Local/devolved elections 2016
 

Did you get what you hoped for out of last night's vote?

Here in Scotland, the SNP has lost its outright majority, the Tories have doubled their seat count and Labour is in third place. Not a bad night all told. :D

Re: Local/devolved elections 2016
 

Labour in third place

Excellent :)

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I never look how the results come, I am just interested in the final result.

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That is the final result Ken. We have a devolved parliament, and the elections were yesterday. You should watch the news more often. ;)

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I see the 'Corbyn Effect' is working very well... :D

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Can't see the SNP being in a position to call for another referendum now.

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That'll suit them whilst the oil price is in the doldrums and meantime they still have us evil Sassenachs to blame for all their ills. ;)

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And having to pay for the "privilege" because of the Barnet formula.:mad:

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Sturgeon really didn't want one anyway. She has no answers to the fundamental problems identified in 2014 and the polls haven't shifted significantly.

Lack of a clear mandate gives her all the excuse she needs to duck the issue and avoid killing the question stone dead, as happened when the Québécois lost their second referendum by a whisker.

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Gutted that our local Labour guy lost his seat to the Scottish Numpty Party.

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Labour hasn't done well in Scotland but that's thanks to the SNP, and this was happening before JC became leader. Elsewhere they haven't had the major losses predicted, won a by election in Sheffield with an increased majority, and look likely to have the next Mayor of London (despite a disgraceful racist Tory campaign). There will be certain Labour mps devastated that they haven't done more badly. However fair enough to give JC another year I think (during which time the Tories will have gone into post-referendum meltdown).

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Reminds me of our arrangement with the EU... ;)

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So, in a year when it's been nothing but bad news for the Government, internal arguments tearing the Tory Party apart, seemingly endless bad press and bad feelings towards government initiatives (Doctors strike, EU Referendum, Universal Credits, Disability Living Allowance changes, etc. etc.) the fact that Labour haven't had major losses (only lost 26 seats so far) is a good thing? :confused:

Surely, if everyone was so upset at the current government, this would have been reflected in the polls, and we would have seen a surge in Labour (and other parties) support?

btw, winning the by-election in Sheffield Brightside & Hillsborough was a bit a foregone conclusion, wasn't it, what with it being a very safe seat, and the widow of the previous incumbent standing for Labour?

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Wales has been reasonably unsurprising, except for UKIP getting 7 seats on the regional list.

Labour got 29 seats, 3 short of an outright majority.

Plaid Cymru got 12, including a surprising constituency win for leader Leanne Wood in the Rhondda (ousting perennial feckwit Leighton Andrews)

The Conservatives got 11, which was disappointing for them

As mentioned, UKIP got 7 members, all on the regional list. These include parachutists Mark Reckless and Neil "Pay me in brown envelopes" Hamilton, both of which were forced on to welsh UKIP by their leaders, and ironically took the jobs of hard working, local nutters.

The Lib dems held on to one solitary seat for the leader, Kirsty Williams, in Brecon and Radnor.

Possibilities are:

Labour asks Kirsty Williams very nicely if she'll be presiding officer, and then go for a minority government

Labour does a formal deal with Plaid

All the other parties club together and govern as a coalition, but that's as likely as flying bacon

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Agree. If they are performing so underwhelmingly with the Tories infighting and on the back foot to such an extent, it really doesn't say too much for the Labour leadership.

Anyway I've heard Corbyn's Cabal have decided their PR needs a shiny new vehicle so they're working on a glossy fly on the wall documentary film to show them in a new light. Evidently it's going to be called:

"Carry on in Denial"

:D

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Well our local guy dispatched Johnny come latelys army last night as at least he comes round and listens to voters concerns much more then the opposition do.

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and you still support them :confused:

An increased majority in Sheffield, and increased Labour vote nationally (btw, the widow mention is a bit low for you Hugh..).

Not pretending it's a fantastic night for Labour, just not the meltdown some were predicting/hoping for. I get the feeling Jezza might be a bit of a slow burner - some on the right seem to be obsessed daily with him, suggesting he's more of a threat than they let on.

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There's nothing low about pointing out Sheffield Brightside's new MP is the widow of the old one. The BBC did likewise in the 1 o'clock news.

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An increased majority?

2015 election, Labour majority of 13,807
2016 election, Labour majority of 9,590

You obviously subscribe to the Ed Balls school of counting...;)

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He could mean majority in terms of share of the vote. I have seen majority used in both contexts.

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Well that's just typical of the right wing media.

;)

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How was it disgracefully racist ? or is that just another one of your over emotive remarks like the other one about the widow

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By trying to link Sadiq Khan to terrorists because his religion. There was a delightful newspaper article by Zac on Sadiq with the picture of a bus blown up to go with it, nice....

Thankfully it's backfired and the only thing that's blown up is the election in Zac & Dave's face....

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It was skirting with racism imo. The Sun article with the exploding 7/7 bus was absurd.

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Personally l don't like any of the two London mayoral candidates but Goldsmith has certainly shown himself in a lesser light if you ask me out of the two with some of his behaviour during the campaign.

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my local candidate [ukip] came in second -voter turn out only 23% i guess people had more important things to do .

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Turnout has always been pretty low from what l hear PS for local elections.

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Turnout in Scotland was around 55%, which is high compared to a council election but really quite disappointing considering we were told 2014 heralded a new age of political engagement in Scotland.

Mind you, on the plus side it does suggest that more than a third of the people who voted Yes in 2014 were not sufficiently motivated to secure a second referendum by going out and voting SNP. :D

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It just seems strange that someone who got less votes than the previous election, and a smaller amount of votes more than the next candidate than in the previous election, could be described as having a larger majority...

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I can't recall where exact but I saw this exact same debate elsewhere last year and the upshot of it was that it depends on what you mean by majority. I think that it is number of votes rather than percentages though.

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I must say that the Mayoral campaign was lacklustre in the extreme. I've heard it said that the Tories were quite happy to sacrifice Mayor of London in order to help keep Corbyn in a job and to discredit Goldsmith who's been a major pain re Heathrow expansion.
Goldsmith seems to have had a personality bypass and Khan is almost as odious as Red Ken.

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Or the majority of those that turned out to vote would rather have a Labour mayor than a Conservative mayor.

Cheers

Grim

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An interesting theory, probably concocted about 7pm this evening, by the same spin Dr. who persuaded Zac to go for the racist campaign?? :dozey:

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What's wrong with Khan? Odious is pretty strong.

Also if it were the case they were 'sacrificing' the Mayoralty then Cameron wouldn't have bothered getting his hands dirty with it all. They seem to have simply lost because they ran a bad campaign, with a poor candidate in a city which trends towards Labour. The best quote I have seen was from an anonymous Tory who said "they ran a dog-whistle campaign in a city with no dogs", essentially pushing the Muslim thing isn't going to help you in London. It might even have hurt him as the turnout was the highest ever.

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WTF, he hijacked the Reliant!

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Odious, yes he is. It may be strong but it's just one of those pesky opinions we're all entitled to. He reminds me of Red Ken in a slimy sort of way and that's enough to make anything odious. ;)

As regards the Tory campaign, I'm only repeating what I heard on LBC this evening, from people much closer to events than me - Andrew Pearce and Iain Dale IIRC. Unlike previous occasions, in this area all I saw of any campaign was a UKIP banner and flags on an Audi estate parked around the corner. No posters, no banners, no presence in the high street, no knocking on doors, nobody at the polling station - it was bizarre. What I saw/heard of Goldsmith was deeply uninspiring, devoid of passion and crass at times. Like or loathe Boris, you'll never forget him. Contrast that with the boring billionaire's son for whom it all appeared a bit tiresome, a boring interlude between far more interesting campaign quaffing events. Goldsmith was already on a hiding to nothing in London and it seems he's a bit of a masochist to boot...

As for Khan, he's on the record as saying that more migration is good for London whist moaning about all the cars, pollution etc. Presumably, therefore, he'll build the tens of thousands of homes he reckons we'll need every year and ensure they're all occupied by people who walk everywhere, wear thick woolly jumpers to keep out the cold and don't want gardens. When all the available brown field sites are built upon he'll start building on the green belt because who needs that anyway and we need more people who'll live longer to look after all the older people who're living longer and causing so many problems... :spin:

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Most people in London don't drive, especially not migrants. The issues with pollution and cars is just because it's an old city with congested roads. Oxford Steet is two lanes and most of the surrounding area isn't friendly to cars either. If it was me I would start to look at banning private non-commercial cars in London and speed up the use of electric taxies and so on.

As for homes London needs more but it would be a damn sight more helpful if every development wasn't for luxury apartments. It's not relatively poor migrants that are the problem there but rich foreign investors that buy apartments as a place to store their money.

I would suspect migration probably is good for London given the constant demand the city has for more workers. Unemployment is low and the city has a very high amount of educated migrants. It's obviously in a different situation than the rest of the county. More people in means we need more housing and transport yes but London has a pretty high churn of people, few stay in the City for long, and it also has a load of people from around the UK coming down as well.

After all if London is to step-up it's house building and transport expansion then we may well need migrants to build them: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/p...sebuilder.html

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and put that thing in pavel's lug hole ;)

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That poor Reliant...

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/...2016/05/17.jpg

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Me thinks I hear the sound of sour grapes..

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It's been a bad day for some: London has overwhelmingly chosen a Muslim, Labour, Immigrant's Son ;)

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I think the Tories are quite happy for Khan to screw up London just to remind everybody how bad it could be under Labour. :D

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There's some pretty desperate straw grasping going on at the moment ;), I'm pretty sure the Conservatives would have preferred a win so Zac could remind everyone how great they're having it. Unfortunately the people of London had other thoughts.

Cheers

Grim

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As l say none of the two candidates impressed me but l will pause judgement for several years and see how much he improves or does not improve things in the next couple of years for our great metropolis.

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What power does the mayor of London actually have?

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I think it's a good thing - he's moderate who will appeal to a wide section of the community, and I believe he will a good Mayor.

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Given the main use of it seems to be keeping house prices high by restricting sustainable development that'd be those who already own property who need it.

Sadly he promised not to build wholesale on the green belt, so that'll potentially be more high quality, well used urban parks and green spaces built on to spare low quality scrub land to ensure the well-heeled have somewhere to exercise their horses.

Meanwhile London's air quality remains abysmal, and London continues to grow, just not as London but as the towns in the commuter belt which now reaches as far north as Yorkshire.

There's 75,000 hectares of green belt inside the M25. A quarter of that would be adequate for a million homes and would ease pressure on Greater London and avoid over-the-top densification there, while simultaneously reducing pressure on the entire south-east.

It's a meaningless designation, which is why it was allowed to double in size over 30 years. It achieves nothing beyond to move 'urban sprawl' from the towns and cities it chokes to just outside of it and in turn force people to commute through it.



---------- Post added at 12:20 ---------- Previous post was at 12:18 ----------

We'll see.

---------- Post added at 12:24 ---------- Previous post was at 12:20 ----------

If he was chosen because of his religion or heritage it is indeed a bad day. You'd hope London would choose the best person for the job. Rather looking forward to when someone's religion and heritage are entirely irrelevant to politics but that's a way away yet.

Fingers crossed identity politics isn't played in the next mayoral election but instead Mr Khan has to sell himself purely on his record. Had his policies been more robustly challenged rather than the hideous and ineffective campaign that was instead fought against him the result may have been different. His claiming TfL didn't need revenue from a fare rise while simultaneously claiming that Goldsmith would increase fares because TfL claim to need the extra revenue was a highlight, as is his announced desire to fire board members from TfL because it's unrepresentative. Straight from the Justin Trudeau school of 'meritocracy'.

I say of course the result may have been different. It probably wouldn't have as that would've depended on how much the electorate vote according to identity rather than policies, which seems to have a way to go too.

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So we build a gazillion new homes in London for more people to live in and still noboday has anything to say about when enough is enough for the infrastructure London relies upon. Not just transport, but stuff like sewers, utilities, schools, hospitals etc.

It strikes me as odd that when it comes to motorways we're told that building more of them just encourages more people to use them and makes the problem worse. Well if we just carry on building more homes for more people they'll be filled up with more people. What we need isn't a rapidly growing population, what we need is to control population growth and starting with mass uncontrolled migration seems obvious to me.

New migrants may well not own cars but anyone who seriously believes that they aspire to build new lives here, have families etc. yet not own cars is living in cloud cuckoo land. Taking kids anywhere on public transport costs a fortune.

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I'd imagine the Thames Water sewer upgrades alongside Crossrail are part of the plan to cope.

London's population was 8.6 million in 1939. It's only as recently as last year reached that mark again, so it's a somewhat different set of challenges from much of the rest of the UK.

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I didn't own a car the entire time I lived in London. Public transport, given the traffic, ends up a cheaper solution a lot of the time. :shrug:

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Well London already need a gazillion new homes which aren't being built. It is depressing the amount of times I see a new housing development only to find out upon a quick Google it's aimed at the high end of the market. There was a case a few years ago, repeated elsewhere, where a new development didn't have a UK marketing office. It was aimed purely at China and other foreign investors. That is the bigger problem.

If you live in London, zone 4 or closer especially, owning a car would be a unneeded expense. However I would say the demographic of immigrants in London differs from elsewhere. It's likely to be a very transient population who come and go. People tend to come down from elsewhere in the UK, or the world, for a decade or so before leaving again. People who start families tend to leave as well.

I don't think London suffers the same issues as the rest of the country. It faces different problems and it almost has to be treated differently. What is good for London may not be what is good for the UK and what is good for the UK may well not be good for London. Immigration is one of those issues, housing is another.

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230v like every one else :)

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Your predicted vision for London seems to be a City inhabited, within the inner parts, by the uber rich surrounded by ever increasing numbers of single, people in small flats with no outside space. If they want to have families and luxuries like cars they'll have to move on out and if they want to still work in London they'll have to spend £££££££'s for the privilege of just getting to work. I don't see how that helps London in the long term. It seems to be more the result of a failure to get to grips with the cause of the problem.

Whichever way you look at it, numbers are at the centre of the problem and developments being built with no thought for the future. It wasn't that long ago that 1950's and 60's developments were being razed to the ground - too cramped, no gardens, no community spirit, magnets for anti-social behaviour etc etc etc. Is that what we're going back to?

We need to put the brakes on speculative foreign investment, ensure that a good mix of homes is available and that London doesn't become a giant shanty town with a recreation of Monaco at its core.

We can talk about how many homes need to be built but unless London's population stops growing the number will never be enough, we'll always be playing catch up in terms of the homes and infrastructure needed to support them which is already creaking at the seams coping with existing numbers.

Something drastic needs to be done and soon but simply building ever more, ever smaller, more cramped homes isn't the answer.