The north side of my town faced east, and the east was facing south
Is it me or does the leader of Her Majesty's opposition look a little like F1 legend Michael Schumacher in this photograph?
As it was raining yesterday I thought I'd trawl through some of the material on the Interweb about the 2001 and 2005 General Elections. The idea had come to mind after reading a couple of message boards and trying to get a handle on how we, the great unwashed, feel about having David Cameron as a Prime Minister. It was an interest also sparked by a couple of polls during the last week that have shown that Gordon Brown isn't doing too badly in the leadership stakes, this was of course before Andrew Rawnsley's old news was reheated for public consumption in the pursuit of book sales.
Anyhoo, there are two very good research papers online from Essex University. This one deals with the 2005 General Election and this one looks at electoral choice in 2001. Two things come through after reading the two reports, firstly I need to get a life but more importantly in a country which prides itself on not having a political class that is presidential in style, the leader who appealed to the public most in 2001 won easily and the leader who was disliked least won in 2005.
Michael Howard wasn't trusted in 2005, ironically given what has happened in the last 5 years the economy was the single biggest reason for voters going Labour in 2005, we now know that the economy was built on shifting sands but we aren't quite the banana case some of those on the right would have us believe. In the wake of 9/11 the Conservative Party were seen in their traditional role of being hard on crime, immigration and terrorism but ultimately they had a leader even the most avid anti-Blairite couldn't see themselves voting for.
Go back to 2001 and Labour was still on a high after 1997. The electorate trusted them, they trusted the Blair/Brown combo and there was little or no chance that the Conservatives were going to change the political annihilation that had taken place four years earlier.
What has struck me having trawled across the great intellectual wasteland is that if you steer away from those message boards and debating areas that only attract followers of either party and step into places where a meeting of minds and ideologies takes place, those in the blue corner are getting more concerned the nearer we get to May. There is a real feeling that this General Election is going to be a really close run thing, in fact it's quite possible that we could have a re-run of the events of 1974 and have two elections in the same year.
It's not just football managers who will be experiencing squaky bum time come May.
3 comments:
Indeed! Put him in Ferrari colours and photograph at a race track and I bet more than a few would be taken in...bit like voters really! ;-)
Re the rest, what a shit pile...no, not your post (!!!) I mean what is going on; I posted this paragraph earlier on the Guardina article about the latest poll:
"This is good news, hopefully by election it will be neck and neck so we may just see the biggest party's supporters (the non-voting majority) turn up to the bun fight: it is worth remembering that even in Blair's 1997 landslide he still didn't get as many votes as John Major in 1992, this is an incredibly telling statistic and in subsequent elections "democracy" has been shown to be slowly drifting down the toilet as labour became crappier than ever and the Conservatives couldn't fight the spin machine.
I live in hope of an 75 t0 80% turnout, it could go either way but at least it would beat what we have now.
Sorry, that last sentence was part of my Guardian effort too ...funnily enough 2001 was the only GE that I have had a really active role* in and it was one where I didn't think the Conservatives had a hope nationally (the honeymmon was still flowing although I'm still at a loss to know why. I think many people [inc media] were just lapping up the good times with no thought for what was the future [good or bad])
* managed the 3rd best swing to the Conservatives in the country!
I think I've mentioned before my Mum's Dad who was a Conservative voter and party activist used to say that the members would turn out in big numbers if they thought they were going to lose.
At the moment it's all so bitty, like turning up at a Christmas party and complaining about the sausage rolls even though the music is crap.
70-80% turnout, now that would be something special indeed.
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