This Wretched Hive Of Scum And Villainy

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Mostly that article just tells you that Matthew Parris is extremely right-wing these days. But then he's started to openly advocate for eugenics so, no surprise.

I'm an armchair observer from overseas, obviously, and a left-wing one to boot, but it looks an awful lot to me like the Johnson government only seems "leftist" compared to the towering hard-right Thatcher legacy and the (overstated and mildly unfair) Blair-Brown reputation for capitulating to that legacy. I can't think of anything they've done that's made stateside news that would have been out of place for an early- or mid-twentieth-century Tory government, except maybe for some of the authoritarianism-adjacent policing/Home Office stuff.

I mean the Blair and Brown governments were a mile to the left of the Johnson government. Almost everything 'left-wing' that Parris is screaming about was just standard practice then and abandoned during the Cameron-Osborne era.

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His seat of Calder Valley fits a familiar pattern from these retirements - Tory until Labour took it in 1997, then retaken under Cameron. Whittaker scraped home with a 609 vote majority in 2017, so this definitely feels like one of those "writing on the wall" retirements.

Constituency was created in 1983 from parts of the abolished Sowerby and Brighouse & Spenborough constituencies, both of which were gained by the Conservatives in 1979. The former was reliably Labour during the postwar decades (and was represented for almost all of the period by Douglas Houghton, an important figure in the Party in the 60s and 70s), though the majorities were rarely large and became very slender in the 1970s as deindustrialization kicked in. The latter was a tight marginal with the smallest of Labour leans in which the winning candidate had a percentage majority of under 1% three times (and under one hundred votes on two of these occasions) during the postwar period. It is notable for a by-election in 1960, which was a Conservative gain from Labour not long after the Conservatives had won a general election with a large and increased parliamentary majority: Labour won it again in 1964 as part of the overturning of that large majority.

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Anyway, crime as a political issue. It is back.

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I might be wrong but I can't remember any Labour MPs using the 2010 boundary change to jump ship; there's something rather undignified about a junior minister or random backbencher moving across the country for a safer seat.

The culture in Labour for a while has been that if the Boundary Commission screws you over, you're expected to suck it up. This is a relatively new development in historical terms and reflects various things that happened in the 70s and 80s.

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Yes, Benn tried first for the nomination in Bristol South because he knew he was in trouble and it was a better bet.

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Bit weird as the report was pretty clear that he's an incompetent oaf.

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Tory Momentum with knobs on, good luck with that eh.

Momentum was always - as I once overheard a then senior member of the Welsh Government say on a train! - a bit of a paper tiger, as its post-2019 trajectory as demonstrated. This feels like it might be a little different: for one thing it's not really post-hoc in the same way, which was really always one of Momentum's big problems...

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I wonder whether Miriam Cates MP and the others there so concerned about the birthrate are aware of precisely which government introduced various caps on child benefit a number of years ago?

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Labour's wins in 2005 and 2010 were largely down to the very strong personal appeal of Russell Brown (the MP for Dumfries 1997-2005 and previously a well-known local government figure), who still managed a quarter of the vote when Götterdämmerung struck, which is about what Labour would usually have polled in the constituency (had it existed) prior to 1997.

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2001.  Al will be able to say more about how the Tories managed to lose it.

Ludlow was an open seat in 2001 and the local Conservative Association made the courageous decision to select a candidate, Martin Taylor-Smith, with no ties to Shropshire, the Marches or even the wider West Midlands and who was, in fact, from, and still lived in, Kent, a place so distant that it might as well be in France as far as most people in Shropshire are concerned. Local irritation was amplified by the fact that the constituency had last had an attentive MP back in the 1970s (the retiring incumbent, Christopher Gill, was from Wolverhampton, which is relatively local, but was more interested in pursuing his various hobby-horses than representing the constituency, and his predecessor, previously an MP for a constituency in the Liverpool suburbs, was largely notable for being very fortunate to have avoided arrest as a result of a privatization-related insider trading scandal) and the fact that Taylor-Smith came across as a rather pompous man with a tremendous sense of entitlement. Gill was also to contribute in a small way to the fiasco that unfolded by making crudely racist remarks (to back-up another retiring Conservative MP who had also made crudely racist remarks) from which Taylor-Smith made no attempt to distance himself.

The constituency still had a solid majority in 1997 (12.7%) but this was inflated by local confusion as to which opposition party was the best option to vote for: the LibDems managed 30% and Labour 25%. But Labour now had unexpected gains in the county to defend and so activists were under the usual instruction to visit those places rather than to fight a flag-flying campaign locally. This left the path clear for the LibDems, who had already chosen a very strong candidate: Matthew Green, a big jolly man from a well-known local Tory gentry family and who came across himself as essentially an old-fashioned Tory Wet. As well as the inevitable tactical squeeze message, he ran hard on the obvious contrast between himself and Taylor-Smith - or, as the leaflets always referred to him as, 'The Conservative from Kent' - but avoided getting overly nasty with it, which made it all the more effective. This would still not ordinarily have been quite enough to win, but Taylor-Smith had clearly not expected to actually have to campaign seriously, and reacted badly to this turn of events: there were numerous incidents in which he behaved rudely to wavering Conservative voters on the doorstep, and word got around very quickly, as it always does, and proved to be the final straw.

The strange part is that Taylor-Smith did actually move to the area after his defeat, and spent a number of years as a local government figure in Ludlow. He has since returned to Kent and is a parish councillor near Tunbridge Wells. Green, meanwhile, left politics after his narrow loss in 2005, but was heavily involved in the recent LibDem by-election triumph at North Shropshire.

The seat is currently proposed to be renamed South Shropshire in spite of only minor boundary changes.  Those boundary changes, although minor, do add a couple of rural wards from Shrewbury & Atcham, and I've seen a suggestion that that constituency's incumbent might now want to follow those wards.

We are going to be absolutely deluged with creeps and I hate it.

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LOL Boris Johnson

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So, apparently, it is a very bad idea to flagrantly lie to a committee that is investigating you for lying.

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This is rather amusing given all the stuff about how he was so honourable to stand down after the division of his constituency and so on. Hahaha.

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So. Emails. About weddings. Emails.

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I believe a Conservative MP has done the chicken run across the border! Tories have selected a Welsh MP for somewhere in Shropshire so at least it’s close!

For North Shropshire as well. Yes. I know. Yes.

Somewhat astonishingly he's not the only chicken runner they're standing for a Shropshire constitency: they've just selected Stuart Anderson (Wolves. S.W.) to run for Ludlow (sorry 'South Shropshire'). This is... a... a... brave... combination of selections.

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How active are the Lib Dems in South Shropshire at the moment?  IIRC their base tends to be the hill country close to the Welsh border: Clun, Bishop’s Castle and so on.

Reasonably so: they never collapsed completely in local elections here. Strongest, as you say, in the West of the constituency where there's a genepool element to their vote, and also in Ludlow.

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I will carefully note that the local election results in that constituency were actually not uninteresting.

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I just don't understand where all this funding is coming for think thanks who produce reports that no one ever reads. Like who thinks this is a good use of their money ?

I'm half tempted to set up a mock think tank - 'the Institute for Institutes' perhaps, or the Institute for Institutional Ideas' - but I worry that it's just not possible to actually parody these things effectively, as they are so absurd already.

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God-tier chicken-run attempt reported: Jamie Wallis (Bridgend) has apparently been shortlisted for Windsor.

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These are the type of situations that occasionally produce a surprisingly ginormous swings to the Lib-Dems.

Ordinarily it's more likely to do so in a rural constituency or a constituency based around a substantial town with a firm sense of self and the local pride that comes with that rather than in commuter territory... but it just so happens that Windsor is an open seat because the extremely sketchy incumbent has managed to bankrupt himself, which is not a great look.

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Oh dear.

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You may wish to note the publisher of her book. Normally a former Prime Minister can be guaranteed of a discreet, informal bidding war between major publishing firms if they decide to write a book: Theresa May's, for instance, is published by an imprint of Hachette. Truss's tract is to be published by Biteback Publishing. Who are Biteback, exactly? Not a large publisher and not, in fact, a mainstream publisher at all: they are an outfit owned (through his usual complex legal structures) by Lord Ashcroft and it really is only a step up from self-publishing. This is the right-wing equivalent of being published by Verso.

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It’s almost Bushie Esque for old enough atlas users…

It works horrifyingly well, including the objectively frightening diet.

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I suppose the "Global Left" (including the international finance markets, well known for their Marxism) being the cause of all our ills makes a change from invoking the "Blob" at least.

Forex and Bond Market traders included. A notorious cabal of lefties, indeed.

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...citing chronic migraines...

Yes, I'm sure that's the reason. Fundamentally (and unlike most of the 2019 intake, which will, I think, always be remembered as a notable vintage, but not in a good way) she is not an idiot and will understand the value of getting out early to avoid the rush. She is also young enough that it is possible that politics was simply not what she expected it to be.