Category: Politics

On the possibility Jo Swinson loses her East Dunbartonshire seat next week…

Published by neilmonnery on December 4, 2019

When the General Election campaign kicked off there was some general enthusiasm for the notion that Boris Johnson could actually lose his seat in parliament to the Labour Party. Heck some even thought Jeremy Corbyn’s seat was in some jeopardy to the Lib Dems as the Remain wave swept over London. Some even thought Ian Blackford could lose his seat as the Lib Dems. None of these things are likely to pass but one other party leader that no-one is really talking about is actually in real danger of losing their seat and that is the Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson.

The more I look at the seat from a betting angle the more the SNP at 9/4 is a real play. The Nationalists will be looking to bounceback from a surprisingly disappointing 2017 performance by pointing out that Brexit is a fucking disaster and the quicker they are removed from the shackles of Westminster, the better for the country of Scotland. Considering what is going on down in the House of Commons then you can see it as a winning strategy.

Jo Swinson has of course lost this seat before to the SNP in 2015, when the independence referendum was still firmly on everyone’s minds and the Lib Dems were in a deeply unpopular coalition government. Even in this scenario, she only lost by just over 2,000 votes and came back to win by 5,339 two years ago, so why could she potentially be in trouble this time?

Well there are 7,500 odd Labour voters out there who can be squeezed. They’ll squeeze towards the SNP because Labour voters hate the Lib Dems more than ice hates fire but also because the SNP have clearly stated they would support Labour in the House of Commons should deals need to be done.

Add to that independence is back on the agenda so those whose primary goal is to get away from the rest of the UK as fast as possible will see that it is tantalisingly close. This should harden up the SNP vote.

Around 7,500 voters last time voted for the Tories and they will probably improve on that number with lots of the older generation who may well like and respect Jo Swinson departing the Lib Dems to vote for the party most likely to deliver Brexit. These numbers won’t be massive but they’ll have some impact.

The Scottish Greens have chosen to put up a candidate with the hopes of stealing 1,000 odd votes that would without them skew more Lib Dem than elsewhere.

East Dunbartonshire voted 71% to Remain in the European Union, which in England would probably mean Jo Swinson would be incredibly safe. In Scotland with another party who could very well be more likely to help keep Scotland in the EU being in play however, that is not the case here.

I don’t think anyone can say with their hand on heart that this election campaign has been a raging success for the Lib Dems. Maybe not even a success. Maybe not even good. Maybe not even adequate. Oh wait is that a clusterfuck I see on the horizon or is the 2019 Lib Dem General Election campaign I see on the horizon? To be honest it is hard to tell them apart.

With eight days to go before people go to the polls, the expectations for the Lib Dems are rapidly diminishing by the day. What better symbol for the disaster that is impending but for the woman who stated very confidently that she could be the next Prime Minister to herself lose her seat?

At the start of the campaign the Lib Dems had a tonne of momentum and good will. That soured early when Swinson stated she could be the next PM and people scoffed at the very notion. It wasn’t as big of a punch to the gut as Tim Farron’s pondering about what God would think about gay people having sex but it set the wheels in motion for what history will no doubt regard as a pretty bad campaign. I am all for being ambitious but that was a ludicrous notion and had the party set a realistic target that they could help Stop Boris winning an outright majority and therefore do whatever he liked, it would’ve played a whole lot better.

A month ago I thought Jo Swinson would hold on to her seat without too much of a fuss. Now I see it as a toss-up. Dominic Raab must be hoping that the Lib Dem leader goes down because that might well be the scalp of the night and he might be able to escape the Portillo ridicule moment.

Who would’ve thought a week or so out from Election Day that the Lib Dems would be in serious trouble to lose their leader? Well here we are and from the outside with absolutely no constituency polling data this is a very real possibility.

I hope you enjoyed this blog post. Please leave any comments or contact me directly via the E-Mail Me link on the Right Hand Nav. You can stay in touch with the blog following me on Twitter or by liking the blog on Facebook. Please share this content via the Social Media links below if you think anyone else would enjoy reading.

On being a Lib Dem voter in a tight Labour/Conservative marginal…

Published by neilmonnery on November 22, 2019

For the first time in my General Election voting life, I do not know for sure who is going to be elected in the seat where I reside. In 2005 I knew the Tories were going to win the Isle of Wight, in 2010 the Clegg bounce had just tailed off so I knew that the Tories were going in win Southend West. In both 2015 and 2017, the Tories were going to win Rochford & Southend East. Now as we go to the polls in 2019, I live in yet another constituency and this one is all to play for – Bolton West.

This one is a straight Labour v Conservative marginal. Labour won in 2010 by 92 votes but lost it again in 2015 by less than 1,000 and came within 1,000 of getting it back in 2017. So it is fair to say it should be one of the more interesting contests of the whole election.

As a Lib Dem member I should be bound to vote Lib Dem but I’m also a pragmatist so I could vote for the least worse option of the two. This though is where we have a problem, I can’t at this point in with any semblance of good conscience hold my nose and vote for Labour and this is something I know plenty of Remainiacs struggle to understand.

The Tory is Chris Green, who is a rabid Brexiteer and in my opinion is a fucking asshole. I consider myself socially liberal but economically slightly conservative so in a perfect storm I could in theory vote for a moderate Tory candidate and party. This lot aren’t that and Green is a great example of the type of idiot who wants to drag the party to the margins. Heck he introduced in just his first year of office a Private Members Bill about Voter ID. What a tit.

So yeah, fair to say in this current guise Green and the Tories aren’t even on my radar.

Then we come to the Labour Party and where they are today. If Yvette Cooper was their leader I’d have a real decision to make. If Chuka Ummuna was still a member and their leader, I’d have a real decision to make. If David Miliband had won the leadership contest in 2015 and was their leader, I’d have a real decision to make. I think you get my drift.

My problem is Jeremy Corbyn is their leader and I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him (which isn’t very far as I’m rather weak). His vision for this country is to go back 40 years. On the biggest issue of the day he doesn’t have a strong opinion and his own advisers are split on what to do about Brexit. His economic plans aren’t tax and spend but spend and spend.

I haven’t even mentioned his lack of desire to address the antisemitic issue that seems rife within his party. The fact that Momentum seem to want to takeover and drag the party away from electability and towards pure socialism. The fact that the bullying within the Labour party is a real issue. The fact that the party rather than modernising under Corbyn, seems to be going backwards and finally the fact that in my opinion, they would prefer to be pure but in opposition than not be ideologically perfect but in power.

That final point to me is a big thing. We all want the world to be shaped in the guise of our own ideologies but to say it is all or nothing rather than small incremental steps to me is an absolute shower.

For this blog post I actually looked up Julie Hilling who is the Labour candidate here. She has been spamming my Facebook timeline with sponsored ads for weeks so I had seen a bit. Looking through her twitter though and the only Labour MPs she ever mentions are strong Corbyn supporters. So she is clearly on that wing of the party and I’ve gone back two months and done a search for ‘Brexit’ and ‘Referendum’ and found nothing on her timeline. So evidently she doesn’t want to take a public position about the biggest issue of the day.

Therefore I can’t vote tactically and this is a problem for Labour. I’m just one person but I’m exactly the type of voter they need to persuade in seats such as this to hold my nose and vote for them. I’m a strong Remainer and passionate liberal but also someone who thinks if Boris Johnson gets a majority then an awful lot of bad things will happen. Stopping that scenario is a must in my opinion but this current guise of the Labour Party isn’t that much better.

Come 12 December I’ll tootle off down to my local primary school and vote for the Lib Dem candidate Rebecca Forrest (I should at this point note that I know her and am friends with her) and I genuinely believe of the four candidate/party combinations that her/Lib Dem is without a doubt my first choice. Yet knowing maths all it will do is help the party to a strong third place in all likelihood.

This is why tactical voting gets so much air time these days, so many seats are just two-way barring anything strange. Many people want to help shape their area and vote for the person/party they want but know under the FPTP system, that often isn’t likely so they have to go for the least worst option out of the two that can win. That is just a sucky position to be in but here we are.

No doubt plenty of Lib Dems will be trying to squeeze Labour supporters in Con/LD seats and I’m here stating that despite theoretically being open to the possibility, I just can’t do so. I have no doubt that seems hypocritical and I get that. For me I just don’t think another Corbynista MP is all that much worse to a hard Brexiteer Johnson supporter.

We all know that another Labour leader with a more sensible approach to Europe, the Economy and vision for the future of the United Kingdom would be doing oh so much better in the polls. Yet we sit here today with Corbyn (and his supporters) putting all their chips on Red 10 rather than hoping for a small win just on Red. All that put together puts off potential tactical voters like myself and like we saw in the three constituency polls in London last week that asked LD and Labour voters to think tactically, more Lib Dem voters would struggle to support this version of Labour than vice versa and that is a problem I don’t think Labour can solve any time soon.

On the Lib Dem chances in Chelmsford…

Published by neilmonnery on November 21, 2019

Back in the day (well 2017) I actually got paid to write columns about constituency betting. Due to contractual reasons I can’t do that anymore but I can of course muse some thoughts on this old here blog and I will do so as/when I feel like it over the next few weeks. I’ll start off with a bet I placed when the market opened up – Chelmsford.

To the untrained eye (or person putting together the odds) the Lib Dems wouldn’t be in play in the Essex town. Despite getting within 5,000 or so votes at the height of Cleggmania, the party fell back to Earth and finished 4th in 2015 to go along with a 3rd place finish two years ago. Both times the party polled 12% when you take basic rounding into account.

With the Tories clearing 50% in both past General Elections then it was a no doubt Conservative banker if you looked at very recent Parliamentary elections. The thing is doing such a thing is stupid and anyone who looks at 2015 or 2017 numbers as a basis of predicting 2019 results really doesn’t understand the state of politics at the moment.

Just this past local election cycle, Chelmsford City Council held all up elections and the Lib Dems went from five councillors to 31 and majority control. Not only that but where they won was in the built up area of Chelmsford itself, which coincidentally is where the House of Commons constituency boundaries are.

At the 2016 EU Referendum, Leave won 53:47 but that takes into account the council boundaries and not the parliamentary ones. There are no numbers that are published to say what votes went where but you can read between the lines looking at the council results that if the Lib Dems did extremely well in the built-up areas, then it is likely that the House of Commons constituency area voted to Remain – and possibly at a decent lick.

These are the types of areas the Lib Dems are evidently targeting in this General Election. Had the Brexit Party stood then you could easily argue that the Lib Dems should be the favourites in this seat but now a lot comes down to the Labour squeeze. Labour do not have a single councillor in Chelmsford and received near as makes no difference, one sixth of the votes that the Lib Dems did at the locals. Labour came fifth at the Euros only just beating out ChangeUK and UKIP. They are not a factor in winning this parliamentary seat.

So it comes down to whether those 15% of Labour voters who are probably ready to cast their ballot for Jeremy Corbyn’s party follow through with voting for who they deep down want or take the pragmatic approach. I’ve seen some serious data from polling services showing that if Labour supporters are convinced they are out of it then they will lend their vote to the Lib Dems.

I’ll be keeping a close eye on this seat not just because I’ve got a fiver on it at 66/1 (which was the insane opening price) but also because it is exactly the type of seat that the Lib Dems need to win if they are going to have a good night. Remain, soft Conservative and with a strong ground game. Since taking control of the council, the party seem to have been relatively popular. This isn’t the be all and end all for a national vote but it certainly doesn’t hurt.

The current price is around 9/2 (it got as short as 15/8 at one point) but the stagnant Lib Dem polling and the pulling out by Nigel Farage has shored up the Conservative price. If the Lib Dems stay at around 15-16% in the polls then I’d say that price is about right but would still be tempting. Where the Lib Dems are attacking, they are doing ok even if a lot of floating voters in non-target seats are starting to look elsewhere.

Unite to Remain are backing the Lib Dems and the Green Party have stood down. The Tory incumbent was only elected two years ago so won’t have the depths of personal vote that others will no doubt have. If the Lib Dems can actually get some momentum and creep up to the 20% mark in national polling then this is a seat that should go yellow, marking it down as the new Lib Dem beacon in Essex following Colchester’s demise as a Lid Dem seat.

A fortnight ago I was super confident that the 66/1 bet was coming in. Now I’m decidedly less so. If there were only two parties on the ballot then the Lib Dems eke it out but Labour will make it interesting. Labour votes in Con/LD seats will decide this election and that should be the focus of a whole lot of polling data analysis over the coming three weeks but they’ll be twists and turns yet…

On whether the UK is ready for a strong female leader like Jo Swinson to be Prime Minister and is it time to pivot strategy wise…

Published by neilmonnery on November 21, 2019

Three years ago Donald J. Trump became the 45th President of the United States. Each person to have been elected to that position has had a penis and a pair of bollocks dangling between their legs. He won despite being woefully under-qualified and by doing so, he beat the most qualified person ever to have run for that particular job in Hillary Clinton. One big difference between the two of them is her reproductive organs weren’t on the outside (small hat tip there to the opening episode of Stargate SG-1…).

Now clearly the United Kingdom isn’t the United States. We have had two female Prime Ministers but only one of them actually won a General Election. Margaret Thatcher won three terms from 1979 through to 1987 and was ousted before she could run a fourth term by her party. I wasn’t alive for much of this having been born in the early 80s and she has shall we say, a divided legacy to put it mildly.

Logically you would think that as our society has moved forwards since this time that being a woman wouldn’t be a factor in this type of thing. Yet I keep hearing the same thing about Jo Swinson and that is she’s too shrill or full of self-importance, lacks personality and isn’t relatable. Personally I just don’t get that and then I look at the other two leaders and remember that women are being unfairly graded on a very steep curve.

Boris Johnson is a known cheat and a liar who will say whatever he feels like in an attempt to get his own way. He quite clearly acts like a petulant child but that doesn’t seem to raise an eyebrow, ‘oh that is Boris just being Boris’ say the media and the electorate. Do people want to vote for someone they think would be fun to sit around with in a pub having a few beers with or do they want the person who might actually do the best job?

Next up is Jeremy Corbyn who I actually think is probably a decent bloke but whose views of the world are certainly not forward-looking in any stretch of the term. His lack of empathy and strength regarding tackling antisemitic behaviour within his own party is a huge pox of his own house. Yet many people who deeply distrust him are will willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Why is that? He has constantly tried to walk along the top of a very narrow fence on the biggest issue of the day, no-one really trusts him to deliver what he says regarding Brexit but yet they still want to believe him oh so desperately.

If you were hiring a person for a job in a managerial position and had three candidates whose personalities were the three leaders of the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems, most people would gravitate towards the latter. Boris Johnson’s tomfoolery and lack of substance in an interview would be off-putting. Jeremy Corbyn you’d probably like to some degree but you would struggle to be inspired or think that he take the company forward. With Jo Swinson you’d probably like her gusto, her forward-planning and vision for the short to medium term future. Yet in politics it is a different beast.

As the years have gone on (heck even in my relatively short time on this planet) substance has given way to style somewhat. Look at some of the political leaders around the world, people like tough guys but tough women, not so much. The fact both Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson are too scared to debate Jo Swinson on the same stage says everything you need to know. The fact ITV and BBC have facilitated this also says a lot.

The glass ceiling clearly hasn’t been busted through just yet and it might be fair to say that we’re not even close in some parts of our society. It pisses me right off that so many still have preconceived ideas into how a person should act based solely upon something out of their control, in this instance men and women. A powerful man is good the electorate says but a powerful woman, not so much.

Even in other areas of society, some young boys are taught that to cry is to show weakness. To have empathy isn’t manly. I just don’t get it. Anyone should be allowed to feel emotions and to act accordingly. People shouldn’t be judged for who they are but for how they act.

I’m sure the Lib Dems did plenty of focus groups and got lots of data going into this campaign. Clearly the feedback was to put Jo Swinson front and centre but at this point, that clearly isn’t moving the needle much. The policies of stopping Brexit and negating a Conservative majority in the House of Commons must surely now take centre stage.

In the 2019 Local and European elections, I didn’t see Vince Cable everywhere but everyone was talking about Bollocks to Brexit and the Lib Dem ground game had been re-energised. A General Election is different but saying a simple and relatable thing many many times will slowly sink in. Jo Swinson is highly highly unlikely to be the next PM. I admired her (and our) ambition in saying this but too many people still see politics in this country as a binary choice between Labour and the Conservatives. So maybe we just need to take small steps rather than one giant leap.

There are maybe what, seven seats where the Lib Dems could realistically take a seat from Labour on December 12, Portsmouth South, Bermondsey & Old Southwick, Hornsey & Wood Green, Kensington, Cambridge, Leeds North West and Sheffield Hallam. There are several more in play should the Lib Dems vault up to the low 20s in the polls like say Hampstead & Kilburn and Islington South & Finsbury but they seem optimistic at this juncture.

Whereas there are maybe 60-70 seats that are within reaching point for the Lib Dems against the Tories across England, particularity in leafy Remain areas that have been staunch Conservative since day dot. It is pretty clear that the Lib Dems need to get that David Cameron type Conservative into the fold and then squeeze the Labour vote in these areas by saying you’ll stop Boris Johnson running roughshod over you regarding scrutiny over Brexit.

If I know it then people a lot smarter than me most certainly do and by constantly saying you can be Prime Minister, you aren’t reiterating that message. Stopping Brexit and Stopping Boris are two peas from the same pod. You need one to do the other. For me it is time to lower our sights and aim for influence rather than outright victory.

This ramble started out as a piece about how unfair it is that Jo Swinson is seen through a different pair of critical eyes compared to Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson but I’m ending it looking at how best to remedy the current state of play. Boris Johnson is on course to get a majority and drag the country out of the EU and do whatever his right-wing paymasters tell him. Jeremy Corbyn cannot stop him, simple electoral maths should make that evident to most. So it is time to game-plan not being the Kingmaker but being the mediating force stopping the government going too far away from the centre ground. If the Lib Dems can get that pragmatic argument across then maybe, just maybe it will resonate with enough voters who are distraught and appalled at the offerings of the two main parties.

Should this strategy work then it won’t lead to Downing Street (and we weren’t heading there anyway) but it could lead to Boris Johnson not being able to govern this country based on his own personal whims. The more extreme the government the more inequality is felt. The country is already divided and the only way to hold it together is to find some sort of middle-ground. The coalition burned us bad but that was nine years ago. The only people that care deeply any more are eerily similar to those who believe Jeremy Corbyn is perfect. Another coalition or even putting Boris or Jeremy back in Number 10 Downing Street isn’t on the cards but ensuring the government isn’t too right or left wing is and that is the card the Lib Dems need to play.

On whether the Canturbury situation is Jo Swinson’s ‘Gay Sex’ issue…

Published by neilmonnery on November 13, 2019

Two and a half years ago or so Theresa May called a General Election in an attempt to get a stonking majority, crush Jeremy Corbyn and get her vision of Brexit done and dusted. It would be her legacy and boy she was on course for that big victory. She knew that plenty of former Lib Dem seats could drift back to the party but Labour were so downtrodden that picking up huge swathes of red seats seemed easy enough.

Then a funny thing happened. Theresa May had a dire campaign, which would surely mean the Lib Dems would pick up steam in those Tory/LD battlegrounds but an even funnier thing had happened before the then Prime Minister shot her own campaign in the foot, the Lib Dem leader Tim Farron just wasn’t sure where he stood on gay sex and that was the end of that.

For you see, a lot of the Lib Dem vote is extremely soft because – and I’ll tell you a little bit of a secret here – not a lot of people actually want to vote for the Lib Dems. They will find any excuse to not do so. I’ve had people email me when I ran a local party website telling me they were going to support us but found a small part of our manifesto that they disagreed with so they wouldn’t. They would instead vote for Labour who had the same thing in their manifesto but that was ok.

Even today I got a message from a supporter telling us that we had lost their vote. Did it have anything to do with policy or something a local candidate had done? Lord no. It had to do with what was going on in Canterbury (although he said it was Cambridge so I’m not sure exactly how clued up they are…) and because we still intend to stand a candidate, we have lost their support. I’m seeing it all over twitter as well. Anything to not vote Lib Dem and instead vote for Labour’s version of Brexit.

This is a problem for Jo Swinson and the Lib Dems. A big problem. The media narrative is already pushing this towards a two-party race. This is what the media like as it makes life a whole lot easier and for many people, they too like this because it sets up a straight contest. The fact the Labour Party and the Conservative Party both want a version of Brexit means very little to a lot of people. Remainer types see Labour as the party of Remain despite their policy being completely different to that. They’ll change people think. Will they heck.

Political campaigns are all about momentum and in the early running of the 2019 General Election one, the Lib Dems are at best – and I mean at best – treading water. The Con to LD vote among Remainers seems pretty solid and significant. It is why many Conservative seats in these areas are very much in play for the Lib Dems. Their problem is Labour Remainers are just itching for a reason to flock back home. They don’t care if their party is racist, antisemitic, actually led by a Brexiteer, what they want is to still vote for them. The Labour vote is more engrained than any other among supporters.

This is why Canterbury causes such a problem for the Lib Dems. Labour stole the seat on the Jeremy Corbyn bounce in 2017 with a candidate who could easily sit on the Lib Dem benches in a parallel universe. Plenty of Lib Dems could go out and vote for her as their MP but she is still standing on a Labour platform of negotiating a version of Brexit, which she says would be a bad thing. She wants to win to change the party from the inside but didn’t we see that play out last time and look, plenty of moderate, Remainer type Labour MPs have either left the party or decided not to stand again seeing the direction the party is going in. Clearly Labour are moving even further left – just like the Tories are moving further right – as the moderates in each party decide they’ve lost the war.

Would Rosie Duffield be an excellent MP and voice for Remain in the House of Commons? Sure. Would she get there by standing behind a manifesto promising a Labour version of Brexit? Yes she would. Now in Labour’s scenario there would be another referendum where presumably she would support Remain so go against her parties negotiated position. Surely that makes little sense? Yet folks, that is where we are.

So do the Lib Dems parachute in a candidate who at this late stage have next to no chance of winning? Probably not, yet by sitting back they aren’t giving Remainers a viable party to vote for who could on a good day win the seat. It is hard Brexit vs. negotiated Brexit and for many that would in itself be a bad thing but because it is a Labour Remainer who is the MP, standing against that would be a disgrace.

The Lib Dems cannot win this situation. All they can do is manage it. Would I at this late stage parachute someone in who’ll enter a local party who don’t want to stand someone and who is highly unlikely to win? Probably not but by standing down, you aren’t giving the residents of Canterbury a Remain manifesto to vote for. You also are giving something to Labour but getting nothing in return. A pretty crap position in itself.

This leads me to think that should the Lib Dems not stand in Canterbury, it wouldn’t do much good as soft Labour supporters will just find another reason to stick it to the Lib Dems and vote for the party they want Labour to be. If they stand they’ll get pilloried by many for actually wanting to win seats in the House of Commons.

Damned if they do and damned if they don’t, the Lib Dems know that they are held to a higher standard than the other two major English parties and should they fall short of those lofty expectations, they’ll get punished, even if they reach a mark higher than the Tories or Labour.

On tuition fees being a more important issue than racism…

Published by neilmonnery on September 5, 2018

The following is a conversation that may or may not have happened over social media last night following the Survation poll that put UKIP ahead of the Lib Dems.

Person 1: Lib Dems down 4% again. They get what they fucking deserve.

Person 2: Eh?

Person 1: Lying about tuition fees. The sooner they become extinct the better.

Person 2: So you are happy with the poll?

Person 1: Fuck yes.

Person 2: But you’ve received plenty of racist abuse over the years and you are rejoicing that UKIP are polling above the Lib Dems.

Person 1: No, I’m happy the Lib Dems are down because why anyone votes for them when they lied about raising tuition fees is beyond me.

Person 2: But the poll shows there is more support for a party I know you think is populated by racists and xenophobes but that isn’t important to you?

Person 1: It is but I hate the Lib Dems.

Person 2: You also hate Brexit.

Person 1: And?

Person 2: UKIP are pretty much the reason Brexit is happening. Oh and the fact it was a plan for David Cameron to quell his backbenchers followed by Jeremy Corbyn refusing to really put his whole muster behind the Remain campaign.

Person 1: Jeremy Corbyn can’t be blamed for any of this. He said he wanted to Remain on The Last Leg.

Person 2: Yeah it wasn’t exactly a wholehearted endorsement was it?

Person 1: If he said it then he meant it.

Person 2: Didn’t he say he was behind Remaining in the European Union like 7 or 8 out of ten or something like that?

Person 1: Good enough for me.

Person 2: Why didn’t he campaign with the other party leaders on it then?

Person 1: Jeremy is his own man and does things how he wants.

Person 2: Really…?

Person 1: Yes.

Person 2: Has Jeremy ever done anything wrong in your eyes?

Person 1: He speaks for me and everyone who cares about others and not capitalist ideals.

Person 2: What did you make of Ed Miliband’s Labour leadership?

Person 1: He lost. He was a loser. Just like Brown and Blair before him.

Person 2: Blair won three landslides.

Person 1: Only because the Tories were so shit. No-one voted for him just against the Tories.

Person 2: Did Jeremy win the 2017 General Election then?

Person 1: Yes.

Person 2: No he didn’t.

Person 1: He did better than everyone expected and that is the important thing.

Person 2: No it isn’t. Surely actually you know, winning and being able to implement his policies and manifesto is the most important thing?

Person 1: That is what people like you always say, winning is secondary to doing the right thing.

Person 2: Surely in politics, if you don’t win then you can’t do anything that your supporters actually voted for?

Person 1: He is holding the government to account.

Person 2: Do you actually believe anything you’ve said in this conversation?

Person 1: Of course. All of it.

Person 2: So you are still happy the Lib Dems are below UKIP in that one poll?

Person 1: The sooner the Lib Dems die, the sooner more people will vote for Jeremy Corbyn.

Person 2: That isn’t strictly true now is it?

Person 1: Yes, they wouldn’t vote for the Tories and the Greens are nothing.

Person 2: Did you not see the 2015 General Election?

Person 1: I did.

Person 2: And the way all those Tory/Lib Dem seats went Tory. Even places with like a 20,000 Tory majority went blue. So all those people who had voted Lib Dem before didn’t suddenly all vote for Labour then did they?

Person 1: That was Ed Miliband though.

Person 2: So under Jeremy Corbyn that wouldn’t have happened?

Person 1: No.

Person 2: So why didn’t all those seats suddenly turn red in 2017?

Person 1: Change takes time. Jeremy is building momentum and soon everyone will see that he’s the future. The Tories are the past and the sooner the Lib Dems die or become completely irrelevant the better.

Person 2: So let me get this straight. You hate Brexit. You hate the Tories. You hate UKIP but most of all, the top of your list is hatred of the Lib Dems over tuition fees.

Person 1: I suppose when you put it like that no.

Person 2: Then why rejoice the fact UKIP climbed above them in that poll?

Person 1: Because they lied and I can’t forgive them.

The mind boggles. I still think the Lib Dems biggest problem isn’t tuition fees per se but more the fact that many people feel like a jilted lover. They feel for Nick Clegg and his hopes of doing things a third way but when it came to the parliamentary maths, the only plausible way to provide a stable government was to form the Con/LD coalition. That isn’t what people voted and when he couldn’t honour all his manifesto (with particular reference to that one bit) then that was enough.

Voting isn’t about reason anymore. It is about emotion. Few people actually look at the candidates they are going to have on their ballot. Few look at the manifestos in full. What is en vogue is going to the ballot box and have a feeling, whether they is voting for somebody or indeed voting against somebody.

To get people to go out and vote you need to give them that emotional reason to do so. A million more people did that for the Lib Dems in 2010 than they had done five years previously. Hope was in the air but a lot of people these days want everything or nothing. Small steps of progress is not enough. This is why Jeremy Corbyn does well up to his limit. People feel that he has the power to change everything in one foul swoop and until he has a semblance of power to actually do so, he can talk the good game and doesn’t need to back it up.

In American Football the most popular player on a bad team is always the backup Quarterback because they provide hope that things can get better. Until they get their chance then they don’t have to prove it and that is exactly how it is with JC at the moment. He can promise the Earth and a socialist revolution but until he gets his chance, people will always believe he can do it all.

Logically the Lib Dems should be recovering. The majority of people seem to back a second vote based on the outcome of the Brexit Deal, which is the key issue facing the country today. Most of the big names tainted with the coalition are gone. In most of their key areas they are Tory facing and they are in absolute disarray. Labour aren’t doing too much better on that front. Yet when it comes to actually voting, people vote with their hearts and not their heads and that stench of betrayal isn’t leaving the Lib Dems anytime soon. It is tough but when you are a Labour Remain voter but prefer UKIP to the Lib Dems, that says an awful lot about where people’s heads are at…

On Kate Hoey and Vauxhall Labour…

Published by neilmonnery on July 27, 2018

Kate Hoey and the constituents of Vauxhall are one of my pet projects on twitter. Every time the MP makes a statement about Brexit or votes for as hard a Brexit as possible, I get out on iPhone and write a pithy tweet about the people getting what they voted for. Last year the country went to the polls and in Vauxhall, a constituency that voted overwhelmingly to Remain in the European Union, they flocked to the ballot box in their droves to ensure that the arch Brexiteer Hoey was the person representing them in Parliament. Why did they do that? Well it is because they decided that MPs aren’t important.

In the past few years we’ve become more Presidential in our style of politics. The fact that during the last campaign, Theresa May and her team decided that instead of being called the Conservatives, being called Theresa May’s Team would be more effective branding. They were wrong. Not because the Conservative Party have a very strong and desirable brand but because she was bloody awful on the campaign trail.

For Labour, Jeremy Corbyn went from panel show punching bag to potentially the Prime Minister of this country. People started to buy into his vision once they understood just how vulnerable Theresa May was and in fact there was an alternative to a stonking Tory majority. The problem with this was instead of looking at all the candidates on the ballot paper, people started to just look at the party and in effect, solely the leadership. It was a referendum on Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn and Tim Farron to a large degree across England. In Scotland throw in Nicola Sturgeon too.

When people do this (and lets be honest, this is what the media has dictated over the past couple of decades) then it allows people to vote for someone who plainly doesn’t represent them. Whose fault is this? Well it on the electorate.

Using Vauxhall as the example, people will say they went out and voted for Jeremy Corbyn and his vision of the country but what they were in fact doing was voting for Kate Hoey. It was her name on that piece of paper and with every x in a box, it was an endorsement from the people of Vauxhall that her strong views on a hard Brexit were the ones that people felt aligned to. I know many will say that wasn’t the case but we vote for representatives in Parliament in this country, we don’t vote for a directly elected Head of State.

Only once have I voted for someone I knew absolutely nothing about. Looking back I am a little bit disappointed that I voted that way without at least Googling something about the candidate or reading something about them. Having been involved in politics, it is pretty clear to me that all parties can have good candidates who would be excellent councillors and MPs. On the flip side all can have bad ones as well. The person you are voting for is just as and often even more important the the rosette they wear.

Vauxhall Labour activists last night voted to deselect Kate Hoey as their candidate going forward, claiming that she doesn’t represent them. The pertinent parts of the motion are quoted below:

‘In June 2017 Kate Hoey was elected on a manifesto which explicitly rejected Theresa May’s approach to Brexit and pledged in a letter to constituents that she endorsed Labour’s plans.

‘This CLP censures Kate Hoey MP for repeatedly reneging on those commitments, and ignoring the clearly stated views of her constituents and the national and local Labour Party.’

‘This CLP therefore requests that the leader of the Labour party and chief whip suspend Kate Hoey from the Parliamentary Labour Party and remove the whip; and that the National Executive Committee declare Kate Hoey ineligible for re-selection or endorsement as a Labour party parliamentary candidate.’

You see I disagree with a lot of that. It was clear and obvious where Kate Hoey stood with regards to the EU. It doesn’t matter what the manifesto said, her position was there for all to see. It is hard therefore to attack her now for those views. It is akin to hiring someone totally unsuitable for a job despite them telling you in an interview that they would be shit and had no idea. Kate Hoey was a hard Brexiteer when 31,576 people voted for her in June 2017 and she is that now. A leopard doesn’t change its spots and just because you’ve only just noticed what she’s about, that doesn’t mean you should be surprised.

If you lived in Vauxhall and voted for Kate Hoey, you knew what you were getting. This wasn’t like the EU Referendum where it can be argued that there was some ambiguity about what people were voting for. Not all 17.4million who voted to Leave wanted the hardest Brexit possible. Some will have wanted looser ties towards the EU but on a cliff edge being jumped off of. Yet the people in Vauxhall knew what they were voting for. They voted in their droves for Kate Hoey and she is doing the job that her electorate clearly endorsed her to do and that is make Brexit as UKIPpy as possible.

If the constituents wanted an MP who’d fight Brexit then they had a more than capable alternative in George Turner. The vast majority however decided to approve of Kate Hoey and her love of Brexit. The people knew it her views, the local party knew her views so why they are making a fuss about it now I have no idea. I think Hoey is awful and is a shocking representative for the people of Vauxhall in Westminster but the voted and they got what they plainly voted for – a hard Brexiteer.

On Nick Clegg’s comments Re: Freedom of Movement in the Financial Times…

Published by neilmonnery on June 17, 2018

The last time I took any interest in the figures, the Lib Dems had around 100,000 members. It would probably be fair to say that I’m in the top 1% of those people with regards to my support of the former leader and Deputy Prime Minister. I have written many blog posts defending Nick Clegg but the moment I saw the words that he’d typed out in his Financial Times column, I knew it was going to be a lightning rod for criticism.

The premise of the piece is that freedom of movement within the European Union shouldn’t be a given. An unchallenged principle. He puts forward that this is the right time to look at reforming both internal and external immigration. If they did this then it would grease the wheels between the UK and the other 27 states.

It is probably accurate to say that immigration played a significant role in the outcome of the EU Referendum in 2016. If being part of the EU came with an opt-out of freedom of movement then I suspect that would be sufficient for enough people who voted Leave to have actually voted Remain. The problem in this scenario is that this option wasn’t on the table and is goes against a fundamental principle of the modern EU.

When Nick Clegg penned the article, he knew it would fly in the face of what many grass root Lib Dems believe. He’s never been one to be overtly political when it comes to appeasing the members, so putting forth such an opinion shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. With his political ambitions seemingly in his rear view mirror, it has allowed him to be even more bold in airing his points of view.

When I first read the piece and saw some of the responses from the Twitterati, I thought back to how Labour members now view Tony Blair. It seems that political parties are broad coalitions of people who generally have similar views but don’t always think the same. When one leader comes then a significant number of the membership will shy away. When they go these people may come back and get more involved with those that strongly supposed the previous leader stepping back. Tony Blair is a swear word within Labour at the moment and Nick Clegg isn’t too far away from that within the Lib Dems.

This is why Tim Farron probably got more leash than he arguably should have had. The membership after 2015 didn’t want another Centrist and instead wanted someone untainted from the coalition. Had Nick Clegg had such a gay sex issue that Tim Farron seems to hold then the clamour to remove him would’ve been far more fierce than it was for the leader who led the party into the 2017 General Election.

Still, Clegg’s name is far more muddied than Farron’s. This column will not have helped. On one hand you can put your own views to one side and understand that maybe it is a debate worth having. I wouldn’t personally say it was but you can at least understand that point of view. Well I can anyway. Yet all that will come about from this piece is more Lib Dems will deride Nick Clegg and look forward to him leaving the party. If he resigned then many would rejoice. This is part of the problem within political parties, many people only want those who agree with them on every issue to be fellow members. If you have a differing position to the majority then you are pilloried.

The truth is across Europe, more people are questioning both the internal and external migration situation. On a personal level, I believe migration across the Globe should be far more open than it is. We are but one race and are all supposedly born equal. Should where you are a born give someone more of a birthright to live and work somewhere? Should an Englishman have more or less of a right to live and work in England compared to someone from say Nigeria or Costa Rica? It may sound a bit Utopian but I believe borders should be even more open.

Yet even though I believe in that, I can understand that the majority of people disagree and that the idea of Freedom of Movement within the European Union shouldn’t be unchallenged. I can disagree with Nick Clegg without hating on the man. Sadly we are at the point where discussion and nuance has become a tiny part of political discourse. Now we only see headlines and compare them to our personal beliefs.

Politics is poorer these days and the reaction to this article is a prime example of why. On a day when Theresa May promised £20bn for the NHS but pretty much refused to say how she’d pay for it, the Lib Dem membership are concentrated on an article from their former leader about how to make membership of the EU work better for those that are sceptical. Kicking Nick Clegg has become a comfort blanket, just like Labour members love kicking Tony Blair.

Disagreement is normal in both life and politics. Just because someone floats an idea different to what you think doesn’t make them bad. It means they are tackling an issue from a contrasting angle and that is rarely a bad thing. If we all had a hive mind, we’d be a cult and UK politics already has one of them, it doesn’t need another…

On the Lewisham East by-election result…

Published by neilmonnery on June 15, 2018

When this by-election was called, the conventional wisdom was that Labour would win with around 50% of the vote, the Lib Dems would put their by-election game into a high hear and get second with around 25% of the vote and then the Tories would slip into third. When I woke up this morning and flicked through twitter to find out what had happened overnight, the result wasn’t exactly a shocker.

What it means in the grand scheme of things is very little. Labour won with half the vote. Yes this is slightly down but it was still a comfortable victory and doesn’t send any sort of message to Jeremy Corbyn on Brexit. No doubt some natural Labour voters drifted to the Lib Dems because of this issue but nowhere near enough to get anyone at Labour HQ to consider changing course.

For the Lib Dems it was a solid result that will remind some that the party isn’t comatose. Winning was never a realistic option despite what some members seemed to think. That wasn’t Richmond Park where the party had a network and a very distinctive position compared to who they were up against in the last big by-election victory. With many Labour supporters still believing that a soft Brexit would be provided by Corbyn, that isn’t too far away from the Lib Dems new position of a second vote.

One person who’ll come out of this with an enhanced profile is the Lib Dem candidate Lucy V. Salek. With the party desperate for articulate and impressive younger women, Lucy has clearly shown that she is another one to add to the mix as hopefully a starlet of the future.

I firmly believe that every person who puts themselves forward to stand for parliament deserves all the help and support possible. The party is moving that way and many talented women are coming to the fore. Supporting in a by-election however is much easier than at a General Election and that is where the party let themselves down last year. A lot of fingers have been pointed at certain candidates for under-performing but those doing the pointing should be looking not only at the lacklustre national campaign but also at where resources were being poured into. Targeting has for a long time been a Lib Dem asset but in the past two elections at least, it has been severely lacking.

So many words will be typed out on computers over the next few days with people trying to work out what this result means but the long and short of it is, it means very little. All three of the main English parties did exactly what was expected. No-one can claim to have done staggeringly well but Labour won, the Lib Dems showed they still have something about them to the tune of if a by-election happened in a Tory facing Remain seat, they would be in the game. As for the Tories, they knew they weren’t getting anywhere and pretty much didn’t care.

So when all is said and done, it is pretty much a Status Quo. If I were a betting man and could get odds on a Lib Dem parliamentary gain in a by-election (should the parliament last a full five-year term) I would be all over them at anything longer than Evens. All you hope for is that the people of Lewisham East continue to hear from their local Lib Dem team and this wasn’t a six-week blitz followed by tumbleweed of epic proportions…

On Lib Dem Targeting…

Published by neilmonnery on April 9, 2018

First things first, when I started to write this blog post I had to work out whether it was targeting or targetting. I always thought it was the latter but that is apparently an obsolete British spelling of the word and the version with only one T is now the preferred way to spell that word. You learn something new every day so they say.

So anyway this piece is about targeting resources within the party. There have been numerous words written about this over the years. The party had a good record in focusing resources through the Tony Blair Labour years as they were able to really harness their vote where it was most needed. Some 2010 and the Nick Clegg bounce however, this seemed to disappear as there were not enough activists nor cash to attack potential fertile ground at a national level. Locally many paper candidates actually won in 2010 on the back of Nick Clegg as what were usually poor areas for Lib Dems significantly outperformed expectations.

Since then things have not gone well. At local level the activists deserted the party in droves because of the coalition and what can you say about the General Election in 2015? When external polling data has people like Julian Huppert up over 20 percentage points and he still loses, sometimes you just gotta admit that you were whacked and had little chance of succeeding. At that General Election the national party were even looking at a handful of potential gains, I’m guessing they weren’t exactly watching the news or the media narrative surrounding the party.

Two years on and the party were given a surprising opportunity to actually regain at least some of its lost ground. This is where I think the national party didn’t do half as bad a job in terms of targeting as I know many other members think. The issues last year weren’t where resources where placed at the outset of the election but the lack of movement when it became clear the election had changed.

Tim Farron did his gay sex bit that foot the party in the foot but more than that, the whole thing stopped being a semi-second referendum on Brexit. It became something more. Kudos to Jeremy Corbyn and Labour for achieving this but this took away the hard Pro-EU vote from the Lib Dems and instead made it an open field. The talk of Vauxhall is the big one but all the data points to that seat very much being in-play as long as the campaign was about one issue and stopping Theresa May having a mandate to push through hard Brexit.

Resources then should’ve been pulled out of any Labour/Lib Dem seat where we weren’t defending. Sheffield Hallam and Leeds North West could still have been saved although the way things went down, the likelihood was unlikely but they weren’t dead causes by a fortnight out. Vauxhall alas was by then.

This however is not a blog about the national party but more about local politics. I think we should stand in every seat we can just so people have the option to vote Liberal Democrat on their ballot paper. The issue is not every seat has an equal opportunity of victory, so you have to have laser like focus to give you the best bang for your buck in terms of both money but also man (or I should say people) hours. That is how bosses run businesses, they don’t just give every department the same amount of cash, they give more money to the areas that are likely to bring in more custom, politics has to work in the same way.

If you have enough man hours and cash to put out enough extra leaflets and knock on enough extra doors to give you 1,000 more votes say across a whole local party, do you do that across all the wards or do you focus in on the ones where those extra resources are more likely to result in holding or gaining a seat or two?

Is it better to have say one win, four second places and ten finishes third or lower than three wins and 12 finishes third or lower? I’d argue the latter. Once you win a seat, you are in a better position to win that seat again next time, you get more involved in the council, you get a better platform to speak from, you have more influence, you give yourselves a better chance to grow.

Unless there are national swings, at local elections you know whether you have a chance months out. You do the work all year round and you’ll know which seats are in-play along with those you’ll run a skeleton campaign in. One of the biggest problems is candidates often think they can win even when they can’t in reality. If your strategy is to send out leaflets but not speak to many people on the doorstep, unless you are ahead going in, it seems awfully unlikely that you’ll win coming from behind.

So I’d love to be able to give every candidate the best opportunity to win but there is only so much money in the kitty and only so many doors that can be knocked, or leaflets that can be delivered. Every journey starts will just one step and every councillor returned is a step towards more. It is better to play to win fewer seats than play to just play many seats with lower chances of success.

Local parties need to have long-term vision instead of short-term reactions. Hopefully up and down the land that is being borne out but if I see lots of time and money spent in dead areas at the detriment of potential winnable seats, I’ll sigh once more and wonder why the same problem continues to not get fixed…