Fragile

I have been researching our parliamentary constituency, because it's not what it used to be. Only 60% of the electorate is the same as that of 2019; we have lost people in the east and gained them in the south. Based on votes cast in 2019, we have become very slightly less Conservative, Labour and Green, and a fair bit more Lib Dem - but the latter still come in third, and the Conservatives still theoretically have over 50%, so not that different then. 

In addition to that lot, we will have the opportunity to vote for an independent socialist, who thinks she is the only one offering anything different and, implausibly, someone from the Social Democratic Party, who thinks the same thing. If, like me, you thought the SDP was absorbed by the Liberals in 1988, it's not quite that simple. A rump of refusniks kept it going for a while, but then dissolved it after electoral humiliation in 1990. Some insoluble activists refused to be dissolved, and revived it and have kept it going until now. In 2019, it got 3,295 votes - that's not in our constituency, but nationally! In the coming election, they have entered some strange pact with the bigots in Reform. Sic transit gloria mundi, as philosophy scholar Shirley Williams might have said

If I could ask them all just one question, it would be why I don't have a single 'progressive alliance' candidate to vote for, rather than having to pick between losers to waste my vote on

The Labour party strategists have what they call a 'ming vase' approach to the campaign. They view their task as being equivalent to carrying a precious ornament across a room with a slippery floor: one mis-step and all might be lost; every decision, statement or policy is to be guided by an abundance of caution. Everyone says it is proving successful but, by all the gods of democracy, it's boring. You can drop a vase by falling asleep

We have one-and-only-one potential apricot on the tree. Will we ever taste it? Our own ming vase project