Wrexham MP votes…
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[quote quote=166186]So Andrew, I know we don’t and will probably never see eye to eye, but you can know this, that you would have been a hell of a lot popular now with your views as an MP in this current Brexit deadlock and debacle.[/quote]
Hint of a Bromance here?
or has Matt been out walking in the hailstones without a crash helmet on?[quote quote=166186]P.s. Those moaning – well you should have all voted for and campaigned harder for Andrew Atkinson and pushed him over the line. He was 100% for Brexit all the way.
I did not see a single person on here or on Facebook or Twitter or in the press backing Andrew and his Brexit views. Andrew was your once in a generation chance to get rid of Labour from town. He was the bookies favourite and Election statistics mathematical certainty to take the seat.
Why do you think all of the Labour activists gave him such a hard time?
There is almost no chance that Atkinson’s replacement will ever command enough voters to beat Lucas. There are a very vocal number who say they will never vote for Lucas again, but there’s a silent majority that like MP1953 says will vote in their local Labour candidate to keep the Tories out. It’s been over 100 years now of no Tory MP in Wrexham.
So Andrew, I know we don’t and will probably never see eye to eye, but you can know this, that you would have been a hell of a lot popular now with your views as an MP in this current Brexit deadlock and debacle.[/quote]In a town like Wrexham you could stick a Labour rosette on an chimpanzee and it would most likely win the seat. Most people aren’t single issue voters, so you can’t just use the issue of Brexit to get a Conservative elected as MP of a town which has long been anti-Tory.
Atkinson was doing well in the polls, as were many Conservatives across the country early on in the campaign, the wheels fell apart not due to a lack of trying on a local level, but because Theresa May started to plummet in the polls due to her awful campaigning and mean-spirited manifesto. So eventually Labour won the seats that they are normally expected to win in Wales.
One of the big issues in British politics right now is the lack of representation for people, generally in working class areas like Wrexham, who lean left-wing in an economic sense, but also take a dim view of the EU, high immigration, identity politics, etc. The disconnect between Labour MP’s and their constituents in Leave-voting areas has never been starker.
[quote quote=166209]
P.s. Those moaning – well you should have all voted for and campaigned harder for Andrew Atkinson and pushed him over the line. He was 100% for Brexit all the way.
I did not see a single person on here or on Facebook or Twitter or in the press backing Andrew and his Brexit views. Andrew was your once in a generation chance to get rid of Labour from town. He was the bookies favourite and Election statistics mathematical certainty to take the seat.
Why do you think all of the Labour activists gave him such a hard time?
There is almost no chance that Atkinson’s replacement will ever command enough voters to beat Lucas. There are a very vocal number who say they will never vote for Lucas again, but there’s a silent majority that like MP1953 says will vote in their local Labour candidate to keep the Tories out. It’s been over 100 years now of no Tory MP in Wrexham.
So Andrew, I know we don’t and will probably never see eye to eye, but you can know this, that you would have been a hell of a lot popular now with your views as an MP in this current Brexit deadlock and debacle.
In a town like Wrexham you could stick a Labour rosette on an chimpanzee and it would most likely win the seat. Most people aren’t single issue voters, so you can’t just use the issue of Brexit to get a Conservative elected as MP of a town which has long been anti-Tory.
Atkinson was doing well in the polls, as were many Conservatives across the country early on in the campaign, the wheels fell apart not due to a lack of trying on a local level, but because Theresa May started to plummet in the polls due to her awful campaigning and mean-spirited manifesto. So eventually Labour won the seats that they are normally expected to win in Wales.
One of the big issues in British politics right now is the lack of representation for people, generally in working class areas like Wrexham, who lean left-wing in an economic sense, but also take a dim view of the EU, high immigration, identity politics, etc. The disconnect between Labour MP’s and their constituents in Leave-voting areas has never been starker.[/quote]
Yep that’s it pretty much summed up with regards to Labour, the plp does not represent traditional Labour voters any more who are mostly young idealists. LABOUR should be 25% ahead in the polls right now.
MP1953 – Obviously we both know that the referendum was not based on the first-past-the-post parliamentary constituency basis that general elections use, but I thought your point earlier was interesting about whether MPs should vote the way their constituencies voted.
So I tried to find out how the referendum results were distributed across parliamentary constituencies. To my surprise, it’s not actually possible. According to the House of Commons Library, results were published by “counting area” (this seems to have been NUTS 1 level) and “local authorities weren’t ever required to publish the results by Parliamentary constituency or by ward”. Results that have been published by parlcon (e.g. on Wikipedia) are generally based on ESTIMATES produced by an academic (Dr Chris Hanretty). The BBC later wrote to all local authorities asking for specific counts by ward where available and the result is that of the 650 parlcons in the UK, we only KNOW the referendum results for 169 of these (26% of the parlcons). The largest difference between Dr Hanretty’s estimates and the known result for a parlcon is Hall Green in Birmingham – he estimated that 43.3% there voted leave, when in fact 33.6% actually did. Other discrepancies were much smaller – and he got the leave/remain result the wrong way around in 6 constituencies – but we still only know the discrepancies for those 169 parlcons the BBC obtained the actual results for.
Given that there are no actual referendum results by parlcon for 74% of parlcons (and this includes Wrexham), it would be difficult for an MP to vote according to the referendum wishes of their own constituents. To be fair to MPs, another difficulty for them in knowing how best to interpret the wishes of their constituents is that since the referendum we’ve had a general election. Despite his stance on Brexit being at odds with the result of the “counting area” of “Wales”, Ian Lucas was voted in again, with 49% of the vote. This is a marked improvement for him on the 2015 general election result where he got 37% – but perhaps this is at least in part due to the fact that UKIP, which got 16% of Wrexham’s vote in 2015, managed to make a pig’s ear of their registration in the 2017 election and so did not field a candidate.
Wikipedia gives various distributions including “major cities” – in Wales, Cardiff voted remain and Swansea voted leave. The ward level data obtained by the BBC is available to download and does not appear to include any ward level results for Wales.
I think it’s easy to pick an approach that an MP could adopt to base their decision on. Ian Lucas could use the results from the counting area of Wales, or the fact that he was elected after the referendum despite his views being contrary to the referendum result. My own opinion is that Wrexham voted leave – but it is only my opinion based on anecdotal evidence and I could well be wrong. There is a wealth of information out there; but nothing is clear cut or directly comparable and everything is open to interpretation. How Ian Lucas interprets things may be different to you and I. I do find it astounding actually that disaggregated data on referendum results was not collated as standard. But I think that whether a person is pro-leave or pro-remain, the one thing we can surely all agree on is that this process has been a shitshow from the getgo.
[quote quote=166256]shitshow from the getgo.[/quote]
Isn’t that the title of the latest LP by Theresa May & The Grand Wizards?
I’ve found the album cover here:
[quote quote=166257]
shitshow from the getgo.
Isn’t that the title of the latest LP by Theresa May & The Grand Wizards?
I’ve found the album cover here:
[/quote]Hahaha. It would make a good album title!
Maybe for one of the tracks she could produce a cover of Nick Clegg’s song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUDjRZ30SNo
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