Category: National politics

A quick scan of the AV referendum results underlines the “chattering class” nature of the Yes campaign and its voters. I saw reporting that only 10 voting areas said Yes. Having scanned the results twice I can only find 9. I don’t know why the Electoral Commission can’t publish a spreadsheet, it is not as if they don’t use them to do their job! The 9 is simply a list of centres of metropolitan silliness: Cambridge, Camden, Edinburgh Central, Glasgow Kelvin, Hackney, Haringey, Islington, Lambeth and Oxford. The most Yes voting area? Hackney. Only another 20 voting areas scrapped over the 40% Yes line. Again all metropolitan centres such as Brighton and Hove, Cardiff Central, etc. The only exceptions were the 9,000 voters on the Shetland Island and Northern Ireland where the whole result was lumped together.

Of the 11 regions of the UK Northern Ireland got the biggest Yes at 43.68%. London was the most Yes in England but still didn’t get over the 40% barrier. 5 out of 9 English regions were less than 30% Yes and 8 out of 9 were less than 32% Yes.

I expect to die before we change first past the post. Yeah!

Update: The borough I did not spot when scanning was Southwark.

The LibDem’s “miserable little compromise” has been comprehensively rejected by the electorate with over two thirds saying no. 68.31% to be precise with 439 out of 440 voting areas declared. See the highly excellent Electoral Commission website here.

This is a terrible blow for Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband. They were both on the side of the chattering classes who live in a rather different world to the rest of us.

Ealing is one of the few voting areas that fell below 60%, see here, with “only” 56.75% voting No.

Only ten boroughs voted Yes out of 440.

I am having a glass of wine to celebrate.

Labour councillor Bassam Mahfouz unwittingly underlines one of the key arguments against AV for me – it amplifies the voice of the fringe. You get to shout Green and vote Labour. You get to protest immigration by voting BNP and then vote Labour. You can protest EU integration with UKIP and then vote Tory. And so on. The silent majority are heard little enough as it is. With AV the fringe gets bigger and the tail wags the dog.

It has got to the point where even some voices in the Labour party feel that Labour needs to move on from its deficit denying stance if it wants to be fit to govern. If I had seen Luke Bozier’s piece on the LabourList blog earlier I might have bought it out at Tuesday’s council meeting. The Ealing Labour group are a very much in the deficit denying camp and were quick last Tuesday with calls of “It’s the bankers fault”. Bozier’s core paragraph was:

Labour now needs to go away, re-build its intellectual base and offer a genuine apology for the economic mess we have contributed to. Whilst many of the Tory cuts are unpopular, a large portion of the population still believes that Labour’s mis-management of the economy from 2005-2007 is a major contributing factor to those cuts. We need to convince the country once again that we can be responsible with the economy. Perhaps we should be looking at Chile & Australia; in Chile it’s illegal to run a deficit if the country is at full employment, and both nations have statutory ‘stability funds’ which get topped up in the good times to cover spending in the hard times. These should be the kind of policies we are putting forward now, not just a shallow, hypocritical and baseless attempt to demonise the government for sorting out the economic mess which we in large-part contributed to.

Ealing Labour take note.

Apparently I might have been a bit harsh on the BBC yesterday. It is James Mills of the Save EMA campaign who is the liar. The BBC merely naively repeated the claims of a Labour party worker without checking them. Their (typically anonymous, hard to nail down) response to my complaint is reproduced below.

Dear Mr Taylor,

Thank you for your email. The information that there were hundreds of people at the event came from James Mills – who claims there were about 300 there.

We asked the Metropolitan Police if they had any figures and they told us that their log showed about 80 people at the protest at about 12.30pm, as people were leaving.

We have slightly amended our story to reflect this. The number of people at protests is often a contentious issue and, as people arrive and leave throughout the day, it is almost impossible to give an exact figure.

Regards

BBC News Website

Does anyone really think that there would have been any more “students” outside Hammermith Town Hall before 12.30pm?

The totally unsustainable standfirst used over the weekend, namely:

Hundreds of students have gathered outside a Conservative conference in London to protest at the scrapping of Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA).

Has now been replaced with:

Students have gathered outside a Conservative conference in London to protest at the scrapping of Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA).

In addition the following paragraph has been added:

He claimed up to 300 people took part in the protest while the Metropolitan Police said about 80 demonstrators were outside the Town Hall until about 1230 GMT.

The original story is in tatters. Does this matter? Have I achieved anything? I don’t know. The BBC online news people still don’t want to accept that there were practically no EMA recipients at the tiny demo on Saturday. If we can persuade the BBC to be more careful then it will take away some of the left’s oxygen and the lies will stop running around the world. Maybe not! At least all of those Twitter links are pointing to a more accurate story.

I was a bit irritated when I saw this story on the BBC London News front page yesterday. It was apparently the second most important London story yesterday. I wrote a formal complaint that they had failed to correctly identify James Mills, the front man of the Save EMA campaign, as a researcher for Labour MP John Robertson whose salary is paid with public funds. I was pleased when they wrote last night to say that they had updated the story.

I was livid today when I did some more research on the story and found some photos of the demo at the Demotix website, here and here.

The BBC’s standfirst is:

Hundreds of students have gathered outside a Conservative conference in London to protest at the scrapping of Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA).

But the photos show maybe 50 middle-aged people protesting about a local planning issue and local cuts. There are a handful of EMA placards and very few obviously young people. There are many more SWP placards and the youngest people seem to be protesting the planning issue. The BBC’s standfirst is an out and out lie. There were not even 100 people there. They were clearly not students. I have complained again.

James Mills is at the left of this group of “students”.

Panning right slightly we see Hammersmith MP Andrew Slaughter at the centre listening to Hammersmith and Fulham Labour group leader, Stephen Cowan.

Panning right a bit more we see this group of “students” concerned about a local planning issue.

These three photos are screengrabs taken from contributor Sinister Pictures at demotix.com, see here. I checked the price for these images and as it was zero felt able to reproduce them here.