Labour Leadership election: Stage 1

This was first posted on Facebook on 29th January 2020, with support from my Ko-Fi network.

The next general election for the UK is likely to be in 2024. According to the terms of the Fixed Term Parliament Act, GE2024 would be held Thursday 2nd May (but Johnson says he intends to repeal FTP): according to the Parliamentary Act of 1911, the next general election can be held at the whim of the Prime Minister but no later than Thursday 12th December 2024.

The Leader of the Opposition until the next general election, and of course we hope Prime Minister thereafter, will be one of four people:

Just for the record: Corbyn can’t resign now

This was first posted on Facebook on 31st December 2019, with support from my Ko-Fi network.

I’m probably going to be writing a lot of posts about looking forward in politics and campaigning in the new year.

This post is more of a backwards-looking one.

The Labour Party suffered a horrible defeat on 12th December. In consequence, not only are we going to have a Tory government in Westminster for the next five years (give or take), and Boris Johnson is Prime Minister of that Tory government (a nightmare scenario of Trumpian proportions), and that Tory government has an 80-seat majority giving Boris Johnson the power to do more or less whatever he feels like doing in government – not only all of that, but the UK is going to leave the EU on 31st January and may crash out in no-deal Brexit on 31st December 2020.

Under the circumstances, it is only human to want to find someone or some group of people to blame.

Writing About GE2019: Kensington

This was first posted on Facebook on 19th November 2019, then updated on 13th December 2019, with support from my Ko-Fi network.

Written on 19th November 2019, as part of a series on tactical voting

I am not likely to consider constituencies in detail, because in practically all instances, if you live there, you know the constituency in far more detail than I could, and if you have a not-Tory incumbent, you should certainly know more than I do about whether they’re a good constituency MP.

But I do want to talk about Kensington.

In order for Boris Johnson to win a majority, he has to hold every seat the Tories won in 2017, and gain at least three more.

Election Polling is a useful website that lists the target and defence seats for each party in order of majority. Kensington is top of the Tory attack list: the Labour incumbent, Emma Dent Coad, won by 20 votes over the Tories in 2017, the very first time Kensington had ever had a Labour MP. The LibDems were a long way third, and have always – even when they were doing well – been third-place candidates in Kensington. If you are tactically-voting in Kensington, voting for Coad would be the right thing to do.

Writing About GE2019: the Dark is Rising

This was first posted on Facebook on 12th December 2019, with support from my Ko-Fi network.

Exit polls can be wrong. But not that wrong.

This is, give or take a few in either direction, what the next Parliament is going to look like:

Conservatives: 368
Labour: 191
SNP: 55
Liberal Democrats: 13
Plaid Cymru: 3
Greens: 1
The Brexit Party Limited: 0
Plus 18 Northern Irish MPs and 1 Speaker.

Boris Johnson has run a successful disinformation campaign, and got his 40+ majority. This could be up to 20 seats wrong in either direction, but that doesn’t make a lot of difference to our future over the next seven weeks or so.

Tory lies, anti-Semitism, the Labour Party, Israel, and Palestine

There are two general things happening through this election.

One of them is that the Conservatives keep getting caught doing very public, very stupidly bad, disinformation actions.

During the BBC Question Time leaders special, the CCQH Twitter account – which is a blue-tick verified account and therefore is not allowed to change its display name without informing Twitter – changed its display name/header image to appear at first glance to be a fact-checking account and proceded to tweet support of Boris Johnson.

GE2019 Results: Rotten, Uncooked, Scottish, or LibLab?

This was first posted on Facebook on 18th November 2019, with support from my Ko-Fi network.

I have no idea which of these is most likely to happen in GE2019. But I’m pretty sure one of them will.

For the purposes of this scenario slicing: I’m assuming The Brexit Party Ltd wins no seats. It might, but I don’t think it will win *enough* to make any difference to the balance of power.

If on Friday 13th December we wake up to:

General Election Begins: Grenfell Tower and GMB

Officially, the general election campaign for 12th December started at a minute past midnight this morning.

We have no MPs – only Prospective Parliamentary Candidates, aka PPCs. Even full lists of the candidates for each constituency won’t be public til Saturday next.

So far:

Jacob Rees Mogg yesterday made a crass and disgusting remark to the effect that the people who died in Grenfell Tower were obviously not as smart as people like himself, or they would have ignored what the emergency services told them and left the building. Tory defences of Mogg’s remark have amounted to “Well, JRM is much smarter than the kind of people who live in Grenfell Tower.”

Writing About Brexit: a rebel Prime Minister

This was first posted on Facebook on 26th September 2019, with support from my Ko-Fi network.

I didn’t get home from work in time to listen to Boris Johnson in the Commons. At the point when I switched on Parliamentlive TV, Boris Johnson had walked out a few minutes earlier: Anna Soubry was making her point of order.

Boris Johnson lied in his speech – he claimed that the EU were open to negotiating an alternative to the Northern Ireland backstop, and so a withdrawal deal could therefore be negotiated. As several Brussel-based journalists are reporting this morning, EU-27 don’t expect anything from the UK that offers a viable alternative to the backstop in keeping the Irish border transparent/preserving the Good Friday Agreement. They haven’t received anything, and they don’t expect to. But lies about Brexit and EU negotiation are normal from Tory ministers.

Boris Johnson also said, explicitly, he thought the Supreme Court were wrong to rule his prorogation of Parliament unlawful.

A general election or Brexit?

Can the UK have a general election before we leave the EU on 29th March 2019?

The UK must have a general election again on Thursday 2nd June 2022.

The only way in which the UK can have a general election before then, is if either two-thirds of the MPs in the House of Commons vote for it (433 MPs, give or take a few Sinn Féin) or if the government loses two votes of confidence, a fortnight apart.

You can choose one of these for 2019, what's more important to you?
Bumper 7 day poll

— Ian B #NHSLove (@ijbrads66) January 2, 2019

Current state of the parties in the Commons:

Gone means gone, May means May

Last night Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 Committee, counted 48 letters in his cupboard and let Theresa May know she’d have a leadership challenge this week. This morning he let the world know.

The system for Tories who want rid of their leader is primarily in the hands of MPs. If one-sixth of the Conservative backbenchers have written a letter of no-confidence in their leader to the chair of the 1922 Committee, a vote of no-confidence is called: if the leader wins that vote, they can’t be challenged again for another year: if they lose that vote, there is a leadership election in which the current leader cannot stand, voted on by Tory MPs only until only two candidates are left standing: the Tory membership then gets to vote on the last two candidates.

Tonight, 315 Tory MPs will get to have a second vote to see if they’ve changed their minds since 2016. (Most of them have been arguing that we shouldn’t get to have a second vote to see if we have.)