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Election latest: David Cameron inflicts worst drubbing in 40 years [Labour suffered one of its worst
Times Online ^

Posted on 05/01/2008 7:35:06 PM PDT by Sub-Driver

Election latest: David Cameron inflicts worst drubbing in 40 years

The Conservatives made sweeping gains across the country early today as voters gave Gordon Brown a huge rebuff in his first electoral test as Prime Minister.

David Cameron chalked up important successes in the North, the Midlands and the South, securing his top target of Bury in Greater Manchester and taking control of Nuneaton and Bedworth, and Southampton.

The Conservatives also took seats in Labour strongholds of Sunderland and Wigan.

Labour suffered one of its worst electoral humiliations, with its national share of the vote dropping to 24 or 25 per cent. The Tory share was projected at 43 or 44 per cent, better than its most optimistic predictions.

The Conservatives also took seats in Labour strongholds of Sunderland and Wigan.

Labour suffered one of its worst electoral humiliations, with its national share of the vote dropping to 24 or 25 per cent. The Tory share was projected at 43 or 44 per cent, better than its most optimistic predictions.

(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...


TOPICS: Breaking News; Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; United Kingdom
KEYWORDS: cameron; davidcameron; england; europe; gordonbrown; johnmccain; labour; mccain; mccainforpresident; senatorjohnmccain; tory
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To: Sub-Driver
Once Obama or Hillary are elected President the conservative movement will retake the House and the senate in 2010. Britain is a classic example.

If we elect McLame - we are all doomed.

81 posted on 05/02/2008 12:30:23 PM PDT by Leo Farnsworth (I'm not really Leo Farnsworth...)
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To: AdmSmith; Berosus; Convert from ECUSA; dervish; Ernest_at_the_Beach; Fred Nerks; george76; ...
Labour suffered one of its worst electoral humiliations, with its national share of the vote dropping to 24 or 25 per cent. The Tory share was projected at 43 or 44 per cent, better than its most optimistic predictions.
Couldn't be that the US' and Iraq's having to clean out the ratsnest formerly "occupied" by British forces had anything to do with Labour's downward spiral, could it? Or is the British economy booming? Yeah, that must be it, their economy is booming, leading to the fencesitters voting Tory, and those on the dole staying home because "Sex in the City" was on. ;')
82 posted on 05/02/2008 12:39:59 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/_______________________Profile updated Monday, April 28, 2008)
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To: Williams

I will happy when it reaches us!


83 posted on 05/02/2008 1:02:52 PM PDT by righting-wrongs
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To: 2banana

“Maybe there is hope for Europe.”

Yeah, in betraying their American Allies in Iraq.


84 posted on 05/02/2008 3:11:16 PM PDT by Natchez Hawk (What's so funny about the first, second, and fourth Amendments?)
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To: snowman_returns

“...the only countries in the world not infected with this social disease...Italy and Isreal”

Don’t let the door hit you on the ass...


85 posted on 05/02/2008 3:13:19 PM PDT by Natchez Hawk (What's so funny about the first, second, and fourth Amendments?)
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To: Free Dominoes

Bingo.


86 posted on 05/02/2008 3:13:46 PM PDT by Natchez Hawk (What's so funny about the first, second, and fourth Amendments?)
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To: Blood of Tyrants

The Tories will do nothing. If Thatcher didn’t do anything what on Earth makes you think that flaming meterosexual Cameron will? The only option is the BNP.


87 posted on 05/02/2008 3:52:02 PM PDT by Free Dominoes
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Eccentric opposition lawmaker ousts Labour mayor of London
David Stringer, AP, 5/2/2008
with cont. by Paisley Dodds and Raphael Satter
88 posted on 05/02/2008 6:13:55 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/_______________________Profile updated Monday, April 28, 2008)
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To: Sub-Driver

Perhaps Londoners have finally realized that their city is indeed becoming “Londonistan” and are tired of being handcuffed by political correctness if they dare try to resist the cultural shift to islam. London has become a crime-ridden hellhole in recent years. Perhaps the voters have more faith that a conservative will be more effective in turning things around. Sadly, it may be a bit too late.


89 posted on 05/02/2008 6:43:45 PM PDT by American Infidel (It's pronounced 'ASK' not 'AXE'. It's a 3 letter word. How difficult can it be?)
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To: brityank

Quite nice that they have accurately kept their election maps for the Conservative Party with the color blue, and Labour with red.


90 posted on 05/02/2008 7:25:46 PM PDT by Reagan80 ("Government is not the solution to our problem, Government IS the problem." -RR; 1980 Inaugural)
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(one of the “have your say” comments referred to “the 10p” as being the tipping point; apparently that’s an excise tax on — of all things — grocery bags)

Tide turns against Labour in its South Wales heartlands
Fran Yeoman
From The Times
May 2, 2008
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article3859504.ece

Ministers had everyone prepared for bad news, but it’s worse than that
Tim Hames: Analysis
From The Times
May 2, 2008
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article3858117.ece

-an oldie-

Gordon Brown’s Black Wednesday
The Northern Rock disaster has torn away any remaining credibility the Prime Minister had
Anatole Kaletsky
From The Times
January 22, 2008
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/anatole_kaletsky/article3227927.ece


91 posted on 05/02/2008 9:10:31 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/_______________________Profile updated Monday, April 28, 2008)
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To: Sub-Driver

The Conservative Party in the U.K. doesn’t share much with what is considered conservatism in the U.S. I’m not sure they know what they stand for, except for environmentalism.


92 posted on 05/02/2008 11:33:10 PM PDT by nickcarraway
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To: dfwgator

Mary Whitehouse has just taken Umbridge, I hear...


93 posted on 05/03/2008 12:22:30 AM PDT by propertius
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To: SunkenCiv

Uncombed and often awkward, Johnson is known both his wit and for remarks that are have offended minority communities and others.

He labeled members of the Commonwealth “piccaninnies” — a derogatory term for black people, referred to Africans as having “watermelon smiles,” and likened his party’s internal conflicts “to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing.”

Johnson’s scorn has also been directed at gay marriage, which became legal in Britain in 2005. In his book “Friends, Voters, Countrymen,” he said that if homosexuals could marry then why not “three men, as well as two men; or indeed three men and a dog.”

Ex-party leader Michael Howard ordered Johnson to visit the northern city of Liverpool in 2004 to apologize after he wrote an editorial accusing the city’s people of “wallowing” in victimhood after Liverpudlian Ken Bigley was taken hostage in Iraq and beheaded.

(From AP)


94 posted on 05/03/2008 12:34:42 AM PDT by propertius
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To: 2banana

Heck, there may even be hope for the United States .....


95 posted on 05/03/2008 4:32:01 AM PDT by pleikumud
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To: SunkenCiv

Thanks. The UK Conservatives may be better on some issues but they still hate America:

America’s Moral Authority
By DANIEL JOHNSON | May 1, 2008
LONDON — Anti-Americanism is not only the world’s most pernicious and ubiquitous ideology — it is also the most tenacious. In fact, it has taken on some aspects of a religion.

Richard Dawkins thinks God is a delusion. He is mistaken, of course: people are deluded when they worship idols. But the worst idol of our time is anti-Americanism. Its devotees will fit any facts into their all-embracing faith in the unique wickedness of the Americans — the people that, of all the nations on earth, least deserves to be demonized in this way.

This week I attended a debate in London on the motion that “America has lost its moral authority.” The members of the audience were highly educated, prosperous (they were paying $50 a ticket), and the event was sponsored by the right-of-center Spectator magazine.

So the Royal Geographical Society theatre was not full of Noam Chomsky wannabes. Yet before the debate even began they voted for the motion (i.e., against America) by 431 to 143, with 176 undecided.

Anti-Americanism is not the monopoly of the Left. In fact, it is strongest among the British liberal establishment, which is saturated in BBC propaganda.

That was true of the speakers, too. The only one of those supporting the motion who could be described as left-wing was the novelist Will Self. And he was the only one on either side who has a U.S. passport. The others were the columnist Matthew Parris and the author John Gray. Mr. Parris writes for the London Times — owned by Rupert Murdoch and one of the few British newspapers not to succumb to anti-Americanism. Mr. Gray was a professor at Oxford and the London School of Economics.

Yet their speeches were dripping with hatred and contempt for America. Mr. Self claimed that American politics was so corrupt that “you would have to be a pedophile to lose your seat in Congress.” He claimed that, on average, 98% of the members of Congress were reelected, which, as the Columbia University-based historian Simon Schama pointed out, means that power never changes hands and makes America a one-party state. And, sure enough, Mr. Self compared America both to the Soviet Union and to Nazi Germany. He also claimed that living standards for the poorer Americans were “worse than in Syria,” which nobody bothered to correct.

Then came John Gray, for whom America is defined by one thing: torture. He tried to scare the audience with detailed descriptions of waterboarding, ignoring the fact that the reason we know all about it is that America is one of the few countries in which officials are held accountable for their use of coercive techniques.

Finally, there was Matthew Parris, whose account of American history is a story about land-grabbing, genocide, and slavery is as cynical as it is inaccurate. He sneered at the “lickspittle British Atlanticists” (I think he meant people like me), but his real animosity was directed at the American people rather than their government. President Bush and his neocons, Mr. Parris declared, were not the antithesis of the American dream, but part of it — indeed the “distillation” of that dream.

And what of the defense? Mr. Schama did a good job of correcting the most egregious errors: “I stopped listening to Matthew Parris when he mentioned that George Washington lived at a place called ‘Montibello.’ It was, of course, Monticello and the man who lived there was Jefferson.” But Mr. Schama is so hostile to the Bush administration that he was too apologetic to be a good apologist.

Martin Amis, the novelist, was more robust in his defense. He cited Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Lebanon, Pakistan, and all the nations afflicted by the 2004 tsunami as beneficiaries of American generosity. He deployed his accustomed eloquence to denounce “unadorned anti-Americanism.” But, he too, conceded too much. “Good intentions are decisively better than bad intentions,” seems a trifle understated, even by British standards.

So it was left to another writer, Howard Jacobson, to get down in the dirt and give the anti-Americans a good kicking. “America has ceded the moral high ground — to whom, precisely?” he asked. His withering words about the gloating of European intellectuals over American misfortunes will live long in my memory. He even cited Mr. Gray’s own words against him: “You asked when Jews will be forgiven the Holocaust. Well, when will Americans be forgiven 9/11?”

By the end of the debate, the case for the defense had won. If it was not an actual victory, at least it was a moral one. The final voting figures were: 433 for the motion, 291 against. So the pro-American camp had won over almost all the undecideds (including my 16-year-old daughter Edith), more than doubling their vote. Not a single one of the anti-Americans had been persuaded, and they were still in the large majority.

That is a measure of the problem we Atlanticists face: here in Britain, in Europe, and around the world. It is not a problem that a new president will solve by him or herself.

For what it was worth, the speakers predicted either Senators Obama or McCain to win in November, but none of them thought it would make a big difference to the way America is seen abroad.

Anti-Americanism is a pathological symptom, not a rational analysis. It would be a grave mistake for Americans to cast their votes for the candidate they thought would make America more likeable abroad. That would be a blow to the respect for which America still holds from its many friends and admirers.

Mr. Johnson is the editor of Standpoint magazine.

http://www.nysun.com/news/america-s-moral-authority


96 posted on 05/03/2008 7:57:45 AM PDT by dervish (I believe in God. I'm bitter.)
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To: AuH2ORepublican

In some senses it is more liberal, but in reality it is often neutral political territory which changes back and fourth.


97 posted on 05/03/2008 9:59:54 AM PDT by UKrepublican
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To: bruinbirdman

And I admire him also as should everybody for being a man that sacrificed himself politically to stand with our American friends in the decisive struggle of our time against islamo nazism.

No socialists like Tony Blair simply because he didn’t govern like a proper socialist.

Political difference aside, as a Brit, I will always look at the man with great pride that he was our leader and he led when it mattered and di the right thing. He got stabbed in the back by his party and his country ultimately.


98 posted on 05/03/2008 10:04:03 AM PDT by UKrepublican
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To: 2banana

Berlusconi????

The man is a crook. He doesn’t deserve to run a country as fine and illustrious as Italy.


99 posted on 05/03/2008 10:35:14 AM PDT by Rikstir
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To: The KG9 Kid

You stick to your politics, and I’ll stick to mine. There is no way our population would vote for personal use of firearms. Its not our culture, its yours.

Get your geography more up to the 21st Century please mate.


100 posted on 05/03/2008 10:38:21 AM PDT by Rikstir
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