Funnily enough not by a political party - by the Ministry of Sound, from the 1997 campaign.
Still as brilliant as ever
Wednesday, 10 May 2017
Tuesday, 9 May 2017
The Progressive Alliance have posters up in Richmond Park
Interesting to see the Progressive Alliance are actively promoting Lib Dem votes in Richmond Park, like the garden poster below. I have never seen this before, and it's powerful stuff.
Wednesday, 26 April 2017
Tuesday, 25 April 2017
I've been bigging up Lib Dem diversity in the New Statesman
It would be lovely if everyone could follow this link and give the article some love. Thank you all!
My favourite poster from the 2015 General Election
Commissioned by The Independent from Whistlejacket for the Lib Dems.
Lest we forget
Keep sending this image round and every good wish to George Turner (@georgenturner) in Vauxhall #libdems #winninghere
Monday, 24 April 2017
How many times do we have to beat Zac Goldsmith?
Here in Richmond Park, we've been wondering who will be the Tory candidate in the GE. James Cracknell's name has been mentioned several times and the shortlist of 3 is announced today.
Rumour has it that one of those names will be ... Zac Goldsmith.
Which begs a number of questions. Not least, why would all those folk who voted against Zac 5 months ago now change their mind and vote for him this time? He remains
a) A Brexit enthusiast and
b) The Tories are still pushing the third runway plan, which is why he resigned in the first place.
Indeed in many ways I would be quite keen if it is Zac. We do know how to beat him - and if he rejoins the Tories his claim to be a man of principle will be very hard to sustain.
I guess we'll find out later today....
25th April Update
Zac has indeed been shortlisted. Blimey
Friday, 21 April 2017
Spread Betting prediction
Here's the spread betting prediction for the election.
and remember mine...
Tories 337
Labour 205
SNP 48
Lib Dems 35
Others 25
Sporting Index have ignored 'others' but this would suggest they expect them to get 19 - a bit low.
It's dawned on the Tories that they may have made a terrible mistake...
Day 3 and already the Tory spin machine in trying to dampen down expectations. Remember - this whole exercise is mean to be about giving Theresa May a massive majority so she can pretty much do what she likes in the Brexit negotiations. Yet, now we hear...
Which I said day 1 (yes I did) and the saintly and usually right John Curtice said day 2.
Oh Theresa
#Butterfingers
Which I said day 1 (yes I did) and the saintly and usually right John Curtice said day 2.
Oh Theresa
#Butterfingers
Thursday, 20 April 2017
General Election Day 2 - Met Tim Farron, Sarah Olney, 2 hours on 5 Live next to Michael Howard
Quite enjoying this General Election.
Yesterday morning was launch day - on Richmond Green with Tim, Sarah, the media, a dog, a baby and lots of diamonds. Heard Tim say 'we are not allowing a coronation to happen' in about 5 different interviews. Was expertly herded into a donut. Chatted about the non arrival of Richmond Park By Election badges with Baroness Kramer. Great fun.
Then in the afternoon was on College Green, sitting next to Tony Livesy on BBC 5 Live Drive for 2 hours, offering the occasional bon mot. Michael Howard came, said some terrible things, and left. Smiled at the tourists. Got caught staring wistfully at Vince Cable. Gave up my seat for Caroline Lucas.
What a day!
Yesterday morning was launch day - on Richmond Green with Tim, Sarah, the media, a dog, a baby and lots of diamonds. Heard Tim say 'we are not allowing a coronation to happen' in about 5 different interviews. Was expertly herded into a donut. Chatted about the non arrival of Richmond Park By Election badges with Baroness Kramer. Great fun.
Then in the afternoon was on College Green, sitting next to Tony Livesy on BBC 5 Live Drive for 2 hours, offering the occasional bon mot. Michael Howard came, said some terrible things, and left. Smiled at the tourists. Got caught staring wistfully at Vince Cable. Gave up my seat for Caroline Lucas.
What a day!
A handy guide to why Theresa May isn't a strong and stable leader.
Theresa
May U Turns as PM
Campaigned for Remain (“I believe it is
clearly in our national interest to remain a member of the European Union”).
Now Hard Brexiteer in Chief
Said there would be no early general
election (11 times). Now called one.
Said wouldn’t do TV debates. Now doing TV
Q&A debates
Rumoured to be announcing that companies
would be forced to reveal how many foreign nationals they employed. Then denied
this was ever on the table.
Class 4 NICs.
Pledged
to constituents she would oppose 3rd runway at Heathrow. Then
approved it as PM
Put Hinkley C on pause. Then unpaused it.
PS - a new one just today!
PS - a new one just today!
Tuesday, 18 April 2017
My on-a-hiding-to-nothing General Election prediction
What do I want to happen? Lib Dems romp home with a historic 50 seat majority.
What (more prosaically) do I think is the most likely outcome?
1. We will successfully defend our 9 seats. The hardest will ironically be our newest - the home of Ham Common, Richmond Park, where we are defending a seat the Tories won in 2015 with a 20k+ majority, and we wont have the benefit of thousands of activists descending on us every week. Needless to say we will be fighting hard.
By the way - WHERE'S MY RICHMOND PARK VICTORY BADGE?)
2. We will win around half of our target seats - and we'll end up with 30- 40 seats in Parliament.
3. SNP will defend most of theirs and end up with around 50. They'll lose a couple to us and at least one more to the Tories.
4. Many of our wins will come at the expense of the Tories in the South West and London. Let's say the Tories lose around 25 seats this way.
5. This means the Tories need to win at least 42 seats from Labour in order to defend their majority, let alone increase it. This is in fact easier than it sounds. Number 45 on their target list - Chorley - needs a swing of just 4.4% to turn blue. If we say they won't win any of the non Labour seats above that (there are 5), number 50 - Bury South - requires a 5.2% swing, again well within current polling predictions.
But that's just to stand still
6. In order to get say a 100 seat majority, they'd need to take another 50 seats off Labour. That takes us to seats like Swansea West and needing a 10%+ swing - tough.
7. So my prediction looks a little like this
Tories 337
Labour 205 - which I think would roughly match their performance in 1983
SNP 48
Lib Dems 35
Others 25
A Tory majority of 24. Which leaves things pretty much as you were. And I would guess Theresa May will be in a worse position than she is now. Butterfingers.
Two other things to note - I suspect we may do better than this. A seat by seat examination of our top 50 target seats looks like that.
And I guess its possible that Labour will do worse than 1983. But just how low could they realistically go - not far below 200 I suspect?
Thoughts?
What (more prosaically) do I think is the most likely outcome?
1. We will successfully defend our 9 seats. The hardest will ironically be our newest - the home of Ham Common, Richmond Park, where we are defending a seat the Tories won in 2015 with a 20k+ majority, and we wont have the benefit of thousands of activists descending on us every week. Needless to say we will be fighting hard.
By the way - WHERE'S MY RICHMOND PARK VICTORY BADGE?)
2. We will win around half of our target seats - and we'll end up with 30- 40 seats in Parliament.
3. SNP will defend most of theirs and end up with around 50. They'll lose a couple to us and at least one more to the Tories.
4. Many of our wins will come at the expense of the Tories in the South West and London. Let's say the Tories lose around 25 seats this way.
5. This means the Tories need to win at least 42 seats from Labour in order to defend their majority, let alone increase it. This is in fact easier than it sounds. Number 45 on their target list - Chorley - needs a swing of just 4.4% to turn blue. If we say they won't win any of the non Labour seats above that (there are 5), number 50 - Bury South - requires a 5.2% swing, again well within current polling predictions.
But that's just to stand still
6. In order to get say a 100 seat majority, they'd need to take another 50 seats off Labour. That takes us to seats like Swansea West and needing a 10%+ swing - tough.
7. So my prediction looks a little like this
Tories 337
Labour 205 - which I think would roughly match their performance in 1983
SNP 48
Lib Dems 35
Others 25
A Tory majority of 24. Which leaves things pretty much as you were. And I would guess Theresa May will be in a worse position than she is now. Butterfingers.
Two other things to note - I suspect we may do better than this. A seat by seat examination of our top 50 target seats looks like that.
And I guess its possible that Labour will do worse than 1983. But just how low could they realistically go - not far below 200 I suspect?
Thoughts?
Wednesday, 12 April 2017
Thursday, 30 March 2017
Theresa May joins the Lib Dems (part 2)
You'll remember this post when Theresa May nicked the Lib Dem slogan from last years General Election?
Well, yesterday in Parliament she said...
Someone sign her up, quick....
Well, yesterday in Parliament she said...
Someone sign her up, quick....
Wednesday, 29 March 2017
I'll know if Brexit has worked.
So, the deed is done and the letter has been delivered - the Brexit process has begun.
In an excellent and thought provoking piece in The Guardian today, Rafael Behr argues the case that there is no going back now. And more to the point, no matter how badly it goes, the Brexiteers will always be able to argue the case that it's only because its not a tough enough Brexit, and if only it was done properly, all will/would have been well.
The problem as he sees it, it that there's no alternative history to compare and contrast. As Rafael puts it...
"Pro-Europeans will struggle to disprove those arguments because there will be no demonstrable counterfactual. The claim that Britain would have been better off on a different path will be no more effective than the prediction in last year’s referendum that Brexit would hurt. No one who ignored that warning wants to be assailed with a smug chorus of “we told you so”. "
And its on this point that I disagree with Rafael. Because I fear there is a counterfactual.
While I think on balance, Britain will be economically worse off out of the EU rather than in, this was never my overarching reason for voting 'in'. Indeed, I suspect there's a lot of guesswork on both sides around the economic ups and downs of Brexit.
No my reason is different - and one where a strong counterfactual does exist.
I've been fortunate enough to see some wonderful Statesman and women speak over the years- I saw Reagan speak on Capitol Hill, I heard Helmut Kohl speak when I was a student - but the greatest political speech I ever heard 'in the flesh' was given in a meeting room in Portcullis House about 15 years ago - by Michael Heseltine.
He spoke, without notes for maybe 20 minutes, about peace in Europe. He was informed, authoritative, mesmerising, running over maybe 100 years of European history and arguing the case for why it was the EU that had delivered, for the first time, long term peace in Europe.
I have never forgotten it.
I am also of an age that I grew up at a time - the 1970s - when the Second World War may have seemed to us as children as ancient history, but we played football around the air raid shelters in the park, and the railings of the houses in our streets were just stumps in the wall, the metal having been removed (we were told) to make munitions. This makes peace seem a little more fragile perhaps than many people remember.
Similarly war in Europe is not a remote, ludicrous proposition. What we often refer to quite glibly as 'the troubles' is anything but a distance memory, and we have had war in Europe in the recent past, and indeed in the Ukraine right now. It's not coincidence that no EU country has been involved in this.
So my counterfactual for Brexit is this; peace in Western Europe for the next 44 years.
Anything less and Brexit is a failure.
In an excellent and thought provoking piece in The Guardian today, Rafael Behr argues the case that there is no going back now. And more to the point, no matter how badly it goes, the Brexiteers will always be able to argue the case that it's only because its not a tough enough Brexit, and if only it was done properly, all will/would have been well.
The problem as he sees it, it that there's no alternative history to compare and contrast. As Rafael puts it...
"Pro-Europeans will struggle to disprove those arguments because there will be no demonstrable counterfactual. The claim that Britain would have been better off on a different path will be no more effective than the prediction in last year’s referendum that Brexit would hurt. No one who ignored that warning wants to be assailed with a smug chorus of “we told you so”. "
And its on this point that I disagree with Rafael. Because I fear there is a counterfactual.
While I think on balance, Britain will be economically worse off out of the EU rather than in, this was never my overarching reason for voting 'in'. Indeed, I suspect there's a lot of guesswork on both sides around the economic ups and downs of Brexit.
No my reason is different - and one where a strong counterfactual does exist.
I've been fortunate enough to see some wonderful Statesman and women speak over the years- I saw Reagan speak on Capitol Hill, I heard Helmut Kohl speak when I was a student - but the greatest political speech I ever heard 'in the flesh' was given in a meeting room in Portcullis House about 15 years ago - by Michael Heseltine.
He spoke, without notes for maybe 20 minutes, about peace in Europe. He was informed, authoritative, mesmerising, running over maybe 100 years of European history and arguing the case for why it was the EU that had delivered, for the first time, long term peace in Europe.
I have never forgotten it.
I am also of an age that I grew up at a time - the 1970s - when the Second World War may have seemed to us as children as ancient history, but we played football around the air raid shelters in the park, and the railings of the houses in our streets were just stumps in the wall, the metal having been removed (we were told) to make munitions. This makes peace seem a little more fragile perhaps than many people remember.
Similarly war in Europe is not a remote, ludicrous proposition. What we often refer to quite glibly as 'the troubles' is anything but a distance memory, and we have had war in Europe in the recent past, and indeed in the Ukraine right now. It's not coincidence that no EU country has been involved in this.
So my counterfactual for Brexit is this; peace in Western Europe for the next 44 years.
Anything less and Brexit is a failure.
Tuesday, 28 March 2017
Some folk think we're going to win Manchester Gorton
When Gerald Kaufmann passed away, and we knew there would be a by election in Manchester Gorton, the odds given on a Lib Dem Victory were 7:1. 48 hours later they had drifted, out to 10:1
In itself these odds seemed slightly mean as we came 5th in the seat in the 2015 General Election. And Kaufmann took over 67% of the vote. Making a victory v. unlikely. Although this hides the fact that in '97, '01, '05 and '10 we'd come consistently second.
Today, the odds on us winning have dropped to just 4:1
This isn't because the bookies have changed their minds. It's because people are betting on us to win.
Which is quite a testament to both the campaign being run in the constituency (kudos to all involved) and the state of Labour, both locally and nationally.
5 weeks to go.
And remember we weren't winning in Richmond Park until the last 48 hours...
UPDATE
Manchester Greens have just tweeted me to say they think they will win. We'll see....
UPDATE 2
I have bet £1 on odds of 1000-1 with a Labour supporter that we'll win Gorton; also interestingly more money now being bet on Lib Dems than any other party. Also UKIP nowhere.
Saturday, 25 March 2017
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