Saturday 5 May 2012 Saturday 5 May 2012 Saturday 5 May 2012 Friday 4 May 2012 Friday 4 May 2012 Friday 4 May 2012
Minority report
The one thing Boris Johnson should not do, therefore, is claim that he speaks for Londoners. He does not, any more than does Cameron speak for the nation, his party taking less than ten percent of the popular vote during the local elections.
That is the state of politics today. We have a man in office, representing himself as our national leader, on what is a tiny minority of the vote. Given the opportunity to endorse him and his party last week, more than ninety percent of the voting nation declined to do so. A goodly proportion do not share his values (if the man has any) and would not accept him as their representative. They care not for his aspirations and disagree with his political outlook.
But the most remarkable thing of all is the self-referential nature of the politico-media bubble. In slavishly following the agenda of this tiny, unrepresentative minority, it has become obsessed with a minority sport that has no relevance to the majority and is of little interest to it.
The great delusion of these people, though, is their belief that they still represent mainstream opinion, in part maintained by a mutual support system, where they refer only to fellow bubble-dwellers for opinion and ideas, rigorously excluding anything from outside.
Ironically, their belief system is reinforced by their habit of calling themselves – and convincing themselves that they are – the "mainstream". And through force of habit, we tend to endorse that view, referring to the rump of the dead tree sellers as the "mainstream media" (MSM).
The fact, though, is that the politico-media collective is the minority – a tiny minority of self-referential obsessives, rehearsing nothing other than their own aspirations, fears and prejudices. In reality, we are the mainstream. Theirs is the minority report.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 05/05/2012 Even less of a good idea
Such a strong supporter of the EU, however, would only call for an EU referendum if he thought one would help his cause. And, whatever one might think of Mandelson, in his role as EU trade commissioner, he acquired a reputation for being a shrewd tactician and an able negotiator. Thus, if he thinks that a referendum would be advantageous for him, he is probably right.
What Mandelson is actually doing, though, is arguing that the EU needs to reshape itself and push for more fiscal union, creating a "eurozone mark two". Only then, once the final shape of the new "Europe" has been determined, does he think the question of our membership be put to a referendum, his idea being to give it a "clear mandate" to proceed.
Predictably, though, the Daily Wail presents this as giving "ammunition" to Cameron's "eurosceptic backbenchers" to pile pressure to hold a referendum.
However, Mandelson sees a poll not as the first step towards the exit but as "the best way of re-establishing a national consensus about future relations with Europe". It is part of his game plan to keep the UK in the EU.
And, as if this was not bad enough, yesterdays results on the referendums for elected mayors serve to remind us of the dangers of using plebiscites as a means of securing public approval for change.
In any referendum, there is always a very powerful bias towards the status quo. All things being equal, voters will tend to vote against change. And, although this worked for us in the mayoral referendums, in the 1975 referendum on the Common Market it did not.
The potential effect of this bias should be sufficient to warn us that any referendum on our membership of the EU would be an extremely risky venture, to the extent that anyone advocating such a referendum might be assumed to be in favour of staying in the Union.
That is, of course, exactly the case with Ian McKenzie, director of the People's Pledge campaign and now we have Mandelson joining in, the idea of having a referendum looks even less of a good idea than it ever did.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 05/05/2012 If politics was a dog
It is easy to be wise after the event, as is Brendan O'Neill, editor of Spiked. But we can still give O'Neill his moment of glory, letting him say exactly what we have said so many times, as he acquaints us with "further proof" that the political class inhabits a different moral universe to normal human beings.
For that proof, he says, you need look no further than the analyses of the elections, with the chatteratiproclaiming "a good night for Labour". Yet, says O'Neill, Labour got roughly 39 percent of the vote on an estimated turnout of 32 percent.
We've done this sort of sum before, noting of a recent by-election that the winner got her seat in parliament with 15.7 percent of the electorate. But in this case, Miliband is preening himself over getting around 12 percent of the eligible electorate to vote for his party, and the political commentariat is allowing him to get away with it.
If you put it another way, O'Neill asserts, 88 percent of us – the heaving mass of society – did not vote Labour. "If that's a good night for Labour", he muses, "I'd hate to see a bad one".
Thus does he conclude: "Yesterday’s elections were the most boring in living memory. But they revealed something very interesting: Britain is morphing into an oligarchy, with a gaping chasm emerging between the spin-doctored politicians and Twitterati who 'do politics' and the man and woman in the street who do not".
The strange thing about this is that the Failygraph is publishing O'Neill. But his is a token comment, and one which will be completely ignored by the paper's own political claque. Even as we write, Charlie Moore is blathering about the need "to revive the Conservative and Liberal Democrats Coalition".
It is people like Moore who give stupidity a bad name. His meanderings transcend myopia, and lift tunnel vision into a new dimension. His is nothing short of a wilful refusal to recognise that the Cameron projet is part is falling apart.
In particular, what Moore is missing – as many will miss over the forthcoming days – is the enormity of Cameron's failure over the elected mayors referendums. The idea was very much his, he spoke for it and invested considerable political capital into it. And nine out of ten areas have told The Great Leader to go take a running jump.
One of the more important failures here is Cameron's complete misreading of the public mood. No one with any feeling for the grass roots could possibly suppose that the answer to public antipathy towards the political classes is to add a new layer to the political classes.
No one with any political acumen could be so blind as to make that mistake – yet this is precisely the mistake Cameron has made, an entirely unforced error betraying a colossal lack of judgement.
And therein lies that proof that, when it comes to the basic trade of politics, Cameron really isn't very good at it. The man at the helm of our political machine doesn't know what he is doing. But then, the idea that the posturing, fatuous fool that is Ed Miliband is any better, that he can provide a credible alternative, is one of those political ideas whose time will never come.
Only in the politico-media bubble could such an idea gain any credence whatsoever. Outside it, as O'Neill points out, 88 percent of the voting population did not vote for it. But one must also remember that 91 percent of people didn't vote Tory either.
If politics right now was a dog, we'd be paying the vet to put it out of its misery.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 05/05/2012 A horse but no mares
UPDATE: A majority in Bristol have voted "yes" to an elected mayor. The margin is said to be very small, 41,032 (53.35 percent) in favour compared with 35,880 (46.65 percent) against, on a 24 percent turnout. That means approximately thirteen percent of the electorate have voted in favour of the proposition. On that "democratic" basis, there is to be an election for a mayor on 15 November.
Wakefield, however, has joined the list of refusniks, rejecting the proposition by 62.2 – 37.8 percent on a turnout of 72,967 - 28.94 percent in precentage terms. This is close the Coventry in the degree of rejection. By comparison, in the 2011 local elections there was a turnout of 35.5 percent, and in 2008 32.28 percent used their vote. In 2010 the turnout was 59.5 percent, although that was a general election year.
On the basis that there's always one, Council leader Coun Peter Box says: "Clearly the people of Wakefield have come out in favour of the existing system. This shows people have confidence that we have got a strong Labour council and they do not want change".
Newcastle-upon-Tyne adds itself to the list, with 61.9 percent saying no, to a mere 38.1 for the propostion. The total vote runs to 64,719. Just two more to come - Leeds and Birmingham. And the Brummies throw it out, voting 57.8 percent against, against 42.2 percent, on a turnout of 208,696 - the best hope they had went west.
And finally, Leeds comes in, and within a few decimal points of Coventry. No less than 63.3 percent of voters reject the proposition, leaving a meagre 36.7 percent voting in favour, with 170,350 people casting a vote - a turnout of 31 percent. That makes nine out of ten cities turning down The Boy's invitation to elect a mayor.
Doncaster, on the other hand, having been given the opportunity to rid itself of its incubus, has votedto keep its town mayor. Of the 68,075 voters who took part in the referendum, 44,571 (62 percent) voted for the mayor. The turnout was 30.5 percent, putting support for the proposition at 18.6 percent.
Of the four results (of ten) so far in, Manchester voted against by a margin of 53.24 to 46.76 percent and Nottingham rejected the proposition by 57.5 to 42.5 percent, both on a turnout of 24 percent. Coventry delivered a vote of 63.58 to 36.42 percent against.
In Bradford, the vote was 55.13 to 44.87 against, despite a higher turnout of 35 percent and the support of George Galloway. Even he could not enthuse enough people to make it happen.
With the rest of the cities expected to reject the proposition, this is a humiliation for The Boy, who invested considerable political capital in the idea. But only a politician completely divorced from reality, or a political groupie totally locked in the bubble, could argue that the answer to the current anti-politician sentiment was to have more politicians.
Thus we have Tim Montgomerie whinging about sabotage "by the vested interests of existing councillor establishements (sic)", failing completely (as so often) to understand what is going on.
Not only were councillors unenthused about elected mayors, people simply could not see the point of having yet another layer of elected official to argue over the same set of powers. This is not "decentralisation" in any way – merely spreading the power more thinly between more professional politicians, a sop to compensate for the popular feeling of alienation from government, arising out of our membership of the EU.
As a political option, this makes no more sense than appointing a horse a consul, and just about as cynical. The Cameron projet deserved to fail.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 04/05/2012 Victory begins at home
Richard North 04/05/2012 The face of defeat
Greenwood's seat was the last to declare in a nail-biting finale to the local elections, which went to four recounts.
On the night, Labour gains two seats overall. Respect now holds five. This leaves Labour with 45, exactly half the 90 on the council, preventing the group taking overall control of the city. The Tories have 24 seats and the Lib-Dims have eight.
In a bizarre twist, the balance of power is held by the dubious Imdad Hussain - the councillor recentlykicked out of the Labour group after being disqualified as a director when £314,873 disappeared from his failed business.
It is thought that Hussain, who was not standing for re-election this round, may vote with the Labour group, giving it a de facto majority, preventing Respect from being king-makers. Such an arrangement, though, cannot improve the already tawdry image of Bradford politics.
But, even than it was not all Galloway's night. In the Wibsey ward of the South Bradford constituency - once very briefly a Labour marginal - UKIP stormed into second place with 781 votes to Labour's 1,753 – against 399 for the Tory candidate and 384 for the Lib-Dims.
The steadily strengthening local performance of this party, in the absence of a BNP candidate, may have it holding the balance of power in the next general election, preventing the Tories taking down the Labour incumbent.
The possibility of this is marked by the fate of the Queensbury ward, which returned a Tory candidate with 1,073 votes, while the combined UKIP and BNP vote came to 1,433. Labour struggled to make 956.
Needless to say, the national focus is on the "good" performance of Labour, which has taken the equivalent of 39 percent of the national vote. The Tories trail on 31 percent and the Lib-Dims pull in 16. The number of Lib-Dim councillors has fallen below 3,000 for the first time since the party was formed in 1988 – all against the lowest turnout since 2000, on 32 percent.
But snapping at their heels are the so-called "insurgent" parties – not enough yet to make the difference, but enough of a presence to prevent the establishment calling the night its own.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 04/05/2012
Saturday, 5 May 2012
Bristol was one of the three "most likely to" cities, along with Birmingham and Sheffield. The result is unsurprising, therefore, less so says one political commentator living in Bristol as: "Bristol is full of hippies and Communists who have never bathed". This may be a slightly exaggerated view.
On the other hand, voters in Sheffield have rejected The Boy's mare. Against were 82,890 (65 percent), with 44,571 (35 percent) for the proposition. This is in a city otherwise known as the Democratic Republic of Sheffield, where baths are used for storing coal. The left-wing, non-bathing theory is not holding.Caligula got his horse as consul, but it looks as if The Boy is not going to get his mares.
The Wail notes, with not a little malice, that The Boy "will be most embarrassed by losses in his Oxfordshire constituency". Labour has taken the seats of Witney Central, Witney East and Chipping Norton.
If he can't even keep the home fires burning, there is not much chance of him sweeping the rest of the country to victory. But this is a man who has totally failed to enthuse the political process, so the Witney result is only to be expected.
Posts
