A rum affair with important issues conspicuous by their absence.
Some spiteful observations from a spoiled ballot paper…
Jeremy Corbyn retained his seat. He always seems to do well when the voters listen to him.
While the election outcome is nominally a big triumph for Keir Starmer, he polled fewer votes than Corbyn’s Labour last time.
Stark reality - people thoroughly detest the Tories, but millions of those people don’t find Starmer’s Labour much better.
Liz Truss didn’t retain hers - and immediately took responsibility for the problem, saying that they weren’t hard enough on migrants and the Tories needed to get rid of the Human Rights Act earlier on.
Ree Smog is gone. A character I would have liked if I saw him in a film, but really not suitable for ruling over real lives.
George Galloway failed by 1440 votes in Rochdale.
Results in full:
Paul Ellison - Conservatives - 4,273
George Galloway - Workers Party of Britain - 11,587
Michael Howard - Reform UK - 6,773
Andy Kelly - Liberal Democrats - 2,816
Martyn Savin - Green Party - 1,212
Paul Waugh - Labour - 1,3027
The results above are given in this ITV link, at the end. (Also here)
At the top ITV says:
“The Workers’ Party of Great Britain leader was beaten by Labour’s Paul Waugh by a little more than 2,000 votes in Rochdale.”
Perhaps there is a numeracy problem at ITV - see that 1,3027.
But I make the difference in the votes 1440.
The Labour party - also struggling with this difficult arithmetic - reported it this way:
“Workers Party of Great Britain leader Galloway secured around 11,508 votes, but Waugh, a former political journalist from the north-west town, secured more than 13,000 to win it back for Labour.”
"Around 11,508 votes. " This puts the difference as something upwards of 1500.
What reason can there be for these little lies?
Well…this result was reasonably close.
So it may be relevant that campaigners in Galloway’s workers party have been assaulted - twice. One in Rochdale itself:
In the other assault, in Sutton Coldfield, it was the son of candidate Wajad Burkey that was assaulted, causing Burkey to suspend his campaign, saying he feared for his life.
He also seemed to say there had been other attacks.
No arrests have been made.
Neither have I seen any reports of condemnation of any of the attacks.
Meanwhile a well fed Neil Kinnock is happy that there is no-one to oppose Kid Starvers Tory friendly policies:
Neil Kinnock cracks up as George Galloway loses seat
There’s a video of this which - fortunately - I can’t get to play.
But this must be something of a fruition for Kinnock, the main hope against Thatcher in the 80s. He carried a lot of hopes that he might finally ‘do it’.
We thought he was at least sympathetic to the left.
No wonder he’s laughing!
