Starmer’s ‘winning back the red wall’ and disinterest in tackling the Islamophobia of the Labour right are going well, then
Labour’s vote collapsed by almost half in the Rumworth by-election in Bolton last night, falling by 35.2% – while allowing the Tories to gain 44.1% to take the seat:
Starmer’s plan to win back the working-class by banging the gong for the royals, the Establishment and authoritarianism continues to backfire – and it shows just how unable he is to understand, let alone connect with, working-class people.
Starmer’s lack of interest in tackling the unchecked Islamophobia and racism of the Labour right won’t have helped either, as almost half of Rumworth’s population is from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, most of them Muslim – a majority of the ward’s residents – and the fact that they voted for the racist, Islamophobic and incompetently-run Tory party rather than Labour suggests just how dire and drab ordinary people see him – and how rampantly anti-Muslim his party allies – to be.
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Corbyn’s fault. Keefs’ done nothing wrong, he’s dead popular everywhere else and it’s because Bolton is & always was a toerag heartland…Bloody forelock-tugging Eurosceptic clogsparkers 😕
(Am I doing this right, wee ballache??)
….and yet the following outcome is predicted for the next General Election by recent MRP polls.
Con 206 MPs ▼ 159 – 30.4% – ▼ 14.3
Lab 340 MPs ▲ 138 – 41.9% ▲ 9.0
LDem 25 MPs ▲ 14 – 11.4% ▼ 0.4
Grn 1 MP 0 – 5.5% ▲ 2.7
SNP* 53 MPs ▲ 5 – 44.3% ▼ 0.7
PC* 5 MPs ▲ 1 – 16.1% ▲ 6.2
Oth 2 MPs ▲ 1 – 10.8% ▲ 3.0
You can find a constituency by constituency breakdown here
https://sotn.newstatesman.com/2022/09/britainpredicts/
It is amazing the difference that the 11% point lead in the polls that Labour now has under Keir’s leadership has made to the potential outcome of the next GE when compared to the results of the 19GE when Labour were 11% points behind.
I’m grateful for the polling update, but it is quite striking how such a lead in voting _intention_ isn’t reflected in an actual vote. You have to wonder why there’s such a discrepancy between the polls and the actual by-election results. Either the polls are wrong or the people are wrong, it would seem. Unless there’s a special exemption for Bolton?
Stark – I suppose that all depends how much weight you give to the results of Local Authority by-elections which may or may not be influenced by local factors and whether you think that LA by-election results can be extrapolated to General Election results.
It is however worth noting that these results are not outliers, they are (and have been for some months) consistent across nearly all the polls plus the polls were all more or less spot on at predicting the national vote share for the 19GE.
Has adopted Boltonian I am not suprised as Bolton and many other milltowns who saw the collapse of the Cotton industry in the early sixties have been treated abysmally by the labour party in government for many year and
as far as the London centric labour party care..Up north might as well be on the moon.and the problems being that they feel abandoned and its not just the Moslem population of Bolton either that feel left behind..Starmers just carrying on the show and thats a real problem for the labour party who must take seats in the next General election or disappear from the scene entirly.A town with three mps and now a Tory council and one mp who looks to be in for a real fight to hang on to her seat in Bolton SW.Mind you shes another lawyer so alls well on dealing with redundency.
The wanderers are doing okay though with the help of players on loan from Liverpool…maybe Everton can help as well?
Reply to Joseph O’Keefe
At the risk of being engulfed by a tirade of abuse I would just point out that Yasmin Qureshi is the Labour MP for Bolton South East .
Smartboi Now why would I abuse you when you rightly corrected me,although I doubt any labour mp will survive the next General election in the many towns like Bolton deserted by the labour party.mind you voting tory will never provide good jobs and well paid skilled jobs or in anyway improve the lives of the working class.We must have a working class party to solve the problems with the establishment……Thanks for the correction…..
As if Joseph – you really are a laugh a minute LOL
It is also worth noting that recent MRP polls (including this one by Britain Elects https://sotn.newstatesman.com/2022/09/britainpredicts/ ) predict that Labour will also regain Bolton North East and Bolton West.
Reply to Steve H
I have no doubt Yasmine will retain the seat if she is allowed to stand. However she is female and Muslim and supported Jeremy Corbyn so I fully expect her face suspension or to lose the whip in the run up to the election following the usual false allegations of “antisemitism”.
I don’t know about the other seats – it will depend on who the PPCs are but I genuinely can’t see a Blue Labour candidate ( and thats the only kind of PPC Starmers Labour seems willing to stand) taking on the Tories and winning.
There is no incentive for the electorate in Bolton to change their vote from Tory to Starmers Labour – they are the both same except that the Tories are open about their politics while Starmers Labour pretend to embrace traditional Labour values but don’t.
Smartboy – You are welcome to come back and tell me ‘I told you so’ if you are proved right.
Joseph, the mighty Tranmere are playing your boys tomorrow. Any chance of a bit of redistribution of goals from you to us?
Starmers an idiot in charge of buffoons. That’s a result likely to be repeated in all demographically similar council areas and come the election probably at constituency level – it’s absolutely dire
Worth a repeated quote.
“The least of Starmer’s problems is that he cannot sell either himself or his Party apparatus in the manner of Blair or Clinton… The only historical precedent to our era’s neoliberal counter-reformation of progressive politics was 1950s America… For decades afterwards, in the US, the 1950s era, with its legacy of political brutality, debilitating rat-race economics, and strangulating social conformity was referred to as a symbolic pejorative, in the same way, that Blair and Clintons names are practically swearwords among even their own Party’s supporters.”
https://labourheartlands.com/starmers-road-to-voter-and-labour-party-suppression/
And from the same source…
“Clearly Starmer is trying to suppress democratic activist and voter participation. This will reduce the election to a contest between voters who would either vote traditional right or neoliberal right, with the outcome decided by a just small handful of swing voters, who by comparison to larger, wider more committed groups are easier to influence. Starmer, Reeves et al are gambling that passing as ‘not quite as loathsome as the other Party’ will win out in this equation.”
https://labourheartlands.com/starmers-road-to-voter-and-labour-party-suppression/
Yes Bernie, when Starmer peddles his billionaire-backed, third-way, I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-capitalism’ crap, it is Labour’s own support-base that dries-up first. Under Blair, Labour ‘lost’ 5m votes, but sadly other than a few of them briefly going to UKIP, the majority became non-existent. Lethargy* resulted.
(As Smartboy would say, this is a desired-Result for the anti-democracy, hard-right oligarchs that Starmer (and blair before him) serves)
*Sure, the majority of the 5million votes that Labour lost pre-Corbyn (that largely re-appeared as Labour votes at GE17), either went to UKIP or simply self-annihilated themselves. Today though, as Bolton by-election shows, they shamelessly and instantly become Conservative votes – another welcome result for the trilateral authoritarian oligarchs behind Starmer.
Starmer’s plan to win back the working-class by banging the gong for the royals…
There are, of course, many working-class people who revere the monarchy — certainly our recently deceased one if not her successor. There are also many that don’t, and Ken Loach’s excellent film The Price of Coal Part 1 provides a welcome (and highly humorous) reminder of that with a royal visit to the mine.
As in the film, I can remember a royal visit to somewhere I was working in years past and how we were all expected to tart the place up as if it was the bloody Savoy Hotel instead of a work place! Ridiculous. No wonder they don’t have the first idea about their poorer ‘subjects’ everyday lives — that is, of course, if they ever really want one — when all they see is a sanitised version of it.
Thanks, that’s very considerate of you, PW. A great ‘Play for Today’ from the 70s. Ken Loach/ Barry Hines at their best I’ll enjoy it later, appreciated.
A pleasure, qwertboi. I thought it might have disappeared from YouTube but happily not — fortunately I have my own copy. The much more serious, and equally excellent, Part 2 is also still available.
My experience of ‘the royal visit’ was, iirc, just after I left school at a paper mill research centre where the pilot plant, and its machinery, had to look as if a day’s work had never been done with it or in it. Although it was only a case of scrubbing walls and general cleaning above and beyond the normal, it still seemed absurd to me. Apart from the waste of time, why not let them see it as it really is on a normal day?
What I particularly like about the film is the way it plays on the extreme contrast between the real dirt and grime of the pit, and the attempts to ‘beautify’ it, e.g. the grass seed on the slag heap; painting the steelwork of the hoist white; and all the tarting up down in the mine itself — as if a royal is actually going to go down there to the coal face! Brilliant.
The death of the Scabby Party of Betrayal is happening and about fucking time too!!! These shitty results will be repeated across the country for the next decade Labour is done,,.
This is what happens when the party/Starmer refuses to take any action against Islamophobia in the party. For me, I just don’t understand as to why they won’t tackle an issue as serious as this. Or is the answer so simple. In that Starmer is so wedded to Mandelsons way of doing things they actually believe Muslim voters have nowhere else to go.
Reply to Back of Beyond
Starmer in my honest opinion does not want to win the next election . He has set out to alienate our traditional voters – Muslim, Black. Kashmiri Irish Socialist and anti Zionist members ( particularly Jewish anti Zionists ) so that come the next General Election they will turn away from Labour and either stay at home and not vote at all or they will vote for one of the other parties,
Starmers real purpose is to neuter the party so that when the electorate eventually get fed up with the Tories they will elect a Socialist free, Zionist Labour party.
By that time Starmer will be reaping his reward in the House of Lords, advising big business etc and making a second fortune and his backers will be happy knowing that their interests are protected.
Well there is the thought that if Starmer succeeds in destroying Labour he will get grateful peerage from the Tories like other participates in the pro-Israel moral panic. And he will probably get a directorship on the energy utilities he welched on nationalising!
My ex-wife comes from Notlob. When we visited, her Dad would pick us up from Piccadilly, and drive to Bolton.
Every time I saw that sign, I cracked the ‘joke’, ‘The road to Hell!’ Always went down well *cough*
I knew the Mother-in-Law was waiting, and things could only get better.
The loyalty that generations of working people showed to the Labour ‘brand’ was based on action, organising and education that are all well in the past. The wonder is that it lasted so long, after betrayal after betrayal by the right wing and the cowardly left. It is now almost gone.
The need for a new party or movement is not to fill a void electorally but to rebuild the base and reinforce the lessons that generations of working people had kept alive over centuries. Political education and support for media, like this forum/news source require democratic organisation, continuity and constant recruitment.
The current state of affairs in the Labour Party has never been worse: there is no point in membership of an organisation that expels any honest member who surfaces. Fighting the current dictatorship is a waste of energy- it will fail on its own without any assistance from the left. The leadership wants to wreck the party for the benefit of imperialism, which is what the Trilateral Commission is all about.
You’re right bevin. It used to be about working class identity and integrity until the Labour party either forgot or decided to prevent.
quertboi…..we are supposed to be invisible and the harsh Bolton accent doesn’t go down too well with our londoncentric labour party as I realised at my first public speach as a councillor .I kept my Halliwell Bolton accent despite arriving in Surrey at fifteen years old and I have even spoken Khmer and Afrikaans in a Bowton “accent and am proud of it.The West Cork accent is even more difficult .even the irish struggle to understand.it.
That moment when the Shithouse Vigilante got shown the noose takes on a new meaning.
Bevin – What happened to this working class loyalty in 2019 when for the first time ever more of the working class actually voted Tory than voted Labour and to cap it off there were actually more middle class Labour voters than there were working class ones.
Bevin – absolutely right!
Labour under Blair/Brown lost 5mil votes – so bad these neoliberals lost 2mil of Kinnocks.
By comparison – to quote the same source again.
“The 2017 Election turnout of 12.8 million for Labour under Corbyn was the largest for the Party this century. Even the 2019 turnout of 10.2 mil beat by a distance the number of voters who engaged with former leaders, Milliband, Brown and Blair’s last electoral outings. And this latter 2019 General Election loss under Corbyn in part only occurred because Starmer and the Labour right, kept threatening to subvert the Brexit referendum.”
https://labourheartlands.com/starmers-road-to-voter-and-labour-party-suppression/
Bernie – You are right to say ‘in part only’, doubts about Jeremy Corbyn (35%) and economic policies/competence (16%) account for over 50%, far outweighing the 19% who cited Brexit as a reason for deserting Labour
And of course, what the colossal differences in the voter turnout figures demonstrate is that the Party’s health was massively improved under traditionalist Corbyn – with the added bonus of Labour’s social base being defended and campaigned for by the leadership, all the year round (rather than just at elections for elitist careerism).
No wonder Labour had a record 0.5mil members and was the largest Party in Europe.
Despite Labour under Corbyn having its largest voter turnout this century, some backstabbing neoliberal idiots, inevitably quote the capitalist corporate media, suggesting that smears of Corbyn’s personality were justified, and the Party’s support for a return to post-war levels of fair progressive taxation on the rich, supporting traditional ‘cradle-to-the-grave’ welfare state, were somehow extremism.
Despicable anti-intelctual treachery!
Leaving aside what dodgy neoliberal Starmer supporting media are saying; polling organisations suggest “Conservatives would win a GE with a reduced but workable majority.”
Election Polling (EP) for example.
https://www.electionpolling.co.uk/swingometer/uk-parliament?CON=36.48&LAB=36.88&LD=9.06&GRN=6.63&BREX=2.06
Most sympathetic onside polling for Starmer suggests a hung parliament.
Bernie – When was this ‘swingometer’ that you have linked to published because it appears to be well past its sell by date.
Labour have been consistently ahead across all the polls for months now
Check it out for yourself
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election#2022
Bernie – The up to date figures published on the same site are vastly different from those published on the page that you have linked to above.
Check it out for yourself
https://www.electionpolling.co.uk/polls/general-election
Strewth, Sidestepping the millions that have been forced to turn their backs on Labour and the thousands of disappearing members, a certain neoliberal troll has gone from quoting the New Statesman (blatantly partisan and neoliberal) to wikipedia as sources. Not even the corporate media would stoop to the latter.
Even a first year undergraduate essay would fail for citing wikipedia. J*sus.
And even if such sources were correct??? What would we gain from switching from Truss subsidising energy profits with a tax burden that disproportionately falls on low & middle-income groups, to Starmer welching on his nationalisation promises.
Winning only means something if Labour voters gain from it!
Bernie – At least I haven’t had to resort to intentionally trying to deceive as you have with your link above. The current figures for the Election Polling’s Swingometer can be found here https://www.electionpolling.co.uk/swingometer/uk-parliament and surprise, surprise they are radically different from the figures that you’ve either made up or are months out of date.
The link to Wikipedia quotes third party polls with direct links to the source material and the link to the New Statesman is also quoting from a third party polling company.
If you can’t recognise the difference between Labour’s current policies (do you even know what they are?) and those of the Tory party then I pity you.
Again it bears repeating; to claim entryist Starmer politics are achieving some sort of success, means ignoring the millions of voters abandoning the party, and the massive purge/decline of what was once the largest political membership party in Europe.
And just to be clear no university – even at first year entry level – would accept citing Wikipedia polling as a credible source of entryist neoliberal success.
Ridiculous and simply pathetic!
Neoliberal trolls are embarrassing themselves. But keep doing so! Keep manipulatively ignoring the neoliberal destruction of the party. Keep pretending that local election voter turnout that Professor John Curtice described as worse than Corbyn, is somehow progress. Keep pretending that 8 lost Labour councils is some sort of success.
Keep pretending that a made-up party – Aspire- stealing Tower Hamlets from New, New Labour is anything other than a crisis.
Stupid, stupid, stupid!
Pete Postlethwaite summed it, all, up, some years ago :
https://twitter.com/MichaelWarbur17/status/1570319792569028608
Bad result for New New Labour, cost of living going through the roof, wages not close to keeping up. A labour party worth daylight would have romped home.
Under Starmer, the LP has become just another arm of the state which is censorship and de-platforming of anyone who criticises the official narrative whether it be the narrative of neoliberalism or of antisemitism or of the unrivalled goodness of the US.
Caitlin Johnstone hits the nail on the head.
onpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2022/september/16/the-trouble-with-western-values-is-that-westerners-don-t-value-them/
It’s a bad day when you have to look to a right wing US libertarian website for a rational analysis.
Whoops. A letter missing from the web address.
I’ll try again
http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2022/september/16/the-trouble-with-western-values-is-that-westerners-don-t-value-them/
A 35.2 point loss of the vote for forensic keef
Only surpassed by a 44.1 point gain for the imbecile truss.
And STILL we’re not graced by the presence of the enlightened one…
https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/Y.C6_4eYE7rQwvlj3kipZg–/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTY0MDtoPTY1Ng–/https://s.yimg.com/uu/api/res/1.2/o9RjMTmHHfqfD43_mF7SJA–~B/aD00ODA7dz00Njg7YXBwaWQ9eXRhY2h5b24-/http://media.zenfs.com/en-US/homerun/the_mighty_beauty_225/20754226766e0c2e9fde06c0b9d70557
The doing up of the places Royalty will visit is
well known – even to Royalty apparently. The
Queen’s says wryly that her least favourite
smell is the smell of paint.
Among the governing class, distinctions are
made. MPs and their staff have a special
queue for the lying-in-state and do not
have to wait like everyone else. The
exception to this queue jumping are
(apparently) the HoC Cleaners! Let
those on minimum wages (and less)
wait like everyone else
I was born and grew up in one of the North Western towns not far from Bolton.
Don’t expect people in those areas to return to Labour any-time-soon.
The sneering attitudes of the likes of Mandelson (The noo-Labour politician who appeared to have no problems with people who were filthy-rich) have left a nasty taste.
We don’t have much truck either with Labour leaders who are Knight Commanders of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath (KCB) and members of the Trilateral Commission.
Ridiculous !!!
Ahah! I see Steve H has a new tactic.
Instead of being first to comment, he, now waits a couple of days,mbefore joining the conversation.
Still, the same delusional, half-assed, nonsense, mind, but a change nevertheless.
George – Is anything that I posted above not accurate. I’ve provided the links, please feel free to check them out for yourself.
Still, the same delusional, half-assed, nonsense…ad nauseam.
George – A simple ‘No’ would have sufficed. 😏
George Peel, maybe the chief Turd Polisher was in The Queue….