#Birmingham Erdington by-election

[deweydecimalchickens]

Right-wingers threatening me with a good time again. This time it's Reform UK (the Party Formerly Known As Brexit).

Listen, foetal fascist, if I thought Starmer's Labour would actually give me net zero greenhouse gas emissions, open and humane border policies, EU citizenship and "woke nonsense" (as a little treat?), I'd be on that like cheese on chips. You've got more faith in the guy than I have. What I've got is cautious approval of the local candidate and a desire to get the Tories out first and worry about everything else second.

(He's right about that last bit, but so's a stopped clock, twice a day.)

[updatesnews]

Boris Johnson sent major warning after Birmingham Erdington byelection | Politics | News

Boris Johnson sent major warning after Birmingham Erdington byelection | Politics | News

Paulette Hamilton comfortably retained Labour’s seat in the constituency polling 9,413 votes, amounting to 55 percent of ballots cast, compared to that of Conservative candidate Robert Alden, who accumulated 36 percent. The by-election comes following the sudden death of Labour MP Jack Dromey in January, who held the Birmingham seat since 2010. Ms Hamilton will become Birmingham’s first black…

[snbc]

Labour's Paulette Hamilton becomes Britain's newest MP by winning Birmingham Erdington by-election

Labour’s Paulette Hamilton becomes Britain’s newest MP by winning Birmingham Erdington by-election

Labour’s Paulette Hamilton becomes Britain’s newest MP after winning Birmingham Erdington by-election caused by the death of the veteran politician Jack Dromey Labour’s Paulette Hamilton has won the Birmingham Erdington by-election The former nurse Paulette Hamilton, 59, will become the city’s first black MP Mother-of-five got 9,413 votes ahead of Conservative candidate Robert Alden  Byelection…

[alexalbert-blog-blog]

Birmingham: Labour holds seat in Erdington by-election

Birmingham: Labour holds seat in Erdington by-election

Paulette Hamilton is Birmingham’s first black MP in an election held after the death of Jack Dromey. Source link

[usasharenews]

Birmingham Erdington by-election: Voters head to polls after sudden death of Labour MP Jack Dromey

Birmingham Erdington by-election: Voters head to polls after sudden death of Labour MP Jack Dromey

Voters are going to the polls today in Birmingham Erdington in a parliamentary by-election triggered by the sudden death of Labour Party and trade union stalwart Jack Dromey. Mr Dromey, who was married to the former Labour cabinet minister and interim party leader Harriet Harman, held the seat with a majority of 3,601 in the 2019 general election. During tributes to Mr Dromey by MPs of all…

[0531223]

Labour MP Jack Dromey dies aged 73

Sir Keir Starmer remembered Mr Dromey, who was the deputy general secretary of the Unite union before becoming an MP, as having “dedicated his life to standing up for working people”.

“From supporting the strike at the Grunwick film processing laboratory, when he met Harriet, through to being elected to represent Birmingham Erdington in 2010, Jack lived his commitment to social justice every day,” the Labour leader said. การพนันออนไลน์

[uk-news-talking-politics]

Fears of Tory dominance fade as voters begin to doubt May

At the start of the election campaign you could to speak to just about any Conservative or undecided voter and hear nothing but praise for Theresa May. Skip forward a few weeks and the 'I trust her, she's a strong leader' has changed to 'I'm not happy about...'

When I spoke to older Conservative voters in the East Midlands town of Northampton just after the manifesto launch, almost all of them mentioned the party's disastrous social care policy. They weren't happy about it.

"Pensioners seem to be promised one thing and then it's taken away."

"I'm really not sure about all this social care stuff."

"I need to hear more details about her plans for pensioners but I'm really quite concerned."

Northampton town centre

At the time, most people said that despite their concerns they would still be voting Tory. But things haven't improved for May since then. If anything they have got worse. She's received criticism for refusing to take part in face-to-face debates with other party leaders and has come under fire in the last couple of days over cuts to policing during her time as home secretary.

Local Conservatives in Northampton are confident they will hold their two seats in the town - they currently have around a 3,000 majority in each - but one party source admits they are far from happy with the national campaign. "Things have been going well locally," they said. "I just wish I could say the same for the national campaign."

Meanwhile, Labour sources in the town say there has been a noticeable change on the doorstep. "We've seen lots switching to Labour over the last 48 hours, it could be close," one said on Saturday.

Another said that while it remains hard to call, the mood on the doorstep is better than in 2015 with the Labour vote seeming firmer. "There's also been some switchers, including from Tory to Labour," they said.

I've found the same when speaking to people in other Midlands seats, particularly among women. Compared with the start of May, women are now seven points more likely to vote Labour than men - and three points less likely to vote Conservative.

"I've been Conservative all my life," a 76 year-old widow in Nottingham told me last week. "But I'm worried about the social care plans and means-testing for the fuel allowance.

"I really rely on that. I don't know if I would lose it or not because they haven't said anything about what the amount will be. I'm going to spend the next few days really looking properly at Labour's ideas."

Another thing that has come up repeatedly among the older women I have spoken to is the free bus pass, even though there's been no mention of any changes to it. There seems to be a worry that once cuts to universal benefits begin, they will spread to other areas.

"I haven't heard anything about the buss pass going but I'd be lost if it did, I use it all the time," one woman told me.

At the start of the campaign I visited the Birmingham constituency of Erdington. Despite being seen as a safe Labour seat, there was lots of talk that the Conservatives would be targeting the area. What struck me then was the number of people I met with views that you would usually associate with Labour - concerns about food banks and homelessness - who were planning to vote Tory.

I went back to Erdington last Friday and there was definitely a change. There seemed to be a lot more support for Labour this time. People said things like: 'We're all Labour around here' and asked if I'd managed to find any Tory voters. There were even some former Conservative voters saying they had been put off by Theresa May.

"I voted for them before but I don't like all her scaremongering on Brexit," one woman said. "I'm going with Labour now."

A couple in their 30s stopped to talk to me. The woman voted Conservative at the last general election, the man Ukip.

"I started off thinking I'd vote for the Conservatives but I don't like the stuff about dementia," the woman said. "My dad has just been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It's not just about him but all the other people like him."

In a clear example of how unpredictable this election is turning out to be, the pair were very hard to place on the political spectrum. The woman had been a teenage mum and now worked in an administrative role in the public sector. The man was a warehouse worker. They both admired Donald Trump but also Emmanuel Macron. "We need an outsider like one of those," the man said. The woman suggested Corbyn was our version of that, the man was unsure. They both wanted to bring back the death penalty and national service. The woman volunteered at a homeless shelter and was strongly against disability cuts but they were both angry about 'benefit scroungers'. They were supportive of immigration because "immigrants work hard". The woman said she was voting Labour, the man said he was still unsure but would like to see a coalition to keep things more balanced.

This election was Theresa May's to lose. The expectation was that she would glide through it and return a huge majority for her party. That could still happen of course, but whatever happens on June 8th it's clear she has been damaged by the last few weeks. Where once people saw a strong leader, now they see somebody who they're not sure they can trust.

Natalie Bloomer is a journalist for Politics.co.uk. You can follow her on Twitter here.

[deweydecimalchickens]

The white Tory candidate has lived in the constituency 39 years.

The black Labour candidate has lived in the constituency 35 years.

Guess who is described as "local" and who isn't. It's qwhite the mystery.

[ericfruits]

Andy Street deploys retail politics in the West Midlands

“GOOD afternoon, madam. Yes, that’s my ugly mug on the leaflet! I hope you’ll give it a read. May I ask where you live?” It is well over a decade since Andy Street quit the sales floors of John Lewis for the boardroom, where he steered the venerable chain of department stores to record profits. But the former chief executive hasn’t lost the patter. This much Bagehot discovered on Erdington High Street as the wiry Conservative candidate for the new West Midlands mayoralty scuttled about, buttonholing shoppers. “I’m supporting you. I hate these politicians on ‘Question Time’ [a TV debate show],” professed Pam Rangely, a former Labour Party canvasser who had never voted Tory. “So you’re switching to the other side?” your columnist asked her. Mr Street spun around: “Did you see her face? It fell when you talked of ‘the other side’.” The former retail boss does not like to think of himself as a party man.

To tour with Mr Street around the West Midlands metropolitan region, which includes Birmingham and industrial cities like Coventry and Wolverhampton, is to discover how lightly he wears his political identity. He considered running as an independent. His banners, website and leaflets are green rather than Tory blue (one handout mentions the word “Conservative” twice in ten pages). Addressing a crowd at the Prince of Wales pub in left-liberal Moseley, he admits: “I have wobbled in my commitment to the party,” adding that he identifies most with Michael Heseltine, the bouffant doyen of centrist Toryism. “You don’t have the hair for it!” heckles a drinker. “How is that different from being a Blairite in Labour?” hollers another. “It’s a fine line,” Mr Street replies. “They’re philosophically very similar.”

Some of this is tactics. Despite Labour’s current woes, it still finds big-city Britain friendly territory. Of the three big “metro mayoralties” that will spring forth on May 4th (along with three smaller ones), only the West Midlands race is truly competitive. Even on this patch, Labour had a 9.4-point lead in the 2015 election. Siôn Simon, the party’s candidate, is rooted in the economically centrist, ruthlessly tribal culture of Labour’s “West Midlands mafia”, which includes Tom Watson, the party’s powerful deputy leader. At stake is a glittering prize: the second-largest direct mandate in Britain after the London mayoralty, control of transport, skills and housing policies affecting 2.8m people and £8bn ($10bn) of new money from the government. To win it, Mr Street must tack away from the Tories.

Yet his vague political identity speaks to something more fundamental, about him and the job. Ideologically, Mr Simon and Mr Street mostly see eye to eye. The difference has nothing to do with general outlook and everything to do with practice. That makes the West Midlands race intriguing—and important.

Take Mr Simon, a former MP now in the European Parliament. He is steeped in his party’s culture and battles. His campaign is all about Labour: he is absent in most hustings, has published no manifesto with barely a month to go before the vote and seems to be cleaving to safe Labour areas. He talks about protecting the health service (over which the mayor will have no control) and taking on “politicians in London”. Some call this posturing cynical, others hard-nosed power politics.

What the Labour world and realism are to Mr Simon, the business world and idealism are to Mr Street. He brandishes his 48-page Renewal Plan at every opportunity, spouts statistics (did you know that 60% of the Black Country lives within 1km of a bike-friendly tow path?) and demands that the West Midlands become fiscally self-sufficient, suckling less at Leviathan’s teat and paying its own way for once. The house parable in Street-land is the successful local campaign, led by a certain former retail boss, to persuade HSBC, a global investment bank, to base its consumer-banking operations in Birmingham.

Convening, arm-twisting, cheerleading: these, to Mr Street, are the essence of the job, as opposed to what he calls the “begging bowl”, “poor us” approach of Mr Simon. He wants to revive the tradition of Joseph Chamberlain, a Victorian mayor of Birmingham and icon of corporatist municipal success. “He used his business experience to ‘improve the lot of the masses’—though I’d never put it like that,” says Mr Street. Such a mayoralty demands a chief-executive-mayor with a strong personal mandate and cross-party reach. Hence Mr Street’s obsession with visibility—he hurtles from event to event at a pace Bagehot has not witnessed before—and with non-partisanship.

Never knowingly under-polled

This matters regionally and nationally. Regionally because local government in the West Midlands does not have a happy history. Once wealthier even than the south-east, this part of England has suffered from decades of inept interventions by central government and bickering between local councils. The result is a deeply divided region (central Birmingham would pass for Boston, Massachusetts, its poorer outskirts for the less fashionable districts of Bucharest), and one beset by policy failures: a collapsing care system, growing homelessness, lagging skills.

And it matters nationally, because this mayoralty may be the one that decides the future of devolution in England. In an over-centralised, economically polarised country, the emergence of powerful elected officials overseeing wide urban regions is the best hope of solving crises in living standards, productivity and housing. Yet neither Andy Burnham (a gloomy opportunist) in Manchester nor Steve Rotheram (a hard lefty) in Liverpool looks likely to do that on their patches. Mr Simon is more promising than either, but a win for him would nonetheless be a blow to the ambition with which the metro mayoralties were created. A victory for the dynamic Mr Street would make Birmingham a beacon of municipal assertiveness. So Bagehot urges West Midlanders: don’t vote Conservative, vote Street.

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[updatesnews]

'Frightened' BBC fails to run story on Labour by-election winner until 'appallingly late' | Politics | News

‘Frightened’ BBC fails to run story on Labour by-election winner until ‘appallingly late’ | Politics | News

Paulette Hamilton came top in the Birmingham Erdington by-election yesterday, on Thursday, holding the seat for Labour, which has won every election there since 1945. The turnout was just 27 percent – 23.3 points lower than in the last general election. It was, as GB News’s Alastair Stewart pointed out, a good night for “None Of The Above”. It was, however, a bad night for the BBC, which has been…

[snbc]

Birmingham: Labour holds seat in Erdington by-election

Birmingham: Labour holds seat in Erdington by-election

Paulette Hamilton is Birmingham’s first black MP in an election held after the death of Jack Dromey.

[thepakmedia]

Candidates for Birmingham, Erdington in UK General Election 2017

Candidates for Birmingham, Erdington in UK General Election 2017

UK General Election 2017 is scheduled to take place on 8 June 2017. This list of candidates contesting election for Birmingham, Erdington in UK General Election 2017.

Birmingham was a parliamentary constituency of the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom for the city of Birmingham. The area was split into seven single-member constituencies in 1885; Bordesley, Central, East,…

[lovingwonderlanddetective-blog1]

General election: May's husband says she wanted to be PM from shadow cabinet days – as it happened | Politics

General election: May’s husband says she wanted to be PM from shadow cabinet days – as it happened | Politics

In the run-up to the general election, six Guardian reporters are writing from constituencies across the country to find out what matters to you and in your area. In the first of a series of dispatches from Erdington, Birmingham, Nazia Parveen meets two lifelong Labour supporters who say the area is a ‘dying suburb’ and are considering turning their backs on the party Published: 9 May 2017

[deweydecimalchickens]

I love our local religious fundamentalist candidate. "Children, dog whistle, family, dog whistle, free speech, dog whistle, THE LITERAL TRUTH OF BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY SHOULD BE TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS."

Damn lady did you lubricate that mask? I've never seen one slip so fast.

I hope she's still working in social care when my gay atheist ass is all dementia, no inhibitions.

[deweydecimalchickens]

The by-election in my constituency has sort of exploded. We had five candidates in 2019: the usual three, Brexit and Green. I started off annoyed the TUSC were splitting the left vote, then relieved Reform (Brexit rebranded to focus on Islamophobia and spreading the plague) were splitting the right vote. Now I'm just staring in exhausted confusion at... whatever this is.

Three independents, some religious fundamentalists, an OG Raving Loony and a Raving Loony knock-off, FML.

[deweydecimalchickens]

Yes! Labour hold Birmingham Erdington with an increased share of the vote and our new MP is a black woman who is not afraid of the word "socialist".

Everyone except Labour and Tory lost their deposits. Shame for the Greens and the TUSC guy (we can has a progressive alliance as a little treat?), but I hope it puts the racists, the religious fundamentalists and the idiot independents* off doing it again. *I'm not against independents per se, but our three were: - a former football hooligan whose sole topic of conversation is the Birmingham pub bombings (pings my alarms pretty hard) - a guy who owns a pub and has noticed that Peaky Blinders is quite popular on the telly - a completely invisible mystery man