10 Comments

• Nick Thornsby 9th Apr '12 - 10:55am

  Is that Jeremy Bowen reporting in the second video?

• Nick Thornsby 9th Apr '12 - 11:09am

  Just been pointed out on Twitter that it’s Justin Webb in the second video.

• The Voice 9th Apr '12 - 1:30pm

  Commenting reminder: Please remember to respect our moderation policy which basically asks people to be polite, be on topic and be honest (ie don’t pretend to be more than one person or to be someone you are not).

  As you can see from other comments published on the site, wide-ranging and robust debate is fine (including comments critical of the party or the site). However, we do ask for little bit of civility – and for people to stick to the topic in hand, so that readers can choose which topics they wish to read about, rather than finding the same people raising the same points on multiple threads.

  Thanks!

• George Kendall 9th Apr '12 - 5:44pm

  My stark memory of 1992 was slugging my guts out in a seat where we had no chance of success, and then realising that with a fraction of that work, I could have made the difference to us winning in a number of ultra-marginals.

  This is a lesson that’s relevant not just to general elections. If your local party is fighting a marginal ward where every vote will count, but you put all your efforts into a ward where it’ll make no difference, I hope you won’t have the same experience I had in 1992, but I fear you will.

• crewegwyn 9th Apr '12 - 6:05pm

  1992 – my only time as a parliamentary candidate. And caught by an unusual squeeze –

  to the right people who said “I’d have voted for you Gwyn, but I couldn’t bear the thought of Kinnock as PM”

  to the left people who said “I’d have voted for you Gwyn, but I couldn’t bear the thought of [my Conservative rival, a ‘prominent’ local councillor] as MP”

  Good fun though!

• Malcolm Todd 9th Apr '12 - 10:18pm

  @crewegwyn — isn’t that just the normal squeeze? People whose preference was ‘1 Lib Dem 2 Tory’ voted Tory because they thought you couldn’t win and were worried Labour might; and people whose preference was ‘1 Lib Dem 2 Labour’ voted Labour for the equal but opposite reason.
  I suspect there won’t be exactly the same problem next time, as fewer of the latter type will exist…

• Adrian Sanders 10th Apr '12 - 8:44am

  I caught an interesting interview with Alan Beith MP who said on the coalition question that we would make a PR bill in the Queens Speech a condition of our support. No referendum, no AV, but PR in a bill in the Queens Speech.

• Tracy Connell 10th Apr '12 - 9:11am

  I was watching some of the re-run of the 1992 Election coverage on the parliament channel yesterday.

  I was studying English and Politics at Strathclyde University at the time. One of my lecturers was John Curtice, the political polls expert, and he was on the programme. I remember that everyone thought Labour would win the election (including John Major!) and John Curtice spent a lecture telling us why the polls had been wrong.

  Watching some of the footage of John Major – you can see he was slightly stunned to realise he had won the election.

  Also, as well as Paddy and Charles, they talked to Alan Beith quite a lot. I thought Alan’s claim that Labour could never win under the FPTP electoral system again was a bit of an exaggeration. LOL. And when you think of their landslide in 1997!

  That definitely brought back some memories 🙂

• David Rogers 10th Apr '12 - 10:15am

  I was election agent for Norman Baker in Lewes in 1992. At the beginning of the week of polling day, we thought we were going to win – then there was a late swing back to the Tories. When I realised that despite finishing a very good second, our campaign had won more votes than many successful candidates, including some winning Lib Dems in Scotland, I realsied that there was a strong case for equal-sized constituencies…

• Jason Good 10th Apr '12 - 10:50am

  Tracy Connell: on Labour being unelectable under FPTP, this was a serious issue at the time. I recall a strand of A-level politics curriculum in the early 80s covering this. “Can Labour win?” was a big thing. The answer was a resounding “no”, hence the creation of New Labour – Blair etc realised the party as was had become unelectable.

  I recall there was an element of hope among Lib Dems that this would see Labour become committed to electoral reform….