Skip to main content

The losers!

It's never who you think, and yesterday the biggest loser was the Scottish National Party!  Sure the Tories got walloped, that's not a surprise, but they retained 121 seats, Reform got 4, nowhere as much as they had hoped and they too will go down the history hole as they rightly deserve. The surprise was the Liberals from 8 to 71. That's the surface result.   

In terms of the vote, Reform was the third most popular party well ahead of the Liberals, but it's not so much that the Liberals gained votes it's that Reform took away from the Tories.   Labour saw its share of the vote rise by 1.7%, the largest gain was Reform, but it was diffuse, and so Tories voters voted for Reform.  No one expected that the Tories would do well, but no one saw the total destruction of the Scottish National Party.   Righly, the Tories got killed at the poll, the vast majority of their supporters went for Reform, and that allowed the Liberals to slip between Tories and Labour.

Sunak is done, but he was always done.   Keir has a massive majority.  The vote Reform  received will create a force for at least the next cycle.  It is entirely possible that Reform does well in the 2029 elections, but it is also possible that the Tory flock returns to its natural habitat, but that's a story for the future.   

Note:  If the UK had proportional representation Labour would have won 206 seats, Conservative 150, Libs 75 SNP 15 and Reform 87.  A coalition government...not relevant but interesting.

Note2:   I didn't even notice, but Liz Truss lost her job too.   Now she's on equal footing with Boris to reclaim her position as the leader of the conservatives...  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ok so I lied...a little (revised)

When we began looking at farming in 2013/14 as something we both wanted to do as a "second career" we invested time and money to understand what sector of farming was profitable.  A few things emerged, First, high-quality, source-proven, organic farm products consistently have much higher profit margins.  Secondly, transformation accounted for nearly 80% of total profits, and production and distribution accounted for 20% of profits: Farmers and retailers have low profit margins and the middle bits make all the money. A profitable farm operation needs to be involved in the transformation of its produce.  The low-hanging fruits: cheese and butter.  Milk, generates a profit margin of 5% to 8%, depending on milk quality.  Transformed into cheese and butter, and the profit margin rises to 40% (Taking into account all costs).  Second:  20% of a steer carcass is ground beef quality.  The price is low, because (a) a high percentage of the carcass, and (b)...

Spray painting Taylor Swift G650 aircraft (updated)

 First, a bit of paint will not harm anyone.  These climate activities are going to learn two things in the next few days:  (1) Trespassing at an airport is a felony almost anywhere in the world.  That means criminal prosecution.   (2) removing paint from an aircraft is expensive.   So these climate activists are about to find out the reach of the British criminal system and it will not be pleasant, the UK has very strict laws about that, I would be surprised if cleaning the aircraft of all the paint will cost less than $100,000.     I am sure that when they planned (premeditation) this little show they had a very valid logic to doing this.  Tonight, they are probably realizing the depth of their troubles.   I understand that in the UK it's a minimum one-year jail sentence.    Also, good luck travelling with a criminal trespass charge against you.  I am relatively certain that the airline industry will ...

Janet Yellen from China supporter to Hawk...

There is rarely serious news in the world these days, it seems that most newspapers are filled with headlines and little else, and then Ms Yellen went to China.  Secretary Yellen has long been known in the Biden administration as the voice of moderation when dealing with China, yet as her trip which concluded yesterday a hawk was born:  She warned the Chinese against dumping goods in the United States.    fighting words! The American administration is very concerned about the lack of Chinese domestic consumption.   Even before the COVID-19 epidemic, there were already the beginning signs of a slowdown, automobile sales were off.   China is facing domestic deflation (a clear sign of collapsing demand) China imports few consumer goods, they import raw materials and intermediary goods.   It seems that the American administration is concerned that the Chinese administration will dump consumer goods abroad to keep its manufacturing machinery ...