On this main part of the site anyone wishing to name individual seats or candidates has to supply a full list of candidates in that seat and comply with election rules. I am deleting all posts that do not conform.
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On this main part of the site anyone wishing to name individual seats or candidates has to supply a full list of candidates in that seat and comply with election rules. I am deleting all posts that do not conform.
Comments are closed.
May 5, 2015
How strange…
Is that because you (no name) are effectively the publisher?
Reply No. Under election law all publishers either have to report all the candidates, or seek the candidate’s permission whom they wish to support and report it as a campaign donation etc The BBC is very careful when commenting on local contests to mention all main candidates and to refer to any others.
May 6, 2015
Election law should state that people should not vote tactically otherwise democracy is reduced to a narrow choice (in this case the similar LibLabCon)
The (word left out ed) Daily Mail invites readers to vote tactically in 5o key seats. They suggest in 37 areas that Ukippers should switch to Tory to ‘keep Red Ed out’.
They suggest only in 2 seats that Tory voters switch to Ukip.
Ahem. Aren’t we due an apology ?
The same Daily Mail went into full on overdrive when Gordon Brown was overheard on a clip on microphone calling a member of the public a bigotted little woman. This little incident went a long way to losing him the election.
Yet the same Daily Mail cheered when David Cameron openly called Ukip voters fruitcakes, loons (and the politically damaging) closet racists as he continued with his record-levels-of-mass-immigration and bomb-the-lid-off-the-third-world agenda (Libya.)
A racist is about the worst thing one can be in Britain today. Tories wouldn’t want racists voting for them at ANY time would they ?
The Tory allegation of racism has been the most poisonous barb to the Ukip cause. It has suppressed debate and hobbled Ukip progress in a far more potent and insidious way than Nu Labour ever managed – largely because of the lack of censure over this unjust comment by the (word left out ed) Daily Mail.*
At the least (the VERY least) these Ukip switchers should not do so until this apology is forthcoming. An acknowledgment that they were innocent as charged. And also as some assurance that their precious votes are not going to be taken for granted and abused.
Mr Farage is a brave man and deserves better from his supporters. If you are a Ukip supporter and you vote tactically without solid and definite assurances and without an apology, then you have no courage, no self respect and will be walked over.
Ever increasing debt (which no other party talked about) ever increasing immigration (which no other party talked about) is now being talked about only because of the brave and stoic Ukip movement and its leader.
The same movement upon which the Daily Mail has heaped such scorn and derision.
(Comment about an individual left out as unchecked)
PS, note that there is no suggestion by the Daily Mail of how to install Eurosceptics of whichever party into Parliament.
Reply A law to stop people voting tactically would be unenforceable and smacks of the thought police itself. People will vote as they see fit in a free country.
The Daily Mail does not have the power you seem to attribute to it. It is a successful commercial business which usually judges its readers wishes well.
Voters will make their own judgements about the parties and candidates on offer, based on a wide range of comments and opinions. Do not underestimate voters’ ability to see what matters beneath the attacks and counter attacks.
As a Conservative I have regularly written and spoken about immigration, the debts and deficit. So has my party, with Mr Cameron making an important speech about immigration. Eliminating the deficit is one of the main planks of the Conservative campaign. Another party cannot own an issue because it too thinks it important, if other parties also think it important and have been talking about it.
May 6, 2015
PPS, The common mistake is to think that we Ukip voters are simply Tories in a temporary state of protest and will come back in response to friendly wink and a ‘come back’ arm motion.
No.
We’re not Tories anymore. It’s permanent. The best thing Eurosceptics within the Tory party have is an optimally strong Ukip – it does them no favours to see them decimated.
Reply We will see tomorrow how others think and feel about all this.
May 6, 2015
Many of the present UKIP supporters weren’t even Tory supporters in the first place, or at least not before they decided to switch their support to UKIP.
And although opinion pollsters know that there have been large scale movements of support between the parties during the five years since the last general election they still make the basic error of asking UKIP supporters which party they voted for in that election, and then assuming that they were still supporting that party before they decided to switch to supporting UKIP.
For example, in the recent Electoral Calculus schematic entitled “Tectonic Voter Migrations hurt the Conservatives”, here:
http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/telegraph11_trans.html
it is acknowledged that only five out of every nine new UKIP supporters have switched from supporting the Tories, but there is the rather absurd claim that only one has switched from Labour but three have switched directly from the LibDems. More like two of them first switched to supporting Labour, and then later decided to move on to UKIP, is my suggestion, and in any case if they now decided not to vote for UKIP then if they voted at all they would be much more likely to revert to Labour rather than to the now unpopular LibDems.
May 5, 2015
a rule the other political websites are ignoring…
yet another law or regulation never enforced or policed
May 5, 2015
Iain Gill: “yet another law or regulation never enforced or policed”
But can you imagine the field day the BBC would have pointing out how a senior ‘right wing’ Tory might be breaking election law.
May 5, 2015
I woke this morning to hear my Green Party candidate given 5 minutes on R4 to push her views to the guardianista voters in my constituency, who may well believe that a windmill on every hill will solve our problems. Then we had the announcement that Mr Brand is going to advise other persons with his political understanding to vote for Red Ed. There’s a surprise. Don’t worry, I wont mention my conservative candidate, a person who states on his leaflet that he……………….. is pleased that Eural has allowed men to marry each other. etc ed
May 5, 2015
Yes that Green Party candidate got an incredibly easy ride, not challenged at all on all their absurd far left policies, currently on trial in places such as Venezuela.
May 5, 2015
We obviously don’t know how things will fall, but if after Thursday it does turn out that there is no clear winner then, Dr Redwood, would it be possible to have your views of what areas could be compromised/negotiated across parties? In other words what are not electioneering red lines?
From the outside it seems that there are possible useful compromises in some areas that don’t long grass issues too much e.g.
Constitutional Convention to conclude by end 2016 so it and EU in/out vote are considered together. It would seem all parties should be able to agree this, and the public is smart enough to cope with a complicated or multi-stage referendum. (Federalism, MMP, and out isn’t that difficult a concept).
The housing issue. The left probably go along with Piketty and accept returns to capital have been greater than GDP growth, and therefore want to redistribute. On the other hand more recently some have suggested that the difference might be due to returns to housing, and the issue comes to one of created scarcity. Land use rules and the supply side would seem something that the left and right should then have a motive to sort out.
What comes after QE? Well, given a reduced confidence in monetary policy, it seems a big research push on network modelling of economies and fiscal (/ central planning!) approaches ought to be researched. Whilst the current argument is on how to reduce debt to GDP (growth greater than interest vs deficit reduction/surplus), all parties ought to be wanting a better understanding of network shocks and the business cycle.
There are many other example. It seems almost anyone outside the political parties can imagine areas of compromise / negotiation but it would be nice to hear from the more statesman-like politicians on this (after Thursday).
Reply, Yes I will comment when we know the results. For me – and more importantly for David Cameron – the EU referendum is not something to compromise on.
May 5, 2015
…….the EU referendum is something CMD won’t compromise on.
Can we be informed as to who will be eligible to vote because if all residents regardless of status are allowed to vote then CMD will have at least a million more EU nationals on his “IN” side.
Clogg has already said he wants EU nationals and children to get a vote and I’m sur Dave will agreer with Nick.
May 5, 2015
To be fair, although I’m not sure why I should be, Cameron has said that his plan for renegotiation followed by an “in-out” referendum would be a “red line” in any negotiations for a coalition, while for his part Clegg has at least dropped a heavy hint that he might be prepared to go along with that.
Of course it is possible to dismiss what both of them say on the basis that they are liars and whatever they say now before polling day may no longer hold once the votes have been cast, just as it is possible for the Tories to dismiss Miliband’s repeated rejection of any deal with the SNP on the basis that he is a liar.
In general europhiles who are opposed to any referendum don’t want the bother and the risk of losing when they can just carry on getting further EU integration through our normal system of representative democracy when it is dominated by three old political parties all of which favour further integration, while europhiles who want a referendum believe that they could win it and that would shut up their opponents for a generation or two; but the latter are very careful about the kind of referendum they call for, in order to maximise their chance of winning, while opponents of the EU tend to much more careless about that aspect.
May 5, 2015
I do think this vituperative language calling Mr Cameron a ‘liar’ is rather absurd. Sure he is a politician who has to deal with the world he finds himself in – in his case a coalition requiring compromise. Any policy or forecast of future action is necessarily subject to alteration depending on circumstances. It would be very silly to have it any other way. But I don’t see he has departed far from the principles he outlined at the last election, not that I agree with all of them. Same for Clegg as a matter of fact.
May 5, 2015
The Tories are calling Miliband a liar, are they not?
May 5, 2015
Not that I’ve heard but I might have missed it. Again I wonder what Mr Miliband has ‘lied’ about? He certainly has some very silly policies and he may be denying things such as Labour’s responsibility for the recession or that he can only obtain power under the control of the SNP but I can’t think of any lies he’s told. Anyone accusing him of lying should make very clear why they do so.
May 6, 2015
Miliband has repeatedly ruled out any arrangement with the SNP – no coalition, no confidence and supply agreement, not even deals on a vote by vote basis.
And yet as far as the Tory mouthpiece the Daily Telegraph is concerned it’s almost as if he had said nothing at all on the matter, and today its editorial is headlined:
“Labour must be open about an SNP deal”
Reply The Telegraph is a paper with its own views. Of course Labour would talk to the SNP all the time if they formed a minority government, as they would need their support to pass laws and budgets.
May 6, 2015
Once again, Labour would only need the support of the relatively small number of SNP MPs if the much larger number of Tory MPs were determined to use their votes to force Labour into that dependency on the SNP, even though that would clearly be against the national interest.
It would always be open to the whips to send the Tory MPs a text message saying that they were not needed for any more divisions and could go home if they wanted, as they did on the evening of March 5th 2008:
http://ebooksfromblogs.weebly.com/uploads/1/5/5/7/1557501/ben_brogan.pdf
” … the vote on New Clause 9, proposed by Bill Cash, which would prevent changes in the Treaty being used in British courts to challenge the supremacy of Parliament. Mr Cameron asked his troops to abstain, but 40 ignored him and voted in favour, including 12 from the new intake … A robustly euro-sceptic MP has just shown me the text messages he received from the Chief Whip’s office yesterday evening. The first, at 19.17, gave Tory MPs a green-light to go home by telling them there would be “no further official votes”. The division on Mr Cash’s clause was called seven minutes later, at 19.24.”
Reply Yes, there are always 4 options open to party whips – Aye, No, abstain, free vote. Doesn’t the issue at stake come into your considerations of how MPs should vote?
May 6, 2015
Yes, it does come into my consideration, but apparently not into that of your party leaders as the whole of their “Labour in hock to the toxic SNP” divisive scaremongering scenario is predicated on the assumption that their MPs would always vote against a Labour government, they would never abstain and let the Labour MPs outvote the SNP MPs.
Reply I think the point the Conservatives are making is that Labour would welcome voting with the SNP to tax England more.
May 6, 2015
“dismiss Miliband’s repeated rejection of any deal with the SNP”
If Ed’s rejection of a deal with the SNP is genuine, what’s to stop Labour from ditching him and voting in a leader who will make such a deal?
May 5, 2015
The Telegraph now has the impudence to tell any UKIP supporters among its readers that there are 26 constituencies where they should not vote UKIP but should instead vote for the Tory candidate.
Presumably this injunction applies to the many UKIP supporters who previously supported Labour or the LibDems, just as much it applies to those Tory sheep who have foolishly strayed but should now “come home” to the fold, and even though these people are swivel-eyed loons, fruitcakes and closet racists the Tory candidates will still welcome their support.
It even goes as far as saying “Nigel Farage’s anti-EU party could help win some marginal seats for the Conservatives” as if UKIP exists to help the Tories rather than to get us out of the EU that the Tories got us into.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ukip/11582796/The-26-seats-where-a-vote-for-Ukip-could-make-Ed-Miliband-prime-minister.html
One of the specified constituencies which strikes my eye is Broxtowe, where the full list of candidates is:
Justice For Men & Boys Raymond Barry
Conservative Anna Soubry
Green David Kirwan
Labour Nick Palmer
UKIP Frank Dunne
LibDem Stan Heptinstall
Maintaining its strict standards of impartiality during the election campaign, the Telegraph helpfully reminds readers that the incumbent Anna Soubry “called out Nigel Farage during Question Time on his claim that 29 million Romanians and Bulgarians would arrive in the UK once restrictions were lifted. That figure, she reminded him that, was higher than the combined population of both countries.”
Firstly Nigel Farage had never claimed that 29 million Romanians and Bulgarians would come here, rather he correctly pointed out that they would all have the automatic legal right to do so and there would be nothing that the UK Parliament and government could do to prevent them doing that if they so wished, and secondly she was wrong about the combined population.
I am particularly looking forward to the result in that constituency.