frankPodmore

frankPodmore, 12 days ago

Imagin an opposition party challenging labours view on FPTP. This would be a real once in a life time change to the old aristocratic power structure.

The really odd thing is that in this scenario, the Lib Dems would come fourth in vote share, behind Reform, but second in terms of seats, which might have an interesting impact on their view of PR!

frankPodmore, 11 days ago

Uncanny. It’s like he’s in the room with me.

frankPodmore, 12 days ago

Clacton was predicted to be held the Tories, but only by 7%, with Labour in second (according to FT’s poll tracker). Farage standing throws that out completely, it’s safe to say.

Question is, will Labour voters lend the Tories votes to keep Farage out?

frankPodmore, 12 days ago

True! We need some constituency-specific polling to know what’s going on, otherwise we’re just speculating! Where’s Ashcroft when you need him?

frankPodmore, 12 days ago

Yeah, finding another Labour MP to smear, probably. But his polling is good!

frankPodmore, 12 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

Very short summary:

She said something foolish and antisemitic, and was suspended from the party. She then was reinstated to the party very late in the day, but there were rumours she wouldn’t be allowed to run as a Labour candidate again, then rumours that she would run, but against Labour, but now she say she’s back and she’s running for Labour.

Slightly more detailed summary:

Diane Abbott published a letter which claimed that Jews didn’t experience real racism because they mostly pass as white. People were very annoyed about this because it’s obviously not true, but also because of Labour recently having been found to be institutionally antisemitic during the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn (a close political ally of Diane Abbott). She was quickly suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), pending a full investigation. She almost immediately apologised, retracted what she said in the letter and agreed to attend some sort of anti- antisemitism course.

Recently, it was rumoured (I don’t think actually confirmed) that the investigation had finished months ago and recommended no further sanction, but the findings weren’t made public or even given to Abbott. She was allowed back in to the PLP at the beginning of the general election campaign, but there was another rumour that she wasn’t going to be allowed to run in the election, which the party refused to confirm or deny, saying it was an internal matter for the National Executive Committee. Various senior party figures then said they thought she should be allowed to run, including, eventually, Keir Starmer.

There were then further rumours that Abbott was so upset by the debacle that she might run against Labour. But, as the headline says, she’s now decided to stand for Labour.

frankPodmore, 12 days ago

Yeah, I agree. I understand why he wants to push out MPs who aren’t loyal to him, because the more loyalists you have, the easier it is to get things done. But the optics of this one were terrible. Still, she’s running, now, and she’ll almost certainly hold the seat for Labour.

frankPodmore, 13 days ago

According to the FT’s polling model, if the Tories’ vote share falls to about 20%, the Lib Dems will beat them in terms of seats even with only about 9% of the vote. So, it wouldn’t take much tactical voting for that to be a real possibility.

Even more hilariously, in that model, the Lib Dems would actually be fourth, behind Reform, in vote share.

frankPodmore, 14 days ago

He hates poor people, is the thing. Younger people are poorer, so he hates them as a by-product. It’s the same deal with immigrants: the Tories are mostly fine with rich immigrants, but since most immigrants are poor, that still means they hate most immigrants.

frankPodmore, 15 days ago (edited 15 days ago)

If I’m reading this right, that doesn’t necessarily mean she will be the Labour candidate. As far as I know, I’m ‘free’ to be a Labour candidate but that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen!

frankPodmore, 15 days ago

Thing with the Greens is that even they say they want a Labour government. But voting Green makes that less likely. So. What are they doing?

frankPodmore, 14 days ago

Which would make perfect sense if there was some way of adding ‘… but don’t count my vote if it makes electing the Labour candidate less likely’ to your ballot. As it is, the effect of voting Green is to make a Labour government, and therefore any effective action on climate change, less likely. So, your real choice is: A Labour government, that does something (even if it’s less than you’d like) or voting Green and handing government back to the Tories, and getting nothing (which is definitely less than you’d like).

And right now, when Labour are promising to decarbonise the grid by 2030, which may well be impossible, it’s especially absurd to insist they do ‘more’. ‘More’ than borderline impossible?

frankPodmore, 13 days ago

This has the exact same problem, though: a hung parliament is not something you can actually vote for.

frankPodmore, 13 days ago

You cannot vote for a hung parliament because you have one ballot in one seat. US presidential logic doesn’t come into it.

We cannot assume Labour is going to win. That is not an attitude with a great track record. If you want a Labour government strongly influenced by the green movement, there’s one way to get that with your one ballot. You should vote for the party with green policies so ambitious as to be borderline unrealistic. You should vote Labour.

I think Starmer’s someone trying to do something notoriously hard (winning from Opposition for Labour) in order to do something even harder (being an effective, reforming prime minister) in a system where the more loyalists you have, the more you get done. If you want to do something very difficult (like, say, a globally unprecedented and ambitious climate policy of decarbonising the grid in six years), you need people on your side in parliament. I think at times he could have been a little more open about that, but that’s not the same as dishonesty.

Incidentally, if you’re going to call the man by his first name, you could at least spell it correctly: Keir. Not to be rude, but how much can you authoritatively say about the guy when you’ve not got the basics right?

frankPodmore, 12 days ago

Correcting a dyslexic on spelling. Classy.

I don’t know how I was supposed to know you’re dyslexic, given that, oddly enough, you’ve spelled every other word correctly. In any case, you’re sitting in front of a computer (or holding one), which would allow you easily to check the spelling, dyslexic or not.

I almost vomited reading your reply

You should probably find something else to do if you have this strong an over-reaction to a person answering a question that you asked.

Naive if you think he’ll make any difference

Every other Labour government - in fact, every social democratic government anywhere in the world - has come to power in the face of this kind of rhetoric. Yet, they generally do make a positive difference. Indeed, you must think they do, otherwise you wouldn’t be left wing.

I’m not sure if you saw the regular backtrack on pledges

I saw a politician adjusting their platform to take into account a changing situation and to try and make it more appealling to voters, which is what is supposed to happen in a democracy. The alternative is politicians not listening to voters, which is not something you can want. Regardless of the changes Starmer’s made and whether they were necessary (obviously I think some of them were and some of them weren’t, but we’ll never know who was right), he’s retained the overall commitment towards greater economic and social justice which he started with and which every Labour government has both promised and delivered. I can’t say for sure if his plans will work out, of course, but the track record of Labour governments is basically good.

If it ain’t in the manifesto, it will not get past the lords. Keir is going to get in power and do very little differently from the Tories. Reeves stated as much in regards to the NHS.

Three sentences, none of them true. We’ve already discussed one way Labour will be very different (decarbonising the grid) which was in the original pledges and is also in the manifesto. Regarding the NHS specifically, Labour’s first step is ‘Cut NHS waiting times with 40,000 more evening and weekend appointments each week, paid for by cracking down on tax avoidance and non-doms.’. You can see their longer-term mission here. These are not the same as the Tories’ policies, obviously.

You won’t believe me though and when you see it yourself, you’ll go through all sorts of logical contortions as if you already knew and expected it. It’ll take a long time before you ever ask yourself if you haven’t got anything perfectly right.

Hypothetically, if you heard two people having a conversation and one of them kept saying they could accurately predict the future, while the other argued that there was too much uncertainty to do so, and acknowledging that what they thought was going to happen might well not happen, which of the two would you think was more likely to ask themselves if they’d got everything right?

hung parliament

A Labour party with a hung parliament would find it harder, not easier, to pass legislation of any kind, including the things we both want for the NHS and green energy. The track record of the SNP on delivering green policies is poor and the track record of Lib Dems and Greens on the same is just NIMBYism or impossibilism (both, in the case of the Greens).

In elections where people have followed your advice and voted Lib Dem, Green, SNP or Plaid in large numbers, the result has not been a hung parliament with Labour as the largest party. This is what happened in 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019. All very different elections, yes, but all elections where the left-leaning vote was split. My suggestion is that instead of trying your tactic, which has failed four times in a row, we try a tactic which has, at least at some points in history, actually delivered something other than a Tory government.

It is in any case impossible to reconcile your argument that Labour are going to win a landslide anyway, so it’s safe not to vote for them, with your argument that you can take lots of seats off Labour by voting for another party. The fact remains that if your ideal situation is ‘Labour are the largest party [with or without a majority]’ the only sensible course of action is to vote Labour.

frankPodmore, 11 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

Checking one word = hours of work? Stop bullshitting, man. The problem here is that you can’t get your facts or your argument straight, and your inability to do the bare minimum research is indicative of the broader problem you have.

Again, acknowledging the possibility that we can’t accurately predict the future is not ‘gaslighting’ and it also makes it very clear that I don’t have unwavering faith in Starmer or Labour to deliver. If I did, I would have assumed that they’re going to win, because that’s a precondition for delivering anything. I have also repeatedly made it clear that I am not confident they’ll be able to deliver on one of their key policies. The fact that you feel able to gloss this as ‘unwavering faith’ is yet another indication that you are not rooting your argument in anything resembling the facts.

If your definition of leftwing doesn’t include social democrats, that means it doesn’t include, e.g., Clement Attlee or FDR, and thereby excludes historic achievements like the NHS or the New Deal from being considered left wing victories. This is yet another idea you have introduced that is impossible to reconcile with the rest of your argument. Again, man, the slightest bit of thought, rather than screaming over-reactions, would be really helpful and might even make conversations like this a productive use of your time.

If you could refrain from constantly introducing irrelevancies, that might also be helpful. This started as a conversation about whether you could vote for hung parliaments and is now a conversation about the history and nature of left wing politics. This is because you kept asking more questions, which anyone can see that I have answered, despite your insistence that I haven’t. Indeed, it’s difficult to see how I could have made you sick with my answers while also not answering you.

If I can suggest another hypothetical conversation: one person is screaming ‘You make me sick! Nobody’s really left wing apart from me!’ and another is saying things like, ‘We cannot predict the future, so I might be wrong, but here’s what I think based on X, Y, Z’ – would you really find the first person more persuasive?

frankPodmore, 15 days ago

I’m generally inclined to give the leadership the benefit of the doubt, but it really doesn’t seem like they’ve communicated with her well. I can understand why she’s finding info from other sources if she’s getting nothing from the party, which seems to be the case.

frankPodmore, 17 days ago

people overlook the fact that a lot of people say one thing to pollsters and then vote another way in the polling booth

Pollsters don’t overlook that, they specifically take it into account! If that was happening we’d be seeing it in actual election results (like the locals and the by-elections) or through discrepancies in other questions in the polls (like ‘Who you trust on the economy?’ Or ‘Who is the best leader?’).

It’s not true that Starmer has purged the Labour voters. The overwhelming majority of people who voted Labour in 2019 are still planning to vote Labour. Most of the 2019 Tory voters who Starmer has won back voted Labour in 2017 and before. Maybe they’ll stick with Labour, maybe not. Frankly, that’s a problem for the next election.

frankPodmore, 17 days ago

Miliband or Corbyn would have won if they’d made their party more popular than the unpopular governments they faced, as Blair did and Starmer seems to have done, but they didn’t. Had they made themselves relatively popular (less unpopular), they wouldn’t have needed a great deal of enthusiasm to also win.