16-JUL 2023 : LAB: 46% / CON: 26% / LDEM: 11% / REF: 6%

[expatr]

Jul 21, 2023 3:26:15 GMT @isa said:

Jul 21, 2023 3:24:28 GMT expatr said:

I wouldn't serve him at the bar

If my maths is correct a 24% swing ins Selby and 32% in Somerton 

cf just under 7% in Uxbridge.An astonishing difference.

Suggests local factors around ULEZ came into play in a big way (also something about that part of London being unshiftably Tory in the same way Bromley is - may more established families meaning less demographic shift)

[Deleted]

Jul 21, 2023 3:30:43 GMT expatr said:

Jul 21, 2023 3:26:15 GMT @isa said:

If my maths is correct a 24% swing ins Selby and 32% in Somerton 

cf just under 7% in Uxbridge.An astonishing difference.

Suggests local factors around ULEZ came into play in a big way (also something about that part of London being unshiftably Tory in the same way Bromley is - may more established families meaning less demographic shift)

I think there is much in what you say.

(Although I think the actual swing in S&F was a tad lower).

[moby]

Jul 21, 2023 3:30:43 GMT expatr said:

Jul 21, 2023 3:26:15 GMT @isa said:

If my maths is correct a 24% swing ins Selby and 32% in Somerton 

cf just under 7% in Uxbridge.An astonishing difference.

Suggests local factors around ULEZ came into play in a big way (also something about that part of London being unshiftably Tory in the same way Bromley is - may more established families meaning less demographic shift)

The car owners of the suburbs want to keep their dirty vehicles, 🚗  all the other issues clearly don't matter enough to them.

[Deleted]

Per terrific media performer and ex-songwriter Johnny Mercer on Sky, LAB have had a disappointing night. Very bullish.

Completely off his chump.

[Deleted]

In an odd way, I think LAB falling just short in Uxbridge and South Ruislip might be a blessing in disguise. A narrow win might have brought a feeling of smugness and complacency. 

Just falling short, though, means they will have to have a period of reflection on what went wrong here, (they should have taken it easily on current national polling). No doubt specific factors (particularly ULEZ) will have contributed to this, but they're going to have to have some sort of rethink. In the circumstances, no bad thing.

[Deleted]

And as the sun rises over Somerset, it's time for bed. See ya later.

[expatr]

Jul 21, 2023 3:39:03 GMT @isa said:

Jul 21, 2023 3:30:43 GMT expatr said:

If my maths is correct a 24% swing ins Selby and 32% in Somerton 

cf just under 7% in Uxbridge.An astonishing difference.

Suggests local factors around ULEZ came into play in a big way (also something about that part of London being unshiftably Tory in the same way Bromley is - may more established families meaning less demographic shift)

I think there is much in what you say.

(Although I think the actual swing in S&F was a tad lower).

You're right 29ish (Gruaniad vote shares for 2019 wrong for some reason)

[steve]

Ulez playing badly in outer London, oddly enough the well healed residents of Ruislip aren't remotely likely to have vehicles that aren't compliant but the power of the right wing press in action.Still a reasonable swing to Labour in a city where they're already strong.
A historic win for Labour in Selby , is this Labour's biggest swing in a by election?

That's my being nice to Labour bit out of the way.

Somerton and Frome


Liberal Democrats: 21,187

Tories: 10,179

Labour: 1,009

Independent: 635


Another stunning By election win and a seat I would anticipate retaining at the general election , along with nearby Tiverton and Honiton.

Apart from a bit of a brain freeze earlier in the campaign Sarah Dyke has had an excellent performance, showing the benefit of local knowledge and shared experience.

You can't read too much into by elections normally but I genuinely feel that it's pretty evident now that disaffected one nation Tories and progressive Labour supporters feel it far easier to switch to the lib dems to express their dissatisfaction with their parties than a straight Tory to Labour switch or holding their nose and voting for light blue Labour.
Where the lib dems are perceived as having a chance it's the lib dems that are the party of choice.
This bodes well for us in the 90 odd seats where we finished second to the Tories.

Crayolala man anything to say?

[hireton]

Has anybody seen the turnout figures for the 3 by- elections?

[steve]

Rafwan

I would have been delighted if the exit poll had been right.
But it wasn't.

[steve]

hireton
Somerton was about 42%
Selby about 44%
Uxbridge about 46%

[steve]

Ruislip and Uxbridge is a bit like Chesham and Amersham in demographics and geography, you come out of a tube station into what appears by London standard to be the countryside.

Of course it's difficult to get the Tories out in this type of area.
Unless you're the lib dems.

[Dave]

Jul 21, 2023 1:12:16 GMT graham said:

If this is true, I have three words for Starmer . Ha! Ha! Ha!

You’re happy with a Conservative win and a Labour loss? That’s all I need to know.

[neilj]

John Curtice"s take seems about right to me

'Conservatives still in electoral trouble, says polling expert Curtice
The Conservatives remain in "electoral trouble" despite their unexpected victory in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, polling expert Sir John Curtice has said.

Speaking on the BBC's Politics Live, Curtice said the local issue of ULEZ had played a significant role in Uxbridge, and so the results in Selby and Frome - both of which the Conservatives have lost - would likely provide a better guide for the wider mood in the country.

“To that extent at least, although Uxbridge will provide Rishi Sunak with some immediate cover, maybe in the end the message from these by-elections is that the Conservatives are indeed in considerable electoral trouble along the lines that the polls are suggesting," Curtice said.

[steve]

Dave
It's odd isn't it I would of course have much preferred a Labour win in Ruislip, it's their own far left who seem to take pleasure in failure.

[Danny]

Jul 20, 2023 21:10:55 GMT alec said:

Yes - that's it. I think you've got it. You were wrong to claim that nuclear is an 'always on' technology. It isn't. Even the existing nuclear can flex reasonably well, and well enough on the predictable timescales of wind generation forecasts. The problem isn't technology, which means that yes, nuclear could be used as a balance to intermittent renewables, unlike your original post claimed. But we can agree that what is holding us back from doing this is the failed attempt at a market based, competition driven model for energy supply.

I think you are simply trying to argue because you always disagree with me on principle. Trying to annoy me?

Nuclear is always on technology because of the way its costs work. It makes no economic sense to ever turn it off unless its down for maintenance. The article you posted doesnt say anything different. All it says is that it is technically possible to regulate its output more than most people think. I personally hadnt even considered whether its possible to turn it off and on, I rather assumed it was. The argument has always been an economic one that no one in their right mind would turn off something producing essentially free electricity for which they had paid a vast capital cost.

Thats always been my point about nuclear. It crowds out all other sources of power. You never use renewables at all if you have built nuclear. Even if wind cost over a lifetime 1p per unit of electricity and nuclear cost 10p, you still just wont build wind if you already committed to building nuclear and already paid the 10p a unit. The government is committing the Uk to expensive power for decades to come, and labour is agreeing to the idea.

And thats before we get to the question of whether the Uk really wants a military target which if exploded could make huge areas uninhabitable. In my lifetime security at nuclear plants has gone from pretty relaxed tourist tours to massive, exactly because of fear of attacks on them. And thats before you contemplate a declared war situation, where for example Russia might deliberately target them. So far it hasnt blown the station in Ukraine, but it wont surprise me if it does.

News just talking about a wind scheme being cancelled after news of nuclear being green lit. Exactly my point. Nuclear will be instead of wind. The official reason for the cancellation of the Norfolk wind farm is rising interest rates. But the subtext is the field has been given a capped rate per unit of energy generated which is too low and way lower than nuclear is being promised. Note that while the wind companies are being given capped energy prices, us consumers arent getting that energy any cheaper. The system is actually subsidising new nuclear from new wind.

[steve]

Interesting from Ruislip
Piers Corbyn (LLL) 101 (0.33%)
Jeremy 's lunatic brother finishing with less votes than count binface

[neilj]

Looking at the results the lib-dems doing well in the South West strongly suggests their continuing resurgence there in addition to other rural seats. Would be surprised on current form for them not to get well over 30 mps at the next election

Disappointing for Labour in Uxbridge, but the ULEZ was in the end I think the reason they didn't win. On the other hand Selby was an historic win and bodes well for them in a General Election

It also seems there was tactical voting between libdems and Labour. The Labour vote was squeezed in Somerton and the libdems in Selby and Uxbridge. That for me is the take away and lesson to be learned

[Danny]

Jul 20, 2023 22:20:52 GMT mercian said:

You do have a weird take on reality.  Labour have not identified as the Remain party. 

Again you seem to have a revisionist view on this. Labour was definitely the remain option in 2017, whereas by 2019 it was becoming clear to remainers they would not stop brexit. And that is why they did worse in 2019. Sure, labour in 2017 did not campaign on remain, but con campaigned on hard brexit and it was almost by default lab became the remain party. Sure, they may never have been hearty remain supporters, but that is precisely why they didnt win and why remain happened. It never had a committed party pushing it. Conservative remainers didnt see any point switching to lab whose policies they didnt otherwise like if lab wasnt clearly remain.

[neilj]

Looking at the swings on my calculations

Somerton around 29% to Libdems
Selby around 23.7% to Labour
Uxbridge around 6.6% to Labour

Hard to see how the tories will make this a good news story but I'm sure they'll try

[domjg]

Jul 21, 2023 3:30:43 GMT expatr said:

Jul 21, 2023 3:26:15 GMT @isa said:

If my maths is correct a 24% swing ins Selby and 32% in Somerton 

cf just under 7% in Uxbridge.An astonishing difference.

Suggests local factors around ULEZ came into play in a big way (also something about that part of London being unshiftably Tory in the same way Bromley is - may more established families meaning less demographic shift)

Unshiftably scum

[Danny]

Jul 20, 2023 22:46:39 GMT oldnat said:

Danny spoke about ScotGov wanting the power to "legalise drugs". I don't blame him for that error, but the news source that provided that information - possibly the BBC.

The power sought is to decriminalise drug possession when for personal use. The distinction is important -.

This seems a similar disagreement to Alec on whether you can turn off nuclear power stations. Its not whether you can turn them on and off, but why you would want to turn them off having already paid for that electricity. There is a similar issue over the claim leaving the EU gives us more sovereign control over immigration, but in reality we will end up with no changes at all in immigration policy, which was always determined by government wish to import as much labour as the country needs. Here its a move to reduce the legislative intervention into personal choice over drug's use. For purposes of spinning a political story I have no doubt various parties think nuance is important, but in general its the directions of travel or overriding truth which matters. Scottish legislators think controls on drugs are too severe and in fact harming their voters. Westminster MPs might also think that, but will not admit it publicly.

[Danny]

Jul 20, 2023 22:54:54 GMT mercian said:

The Greens are another example.  Unfortunately from my point of view they have a lot of left-wing policies as well, though concern for the environment shouldn't be a left-right thing. A lot of farmers and landowners have a responsible attitude to nature even though they are not generally left wing.

Farmers have a vested interest in general in preserving the viability of farmland. Whereas for example, a water supply company has no interest in preserving the viability of rivers it dumps sewage in.

And thats the problem. Preventing pollution is generally a big cost to any enterprise, so any organisation concerned about its profits will wish to do as little as possible about pollution. Unless as with the farmer, it might directly impact their own production capacity. The left is generally associated with sharing of profits, social ownership, social responsibility protecting everyone equally. Whereas the right is associated with the right to concentrate assets in private hands and maximise profits. Its natural therefore that the right do not care about stopping pollution. They want to socialise the cost of pollution, but privatise the profit making.

[domjg]

Jul 21, 2023 5:10:33 GMT steve said:

Ruislip and Uxbridge is a bit like Chesham and Amersham in demographics and geography, you come out of a tube station into what appears by London standard to be the countryside.

Of course it's difficult to get the Tories out in this type of area.
Unless you're the lib dems.

Chesham and Amersham is educated, Uxbridge far less so. The tories always have a better time with bears of little brain especially if they're mean in spirit as well.

[neilj]

@danny
'Farmers have a vested interest in general in preserving the viability of farmland. Whereas for example, a water supply company has no interest in preserving the viability of rivers it dumps sewage in'

It's not as simple as that, we have a huge problem with pollution in the River Wye due to chicken farming.

This is because the poultry produce large amounts of manure, which contains nutrients including phosphorus. Much of this is spread on the land, which results in the phosphorus it contains entering the river, it's killing the river

[Mr Poppy]

So folks in U&SR sent a protest about the ULEZ expansion. LDEM's, as usual, did well as the protest party where they were best placed ABG and LAB did well where they were best placed ABG (where G = current HMG). Credit to jimjam for his campaigning in S&A where the swing was larger than expected. 

Turnout was decent for by-elections (possibly due to three on the same day receiving more attention than usual? possibly due to a slightly higher desire to protest vote than usual?)
 
Greens did fairly well in S&F (possibly as a LDEM win there was near certain?) but RUK didn't register much of a protest vote from the RoC side (possibly as Rishi did get the Illegal Immigration Bill through parliament before the day?)

Something for everyone in those results and I expect the partisans and 3 party's MPs/leaders/HQs will be making a huge deal of their specific bit of good news (or 'less bad' in CON's case). Tells us very little about what will happen in GE'24 as by-elections have a weak track record of 'predictive' powers and they are mid-term.

[Danny]

Jul 20, 2023 23:56:32 GMT lens said:

I tend to believe one unified system is probably best, but it's largely a red herring here. The core argument is that to guarantee the lights won't go out, you need a lot of spare capacity most of the time. The system needs redundancy. But redundancy is expensive. It really matters less whether such redundancy comes about via the current payments system - or this unified system building a lot of plant which they don't need to utilise much of the time.

But when you are paying private organisations to provide that redundancy, the public is paying for their profits entirely, not their products!

If the system is to break even the redundant plant can only push up the overall cost, and hence mean a higher average price.

thats true. However the issue I was talking about was the deliberate policy of using nuclear to provide redundant capacity when its actually very very expensive. There is an obvious way to compromise and that has always been to use gas to cover gaps in renewables. This still eliminates most use of fossil fuels but is far cheaper than using nuclear only maybe 1/4 of its operating time. That would make nuclear x4 more expensive even than its nominal quoted expensive costs.

As a thought experiment, imagine your energy needs fluctuates between 1MW and 4 MW, with an average of (say) 2.5MW. Do you build a windfarm capable of 2.5MW over the year, together with necessary hydrogen production, storage, and generation plant - or just overbuild a windfarm to the extent you know it will always be capable of meeting demand? That's unanswerable (and idealistic!!) without knowing a lot of relative costs, but get the idea? If windturbines are cheap enough, then why bother with all the other plant, why bother with storage, if we always know enough will be generated all the time to satisfy need? (Yes, an idealised case, but get the idea?)

I made that point myself some time ago. It looks to be clearly the way to go. Overbuild renewables. However it does not eliminiate the problem there will always be some periods of exceptional low wind and you must have backup. Its just nuclear is utterly unsuitable for that.

Danny - in this context, bringing up public charging points are a complete red herring. Currently, about 80% (I believe?) of the electricity used by BEVs is via home charging overnight. And if you read what I put, there's no mention of such being put back into the grid. That's another red herring.

I mentioned regenerating that power back into the grid for completeness to illustrate that cars cannot become a national battery for times of low wind to keep the lights on and heat homes. So energy storage in vehicles is a red herring to the problem of bridging when the wind doesnt blow.

But the further problem in setting up cars to charge when there is a surplus of energy is they can only charge while they are plugged in. So there has to be a plug where they are parked. If you want to use daytime surplus energy this way, there has to be a wide public charging network, home charging isnt enough. The old pattern was surplus energy only at night, but with renewables it could come any time of day. Unless you have a public network you cannot use it this way. Ok, maybe it wouldnt be cost effective because most surpluses will still be at night but the background incentive is if there is an unused surplus at any time it is free electricty being thrown away. There is a real difference between powering down a gas plant at night because you dont need that electricity and turning off a wind turbine, because the wind electricty is free whereas the gas costs. Consider how stupid it would be to keep running a gas plant and buring gas if there was no use for the electricity. So why is anyone going to really do the same and waste that value with wind? Why are we doing that right now?

[Danny]

Jul 21, 2023 1:05:14 GMT mandolinist said:

Jul 21, 2023 0:58:26 GMT peterbell said:

REturning officer did not state who had requested the recount but it is the Tory and Lab votes which are being counted

I hear a great clanging of  a ming vase hitting the floor....or leaves on the line de-railing the train. Disapointing night for Labour I think, whatever the final result. Time to stop triangulating and to begin offering some sort of vision for what the future should actually look like.

Curtis made the point that this cuts both ways. The con win in Uxbridge is credited to a clear and firm labour policy voters didnt like.

[Mr Poppy]

Jul 20, 2023 23:08:51 GMT mercian said:

Jul 20, 2023 21:58:49 GMT @fecklessmiser said:

Well, your mate nickp’s posts never take up more than half a line. The Trevor’s are a *minimum* of half a page (based on scrolling time at an average pace) so I think it unlikely.

Perhaps Mr Poppy and crossbat11 are alter egos?

Maybe it's an LoC thing but I don't know why some folks continue to struggle with the 'new' features/tech on UKPR2. Unlike UKPR then it is now very easy to ignore someone by hiding their posts and blocking their notifications. So once again.

To ignore someone then:

- click on 'Profile' in the blue area at the top of the page
- click on the grey 'Edit Profile' button on the right hand side
- click on 'Privacy'
- under 'Member Block List' enter the name of whoever you wish to ignore (I'm 'ceo' but folks can easily find someone's name from the 'tag' feature where 'Trevor' would show them I'm 'ceo')
- four boxes to tick which are pretty self-explanatory.

For a while I unblocked some folks for notifications to catch some trolling but apparently some folks haven't even worked out how to 'tag' or 'reply' so I reverted to blocking the 'usual suspects' (as per Mark 's request/rule then were not supposed to mention who we ignore and we're not supposed to engage in trolling - although obviously those requests/rules are ignored by some and clearly not enforced by Mark )

NB Everyone is entitled to an opinion of course. Everyone is also entitled to ignore other people for whatever reason (eg trolling, nothing interesting to say, making stuff up, unable to substantiate claims with sources, etc - sometimes 'all of the above'). 

NB2 Please don't overuse the 'tag' feature and tag me into nonsense for whatever reason. Whilst I respect Mark 's rules then it is hopefully clear that I only have one ID and worked out how to use UKPR2 features early on - offering the above 'help' to other users many times already.  

PS Congrats on your by-election winnings - probably enough for a pint around your way 

[steve]

You know you're getting old when MP's are young enough to be your grandchild.