A learned professor whom we all see on the telly confided to a friend this week that Ukip might win yesterday's Feltham and Heston byelection. It's a useful reminder why learned professors should always be on tap, never on top. They so often lack the common sense with which we mere mortals are saddled.
Labour won easily with an evidently clever management consultant called Seema Malhotra for a candidate. She went to school in the area and would have had to have been caught behind a bush with Ed Miliband – no, make that David Cameron – to have lost the seat.
Admittedly, with low turnouts accidents occasionally happen. But after the coalition's bust-up in Brussels last Friday this wasn't going to be Ukip's night. Would-be Tory protest voters may have stayed put and the Conservatives are currently doing better in some polls despite the recession and the cuts. We'll come back to that.
It's usually better to win an election. But that's about it. Labour should be under no illusion about its prospects – and probably isn't. The overnight death of the contrarian-and-proud-of-it journalist Christopher Hitchens was higher up the Radio 4 news bulletin this morning than the byelection – and rightly so, though comparing Hitch to Voltaire (as MP Denis MacShane did) was over-cooking things a bit. An old drinking companion of mine, Hitchens came to believe his own press releases.
Back to Feltham and Heston, not a very Hitchens kind of place located under the Heathrow flight paths and solidly blue collar. I've always enjoyed byelections and try to visit most of them in my old age. Driving around the network of lookalike suburban roads in the constituency last week I managed to get lost, but have an excuse. It was the nearest byelection to my own west London home that I have attended in 30 years of this sort of thing. Complacently, I didn't bother to take my wife's new sat-nav. At least I called the right result.
So what does it tell us about the state of play in domestic Westminster politics? Not much, I fear, and certainly not much that will keep Cameron awake at night or prompt Miliband to open the cava. In her acceptance speech this morning Malhotra – canvassing again with Miliband on Friday, we are assured – called it a "wake-up call" to the coalition, which is what byelection winners say, always privately relieved they didn't blow it.
As Nick Watt's report makes clear there was an 8.5% swing from the Tories, whose candidate was a likable local councillor, Mark Bowen. That may reflect a restoration of the Labour vote damaged by the embarrassing treatment of expenses by the ex-MP, the late Alan Keen, in tandem with his ex-MP wife, Ann, who lost her neighbouring suburban seat in 2010.
But attempts to make this bread-and-butter event more interesting than it was ever likely to prove focused on Ukip's hope of pushing the Liberal Democrats' first-time contender, Roger Crouch, into third place. It failed, only narrowly by 88 votes, but we all know that one vote would have been enough either way. The BNP got 540 votes (since you ask) ahead of the Greens on 426 in a nine-candidate field where the Bus-Pass Elvis party garnered 93 votes.
All right, an 8.5% swing sounds fine and for an opposition party it's always better than a similar swing in the opposite direction. Much more important – and discouraging for all concerned – is the low turnout of 28.7%, half the 69% in the 2010 general election and apparently the lowest in a byelection for 11 years since David Lammy won Tottenham on a turnout of 25.4% and Adrian Bailey held West Bromwich West on 27.3%, both in 2000 when Tony Blair was in his prime.
As Mike Smithson notes on his smart Political Betting website there were 10,145 postal votes cast in Alan Keen's last win – 21% of the total – and could have been even more significant in Malhotra's win because nowadays people don't need an excuse to claim a postal vote. Like me, Smithson disapproves of this Labour "reform" because it encourages fraud and allows people to vote without being able to judge candidates.
I persist in believing that candidates matter, that a good or bad one can make a difference, especially in a byelection. Ukip's candidate, a colourful entrepreneurial character called Andrew Charalambous who was still sniffing after a Tory seat until quite recently, didn't strike me as the man to swing votes, though he was protectively supported by his party leader, the much more plausible Nigel Farage MEP, always a cheerful presence and looking a lot healthier than when I last saw him (before his 2010 election plane crash).
That's why parties take no chances, they ensure that "safe" candidates are picked, though byelections are no longer the TV three-ringed circus they were in the days when Newsnight's Vincent Hanna had such fun. The parties protect their candidates too closely – and in this instance Labour staged the ballot (the party holding the seat chooses the date) barely a month after Keen's death. Why? To save campaigning money it doesn't have, so I was told. MPs also tend to retire or move on to new pastures rather than die in harness: there are fewer byelections. Check the record with Wikipedia. Yet there have already been five – now six – in this parliament after 18 months, as many as in the whole 2001-5 parliament.
Belfast West's Gerry Adams, who became an Irish Sinn Féin TD and Sir Peter Soulsby (Leicester South) became elected mayor of Leicester; Inverclyde's David Cairns died; Barnsley Central's Eric Illsley went to jail for expenses fraud and Oldham's Phil Woolas was ejected by an election court, the first such verdict in 99 years.
No seat has changed hands in party terms, all the winners came in on the usual lower turnouts, 45.4% in Inverclyde, 36.5% in Barnsley Central where an ex-Para major, Dan Jarvis, held the seat for Labour and Ukip pushed its way into second place in this South Yorkshire ex-mining stronghold. In Leicester, Labour pushed up its vote by 12.2% (Jarvis did slightly better) and in Inverclyde, the rampant SNP took 15.5% more than in 2010 – in what is a Labour heartland area. Elwyn Watkins, the Lib Dem whose complaint of illegal campaign practice forced the Oldham byelection, did not prosper: Labour's new candidate, Debbie Abrahams, upped her vote by 10% and elbowed him aside.
Not much to glean from that lot. Labour defended five seats and held five, though not very excitingly. In Feltham and Heston Labour usually runs the local council – Hounslow – and clearly has both achievements and failures on its record. Being lost, I arrived too late to see Ed Miliband and his candidate visit the Sure Start project on the edge of the Beaver Estate, a tough 1960s high-rise neighbourhood close to the busy M4.
The Sure Start centre looked bright and cheerful – like its staff – but times are still tough for many people around here, relatively prosperous though it is compared with some of the other byelection constituencies I have visited lately. Youth unemployment has risen sharply and the price paid for many local jobs is noise and pollution from the airport.
On Comment is Free today the Guardian's Martin Kettle presents the challenge Labour faces here – and elsewhere – which is how to address issues of public spending and social justice, its core appeal, in times when there is no extra money and no prospect of there being any more for the forseeable future.
Voters remain more inclined to blame Labour for its share of the recession – borrowing too much to fund its ambitious anti-poverty plans and not reining in the boom-and-bust banks via effective regulation – for the state we're all in than they are to blame the coalition for trying to fix it. Self-defeating austerity, which simply piles on the debt, may change that. But when it does, Labour had better have created a more persuasive story to woo voters back – or something nastier may step into the vacuum.
From learning Quran online Blog
And important note that we want to discuss and share with you it is about Quran reading and doing Quran recitation online to understand it, Ramadan is the month when the beautiful the Holy Quran has been revealed. A miracle by the creator of the worlds, Allah (SWT) Should we not glorify him by reading quran the gift he has sent down for us and learn Arabic Quran by heart to feel the power of it and we as Muslim should try to learn quran with translation to understand it wile we do Quran memorization and let our heart fill will tears of glory and wash away our sins in the month of Ramadan many people teach quran and we should participate in teaching quran as much as we could because it is the noble cause to spread the word of Allah and the quran tutor will get the reword in the day of judgment “Will they not meditate on the Quran, or are there locks on the hearts”, Quran for kids , Surah Muhammad, Verse 24. Here is an interesting tajweed quran reciter where you can listen to quran from top Koran reciters and read the Koran with different translation and plz link to it and share it to promote islam
End from online Quran reciter blog
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