Angela Rayner is worried, which is no bad thing. However, the meat of the story is in this.
Ms Ardron-Adams said she used to vote Conservative, then switched to Ukip and the Brexit Party – but now she plans to vote for Reform UK.
It’s not just the Tories under threat by Reform. There will be Labour marginals where the switch could topple the sitting MP. Although this woman is an ex Conservative voter, there will be Labour voters who find Reform appealing. This isn’t being discussed much and I remain unconvinced that Starmer’s win will be a massive landslide. The swing necessary is just too great, even if there is a complete Tory collapse.
Something that occurred to me was, although there are many things to criticise the sitting government for, a great many people are not at all badly off. How many tatty beaten up cars do you see on the roads nowadays? My wife and I both worked, we lived relatively frugally and made sure we put a bit of money by. We are now both comfortably retired, we’re not rich by any means but we’re doing alright. Our private gym membership isn’t cheap, the gym has plenty of members. The gym has personal trainers available, they’re not cheap either and they always seem to be busy. Given Labour’s track record of putting the economy in the toilet I’m not sure that too many people are willing to risk their current prosperity by voting for them.
With respect (and i mean that genuinely, you did what was right), it doesn’t sound like you lived your life via credit cards with a new rented car, lease pcp whatever handy label applied its all glorified renting, every 3 years, with the must have two exotic holidays per year and multiple media etc payments going out every month.
You set your stall out lived within your means and tried as best you could to not be still in debt entering retirement.
I’m one of the genuine working class and always have been but have always been at the higher end of working class pay, even in my well paid sector of my industry the reality for so many i work with is that they might well have a shiny German car(s) on the drip but they’re either renting a house still or mortgaged up to the hilt on a new build made of cardboard with maxed out credit cards and sod all savings in case that rainy day arrives.
So many thought the false minimal bank interest rates of the last 15 years would last forever, instead of buying and living sensibly to their means (as you and we, thankully, have done) many kidded themselves they were celebrity class, encouraged imho by the idiot box in the corner, now the rates have risen as they always reality has arrived.
You only have to look at the ridiculous amounts they piss up the wall on hen/stag dos and weddings, £30k is bugger all these days, ludicrous.
Not all are like this of course, thankfully my daughter, by herself, and who would agree with most sentiments found here in this blog (attended multiple freedom marches during the covid scam she also saw through), did things the old way and is now mortgage free whilst still under 40.
Mark, below, is right to wonder about that red wall working classes reverting to anti working class labour, only if they are addicted to the idiot box.
Deliberately designed mass and illegal immigration has affected the working classes infinitely more than the cabal elites who benefit from it…though quite what those elite fools imagine lording it over a Britain reduced to a virtually lawless third world crap hole will be like is a wonder.
What hell do they, the uniparties owners, have planned.
Makes no difference whether Sunak’s traitorous mob or Starmer’s rabble get in, neither regime are calling the shots, to find out who is running the west it might be interesting to see where ex useful idiot senior politicians end up, who they work for afterwards and how amazingly rich they become.
Follow the money.
The sensible ones won’t be, but how many of those are left?
Who actually were the “red wall”, who were so disgusted with labour in 2019 that they switched to the tories?
I would posit that these were the actual working class (what’s left of it) who had finally had enough of the metropolitan globo-filth and their haughty disdain for the concerns of real people.
The tories (quele surprise) betrayed them totally (along with the rest of us), but I really can’t see why they should automatically go back to a labour party which, if anything, has doubled down on what so disgusted them in 2019.
Labour have to gain at least 60 seats and not lose a single one themselves to reach 325.
Possible of course, but what, apart from polls of, to put it mildly, dubious provenance and a spectacularly biased lame stream media, is suggesting it will happen.
I expect der sturmer and his supernova of stupidity, his riot of retards, to get the most seats, but a landslide?
I am no longer in the UK, so have no skin in the game except that my pension comes from there. When resident in the UK I was a long time conservative supporter, but from what I can see the party has lost all its conservative roots and is more like a poor imitation of Wilsons Government without the ethics. They appear to be in line for a well deserved kicking and I hope a lot of the others get it too.
You could make an argument that the Conservatives already know they have ‘lost it’ but Labour are not ware of ‘the Reckoning(tm)’ that will gut their support too. If not this General Election but the next.
I expect that Sir Ikea has frozen in the headlights fearing that one of his ‘team’ of prospective MPs is going to say the one thing that will expose Labour’s unsuitability to govern. And then all bets are off.
That sounds perfectly plausible and in the case of the painfully stupid Rayner, this perhaps might have already occurred.
It’s a damned low bar but I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite so obscene as this imbecile whoring itself in front of stone age savages in a cave in Afghanistan.
It wasn’t actually in a cave in Afghanistan?
Well morally, intellectually (yes, I know rayner was there), civilizationally, it most definitely was.
I’m sure labour voters will have seen it too.
Then there is the determination to ban cars from 2030, nut zero, a blatantly stated intention to “align” with toytown Austria-Hungary as it collapses.
Der sturmer certainly has his finger on something!
Labour support is a mile wide and an inch deep. In the daylight it may evaporate. You can forget the polls, they are adapted to the two parties and a few minors. They are not looking for Reform’s support to come from unconvinced labour voters giving them a punt because Starmer and his team are just so useless.
Didn’t Blair get a 3rd majority on 21% odd of the electorate? If you have a low turnout, it doesn’t take much to get power.
The question is not whether we’re well off, but how much better off we would be without all those clowns in power, affecting our lives negatively. This is the only shot at life that you get, yet half of it is spent paying for those scumbags stupidity.
Our sitting MP Graham Stuart has sent us two different leaflets to tell us why we should vote for him. He seems to be a decent constituency MP but there is just no way that I’m voting Conservative.
I have a similar problem Stonyground, one of the candidates in my ward is Suella Braverman who l would normally vote for in a heartbeat but……. she’s a Tory so l can’t this time.
My neighbour wasn’t going to vote but he has decided to vote for her so l guess that sort of balances it out.
Everyone thinks Labour will get in, trouble is I haven’t found anyone yet who is planning to vote Labour. Think it will be a lot of votes going to independent parties.
I think some of these polling companies inhabit some bizarre parallel universe which has no relation whatsoever to the real world. There was some ‘prediction’ yesterday that Labour will win 516 seats and the ‘Conservatives’ will win only 53, giving Labour a majority of 382. Now, I’ve been doing some messing about with an online swingometer in the last few weeks, and the swing required for a result like that would ludicrous. It would be something like a Labour vote share of 57% and ‘Conservative’ share of 23%.
It’s worth bearing in mind that in virtually every election from 1992 onwards the pollsters overestimated Labour’s share of the vote and underestimated the ‘Conservative’ share of the vote. Even in the 1997 election (when Blair was very popular with the public), opinion polls had Labour up at around 50%. Their actual vote share in the election was 43.2%.
I think the pollsters have got this election badly wrong. I suspect enough traditional ‘Conservative’ voters will hold their noses on the day and vote ‘Conservative’ when they consider the alternative is Sir Kneelalot. So, my prediction is still a small Labour majority, or a hung parliament with Labour a few seats short of a majority.
That’s where my money is.
My constituency (Perth) will vote SNP regardless, so all votes are effectively wasted.
This time I’m voting Reform.