Could not possibly agree with more you take on the election coverage, it was genuinely making me angry that the coverage was just ignoring the Labour achievement and speaking as if Labour only failed slightly less badly than the Tories
And how suddenly the electoral system and getting majorities without 50% of the vote is suddenly a major source of concern despite that never being an issue when the left vote was split for decades but now the right vote is split suddenly it’s a major issue
Excellent piece, Helen. I especially love this: ‘Losing with dignity—and at a fundamental level, accepting that you lost—distinguishes politicians I respect from those I do not.’
It was frustrating that the coverage was so skewed towards losing Tories and the Reform story rather than the positivity of the Labour, LibDem and Green narrative. However, it was good to finally get to bed last night, having been up for 36 hours, and feel relief, not just because I could finally go to sleep, but because we have a government of serious people with expertise in their fields.
Love this. Also a nice antidote to the “they’re all the same”/“makes no difference” cynicism pre election. After 14 years where most things have just got worse (homelessness, courts, NHS waiting lists, food banks, etc), it’s really nice to have hope again that things will get better. Just having a cabinet where most of them seem to actually care and have knowledge of their briefs is uplifting!
I agree with you about Rees-Mogg, who was my MP, sadly. However, he was made by the media. I recall years ago when he was a nobody, finding that he repeatedly turned up on Radio 4's The Westminster Hour. Why? He was of no importance then and the constituency isn't remarkable. I can only guess it was because he was a bit of fun, that he lightened the tone. And at what cost. He went from being a Nobody to a Somebody with horrible consequences. Same thing happened with David Starkey. As a former radio and TV producer, I do wish people would think a little more carefully about who they concentrate on. Fame and extremism too often amplify one another.
Sadly I think that the decency of Sunak and Hunt's conduct on Friday is going to be squashed in the Tory party for the next couple of years (let's face it, Rishi has had to sound intolerant to impress the gobby elements in his party) as the less desirable elements flirt with big Nige and his gang (whose heckling of Cathy Newman at the press conference where Farage complained about being heckled himself was appalling and felt nastily misogynisticic ... I've always felt that him and George Galloway would probably get along quite well if they bumped into each other in a smoky pub in 1977). Let's hope Starmer acts on his repeated promise of "service", a word that it was refreshing to hear used so often in the campaign.
I would have liked to have voted Labour but where I live tactical voting (ie LibDem) is key. So although my vote would be in the LibDem vote share stats, I did it so that Labour could win. If I had another choice I would have chosen to be part of the Labour vote share . Also I’m old enough to remember how the 1997 election was a complete headf*** (in the best way!) for those of us who’d known a Tory government for most of our lives. I’m having that feeling again 😊
The Vanity Fair piece on RFK jr. reminded me of this fabulous post by Josh Barro https://substack.com/home/post/p-131217880 (apologies, I might have come across it in this very newsletter... testament to how well curated The Bluestocking is)
Absolutely fascinating how a bunch of risk loving people are elevated to an almost saintly status in a lot of people's minds through the myth of a family curse!
I am hoping that someone (anyone) can unearth some footage of the delightful/shocking historic change in West and East Worthing. ‘Father of the house’ Peter Bottomley being voted out feels like a big moment and Beccy Cooper is a great incoming candidate. I’d love to see what surely must have been filmed *somewhere*. Anyways - thanks Helen as ever.
"It can safely be said that the Labour Party has in no way ‘a mandate from the country to rule as dictators’. They have achieved 34.4% of the vote, less than David Cameron got when he had to go into Coalition with the Liberal Democrats.
No-one should have any tolerance whatsoever for any Labour liar that says they have ‘won’ this election. They have won lots of seats due to an unrepresentative electoral system.
Nearly twice as many people voted NOT LABOUR as voted for the Labour Party, yet already, the Labour Party has nearly 400 seats, with around 50 still to declare. In a truly representative system, they would have around 200 seats.
The Liberal Democrats actually have about the right number of seats – 65 on 12% of the vote. Reform UK ave secured 600,000 more votes than the LibDems but have 4 seats. They also secured 20 times as many votes as Plaid Cymru but secured the same number of Parliamentary seats.
This is a complete farce and nothing Ed Davey nor Keir Starmer try to say about that will change that. On 14% of the vote, there should be nearly 90 Reform UK MPs. The Conservatives, on 23% of the vote, should have around 150 seats. They are significantly down.
Ed Davey, in particular, leads a party that has campaigned for decades for Proportional Representation. If he tries to come out with drivel that ‘the electoral system works’ because of a quirk of the split of the vote, then he will have proven himself as nothing but a principle-free shyster worthy of being thrown into the River Thames.
I truly hope that the country tells Labour in no uncertain terms their lack of support and makes life absolute hell for any contemptible Labour MP, supporter or activist that tries to claim that 34.4% is a ‘mandate to rule’."
Sir Keir will be disappointing and dangerous and ruthless.He is a Globalist.Conservatives are horrible.They are all idiots.
Labour did win this election. Just like the Conservatives won the last three, all with less than a majority of the vote. I don’t see why winning with 34% is awful but winning with 40% is ok.
Sorry, saw this comment a bit belatedly. It is a landslide, according to how British democracy works. Disliking parliamentary democracy does not change that.
Ah, see you’ve now noticed the First Past the Post, the electoral system that Britain has used, oh, forever. There was an attempt under the Coalition to reform it by putting it to a public vote, but The People weren’t bothered and so we’ve carried on with FPTP. Did you vote for reform (small R!) when you had the chance?
Something you’d have to get your head around, in a more Proportional Representation-type system, would be that although there would be a much greater variety of parties there would also be a lot more cross-party consensus-building to get legislation pushed through. So you can have a plethora of parties, but if they want to get anything done they’ll all have to learn to get along with each other instead of endlessly point-scoring. A lot of the current Reform (large R!) lot aren’t actually so keen on that, as it would require working well with others. They just want to be the new Tories, but winning under FPTP themselves.
The majority vote share Labour won yesterday still makes the Brexit vote look weak, but at least there will be another election in the future. We’re stuck with Brexit now whether anyone still wants it or not.
Id rather give it a try as this FPTP-isn't working for the people.Maybe if the parties had to deal with each other we the people might benefit -for once.
If you are very keen on electoral reform, I would strongly recommend spending some time looking into proportional representation and how it’s been implemented elsewhere. For a starter, there are three main methods of PR: party-list (open version in Sweden, closed in Turkey), mixed-member (Germany, South Korea), and single-transferable (Ireland, Malta). The countries I’ve listed here are far from comprehensive, but they will give you a start for your investigations. While you’re looking, do look up the roots of FPTP as well - it’s good to know what it is you’re changing and why, because constitutional reform is long, slow and often isn’t easily reversed.
I am a democracy geek and will freely admit I find the systems that have been designed to try to balance “the will of the people” with enough stability to not allow nations to dissolve into chaos really interesting. They all have their pros and cons, and I’d be delighted if more Britons took the time to have a look at those systems and worked out which ones they think will lead to better representation AND better governance.
Surely the point is that people understand FPTP and vote tactically and the politicians canvass tactically too, which means we end up with these kinds of results? I’d argue that if we went to PR and people could vote for whoever they wanted, it wouldn’t necessarily have ended with the same vote share we just got.
Spot on. There’s a lot being read into the data, but little robust qual research into that specific Reform voting sample. Who knows how votes would change in a PR system?
Is this diatribe a consequence of having been up all night? It's perfectly possible to promote PR without blaming Labour for having the temerity to win under the current system, and indulging in personal abuse.
What distinguishes Bluestocking from MSM? Because you can experience the to this bias eveywhere:Graud,BBC.NPR.Disparaging RFK:Why? He has flaws,as do they all. He was addicted to heroin. His family is embarrassed by him.Wow. big deal. Democrats Obama.Biden ramped up bioweapons labs in Ukraine.RFK wants to end this:
"This recording of a video from a dinner that you had with some journalists from The New York Post, in it, you talked about — I'm going to let you put it in your own words, because, in the video, you say that — you do say studies and reports indicate that there may have been some genetic direction for this virus, if it was manipulated.
Explain.
KENNEDY: Yes, I — actually, the — the studies don't say that it was — suggested that it was deliberately manipulated. And I never suggested it was deliberately manipulated.
In fact, I said the opposite. What the study said is that certain races were more affected by COVID than other races. And there was a long list of the races that were minimally affected and those that were maximally affected.
So I was — I was not saying that this was something that had been deliberately done. I was just describing the results of this study.
MACCALLUM: So, do you believe that there is bioweapons work going on in China and in the United States that is trying to determine if these genetically cleaved, changed viruses — you know the terminology better than I do — could be used in that way as a bioweapon targeted towards certain populations?
KENNEDY: There's been a long history of our nation and other countries trying to develop ethnic bioweapons.
And, today, because of the developments of synthetic biology, CRISPR technology, genetic editing techniques that were never available to earlier scientists, those kind of studies are much — or those kind of weapons are much more likely to be developed, and along with a host of other weapons.
And what I have said, and the point of that talk that I was giving, is that we used to have a bioweapons treaty. We signed it in 1973, and people were generally complying with it. In 2002, when we passed the Patriot Act, we revoked that treaty. And that has launched a bioweapons arms race.
All of the major countries are putting major money into bioweapons. And one of the first things I'm going to do as president is to re-sign that treaty and to enforce it, to have provisions that make it transparent, that make it enforceable, and end that whole area of study. We don't need it. It does no good for the world, and it's very, very, very dangerous.
The insanity will intensify under Sir Keir: our daughters will be forced to compete in Sport with biological males and get hurt doing so.Biological males ,who Starmer believes have a cervix, while biological women having actual cervical cancer-will have to wait on treatment because of this dangerous farce.Biological males will have access to women's shelters,and jail cells and terrorize these traumatized biological females.Starmer will dutifully roll out CBDC, digital ID, Net Zero acceleration, and Universal Basic income, fast.
Could not possibly agree with more you take on the election coverage, it was genuinely making me angry that the coverage was just ignoring the Labour achievement and speaking as if Labour only failed slightly less badly than the Tories
And how suddenly the electoral system and getting majorities without 50% of the vote is suddenly a major source of concern despite that never being an issue when the left vote was split for decades but now the right vote is split suddenly it’s a major issue
Infuriating
Excellent piece, Helen. I especially love this: ‘Losing with dignity—and at a fundamental level, accepting that you lost—distinguishes politicians I respect from those I do not.’
It was frustrating that the coverage was so skewed towards losing Tories and the Reform story rather than the positivity of the Labour, LibDem and Green narrative. However, it was good to finally get to bed last night, having been up for 36 hours, and feel relief, not just because I could finally go to sleep, but because we have a government of serious people with expertise in their fields.
Love this. Also a nice antidote to the “they’re all the same”/“makes no difference” cynicism pre election. After 14 years where most things have just got worse (homelessness, courts, NHS waiting lists, food banks, etc), it’s really nice to have hope again that things will get better. Just having a cabinet where most of them seem to actually care and have knowledge of their briefs is uplifting!
I agree with you about Rees-Mogg, who was my MP, sadly. However, he was made by the media. I recall years ago when he was a nobody, finding that he repeatedly turned up on Radio 4's The Westminster Hour. Why? He was of no importance then and the constituency isn't remarkable. I can only guess it was because he was a bit of fun, that he lightened the tone. And at what cost. He went from being a Nobody to a Somebody with horrible consequences. Same thing happened with David Starkey. As a former radio and TV producer, I do wish people would think a little more carefully about who they concentrate on. Fame and extremism too often amplify one another.
Reform: at best 3 remaining by end of parliament. 30p will prob flounce out.Strong likelihood of a Judas Peoples front, with 5 Splinter ‘Re…’ parties.
Will love it Helen if you can do a follow up piece on your mega Starmer pundit survey 6 months down the line.
Sadly I think that the decency of Sunak and Hunt's conduct on Friday is going to be squashed in the Tory party for the next couple of years (let's face it, Rishi has had to sound intolerant to impress the gobby elements in his party) as the less desirable elements flirt with big Nige and his gang (whose heckling of Cathy Newman at the press conference where Farage complained about being heckled himself was appalling and felt nastily misogynisticic ... I've always felt that him and George Galloway would probably get along quite well if they bumped into each other in a smoky pub in 1977). Let's hope Starmer acts on his repeated promise of "service", a word that it was refreshing to hear used so often in the campaign.
I would have liked to have voted Labour but where I live tactical voting (ie LibDem) is key. So although my vote would be in the LibDem vote share stats, I did it so that Labour could win. If I had another choice I would have chosen to be part of the Labour vote share . Also I’m old enough to remember how the 1997 election was a complete headf*** (in the best way!) for those of us who’d known a Tory government for most of our lives. I’m having that feeling again 😊
The Vanity Fair piece on RFK jr. reminded me of this fabulous post by Josh Barro https://substack.com/home/post/p-131217880 (apologies, I might have come across it in this very newsletter... testament to how well curated The Bluestocking is)
Absolutely fascinating how a bunch of risk loving people are elevated to an almost saintly status in a lot of people's minds through the myth of a family curse!
I am hoping that someone (anyone) can unearth some footage of the delightful/shocking historic change in West and East Worthing. ‘Father of the house’ Peter Bottomley being voted out feels like a big moment and Beccy Cooper is a great incoming candidate. I’d love to see what surely must have been filmed *somewhere*. Anyways - thanks Helen as ever.
Congratulations to the UK!
"It can safely be said that the Labour Party has in no way ‘a mandate from the country to rule as dictators’. They have achieved 34.4% of the vote, less than David Cameron got when he had to go into Coalition with the Liberal Democrats.
No-one should have any tolerance whatsoever for any Labour liar that says they have ‘won’ this election. They have won lots of seats due to an unrepresentative electoral system.
Nearly twice as many people voted NOT LABOUR as voted for the Labour Party, yet already, the Labour Party has nearly 400 seats, with around 50 still to declare. In a truly representative system, they would have around 200 seats.
The Liberal Democrats actually have about the right number of seats – 65 on 12% of the vote. Reform UK ave secured 600,000 more votes than the LibDems but have 4 seats. They also secured 20 times as many votes as Plaid Cymru but secured the same number of Parliamentary seats.
This is a complete farce and nothing Ed Davey nor Keir Starmer try to say about that will change that. On 14% of the vote, there should be nearly 90 Reform UK MPs. The Conservatives, on 23% of the vote, should have around 150 seats. They are significantly down.
Ed Davey, in particular, leads a party that has campaigned for decades for Proportional Representation. If he tries to come out with drivel that ‘the electoral system works’ because of a quirk of the split of the vote, then he will have proven himself as nothing but a principle-free shyster worthy of being thrown into the River Thames.
I truly hope that the country tells Labour in no uncertain terms their lack of support and makes life absolute hell for any contemptible Labour MP, supporter or activist that tries to claim that 34.4% is a ‘mandate to rule’."
Sir Keir will be disappointing and dangerous and ruthless.He is a Globalist.Conservatives are horrible.They are all idiots.
Labour did win this election. Just like the Conservatives won the last three, all with less than a majority of the vote. I don’t see why winning with 34% is awful but winning with 40% is ok.
because in reality it's not a "landslide" as being reported.
Sorry, saw this comment a bit belatedly. It is a landslide, according to how British democracy works. Disliking parliamentary democracy does not change that.
Ah, see you’ve now noticed the First Past the Post, the electoral system that Britain has used, oh, forever. There was an attempt under the Coalition to reform it by putting it to a public vote, but The People weren’t bothered and so we’ve carried on with FPTP. Did you vote for reform (small R!) when you had the chance?
Something you’d have to get your head around, in a more Proportional Representation-type system, would be that although there would be a much greater variety of parties there would also be a lot more cross-party consensus-building to get legislation pushed through. So you can have a plethora of parties, but if they want to get anything done they’ll all have to learn to get along with each other instead of endlessly point-scoring. A lot of the current Reform (large R!) lot aren’t actually so keen on that, as it would require working well with others. They just want to be the new Tories, but winning under FPTP themselves.
The majority vote share Labour won yesterday still makes the Brexit vote look weak, but at least there will be another election in the future. We’re stuck with Brexit now whether anyone still wants it or not.
Id rather give it a try as this FPTP-isn't working for the people.Maybe if the parties had to deal with each other we the people might benefit -for once.
If you are very keen on electoral reform, I would strongly recommend spending some time looking into proportional representation and how it’s been implemented elsewhere. For a starter, there are three main methods of PR: party-list (open version in Sweden, closed in Turkey), mixed-member (Germany, South Korea), and single-transferable (Ireland, Malta). The countries I’ve listed here are far from comprehensive, but they will give you a start for your investigations. While you’re looking, do look up the roots of FPTP as well - it’s good to know what it is you’re changing and why, because constitutional reform is long, slow and often isn’t easily reversed.
I am a democracy geek and will freely admit I find the systems that have been designed to try to balance “the will of the people” with enough stability to not allow nations to dissolve into chaos really interesting. They all have their pros and cons, and I’d be delighted if more Britons took the time to have a look at those systems and worked out which ones they think will lead to better representation AND better governance.
Surely the point is that people understand FPTP and vote tactically and the politicians canvass tactically too, which means we end up with these kinds of results? I’d argue that if we went to PR and people could vote for whoever they wanted, it wouldn’t necessarily have ended with the same vote share we just got.
Spot on. There’s a lot being read into the data, but little robust qual research into that specific Reform voting sample. Who knows how votes would change in a PR system?
Is this diatribe a consequence of having been up all night? It's perfectly possible to promote PR without blaming Labour for having the temerity to win under the current system, and indulging in personal abuse.
What distinguishes Bluestocking from MSM? Because you can experience the to this bias eveywhere:Graud,BBC.NPR.Disparaging RFK:Why? He has flaws,as do they all. He was addicted to heroin. His family is embarrassed by him.Wow. big deal. Democrats Obama.Biden ramped up bioweapons labs in Ukraine.RFK wants to end this:
"This recording of a video from a dinner that you had with some journalists from The New York Post, in it, you talked about — I'm going to let you put it in your own words, because, in the video, you say that — you do say studies and reports indicate that there may have been some genetic direction for this virus, if it was manipulated.
Explain.
KENNEDY: Yes, I — actually, the — the studies don't say that it was — suggested that it was deliberately manipulated. And I never suggested it was deliberately manipulated.
In fact, I said the opposite. What the study said is that certain races were more affected by COVID than other races. And there was a long list of the races that were minimally affected and those that were maximally affected.
So I was — I was not saying that this was something that had been deliberately done. I was just describing the results of this study.
MACCALLUM: So, do you believe that there is bioweapons work going on in China and in the United States that is trying to determine if these genetically cleaved, changed viruses — you know the terminology better than I do — could be used in that way as a bioweapon targeted towards certain populations?
KENNEDY: There's been a long history of our nation and other countries trying to develop ethnic bioweapons.
And, today, because of the developments of synthetic biology, CRISPR technology, genetic editing techniques that were never available to earlier scientists, those kind of studies are much — or those kind of weapons are much more likely to be developed, and along with a host of other weapons.
And what I have said, and the point of that talk that I was giving, is that we used to have a bioweapons treaty. We signed it in 1973, and people were generally complying with it. In 2002, when we passed the Patriot Act, we revoked that treaty. And that has launched a bioweapons arms race.
All of the major countries are putting major money into bioweapons. And one of the first things I'm going to do as president is to re-sign that treaty and to enforce it, to have provisions that make it transparent, that make it enforceable, and end that whole area of study. We don't need it. It does no good for the world, and it's very, very, very dangerous.
Oh, the irony of jailing pretendians in a country, whose PM is Justin Trudeau. And I wonder, what other type of liar could be jailed?
The insanity will intensify under Sir Keir: our daughters will be forced to compete in Sport with biological males and get hurt doing so.Biological males ,who Starmer believes have a cervix, while biological women having actual cervical cancer-will have to wait on treatment because of this dangerous farce.Biological males will have access to women's shelters,and jail cells and terrorize these traumatized biological females.Starmer will dutifully roll out CBDC, digital ID, Net Zero acceleration, and Universal Basic income, fast.
And there I was thinking that Hawk Tuah was referring to the Quarterback of the Miami Dolphins NFL team.