15 Comments

• Kevin Maher 14th Dec '19 - 7:01am

  Is that total views or individuals who viewed.

• Ian 14th Dec '19 - 9:01am

  Then let’s hope that LDV can continue to lead the way as the party processes the election result and debates the way forward!

  There’s an article in the New York Times that is well worth a read. Here’s an extract:

  “The Liberal Democrats collapsed for two core reasons. They epitomized the London liberal elites. A key promise was simply: We will revoke Brexit altogether, you dumbass voters. No second referendum, just a parliamentary program to nullify the referendum of 2016. Hard to think of a more elitist project than that.”

  “Then they embraced wokeness. In the last week of the campaign, their leader, Jo Swinson, got caught in long discussions about what she believes a woman is. She didn’t just lose the election, she lost her own seat. It is clearer and clearer to me that the wholesale adoption of critical race, gender, and queer theory on the left makes normal people wonder what on earth they’re talking about and which dictionary they are using. The white working classes are privileged? A woman can have a penis? In the end, the dogma is so crazy, and the language so bizarre, these natural left voters decided to listen to someone who does actually speak their language, even if in an absurdly plummy accent.”

• Barry Lofty 14th Dec '19 - 9:31am

  There maybe some element of truth in the New York Times article but somehow I find it hard to take criticism from a country that elected Donald Trump.

• John Marriott 14th Dec '19 - 9:33am

  I know it’s tough when you signal your intention to be PM and need to be seen around the country, but I wonder now whether Jo Swinson ought to have spent more time campaigning in her own constituency.

• Nonconformistradical 14th Dec '19 - 10:06am

  I second Barry Lofty’s comment!

• David Evans 14th Dec '19 - 10:11am

  Barry Lofty – It is so ssad to hear you say ‘somehow I find it hard to take criticism from a country that elected Donald Trump.’ I suppose some may say ‘somehow I find it hard to take seriously a party that manoeuvred for a snap election that elected Boris Johnson.’

  One line put downs may make us feel good in ourselves, but the NYT is a Newspaper that takes objective news reporting much more seriously than most if not all UK newspapers, so tarring them with the Donald Trump brush really is lashing out at the messenger.

• Barry Lofty 14th Dec '19 - 10:36am

  I agree if there was one mistake the Lib Dems made it was allowing Boris Johnson his wish to call an election, we should have made him sweat and struggle to get his right-wing policies through parliament, we fell for his sucker punch. But my feelings about Trump equally apply to Boris Johnson, how on earth could the British electorate elect him and his group of self servers? But my grandfather was reputed to have said many moons ago, ‘if you put a blue rosette on a cow they would vote for it” at least in the area where my family have lived for many generations.

• Ruth Bright 14th Dec '19 - 11:06am

  80% of women are mothers. Jo is not some sort of identity politics obsessive or woke weirdo because she talked about childcare and the challenges of being a working mother.
  Clearly we failed utterly but it was not because Jo seemed a remote, metropolitan, politically correct figure as the NY Times suggests. My experience was that people often really liked her but that it wasn’t enough and that sometimes (unfairly) they thought she was too young.

• Joseph Bourke 14th Dec '19 - 11:52am

  Age and Gender is no obstacle. This is the most diverse parliament ever. One-third of MPs are now women and 10% of MPs are from a BAME background.
  David Cameron and Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister at 43. Emmanuel Macron is 41, New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern is 37.
  Finland has the world’s youngest prime minister. At 34, Sanna Marin will head a coalition government of five parties, all of which have female leaders, of whom four are under the age of 35.
  Nancy Astor, The first woman MP to enter Parliament was 40 when she took her seat, paving the way for the women that would follow.

• Alasdair Brooks 14th Dec '19 - 12:00pm

  Two comments on the ‘New York Times’ piece.

  1) I don’t believe it was published in the Times. The online version can be found here: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/andrew-sullivan-boris-johnsons-winning-formula.html
  This strongly suggests that it was originally published by New York magazine, a very different type of publication than the New York Times.

  2) The article was written by conservative political commentator Andrew Sullivan. That he’s conservative doesn’t mean he’s inherently wrong, and he’s not always easy to pigeonhole in the American conservative spectrum, but with the exception of his strong support for LGBT+ rights (Sullivan is gay), he’s not a natural supporter of LibDem policies. He admires Johnson because Sullivan believes he offers ‘Trumpism without Trump. A conservative future without an ineffective and polarizing nutjob at the heart of it.’

  The quotes from the article (and I’ve linked to the original in this post) should likely be understood in that context.

• Ruth Bright 14th Dec '19 - 12:12pm

  Joseph – this is a classic example of not reading the post . It is not MY view that she was too young. I am feeding back what I heard. I was 27 when I was elected as a Lib Dem councillor and because I had long dark hair I was called by Labour councillors: “Barbie”, “Morticia” and “Mata Hari”. I thought the world had moved on a bit in the quarter century since then. Sadly not.

• Michael Berridge 14th Dec '19 - 6:09pm

  If there is one thing that Jo Swinson did in her election campaign that should make her live for ever in political history it is telling the truth about the “Brexit” narrative – that it was dishonest from the start, that it had was inwardly contradictory (for details see Chris Grey’s excellent Brexit Blog), that we as a nation should renounce it. The wisdom of this can be questioned, but the rightness of it, never. We did not need a new referendum. We needed to get the message over that the 2016 referendum had failed because “Leave the EU” meant whatever Leavers wanted it to mean.

• Paul Walter 14th Dec '19 - 6:23pm

  Kevin

  “Is that total views or individuals who viewed.”

  Views.

  There were 25898 views.

  There were 6,831 visitors, who each viewed an average of 3.79 pages.

• nigel hunter 14th Dec '19 - 6:42pm

  Swinson was not liked cos we live in a World where the powerful are right wing ‘oldies’ who control t he media have a political agenda, do not like women who can stand up agin them and was honest in a world of sharks.
  She is also young and learning. She will be back.

• Graeme MacDonald 28th Dec '19 - 8:23pm

  Jo Swinson was defeated by a women who was much younger than her so suggesting that she lost due to her sex or age is clearly nonsense. Jo lost because of a surge to the SNP that meant that a 10% majority was not enough. Scotland is now becoming a battle between the pro-independence SNP and pro-union Conservatives with Lib Dem and Labour voters being squeezed to vote tactically. This bodes well for the SNP and badly for the future of the UK as a single countrygr