Election Year or Fear!

[swaledale]

Swale, "Not sure where your determining wthat at least half of the Reform votes have come from Labour?"

A simple analysis of facts. I recommend you look at where Reform gained councillors and who from. It's not tricky. I've been generous in assessing only half of those seats switched from labour.

After 131 results Con have lost 557 councillors, Ref gained 1444. Let's assume all Con losses switched to Ref and the LibDem, Green and Independents gains all came from a Labour drift left, then some 887 representatives in effect switched Lab to Ref - more than half of Ref gains. Source BBC, Sky News.

But please continue to live in laa-laa land if you think otherwise - and you have the gall to call Reform voters thick ��. Perhaps the analogy should be to Nero - you can sit there proving Reform are losing as England burns

Except that you haven't analysed the facts correctly, because the transfer of seats does not indicate where the votes have gone, for that you need to look at the split of votes between the parties.

I'll explain it for you. If say Labour had won a council seat with 30% of the vote previously, if that vote in this election is split between say The Green party, Labour and Lib Dems, for simplicity I'll say 10% each, and the Cons or other parties get 9%, then Reform only need to get 11% or more to win that seat without any Labour voters switching to Reform.

Obviously in practice its obviously more complicated than that but the principle is correct. A simple anlaysis of the votes cast for each party for each seat shows that in the main thats what has happened.

Of course some people who voted labour last time will have voted reform but the majority of votes that formerly went to Labour have gone to other parties and not Reform. A considerable number of people who voted Conservative last time have voted Reform, indeed that is where most of their votes have come from.

What we have is a situation where the voters have split on both the left and the right of politics thus enabling Reform and to a lesser extent The greens and Lib dems to win seats.

This is even more so in the Welsh and Scottish elections, where Plaid and SNP were the major winners.

I am not proving reform are losers, though their overall share of the vote at 26% is down on last time, indeed I've stated before that the biggest danger is this splitting of the vote. hence my reference to those that vote for another left party instead of Labour because of the "Gaza" issue. If that results in reform winning a seat, then they may well end up with a government far less symapthetic to their cause. But then that has been the lefts problem for decades, which has now been followed by the Conservatives, who historically were rather better at keeping a broad church of voters on board.

And I thought you were good with figures.