"James Wilkinson Sword" wrote in message
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On Sat, 06 May 2017 12:08:43 +0100, tim...
wrote:



"Andrew Gabriel" wrote in message
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In article ,
(Andrew Gabriel) writes:
In article ,
Bod writes:
From what I've read and heard, most Labour voters ARE like sheep. I
hear it all of the time "I vote labour because all my family have
always
voted for Labour".

I think there's been a lot of truth in that, but a lot of people
who had always voted Labour for decades have abandoned the party
in last couple of years for two different reasons, Brexit, and the
party's recent move towards the far left (popular with Labour
members, but less so with the bulk of voters they need to attract).

Both Conservative and Labour voters were split on Brexit - it
wasn't a hard left/right issue. Now the Conservatives have come
out heavily for Brexit, they've pulled in lots of Labour Brexiters,
and I think they'll pull in all 5M UKIP voters (UKIP will be dead
in 8 weeks). Conservatives will lose some Remainers to Lib/Dems, but
that will be small compared with their gains from Labour and UKIP.

I think the most significant thing historically will be the number
of traditional left wing voters who've moved well to the right just
to ensure Brexit goes through. They'll probably move back a few
years after Brexit, but for now, they regard Brexit as more important
than left/right politics.

So, the local government election results are exactly what I
predicted above for the general election result.

This is actually slightly surprising to me in the context of the
local elections. I had expected Labour and LibDems to do better

LDs got 18% of the vote, far beyond their current national polling

that that did not result in more seats almost certainly can be attributed
to

Lack of proportional representation.

LDs usually manage ok on this percentage of the vote as their vote is more
targeted towards winnable seats.

But it didn't seem to work that way this time