The Henley by-election in colour, courtesy of Microsoft Excel
In case you can’t really see it, the little speck of red at the top of the pie chart is the Labour Party. Labour received fewer votes than the Green Party and the BNP and were only 200 votes ahead of UKIP - and I don’t remember any of those rival parties being at the top of the political agenda recently or doing anything to deserve extra votes.
Happy anniversary Gordon.
Lots of love
A.Tory
P.S. In case any Lib Dems are feeling a bit smug this morning, may I remind you that Labour’s share of the vote fell over 11% from 2005 to 2008, yet you only managed to pick up an extra 2.5% of the votes while the Conservatives picked up an extra 5%. Even when Labour are falling apart, the voters are still choosing the Conservatives over the Lib Dems.
Witanagemot Blogs
Anyone who thought David Cameron’s Man wasn’t going to be collecting a parliamentary salary and associated expenses as of this morning needed their head examined.
But I have to say there is something shamefully delightful in seeing Gordon’s stooge taking this much of a beating.
Happy Prime Ministerial Birthday Gordon. Enjoy it while you can. A few more results like this, where you can’t beat the Greens or the BNP and you won’t be having many more.
Indeed. The newspapers gave a brutally frank assessment of Gordon’s first year today. He simply cannot escape the pessimism that he has cast over the whole UK.
I’m a Lib Dem (obviously), & I’m disappointed. To allow Camoron to get over 50%, in an area where we are the main opposition?
I believe that there are liberals everywhere, in the city & in the country, making up a higher proportion of the country than those who vote for Lib Dem candidates, & a large number of these broadly liberal-minded people have voted Conservative, which is a loss & something that must be addressed.
I’m not happy today, but at least I’m not one of the few remaining Labour loyalists, unable to face the obvious truth that their repulsive policies have turned anyone with a speck of human decency off.
They assumed that the people were as nasty & vindictive as the Daily Mail, & it turned out not to be true, so they’re reaping the “rewards”.
Asquith: it is quite simple. The LDs are not a liberal party. They are a tax and spend, top down, pro EU party. On paper there is very little to distinguish the party from Labour.
I am a liberal and as much as I dislike some Toryism, the Conservative party is still by far the closest to classical liberalism that it is possible to find in mainstream politics.
Until the LDs become properly liberal, they aren’t going to beat the Tories in the south of England.
Well said Blue Eyes. The Lib Dems are not a truly liberal party. Any party that supports the EU certainly cannot claim to be liberal or a supporter of democracy, as we have witnessed over recent weeks and months.
Right, strawman alert…
Yes, I tend to be pro-EU, in a critical sense. I supported the Lisbon Treaty because it came close to my desire for the EU to have as much power as (I consider) necessary & devolve as much as possible, to make the whole business work (in the way that I’d like). I don’t have a policy position over whether there should be a referendum, but if there was one I’d probably vote Yes… though I agree there are hard questions that need to be asked after the Irish business.
I tend to be supportive of immigration, but only because I don’t think it will be as destructive as some claim: if it did, I’d be against it.
You can read my comments here, & observe that I agree with LFAT at least half the time. What does it mean that I’m economically liberal & I agree with much of what is written here? Does it make me some right-wing outrider who is in the wrong party? You may well think so, but only if you cleave to an image of the Lib Dems being far left…
In fact, I, with the opinions I’ve openly expressed, fit perfectly well within the mainstream of the party. If you visit sites like Liberal Democrat Voice, you’ll see that my point of view is held by many, & no one is the raging politically correct socialist you seem to be envisaging.
If you held a gun to my head, I would take Cameron over Brown… & so would many in this party, about half (see also the thread about second preferences in the London mayoral election). I think Cameron is more liberal than Brown, but I don’t regard him as liberal, and his party is even less so. The elephant in the room is the reactionary wing of the Tory Party, which can’t be PR-ed away.
I really want to suggest that disillusioned Labour supporters who don’t want Brown but can’t vote Tory should vote Lib Dem, and therefore crush the Labour Party into third place. The problem is, that’s exactly what Labour supporters were telling everyone to do to the Tories 5 years ago. It was wrong then and it’d be wrong now.
The Lib Dems remain an unelectable ragbag of a party, who seem to exist largely to exert pressure on the other two parties. You wouldn’t want them in government because they’d be too busy being all things to all people. You wouldn’t want them in opposition because they just aren’t effective enough – they spend too much time arguing amongst themselves to genuinely oppose the government – which the Tories have been guilty of too, but at least they can turn themselves around when needs be.
As for Labour coming fifth and losing their deposit, I think the appropriate soundtrack for the moment comes from the chorus of this song!
Asquith: I don’t go on what is said on liberal blogs, I go on what Kennedy, Ming and Clegg say. They are statists. They think that more government and more legislation is the answer. This is why LDs feel at home in the EU.
Small l liberals believe in small-scale voluntary activity not big one-size-fits-all state solutions. The Tories are the only party offering this.
Interesting that Lib Dems still claim to be the party of localism, even though the Conservatives are more committed to small government and genuinely seem to believe in it to a much greater degree than the Lib Dems as evidenced in their policies.
You may support localism yourself, but there is a substantive wing of the Tory party that simply cannot accept localism in, for example, education… where your views on the matter are closer to mine than of those who want the state to impose social engineering policies, which many Tories do.
I believe in minimal government involvement in a) the economy & b) society. Just as there are few Labourites who can make the first claim, there aren’t all that many Tories who can make the latter.
This argument is going to go round and round until someone gets bored
[...] To rub this point in, here is a pictorial representation of the Henley results, courtesy of A. Tory [and Microsoft Excel]: What the last two by-elections have shown is that the Conservatives are now [...]