Nigel Farage has been ‘egged’ while on the campaign trail. He was pelted by a protestor as he left his car. The protestor was dragged away by police. Mr S can’t help but notice that Farage has joined a list of political greats, including such lights as John Prescott and Ed Miliband, who have been ‘egged’ while out on the stump. Truly, Ukip has arrived.
UKIP are buoyant and, all of a sudden, everyone’s favourite protest-group. In a curious way, the confirmation that many of their candidates really are boggle-minded, eyes-popped extremists of one stamp or another almost helps UKIP. It confirms that they’re not like the other political parties and encourages people to adopt them as the Sod it, I’m just mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more party. (These people tend not to be attracted to libertarian parties; just as well UKIP is not a libertarian party.) But UKIP should enjoy this moment while they can. They will remain a presence on the political scene and they will
Forget the European elections, which everyone (particularly those who fancy causing a bit of grief for David Cameron) expects to produce humiliating results for the Conservatives. The elections that have a longer-lasting impact that take place on the same day are the local elections. I look at the emphasis the Tories are putting on campaigning in the locals that goes over and above anything they’re doing for seats in Brussels, in my Telegraph column today. But even those areas that don’t have concurrent local and European polls on 22 May aren’t exhausting themselves on campaigning for the European elections. Last year, the Conservatives tried to manage expectations by suggesting at
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There was much excitement on Tuesday night when Labour’s Pat McFadden, a former business and employment minister, appeared on Newsnight and said: ‘I want to see a Labour Party that takes wealth creation every bit as seriously as its fair distribution. I’m all for justice and fairness in the work place. But you have got to create wealth too.’ Tory spinners set to work. ‘Miliband needs to show that wealth creation matters,’ they said. ‘Even his supporters are critical.’ Tory spinners would say that, wouldn’t they? McFadden was merely one disgruntled voice (and with some form). But the chorus of concern has built over the last 24 hours; encouraged, no doubt,
After all the excitement of Nick vs Nigel and the endless mutterings in the Tory party about uprisings following the European elections, you might be forgiven for thinking that the European elections are the only game in town in May. But there are 4,161 local council seats up for election on the same day – and the main parties are quite keen to make big efforts to secure a good result in those polls. The Conservatives have been holding campaign days in London, where many of the seats up for election are located, and making those local council seats a focus for the parliamentary party, which descends on different areas
In 1964 Harold Wilson was so afraid that a scheduled election-night broadcast of Steptoe & Son would cost him at least a dozen marginal seats that he successfully pressured the director-general of the BBC to postpone it. There are plenty of ways to manipulate an election, short of stuffing a ballot box. Another example is here, from 1938: This ballot paper crudely follows the advice of Dr Josef Goebbels, that ‘the most effective form of persuasion is when you are not aware you are being persuaded’. Translated, it reads: ‘Do you approve of the reunification of Austria with the German Reich that was enacted on 13 March 1938 and do
What few results there have been so far suggest that UKIP has scored about a quarter of the vote and gained more seats than Labour. A ‘phenomenal performance’ says Prof John Curtice. Nigel Farage now looks like the main winner, suggesting that his party is mutating from an EU protest party into a being broader party of the working class. The local elections have nothing to do with the European Union so there’s no rational reason that one-in-four voters would chose UKIP — unless they believed the party was addressing their concerns on wider issues. The reason that David Cameron’s referendum pledge did not shoot the UKIP fox is that
Forget London. Odds are that Boris will win re-election while Labour becomes the largest party on the GLA. There are far more exciting battles going on around the country. Here’s the state of play in 15 cities outside the M25: 1. Birmingham. After strong gains in 2011, Labour are looking to depose the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition and regain the overall majority they held here until 2003. They need just five gains to do so — and, with 18 Tory seats and 13 Lib Dem ones up, that shouldn’t prove too difficult. Both of the coalition parties are simply in damage limitation mode. 2. Glasgow. Labour held a majority here for
For the long-term future of Britain, perhaps, the most important contests today are the mayoral referendums in 11 of Britain’s biggest cities. For elected mayors offer the best chance of urban renewal. As recently as the ‘70s people described Birmingham as the city of the future. No one would say that now. But a mayor might just be able to give Britain’s sclerotic second city the leadership it needs. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how a mayor could be worse than the Tory-Lib Dem council that currently runs the city which opposed education reform for far too long. Liverpool has already decided to have a mayor and is electing
The Tories have released a local election broadcast, to be shown on the TV tonight. Unlike previous ones, it doesn’t have any awkward confusion between debt and deficit, preferring instead to focus on people looking a bit confused as they try to remember what the government has or hasn’t done on council tax, income tax and the cost of living, accompanied by some cheesy guitar music. It’s actually quite a snappy piece of work as it sells the party’s key achievements at a national level to voters in a rather understated way, partly by admitting that not all of them have noticed what’s going on, then driving home the key
Much of the post-Boris analysis in today’s press features on whether a rightwards shift is appropriate. The Daily Mail calls for a return to Tory values, while Matthew Parris in The Times says such calls are predictable and meaningless. But, to me, talk about moving to the right or the left is pretty pointless. As the Telegraph says in its leader today, what’s needed isn’t a lurch to the right, but a lurch towards the public. This comes back to the great, eternally-relevant distinction that Keith Joseph made between the ‘middle ground’ between political parties, and the ‘common ground’ between a party and the public. The problem with what
As the dust settles on these elections, it is becoming clearer how the parties did. Labour exceeded expectations, the Tories had a bad but not disastrous set of results and the Liberal Democrats took another kicking. Indeed, they actually lost a higher proportion of the seats that they were defending this year than they did last year: 44 per cent compared to 41 per cent in 2011. Given these results is it is quite remarkable how solidly behind Nick Clegg the Lib Dem parliamentary party remains. Not a single MP has called for him to go or for the party to quit coalition. I’m sure this is partly because the
A few videos from yesterday that we thought CoffeeHousers might care to tune into this morning. First, Boris’s victory speech (with a bit of Ken Livingstone tacked on to the end): Second, Livingstone’s concession speech, in which he announced that ‘this is my last election’: And, finally, Ed Miliband’s unfortunate meeting with an egg:
This was the election which was supposed to establish the SNP as Scotland’s new national party, replacing Labour as the default party of choice for Scottish voters. This was also the election which was expected show that last year’s extraordinary Scottish Parliament result was not a one-off and that the SNP could push on and defeat Labour in its town hall heartlands too. But none of this has happened. Not all the results are in from Scotland’s councils yet but the overall picture is already clear. Labour has recovered from last year’s Scottish Parliament shocker and halted the SNP momentum — at least in its core key urban areas of
We’ve heard about those disgruntled Tories, but what about the Lib Dems? After all, the local elections always used to be their psychic salve: they may have struggled to make much progress in general elections, but their fierce local activism could always be counted on to yield council seats. But now that’s less reliable a tonic. After today the party is going to have fewer than 3,000 councillors for the first time since the it was formed in 1988, losing overall control of Cambridge in the process There’s even talk that Brian Paddick will slump to fourth place, or possibly fifth, in the London Mayoral race. Of course, all this
In my unscientific canvass of Tory opinion this morning, there have been a couple of consistent themes. There’s a lot of criticism that the government lacks a narrative, that voters don’t understand why it is doing what it is doing. Another regular demand is for a shake-up of Number 10. Now, undoubtedly some of this is just the acceptable way of criticising the leader. But reinforcements arriving in Downing Street — especially ones with deep roots in the Tory party — would reassure quite a few people, as well as broadening Number 10’s support base in the party. Sayeeda Warsi is also coming in for a lot of stick. There’s
There are two major stories behind the headline results this morning: the rejection of elected mayors and the low voter turnout. Of these, I think the second is the most significant. You can apportion some of the blame to the dreary weather, if you like. But, still, a predicted turnout figure of 32 per cent? That’s hardly encouraging. First, though, we shouldn’t exaggerate the situation. This wouldn’t be the lowest turnout figure for any local election in history — but the lowest since 2000, when the figure was less than 30 per cent. And it’s also true that turnout has risen for the past three general elections, even if we’re
The results so far have been good but not spectacular for Labour. The BBC’s national vote share projection has them on 39 percent, the Tories on 31, and the Lib Dems on 16. These numbers would deliver a comfortable Labour majority on both the old and new boundaries. Strikingly, UKIP is averaging 14 percent in the wards it is standing in. This is an impressive result given that UKIP traditionally doesn’t do that well in local elections where Europe is less of an issue. I suspect that the result is a combination of the fact that the party’s agenda has widened beyond Europe in recent years, that the coalition has
Tonight, there seems to be a general acceptance that Boris has won London. The talk is of a four points plus victory. But it is worth, of course, remembering that no votes have been counted and there’s been no exit poll. But, sadly, it appears that there will be few other mayoralties created this evening. The opposition of the local political establishment appears to have triumphed in nearly all the cities holding referendums on whether or not to have a mayor. Their loss is Liverpool’s gain which will benefit considerably if it is the largest city outside London with a mayor. In terms of the council results, the very early