The bad news: Soubry hangs on with a little help from Labour. The good news: Labour now has a government in waiting if it chooses not to be an opposition.

As I feared, softly softly did it for Anna Soubry and for that she is to be admired and congratulated. She was keeping her powder dry, just in case it led to a call today from Theresa May.

On BBC-TV's election coverage in the early hours of this morning she looked tired and shell shocked, not, I suspect by the fact that she survived Labour's onslaught in Broxtowe, but by what had happened across the UK. Seeing the game was up for Theresa May, she emerged from the shell she had made for herself and said '(Theresa May) should consider her position'. When asked by Dimbleby about her reduced majority she pointed out that she had got elected in 2010 on a smaller majority.

Anna Soubry in her eve of poll email listed '10 pledges', 9 and 10 being:

I will continue to campaign in Broxtowe and in Parliament for a fairer society based on tolerance, openness, free speech and democracy.

I accept and will continue to honour the EU Referendum result. We are leaving the EU and must now get a good deal. I will continue to make the case for the positive benefits of immigration and the single market.

Personally, I don't doubt her commitment to these things and I suspect her decision to stay away from public debates was to protect herself from saying things she might later regret, since the general thinking at the beginning of the campaign was that the result was going to be a landslide for Theresa May. In the event the election I described as 'madness' for Jeremy Corbyn and Labour turned out to be madness for May. The result nationally is as a good as a victory, if not better, given the fact that I cannot imagine another general election now until after Brexit in 2019. But I digress, I want to stay with Broxtowe for the moment. Here is an updated version of my Broxtowe constituency general election results summary 2001–2017 (click on table to enlarge):

Last night Greg Marshall got more votes than any Labour Broxtowe constituency candidate from 2001 to date and only the 2001 percentage turnout for Labour (48.6%) beat Greg's 45.3%. He was just 864 votes from victory. Put another way, had 431 fewer voters pit their cross next to Soubry and 432 more had chosen Greg, he would have won — a margin of less than 2%. Labour's mistake in Broxtowe was as I feared and said in a couple of my posts — it made too much noise and in the process pulled out Conservative voters as well as Labour voters. I hope this lesson will be learned and learned well so that come the next general election Greg can win handsomely. The awful truth is that, as I have also pointed out in recent posts, high turnouts work against Labour and my summary table demonstrates this point.

Nationally, I claimed that the very best Labour could hope for was a hung parliament. I didn't expect Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party to achieve this, but I am joyous and proud that they did. The media this morning in all its talk of Theresa May and the Conservatives hanging onto power makes no mention of parliamentary 'pairing', which allows MPs to be absence from Parliament because a Labour MP 'pairs' with a Conservative MP so both can be absent from Parliament at the same time. I hope Corby will tell May there will be no pairing during the course of this parliament with Conservatives and that Labour will only pair with the SNP, Liberals and Caroline Lucas.

I also hope Labour behaves like a government in waiting and not an opposition. Oppose May on nothing, put forward an alternative policy instead and dare the other parties to vote the policy down. 

I heard Corbyn say that if he became PM he would ensure the rights of EU citizens in the UK today. He still can and Anna Soubry will have to support him or break her 10th pledge (see above). Voters will see Labour being positive all the time and the Conservatives as being anti everything. 

My overwhelming wish is that Labour will work with the SNP, Liberal and Green parties to ensure the next UK Parliament is elected by the same PR system as the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly. Abolishing the House of Lords is taken as a given. Personally, I see no need for a second chamber.

Every vote should count and that is still not the case. This is an injustice we should not lose sight of in the heady days ahead as Labour Party members come to terms with what, by any measure, is a stunning victory for Labour.

I will return to the national result in a weekend post, having watched the rest of Nottinghamshire, Stoke South (which we lost), Hastings (which Amber Rudd held by a whisker), Greenwich, Birmingham and the Black Country closely, all places in which I have some kind of interest.

What historic numbers tell us about Broxtowe come Thursday

My 14 May blog looked at the likely outcome of the general election in Broxtowe, now just three days away, from a historical perspective. I headed it 'The erosion of the Labour vote in Broxtowe does not look good for 8th June'. I included some tables which were devoid of totals from the 2017 county council elections because Broxtowe Borough Council were dragging their feet in providing data which they could have provided in five minutes. The data finally arrived this morning, which has enabled me to update the tables, which you can see below (click on tables to enlarge):

What the data tells us quite plainly is that in the May County Council election just gone, the Conservatives were the main beneficiaries in the collapse of the Liberal and UKIP votes. Their vote went up from 27.7% in 2013 to 43.2% in 2017. Labour's share of the vote only increased from 28.5% to 29.8%.

In my 14 May post I wrote:

When I was younger and running elections I used to identify the core vote early, then work it. I was the view that I could win any local election with 10% of the vote as Labour by election day. As far those firmly against Labour were concerned there was no election taking place. I simply didn't contact them and as a strategy it worked. I am pretty sure the Conservatives in Broxtowe are doing this. 

This has been the Conservative strategy in Broxtowe. I have not had a leaflet from them, nor have others I have spoken to. I lay odds they are working their core vote and all Labour banging its drum does is to make that core vote more determined to vote.

I want to be wrong and, as some politician famously said, 'Seven days is a long time in politics' (or was it a week?). The London Bridge attack appears at this moment to be playing out to Theresa May's disadvantage and perhaps Labour has to find a way of exploiting this moment, but it may be too late.

As for the Broxtowe general election results since 2001, I pointed out that in my 14 May blog that, historically, a low turnout is to Labour's advantage. If you look at the County Council election a month ago it is the lowest turnout I have recorded. It will also be interesting to see what the electoral roll will be in terms of numbers. One would expect it to be climbing as the local population grows, but this does not appear to be the case and missing voters the general assumption is favours the Conservatives.

So where does all this leave us? I fear not in a good place. I will be happy if events prove the historical data wrong.

As one who will be sitting this election out for health reasons, I wish Greg Marshall and the Broxtowe Constituency Labour Party an amazing victory on Thursday — for that is what it will be!

What I would like to see on eve of poll this coming Wednesday

All the candidates in Broxtowe will be trying to reach their supporters with eve of poll leaflets. I am of the mind that it is not too late for all the candidates to work with Broxtowe Borough Council to produce a shared eve of poll card encouraging all registered electors to vote on Thursday. Below is my stab at a simple A6 card printed both sides. If all the parties work together they could reach every home in the Brtoxtowe constituency on Wednesday.

No doubt someone could design something better, but, somehow, all the political parties, have to come together to ensure that despair and cynicism do not result in a low turnout on Thursday. It behoves all politicians and would-be MPs to show leadership. Right now they can unite in Broxtowe in encouraging every elector to vote on Thursday.

I know it's not going to happened, but it doesn't stop me imagining the possibility — just like leaflets containing 500 word election statements from all candidates published by the Election Commission via local councils and sent to every voter. This is what is done for many elections, such as trade unions, pension funds etc. 

In search of sunny optimism for the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn

Today's Guardian has a wonderful piece by Alan Johnson headed 'Alan Johnson's Sgt Pepper pilgrimage' in which he remembers the album and revisits Liverpool. It would be very easy to dismiss it as nostalgia, but it taps into the topical and present day in unexpected ways.

What caught my eye was the following paragraph:


As Ian MacDonald said in Revolution in the Head, the greatest of all books about the band: 'Anyone unlucky enough not to have been aged between 14 and 30 during 1966-7 will never know the excitement of those years in popular culture. A sunny optimism pervaded everything and possibilities seemed limitless.'

Now I cannot claim to have been a Beatles fan at the time. I liked their music and, as people, they always held my attention. My first wife bought their albums, so I heard their songs regularly, my favourite from the moment I heard it was Eleanor Rigby and it remains so fifty years on. I was more into Joan Baez and folk, but whatever your musical tastes at the time, the words of Ian MacDonald were, and remain, true, especially the last sentence, which bears repeating:

'A sunny optimism pervaded everything and (the) possibilities seemed limitless'.

1966 was the year I moved from Wembley to South Harrow with my first wife, Tricia. We had married in 1965 and spent our first year together living with my maternal grandfather, my grandmother having died in 1960. I grew up with my grandparents, my mother unmarried until 1953, then starting a new family with my step-father, 'Uncle Jimmy'. Somehow I never saw myself fitting in, so I stayed with Nanna and Pop, as I called them.

Tricia and I both left school at fifteen and, thanks to Tricia's tenacity, saved enough money so we could put down a £300 deposit on a semi-detached house which cost us just over £3,000. In 1966, we were earning about £32 a week between us.

Today that seems eye-popping stuff, but it was still the same in 1975 when Susan and I bought our first house together in Mansfield with a similar deposit and for a few hundred pound more. Then, we were earning about £60 a week between us.

There were then schemes for low earners whereby the income tax relief came off the mortgage payments instead of being a tax allowance.

What we don't hear folk reminiscing about is how much it cost in the mid-1960s and into the 1980s to buy a TV, a washing machine or a car, to name just three 'luxury' items. TVs and washing machines were rented for about 35p a week (7/6d then).

The world was different then in many ways. I didn't know Nottingham until the early-1970s, but this photograph is dated August 1965 and comes from The Prestige Series Nottingham 2 by John Banks with photographs by G H F Atkins and published by Venture Publications in 2002. Sadly the book is out of print, but the occasional second-hand copy can be found. It is a truly wonderful collection of photographs showing Nottingham old trams, trolleybuses and buses. What makes them so good is the street scenes like the one above. August and most folk are wearing thick coats. How different to now.

To go with the music we had Harold Wilson, his 'The white heat of technology' speech a couple of years before, plus the prospect of what it offered; North Sea oil and, to cap it all, we won the World Cup at Wembley in 1966. Harold Wilson went up and down the country enthusing us with visions of a future offering more leisure and automation making live easier for all. 'Let's go with Labour' was the slogan.

Roy Jenkins is reviled by many, but I knew the man personally for a good few years, because I was a Labour city councillor living in Stechford, Birmingham. I did not agree with him over Vietnam, but when it came to social reform he led the charge, pushed along by a sea of great Labour politicans, names few remember today: Sydney Silverman, Fenner Brockway, Dick Crossman plus, of course, Barbara Castle, Derek Healey, Dick Crossman, Jenny Lee to name just a few.  As I saw somewhere recently, Harold Wilson stood on the shoulders of giants. Hanging was abolished, we got votes at 18, Homosexuality legalised, The Open University, so the list goes on. No wonder 'a sunny optimism pervaded everything and (the) possibilities seemed endless'.

I wish I could say 2017 feels full of sunny optimism. I want it to be, and I am beginning to think that Jeremy Corbyn might just have the makings of Harold Wilson MkII. Shame on me for doubting.

I still believe this general election is a mistake, and I am suspicious of media talk about the closing gap between Labour and the Conservatives in the polls. This election, like 2015, is all in the demographics: Facebook and Twitter etc belong to the young and the chattering classes. Oldies like me may do Facebook, but most seem to blog like me.

Us oldies are damned before opening our mouths as Mayite Brexiteers, when many of us are more left-wing and less accepting of austerity than the young who condemn us.

For the remainder of the campaign I'm going to promote sunny optimism. Here's my attempt at a logo. I'm sure someone can do better than me!

A reader remembers Beeston and wonders?

I received an email today which read:

Dear Robert,

Mainly to say how I enjoy your observations and congratulate you on returning following major surgery, "ready for anything".

I'm a former resident of Beeston - over 50 years since I left - but enjoy reading about dear old Beeston, especially politically. You might be amused about my start in politics; way back, probably 1948/9.

I worked at Boots offices in Nottingham, with a day release to Boots College, Beeston Works. We had a mock election, and I ventured to be the Tory candidate - I was resoundingly beaten by the Labour candidate, which brought it home to me what were political leanings in the Beeston area.

Since then I've gone through Tory and recently Lib Dem phases, but seeing now how the polls are moving towards Labour, might even vote for them, even in this Lib Dem run area, with Tim Farron in charge.

One thing that surprises me about your online work is the absence of comments to what you say - why is this do you think?

Regards,

Douglas Worrall

I'd like to thank Douglas for his kind words and to respond to his question in the final paragraph.

The answer is I don't know. Some folk tell me they have tried to post comments without success, some come through in the form of emails like Doug's. A few come direct.

Beeston is like its neighbour Lenton. Both draw you in and hold you fast. 

The important thing is that we all vote. I toyed with the idea of a postal votes at the county council elections, being just nine weeks after my op, but I decided I would go in person, as I will Thursday week. I really will miss not taking numbers on polling day at the polling station near our home with Susan. I look forward to doing it again in 2019 at the Borough Council elections.

Doug, assuming you read this, thanks once again for your email, you seem an OK guy and I am sure you will vote wisely come the day. I hope it's for your local Labour Party candidate wherever you are.