The High Court has rules that the Oldham East and Saddleworth result at the 2010 General Election is to be re-run. The LibDem candidate, Elwyn Watkins, had complained that Labour's Phil Woolas had made false statements about him in a leaflet.
This is going to be interesting! The LibDems have lost an enormous amount of support since pitching in with the Conservatives. And it's unlikely that the coalition would have wanted a public show of support/protest this early in the parliament.
Not sure who is going to win the election, but I am pretty sure there's going to be several losers.
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Just thought I'd share that with you Chizz so you don't feel alone on your own on this thread.
Oldham is a shitehole.
A real test for the coalition Baroness Warsi has confirmed the Tories are fielding a candidate against the Lib Dems .
This is interesting in electoral law , if misleading the electorate is a crime then for example should we have By-Elections for all Lib Dem seats where their candidates promised students that they would vote against student loans.
A good example of this would be Norwich North where Charles Clarke was narrowly unseated by the Lib Dems on this very issue and now the new MP will now support the opposite policy for which he campaigned.Chris Huhme would then be worried given that he was pictured as a 'happily married' man and four weeks later he leaves his wife for another woman.
Let's hope this will make the political process more honest.
Politics can be a brutal thing, but I don't want it to descend to American standards where outright lies and negative campaigning are considerable acceptable politica tactics.
The Lib Dems are down to around 10% in some recent OPs and far from a By-Election that no-one wants this can play into the hands of Ed Miliband. If Labour win the election comfortably and the Lib Dems take a kicking then it makes Labour and Ed Miliband look successful and gives him some credibility and it puts a bit of pressure on the Lib-Dems, perhaps they'll be a little less supine in their negotiations with the Toryboys.
I thought Miliband came over really well tonight , if there is something factually wrong in Woolas's literature then clearly it is indefenceable and Labour is no longer paying his legal fees .
But then so is having a specific policy on student loans which has now been abandoned . If Woolas is felt to have won his narrow majority by deception how many seats did the Lib Dems win because of their popular policy which they have immediately disgarded ?
I also found it ironic that Simon Hughes the winner of the most personally negative By - Election of all time 30 years ago against Peter Tatchell was the LD spokesperson today.
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To the latter question - that is unknowable, but it was Lib Dem policy at the time and you have to accept that they were sincere when making that promise. That they've subsequently broken it should not trigger a byelection, unless it can be proven that they had zero intention of honouring it. In any case their backtracking over tuition fees and social housing and supporting much deeper cuts than they advocated in the election campaign is losing them popular support along with the perception that they are being used by the Tory party to steamroller some neo-Thatcherite legisation through - I can't imagine that the average Lib-Dem voter or activist is thrilled at the way that Clegg, Laws, Cable etc have rolled over and it can be argued that there is no mandate for the depth of cuts proposed by Osborne. The Tory party did not win the last election, they only got over the winning line aided by the Lib Dems who did not run on a manifesto of deep cuts. If they take a kicking in this byelection then it could trigger the beginning of the end of the coalition.