Six wards, four changes of hands and one tied percentage have produced seventeen contradictory analyses in a single group chat.
PORTLAND, Oregon – The emergency meeting of our expat group chat was called to order at a quarter to seven in the morning, Portland time, by a woman in a dressing gown holding a spoon of porridge, and these are the minutes, which I have taken myself because nobody else would do them properly.
Item one: apologies and who is present
Present: me, in a coat; Delphine, a retired signal operator from Leeds who now lives two streets away and speaks in headlines; and Tarquin, a Brighton man who joined by phone from a parked car and has not been told he is allowed to leave the car. Apologies were received from a comrade named Hugh, who has a sore throat and a strong view that the minutes will be wrong.
The business before the meeting was the council by-elections held the day after the Budget. As a Marxist I have no illusions about the narrowness of a single ward, which is why I read all six of them twice.
Item two: the results, as listed
I took the figures from Pollcheck’s page of council by-election results, and I will report only what that page states, with the usual warning that percentages are rounded and a page of results is not a prophecy. Six wards were contested. Four seats changed hands.
- Mid Argyll, in Argyll and Bute: the SNP gained the seat from an independent, on 46 percent.
- Worksop East, in Bassetlaw: Reform UK gained from Labour, on 46 percent to Labour’s 37.
- St James’s, in Dudley: listed as a Labour gain from Reform UK, with both parties shown on 38 percent.
- Beechwood and Heath, in Halton: Reform UK gained from the Liberal Democrats, on 35 percent, with the Liberal Democrats on 26 and Labour on 25.
- Dover Beck, in Newark and Sherwood: a Conservative hold, on 42 percent.
- Southwell, in Nottinghamshire: a Conservative hold, on 45 percent.
Delphine said, “So that is a trend.” Tarquin said, from the car, “It is six wards, Delphine.” Delphine said that a trend is just a number of wards that has not yet been asked to account for itself. I recorded that as the quote of the meeting.
Item three: St James’s, Dudley, or the tie
The meeting spent most of its time on Dudley, where the page lists Labour and Reform UK each at 38 percent and records a Labour gain. I want to be careful here. Percentages are rounded, so the page’s own figures cannot separate the two; it names Labour as the winner, and I have no other source with which to argue. It is a result for which a person could write a thesis, or a very long text message.
The chat did, in fact, write several. A comrade who describes himself as a “committed non-voter” said the tie was a sign that “the system has no center.” A Labour-voting friend said it was a sign that “persistence pays.” A Conservative friend in Seattle, who is in our chat because he makes excellent sourdough and has never been removed, said it was a sign that he should have bought a ticket home. Nobody mentioned that a tie on a rounded percentage is a tie only until someone looks at the raw votes, which I could not do from the page I had.
The Greens, who the page shows on 2 or 3 percent in the wards where they stood, would like it noted that they were extremely well liked in the chat, by roughly the same people who did not vote for them. The Liberal Democrats, who lost Halton, were praised for their leaflets. Everybody was fair to everybody, which is the surest sign that nobody was going to change a vote.
Item four: any other business, mostly my own
Under any other business I raised the matter of my own faction, a small group of Marxists who meet at a laundromat table and who spent the evening before the meeting splitting into two. The cause was whether a by-election result is “a data point” or “a mood.” We hold the position that a data point is a thing you measure and a mood is a thing you have, and that there is an enormous gap between the two, in which we keep the biscuits.
I should say that even with the faction, I was glad of the argument. Last night I had a pint with Tarquin’s cousin in a dim bar where a woman sang a folk song about a canal. The song had thirty-one verses. Nobody left. It occurred to me that this is what the whole thing is about, and I felt very homesick for a place where a result is announced in a sports hall and followed by a sausage roll.
A friend at the pantry sent a farm.fm headline, Iowa candidates oppose pipeline land grabs. I only know the headline, but it struck me as the single most unanimous sentence I had read all week, and I proposed that our group chat adopt it as a motto, with the word “pipeline” replaced by “agenda.”
The Budget the day before the vote, if you want the background, is summed up in LBC’s live coverage of the Budget, which is worth a read before you tell your group chat what a by-election means.
Next meeting
The next meeting will be held when the next ward does something. Motion carried. Delphine’s porridge was cold and Tarquin turned off the engine, which I took as agreement.
I sent the minutes to the people at Bohiney and to The London Prat, which has a page about what a British humour website does all day, which turns out to be about what we do: read the results and then explain why they mean us. You can find more of my daily notes at my daily notes at The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
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