Elections - Who are you going to vote for?

Interesting that Labour gained 106 Council seats overall but reckon it could have been a lot more but for UKIP eating into their vote. Still they were the biggest winners on the day.
UKIP +89 seats
Toerags -97 seats
LibDems -103 seats

The UKIP Fox is now in the Westminster hen house.

So what is DC going to have to do here?

Labour up 106 seats.

UKIP up 89 seats.

When you compare available resources and total number of seats contested, I think it would be hard to argue that UKIP weren't the biggest winners on the night.

And just wait 'til Sunday when the European results are in.....

scottjames30 wrote:So what is DC going to have to do here?

He's doing it already - keeping his swede down and sending his minions out, in front of the cameras, to try and pretend that it wasn't a disaster for them last night......

I'm just glad the Lib Dems got the twatting they so thoroughly deserved after showing their true colours after the last General Election.

scottjames30 wrote:So what is DC going to have to do here?

Help himself to a large slice of humble pie and start taking UKIP a lot more seriously. Net migration and a firm policy on our future in Europe would be a start.

The early results indicated Ed Milliband would face intense criticism over the next 48 hours, including over his personal performance and his appeal to working-class voters. The inquest is likely to focus on whether his campaign strategists realised early enough that UkIP posed a threat to Labour as much as to the Conservatives.

Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary and Labour election co-ordinator, insisted there were "grounds for optimism" in key target seats and that the party was well-placed to win the general election.

But the night was described as a wake-up call for the main political parties by John Healey, Labour MP for Wentworth and Dearne.

"People are angry. They are saying they aren't hearing enough of what they feel in what we politicians are saying," he said. "For me today was compounded when I was out knocking on doors and one man, a lifelong Labour voter, said to me: 'John, I'm voting for UKIP today. You all need a kicking.'"

In Labour target seats further south and east, such as Portsmouth, a strong UKIP vote was destroying the party's hopes of making more than 400 council gains.

The leader of the Labour group in Portsmouth, John Ferrett, said UKIP's performance was "causing mayhem". The party also suffered a major blow in a key election battleground after the Conservatives held on to Swindon council, days after Milliband embarrassingly failed to recognise the name of the party's group leader in the borough.

But the man in question, Jim Grant, insisted Milliband's gaffe had not had an impact on Labour's disappointing showing in the Wiltshire town.

"

Reebok Trotter wrote:The early results indicated Ed Milliband would face intense criticism over the next 48 hours, including over his personal performance and his appeal to working-class voters. 

I don't think Mr. Ed appeals to voters of any class - he's a hard man to like, especially as he tries to use the same body language and presentation as an early Blair. I guess that when he was elected as Leader they hadn't yet realised that smarm was passe.
Still Labour make big gains despite his lack of voter appeal so the commentators shouldn't only be focussing on how many more seats they would have won if they had a different Leader and had taken precautions to head off UKIP defectors but also look into what it was about their policies that persuaded voters to vote Labour despite these shortcomings. Or was voting Labour a protest vote against the Coalition and nothing to do with their policies?

wanderlust wrote:

Or was voting Labour a protest vote against the Coalition and nothing to do with their policies?

A didfficult question to answer. Probably a bit of both.

All joking apart, not voting labour yesterday was a difficult decision for me.

I've always considered myself a dyed in the wool Labour supporter. (I was a Young Socialist, was active in supporting the Local Labour Party during my late teens and early twenties and was a card-carrying party member until about ten years ago.)

I shed tears of unadulterated joy when Labour got in in '97 with a massive majority and really thought it would be the start of something special.

Little did I know that the shear size of that majority would eventually be the party's undoing.

They got lazy and New Labour became "Tory Lite" and the rot started to set in.

Honestly, if I saw Blair in the street today, I'd punch him in his smug face.

As for Miliband, he's just a bland, watered-down copy of early Blair, lacking in both charisma and substance.

I want to vote Labour, but I just can't bring myself to do it nowadays.

(And that's without going into the disastrous job Morris and his cronies have done in Bolton over the last twenty five years. I used to work for Morris and even as a 17 year old pot washer, I could see then he was a thoroughly unpleasant, self-promoting, religious nutter....)

Reebok Trotter wrote:

wanderlust wrote:

Or was voting Labour a protest vote against the Coalition and nothing to do with their policies?

A didfficult question to answer. Probably a bit of both.

Historically it's happened a lot where people register their discontent with the Govt by voting for the main opposition so I imagine there's a fair degree of this. 
That's the thing about protest votes - they show what people don't like and not what they do like so we're not much wiser about what they really think.
I think Brits like to complain a lot but are not often brave enough to put their opinion behind a specific way forward for fear of it not working out. It's a lot easier to find fault than create something.

wanderlust wrote:
I think Brits like to complain a lot but are not often brave enough to put their opinion behind a specific way forward for fear of it not working out.

That's exactly the reason why we need people like Farage.

Reebok Trotter wrote:

wanderlust wrote:
I think Brits like to complain a lot but are not often brave enough to put their opinion behind a specific way forward for fear of it not working out.

That's exactly the reason why we need people like Farage.

TBF, Nigel talks a load of sense, i'd rather him be in-charge of our country rather than 'out of touch of the working man' Cameron and his puppet Clegg.

And he's got a good sense of humour.

My father was a devout Labour man through and through. A working class engineer living in a two up two down terraced house. He always had the opinion that the Tories were not interested in the working classes. My grandfather was the same.

My father was a big supporter of Harold Wilson but when James Callaghan took over he lost all enthusiasm for the Labour party. The winter of discontent in 1977 was the turning point. Binmen and grave diggers on strike. Refuse piled up on the streets and bodies piled up in mortuaries waiting to be buried. Somebody or other was always on bloody strike and he had seen enough.

' It's time for a change son. Let's see if a woman is any better at running the country ' he said. We both voted for Thatcher in 1979. We could have gone with the Liberals but my dad reckoned they were a bunch of willy woofters, especially after the Jeremy Thorpe scandal and the whispers about fat Cyril..

As time went by it was Kinnock's turn to lead Labour. We couldn't vote for him because he was Welsh so the Tories got our votes again.

John Smith was a breath of fresh air for the Labour party but unfortunately he passed away before achieving the highest office. I think he would have made a good leader. The young pretender, Blair took over and we liked what he had to say so we gave him our vote. I went to a rally in London where Blair gave a speech. At that time he was the deputy Home Secretary. He talked a lot of sense but sadly he turned out to be a Tory in disguise. New Labour was Old Tory. My father didn't like Gordon Brown either. He referred to him as a smug git.

He passed away earlier this year but had he been alive he would of voted for UKIP, of that I am certain.

Lets get out of Europe, Lets get out of Europe la la la la, la la la la.

I voted Green. The lentil eaters are on the march. 

Scott,the above is an hour of my life I'm not going to waste.

...says the man who posted a clip of Bruce Forsyth pretending to be Sammy Davis Jr....... 

It's a big eye opener for politicians to have UKIP doing so well, if they weren't taking them seriously before they certainly are now. It's obviously not as simple as discrediting them as racist bigots, they need to examine the reason people are backing UKIP, personally I can't understand it.

Farage is a great speaker, no doubt about that so is that why people vote for them? Because they like Nigel? I don't get the argument he's not like the other politicians because he used to be a normal career guy, because he was a city trader so pretty far out of touch from reality.

I hope people aren't voting for their policies, aside from the EU which makes up 99% of what they talk about their other policies are madness. Bring back hand guns, don't believe in global warming or womens rights, just sounds like they want to take us backwards to me.

Clearly people are disillusioned, but why choose UKIP? I can just about get the Torie to UKIP mindset but Labour to UKIP makes no sense to me, I just can't understand what people see in them that would make them good leaders in this country.