Starmer's Uxbridge by election balls up goes beyond ULEZ.

Right so, three by elections, three very different sets of results a hold and two losses for the Tories and just the one win for Labour, means Sunak can breathe a sigh of relief that he’s not the first PM since 1968 to lose 3 seats in a single day, but Starmer will be rather cross he only took the one seat and not even the one he was odds on to win. We’ll start with that one, Uxbridge and South Ruislip, the seat Boris Johnson vacated. First things first, turnout was down. Not surprising Damo, it’s a by election, however I did expect better because these poor sods had had to put up with Boris Johnson as their MP up until now, you just felt like the appetite to send the Tories packing was legitimately there, put yourself in their shoes, you’d had the bloviating blonde baby making factory as your parliamentary representative, he’d broken the law, his time as PM was marred by offensively bad decision making, loss of life bad potentially, so much so that a 3 year inquiry is under way and whilst all of that is going on, he’s not even talking to you about your issues, he’s making millions in America on the speech circuit. So turnout down by 17%? Struck me as disappointing. The result in the end was that the Tories held the seat, taking 13,975 votes, 45.2% of the vote, which is down 7.4%, so they held it despite losing ground. This was effectively damage limitation. Labour ran them incredibly close though, their candidate, Starmer’s choice of course, Danny Beales took 13,470 votes, 43.6% of the vote, which was an increase in vote share for Labour, but at a measly 6% increase, you really expected better if people were going to turn out to get the Tories out, if that was the driver for people during these by elections, if they really wanted to give the Tories a beating. That did not happen here. I’ll come back to some of the other results presently I think one or two of them bear consideration as a possible further explanation of these results, but lets address the official Labour Party reasoning for failing to take what was thought to be the easiest one for them to win and that’s ULEZ. London Mayor Sadiq Khan is about as popular as a dose of the clap right now in London over this, hell bent on expanding ULEZ, or the Ultra Low Emission Zone, which, if your vehicle is not up to emission standards, costs you £12.50 a day to drive in inner London. Khan is rolling it out despite protest against it, to all of London including Uxbridge and South Ruislip in outer London. The further out from the capital you get, although still not a cheap place to live by any means, as in any other large town and city, you tend to find the cheapest accommodation by the less well off households the further out you go. Therefore by rolling out ULEZ to cover all of London, it’ll hit more poorer households, hit more with older cars, potentially cripplingly so. Now for many of us who don’t live there we might think, well, they’ve got fabulous public transport, but that’s less reliable the further out you go too and is actually besides the point when you look at this in terms of things voters are going to the polls thinking about. There’s a right way and a wrong way to win people over to the arguments and issues surrounding pollution and climate change and ruling by diktat is always wrong. No wonder Starmer and Khan get on so well, two tiny men with superiority complexes who like imposing their will come what may. Khan is well on his way to losing the London mayoralty for Labour with the way he’s conducting himself and on this issue, but is this really the sole reason they lost? I don’t think so. You see the third placed party in this by election turned out to be the Greens. Hardly the result you expect if people are anti climate change, or even anti ULEZ to the point they’d still back the Green candidate. Although there’s no denying this was very much a two horse race, the Green vote share rose by 0.7%. The Greens are more and more being seen as the socialist alternative to Labour by more people on the left though, they won just 893 votes, but given Labour’s Danny Beales only lost by 495 votes, arguably people going Green in disgust at Labour and at Starmer, cost them the win. I could point at the long list of candidates who took part in this particular by-election and make the same arguments, but the last election here drew a lot of attention and a lot of comedy entrants too because who didn’t want to dress up in a furry costume and stand next to Boris Johnson? There’s another angle for socialists to have walked away from Labour here too and that is the fact local Labour didn’t pick Danny Beales, they picked a local lefty called Connor Liberty and he got ditched on the basis he was too young, despite actually being only 4 years younger than Labour’s candidate for the Selby and Ainsty by-election. Beales wasn’t local, he was in fact a member of Starmer’s own constituency of Holborn and St Pancras, so the Starmer connection, combined with him being imposed on them, will have upset and driven local Labour members to potentially have downed tools. It was high profile though, this by election, all the big Labour names were there at some point, yet even that didn’t matter, so can we pin all that on Danny Beales being imposed? Well, there’s no escaping Starmer’s recent policy announcements, or rather the changing his mind about policy announcements and scrapping them. The Kid Starver effect right before this by election, given how close it was, how much did saying he’ll keep starving kids by keeping the two child benefit cap come into play? It’s hardly a reason to vote for Labour is it? Labour basically lost what was predicted to be an obvious win for them based on their national polling. They needed a swing somewhere in the region of half of that polling to win here and they failed to get it, which should put some perspective on the veracity of those polling numbers. Instead of taking stock, taking some time this morning, over the next few days, to look at how this result occurred, they’ve embarked on a blame game already, pointing the finger at Sadiq Khan as being solely to blame. They gained 6% here, they didn’t go backwards like the Tories did, they gained, just not enough yet still civil war breaks out as someone has to be at fault for this, and we can’t let it be Keith. I know, we’ll let the London mayor cop the blame. Well there’s two other by elections to look at, one of which Labour also lost and you can’t blame Khan for that one. Labour lacks the appeal it’s polling numbers indicate it has got. It has lost the boots on the ground that always came from the left, as many have left the party and gone elsewhere, I can relate, I’m such a person down here in Cornwall, but the left were the ones who went out and were most active, the desire for change driving them. That change has been taken away, so we’ve all gone elsewhere or stayed at home. Even those still in the party, you can’t force them out on the streets to campaign, especially for a candidate they didn’t choose, after their choice was taken off them! A big fat Starmer shaped elephant in the room is behind this loss, snatched from the jaws of victory and Labour need to face up to it. Thanks for watching, I hope you found this video useful, please do like, share and subscribe to the channel if you did, new content posted daily, meanwhile here’s another video recommendation for you where going Green was a perfectly understandable thing to do for those who might remember Starmer letting the Tories draconian Public Order Bill pass by sitting on their hands as the Greens tried to destroy it with a fatal motion in the Lord’s, for those wanting an opposition party that actually opposes and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.