austinmitchellelectiondiary2019

Once you let an election out of the cage   it  goes anywhere, eats and pisses on all parties. It can’t be kept on a lead and taken for a nice quiet walk   towards whatever destiny the Prime Minster who called it intends. Boris hoped it would be a rally of Brexiteers to stop Brexit and that the people would reward him for standng up to the EU and getting a marginally better deal than Theresa had managed. The Tory Party was to emerge as a patriotic British, populist party rallying the nation against immigration, subservience to Brussels and a lot of European busybodies telling   a great nation what to do Labour pretended to want an election but didn’t really for various reasons like common sense, because it was split on Brexit, Jeremy wasn’t popular, it wasn’t ready and the Blair legacy still   divided the party between Blairite moderates and Corbynite radicals. Corbyn only came round to an election in the hope that he could consolidate his p...

A word of warning. You should believe what each party says about the others but not what they say about themselves. For the truth you have to look behind the lies and the promises to what they’re not telling you. That’s a better guide to what they’ll do if you’re daft enough to vote for them.So here’s what the manifestos don’t say. First the Liberals. Much the nicest and most promising party because they can promise anything to anyone (except trade unions and Brexiteers) and are filled with good intentions.They’ll never be in power to deliver so they have the purity of unsullied virtue and can be generous, idealistic and almost perfect,. In policy terms they can love the EU, join the Euro, allow in every immigrant who wants to come, spend more on aid, social services , education and the health service, end the class war,Save the environment, reduce taxes, require the regular brushing of teeth and see pie in every sky.   They can’t pay for it   because the...

Elections often end with a bang This   one  certainly needs to if we’re to have a government -any government-that can govern.But they can begin with a whimper. This   has. As usual it’s a tuning up as the parties struggle to find a note that will reverberate with the electorate. Brexit hasn’t. Things have gone quiet on the Brexit front (except for me) either because people are fed up or they’ve made their minds up.So trivia has taken over.   That means dirt bags emptied over parties and   politicians to damage them before the electorate does. Everyone with a grumble or a grievance-and they’re more numerous than ever because of Brexit and austerity-is turning up the volume in the hope that someone will listen.Character assassination of leaders pours out, Blairites praise Labour with faint damns, MPs who feel their genius has never been recognised by their party denounce it and the chattering classes poodle   away on their endless i pads T...

In the last two elections the Lib-Dems were rightly punished for their letting their desperation for pelf and place betray all their principles and helping to impose the disastrous austerity programme on Britain. Yet with that exception, recent elections have shown a clear trend to erode the traditional two party vote and boost the minor parties, though mainly in vote rather than seats. That trend will probably continue in this election as Liberal crimes are forgotten, the SNP dominates   Scotland and Farage’s Brexiteers try to repeat their victory in the EU elections.   Ours are now multi-party politics which could be worked with proportional representation as it has been in New Zealand but produces unpredictable results with First Past the Post which strengthens the big undermines the small and   leads to tactical voting to try and escape from the trap. The result is more likely to be another hung Parliament rather than the clear majority Briti...

They’re off. Some have been for years. Now they all are in a race for your vote, with the option to reject it if they don’t like it. Just three more days of suits, respectable auras and, in the case of this Parliament, unsavoury smell, and MPs will turn from paragons pontificating to plaintiffs pleading. For votes. Elections are mysterious things. They never go the way politicians and pundits want them to.   So no predictions (yet) but let’s look at expectations instead. Boris hopes for a boost after screwing the semblance of a deal out of an intransigent EU. He’d like a 1979 result. He won’t get it .He’s not running against a clapped out Labour government but his own party in power.   Farage will split the Brexit vote and we in the northern tribe will (mainly) stay loyal to Labour. Another 2015 is the best he can hope for. Having snatched defeat from the jaws of disaster in 2017 Jeremy hopes that an election he didn’t want will carry him to victory t...