Monday 3 May 2010

prediction

from The Times, widely reproduced around the blogs:

has Lib Dems in a very distant second place for Reading East with a 15% chance of winning the seat. Labour are third with a 5% chance and the Tories are a near certainty with a 77% chance of winning.
In Reading West, Labour are a bit stronger, and the Tories and Lib Dems a bit weaker, but the Tories are still ahead with a 65% chance of winning the seat.
Labour look like facing almost complete wipe-out in the South of England outside of London. If you draw a line from the Wash to the Bristol Channel, or indeed anywhere below Coventry, and look south of it, it looks like the will hold onto Luton North, Slough, two seats in Southampton, two seats in Bristol, Exeter and Plymouth Moor View, and only three of those look like safe seats.


Why is Labour "a bit stronger" in Reading West than East?  Anyone?  Perhaps more interestingly, in terms of the council elections in Reading, why has Labour got nothing positive to say despite more than 20 years of controlling the council and for 13 of those years having an MP as the paid lobbyist for Reading Borough Council?  Why do they just put out false propaganda about their opponents, especially in Abbey Ward, where Tory Tickner may not save her seat by pretending, as she has for years now, to be the Tory she is inside.  Incidentally, if anyone meets her on the street in the next few days they may wish to ask her to back up the claim she made, in an email to me, that the "rapaciousness of African men" is the cause of the high incidence of HIV in much of Africa.
All this, and Basher puts a picture of Mr D.P. Singh and other Sikh men up on his website, so I had to look (becomes thoughtful) and then informs us that on Saturday afternoon he went canvassing with Anneliese.  Canvassing?  Five days before polling day?  Canvassing?  What precisely were they going to do with any data gained from that?  Five days before polling day canvassing is finished.  Has to be.  Literature is going out, last-minute blitzing of PEOPLE YOU KNOW ABOUT is being organised.  They have lost it.

In the name of God, go.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

We know why Reading East is more hopeless than Reading West in the fascinating variants of degrees of hopelessness.

So does Tony Page.

The Hooded Clump said...

Labour party canvassing in Cockney Hill (that bastion of socialism) on Saturday afternoon.

Change of personnel needed, time to take stock and come back stronger. Right party, wrong people.

Very poor

duke said...

JG

Do you not feel the slightest twinge of sadness about Labours forthcoming demolition in Reading. Do you have happy memories of the heady days of local and general election success. Or is this closure and just deserts for your deselection?

janestheone said...

Of course I have happy memories of election successes in Reading and of many things we tried to do, and succeeded in quite a lot of them. No sadness at all. Labour's forthcoming demolition is richly deserved in Reading, and has partly happened already. the deselection ensured, in a pretty good year for Labour (we still had Tony Blair then)a narrow Tory victory, which was what some of the Reading boys actually wanted, and this year there is no doubt of a comfortable Tory result. Good. they deserve it. I do feel sorry for Anneliese, who presumably did not know that she would be kept firmly in the background in the way she has been. But she is not a novice candidate and should have checked things out first. No, no twinge of sadness at all.

Anonymous said...

Why feel sorry for Anneliese - you really are too NICE, Jane!

Anneliese is not a novice candidate and she was happy to live in the Fraudster's basement, breathing in poison about the previous Labour MP for sustenance and turning herself readily into a cheer leader for He Who Must Be Obeyed - ie, Salter.
Dr Dodds could, at any time, have said 'I want to run my campaign like this and am going to do so - and, by the by, I have arranged such and such events with local people, the press and Westminster key campaigners. Ad nauseum est.
Well, she didn't.
She chose to let Fraudster and co direct the shoot and was happy to play the little woman in the attic, or basement, or sink or what the hell.
She's got a good job; she ain't old. No probs then really. All down to life's rich pattern. Maybe it can be a footnote in her autobiog, or career biog or whatever the hell becomes attached to her name, but it won't be in Who's Who because she won't have been an MP.
End of.

Anonymous said...

Wiped out in the South.Presumably Malcolm Powers is busy polishing and,oiling,his old service revolver...