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BBC Parliament celebrate ten years of Tory rule (Election 2010, 8th May)

Started by Billy, May 03, 2020, 09:43:24 PM

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Billy

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000j0nr

Heads up for anyone interested. BBC Parliament often repeat entire General Elections on their 10th/20th/even 60th anniversaries, and this year it's the turn of 2010, getting reshown in full on Friday for the first time since the year it aired.

It won't be as fun a rewatch as the 1970s ones or even the 1990s - no presenters smoking pipes or caught eating Mars bars on camera here, and culturally a world almost identical to today with just slightly less powerful smartphones and cheaper bus fares. But it's a special one for me as it was the first General Election I voted in as a 21 year old student, and will take me back to that very brief glorious time when Youth Hero Nick Clegg was going to landslide his way to power, end the recession and make everything free forever. I've not voted Lib Dem since.

(for the record, Labour voter every year since 2008 except for that one)

Plus it's airing on VE Day's anniversary so will be a nice way of escaping all that bollocks and going back to a pre-virus time when Bruno Mars was number 1, Glee was the top show on telly and Corona was still something I bought for four quid at the Roadhouse in Covent Garden every Friday night.

idunnosomename

i always thought nick clegg was a dickhead and hope he falls into a huge meat grinder. cheers

Shoulders?-Stomach!

Hurts to watch but vital to do so in order to understand how at that point Labour had eroded so much enthusiasm from the very people who it relied on.

Labour amassed 8,6M votes and lost 97 seats.
(In comparison to Corbyn in 2019 who got 10,6M seats last December and lost 67 seats.)

Even when Corbyn was leader you would get people who would confidently assert they didn't believe Labour under him would do anything left wing. That's the extent to which trust was shattered, that a supposedly infamous Marxist standing on a platform of renationalising lots of things can't convince ex-Labour voters on the old left .

2005 was cleverly handled by Labour as they fought a tactical retreat and were very smart in targeting certain constituencies, but by 2010 there was nowhere to hide.

Then of course we waste 5 years on Ed Miliband's utter shit.

Harry Badger

I love watching old election nights. By far the best is the 'Who Governs Britain?' miner's strike February 1974 election where it was more or less a dead head and utter confusion reigns. At one point, AJP Taylor had to be called in to explain the constitutional position.

Old Nehamkin

2010 was the first election I paid any attention to. I was a 17 year-old with vague socialist convictions that had been transmuted into a rather wimpy centre-left outlook partly informed by high school Modern Studies (lots of exam questions that were like - "You are a minister and the budget isn't balanced. Do you cut winter fuel allowance or make it means-tested?") and also by the heavy trust I still placed in the liberal celeb-sphere. I paid close attention to Armando Iannucci's Twitter and would nod in agreement at all the illuminating graphs and reasonable calls for voter engagement he would regularly post.

Like Iannucci, I supported the Lib Dems in that election, even though I was too young to vote. As horrible as it is to remember now, I totally bought into Cleggmania at the time. I was enchanted by the idea of a third-party candidate seeming to seize the narrative of the campaign and I was looking forward to a Labour-Lib Dem coalition that I naively thought would tug Labour back leftwards, legitimise the electoral reform movement and put the country on track for proportional representation. I remember on election night I insisted on commandeering the living room TV to watch the entire night of BBC coverage - with Jeremy Vine using a gun that fired the words "the pound" at a CGI clay pigeon with Alistair Darling's face on it or whatever he was doing that year - but after an hour or so my dad got restless and made us change it over to old Top of the Pops on BBC4. It was like the politics version of when I tried to show him Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, and just as anxiety-inducing. I sulked off to my room and spent the rest of the night listening to the Radio 4 coverage like a total fanny. It was only in later years that I realised how completely correct my dad's judgment was.

The following week, which ended with Clegg perched on Cameron's shoulder like that monkey who betrayed Indiana Jones, was about the neatest disillusioning blow that could have been served to my soft, reform-minded liberalism at that time. If it had a positive upshot for me it was to absolutely clarify which side of the fence I was on and to teach me the futility of trusting centrists to do anything else than sell out the left and enable the right - a lesson that the last 10 years of western politics hasn't exactly disavowed me of! Also, I think Four Lions came out that same week and I did enjoy it very much, so that was something. Chris Morris should do more stuff.

checkoutgirl

Jaysus Nemakin, I'm on your dad's side regarding Top of the Pops.

Old Nehamkin

Quote from: checkoutgirl on May 04, 2020, 01:55:12 AM
Jaysus Nemakin, I'm on your dad's side regarding Top of the Pops.

Lol yes, to be clear, I was definitely being a shitty little nerd in that instance.

the Wikileaks - leaked US state department cables thoughts on that 2010 election were oddly correct though.

showed how much they saw the UK as their bridge to Europe and that they saw Cameron as a threat to that, Hillary Clintons aides were slagging him off loads, rightly perceiving him to be a aimless, too young, aristocratic lightweight who would not be able to control the Europskeptics, and that the party was becoming more aristocratic losing touch with its working class base.
they knew Labour was totally dead in the water and a zombie government 18 months before the election. and were furious that David Milliband did not win the labour leadership post.

Nigel Farage began appearing on Question time and mainstream media a lot around the time of this election, very weird, flat,  directionless period, post labour post crash, i cant see why people found him exciting he is furious and the only politician with any sense of energy in that period.

kaprisky

Hang on... "old Top of the Pops on BBC4" didn't start until 2011.


Old Nehamkin



thenoise

I wish my Dad preferred old ToTP to election coverage.  Incidentally, the first year that my Dad - who took me on demos and marches as a child, who encouraged us to use the word 'Thatcher' as a euphemism for 'poo' when we were growing up (it still makes me giggle) - voted Conservative for the first time, an act which he has repeated every election since.

Quote from: Shoulders?-Stomach! on May 03, 2020, 10:15:58 PM
Even when Corbyn was leader you would get people who would confidently assert they didn't believe Labour under him would do anything left wing. That's the extent to which trust was shattered, that a supposedly infamous Marxist standing on a platform of renationalising lots of things can't convince ex-Labour voters on the old left .

Well, a lot of Labour supporters thought that he would be leading a coalition government at best, possibly resulting in a deal with the SNP resulting in Scottish independence (England would be a lot more Conservative in general without the Scottish vote), and being forced to compromise a lot of their politics due to the Lib Dems, who a European Neo-liberal capitalist globalists (albeit ones 'with a heart' compared to the Tories).

Quote

The 'compassionate Conservatism' myth was being peddled a lot then wasn't it? Interesting to look back on that knowing the utterly vicious horror they unleashed upon society once they got in.

Paul Calf

Quote from: Silly Little Tart on May 04, 2020, 04:00:06 AM
the Wikileaks - leaked US state department cables thoughts on that 2010 election were oddly correct though.

showed how much they saw the UK as their bridge to Europe and that they saw Cameron as a threat to that, Hillary Clintons aides were slagging him off loads, rightly perceiving him to be a aimless, too young, aristocratic lightweight who would not be able to control the Europskeptics, and that the party was becoming more aristocratic losing touch with its working class base.
they knew Labour was totally dead in the water and a zombie government 18 months before the election. and were furious that David Milliband did not win the labour leadership post.

Nigel Farage began appearing on Question time and mainstream media a lot around the time of this election, very weird, flat,  directionless period, post labour post crash, i cant see why people found him exciting he is furious and the only politician with any sense of energy in that period.


MY MY THATS AN INTERESTING FIRST POST.


checkoutgirl

Quote from: Old Nehamkin on May 04, 2020, 02:16:59 AM
Lol yes, to be clear, I was definitely being a shitty little nerd in that instance.

The passionate spunk of youth. Has to be admired.

jamiefairlie

Quote from: thenoise on May 04, 2020, 11:53:09 AM

(England would be a lot more Conservative in general without the Scottish vote)

How so? Removing the Scottish vote does nothing to change the English vote. If Labour wants to get back into power in the UK, it needs to win in England. If they won every seat in Scotland it would have made no difference.

Quote from: jamiefairlie on May 05, 2020, 12:31:55 AM
How so? Removing the Scottish vote does nothing to change the English vote. If Labour wants to get back into power in the UK, it needs to win in England. If they won every seat in Scotland it would have made no difference.

Exactly.  There's only been one election (1964) when Westminster having no Scottish MPs would have changed the outcome (Feb 1974 would still have produced a hung parliament).  Labour forms a govt when it wins in England, regardless of Scottish seats.

Besides, it would be interesting to see if the SNP would vote Labour down and help in a Tory govt like they did in 1979.  It would go down like sick in the previously Labour heartlands of Scotland would be my guess.

Blinder Data

Labour got its comfortable majority in 2005 on the back of Scottish votes tho. 286 English Lab MPs versus 186 English Tory MPs. They lost the popular vote in England too.

Labour had a comfortable majority of English seats.  Even given the Lib Dems winning c.50 seats in 2005 (estimate - haven't double checked), that would mean a Labour majority of roughly 50 in England    A majority of 50 in a UK GE is a pretty healthy majority.  They could've governed comfortably for five years if Parliament was England only.

kaprisky

The 1964 General Election coverage is currently on BBC Parliament.

Loads of men in ties, glasses and receding hairlines. No women it seems.

imitationleather

Quote from: kaprisky on May 16, 2020, 04:34:05 PM
The 1964 General Election coverage is currently on BBC Parliament.

Loads of men in ties, glasses and receding hairlines. No women it seems.

Women weren't invented until Tom Jones had his first number 1 in 1965.

Danger Man

Quote from: kaprisky on May 16, 2020, 04:34:05 PM
Loads of men in ties, glasses and receding hairlines. No women it seems.

Women couldn't open a bank account without the permission of their husbands/fathers until the 1970's so it's not much of a surprise that they weren't fronting election night TV shows in the 1960's.

Uncle TechTip

The women's role was reduced to answering the phones pouring in the results from all around the country, all delivered by men of course. I'm sure it's the 1964 broadcast which opens up with Dimbleby gushing over the "girls who'll be working busily" or something like that.

thenoise

Quote from: imitationleather on May 17, 2020, 12:43:47 PM
Women weren't invented until Tom Jones had his first number 1 in 1965.

With homosexuality remaining illegal until 1967, there was a rather awkward four years beginning in 1961, when sex was legalised for the first time.

kaprisky

Election '70 is currently on BBC Parliament if you are bored with the football. In colour but preserved in shaky videotape.

Still a load of older, balding gentlemen with bow ties and glasses onscreen, etc. Some (younger) women milling about in the background on occasion.