". But someone came up with a counterproposal which involved just moving Pitshanger ward (around and below Pitshanger Park) from Ealing North to Acton. Although it didn't achieve electoral equality (Ealing North had only 62,000 voters and Southall nearly 73,000) the Commissioner liked its simplicity and changed the recommendations.
There was then a big public campaign objecting to the revised recommendations and demanding a second local inquiry which the Commission seems to have taken against as they were "petitions and standard letters of objection, which people had signed as the result of organised campaigns to make us change our minds without advancing reasoned arguments". One objector "also complained that the assistant Commissioner's conduct of the local inquiry had denied ordinary people the opportunity to make their views known" which the Commission countered by reading the transcript in which the same objector thanked the assistant commissioner for creating "a splendid atmosphere".
|
|
|
Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 13, 2023 23:23:41 GMT
After working out the electorate transfers between old and new constituencies, here's the analysis for East Midlands. Seven constituencies were unchanged: Chesterfield, Derby North, Derby South, Erewash, High Peak, Lincoln, and South Holland and the Deepings. As the region gained one additional seat, one of the old constituencies was the base for two new ones and that was Rutland and Melton (for Melton and Syston CC and for Rutland and Stamford CC). The Index of Change for the 40 new constituencies is: Constituency | Index of Change | Amber Valley CC | 0.1 | Bolsover CC | 0.8 | North East Derbyshire CC | 0.9 | Rushcliffe CC | 1.5 | Gainsborough CC | 2.7 | Leicester East BC | 2.9 | Mansfield CC | 3.5 | Bassetlaw CC | 4.3 | Kettering CC | 4.7 | Mid Derbyshire CC | 4.8 | North West Leicestershire CC | 5.3 | Gedling CC | 6.9 | Loughborough CC | 7.7 | Harborough, Oadby and Wigston CC | 8.0 | Boston and Skegness CC | 9.2 | Louth and Horncastle CC | 10.7 | Corby and East Northamptonshire CC | 10.7 | South Derbyshire CC | 11.6 | Leicester West BC | 12.8 | Newark CC | 13.5 | Sherwood Forest CC | 13.6 | Nottingham East BC | 13.7 | Leicester South BC | 13.7 | Daventry CC | 17.4 | Hinckley and Bosworth CC | 18.0 | Ashfield CC | 18.0 | Wellingborough and Rushden CC | 18.9 | Derbyshire Dales CC | 19.1 | Sleaford and North Hykeham CC | 21.3 | South Leicestershire CC | 21.8 | Broxtowe CC | 33.0 | Northampton North BC | 34.1 | Nottingham South BC | 34.5 | South Northamptonshire CC | 43.6 | Nottingham North and Kimberley BC | 47.1 | Mid Leicestershire CC | 60.2 | Grantham and Bourne CC | 60.6 | Northampton South BC | 73.2 | Rutland and Stamford CC | 85.7 | Melton and Syston CC | 91.5 |
|
|
|
Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 13, 2023 13:11:33 GMT
Yebbut if you ask the locals, London would have a borough called Ackney.
|
|
|
Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 12, 2023 22:41:46 GMT
This was a key problem with many other reforms of the 1970s, such as the Courts Act 1971 and the reorganisation of emergency services such that there are constabularies covering multiple counties (West Mercia Police has to cover 3!) The Met Police's boundaries used to extend outside of the GLC/A area. As any map in the Sweeney shows. The Government wasn't certain what to do about this when the GLA was created. Even at the time of the White Paper 'A Mayor and Assembly for London' (Cm3897) in March 1998 the proposal was to retain the traditional boundary of the Metropolitan Police District, and create a Metropolitan Police Authority including representatives of districts outside the Greater London boundary. By the time the Greater London Authority Bill was published in December 1998, the proposal had changed and the areas of the Metropolitan Police District outside Greater London were transferred to Surrey, Essex, and Hertfordshire constabularies.
|
|
|
Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 12, 2023 20:23:28 GMT
The police served the constituency "magnanimously" it seems. I wonder what exactly it was they had won from it.
|
|
|
Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 12, 2023 12:14:44 GMT
Angus Brendan Macneil isn't returning to the SNP - for now, at least.
|
|
|
Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 10, 2023 15:22:45 GMT
There are boundaries delineated in Lough Neagh. I think the rule is all inland bodies of water and anywhere which is above the sea at low tide must be included, plus there are a few odd exceptions of open sea like the area between Flat Holm and Steep Holm.
|
|
|
Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 10, 2023 9:54:57 GMT
What is the final shape of this seat? Has it been left unaltered in the boundary changes after all? Loses Heston East ward ( -> Brentford and Isleworth).
|
|
|
Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 10, 2023 9:35:32 GMT
Unfortunately I don't think this is a realistic 'what-if'. If the Herbert reforms to create the GLC and London Boroughs hadn't happened in the late 1960s, London would have been included in the Wilson government's Royal Commission, and would then have been included in the Heath government's 1974 reform.
|
|
|
Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 9, 2023 19:33:57 GMT
It's on a sticker placed on most car rear-view mirrors in the USA. I think there's some sort of legal case which turned on it, and auto manufacturers needed to add it as a sort of disclaimer.
|
|