{"id":4567,"date":"2011-01-14T09:39:07","date_gmt":"2011-01-14T08:39:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=4567"},"modified":"2011-01-14T09:40:57","modified_gmt":"2011-01-14T08:40:57","slug":"young-and-happy-in-old-and-sad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=4567","title":{"rendered":"Young and happy in Old and Sad"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Three and a half months ago, I did <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=3741\">a posting<\/a> suggesting that what British politics now needed was a by-election. I pointed out:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;In the \u2018old days\u2019 of British politics, typically there used to be three  or four by-elections a year. These days, Members of Parliament tend to  be younger and healthier so there is less death or serious illness. But,  of course, there\u2019s always the chance of scandal or an MP wishing to  spend more time with his or her family.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So we had the scandal when Phil Woolas was ruled to have lied in the course of the General Election and was forced to give up the seat he &#8216;won&#8217; with a majority of just 103. The constituency in question was, of course, Oldham East and Saddleworth which the media has dubbed Old and Sad.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/uk-politics-12187965\">result of yesterday&#8217;s by-election<\/a> is that Labour won it with a majority of 3,558 making 50-year old Debbie Abrahams a happy Member of Parliament. Turnout was down from 61.2% to 48.6%.<\/p>\n<p>It was a good result for Labour but not a spectacular one and new leader Ed Milliband will be quietly pleased.\u00a0 The Liberals did not do as badly as they might have feared, but in normal circumstances would have walked this type of election. The Conservative vote collapsed but the Tories made no real effort in the constituency.<\/p>\n<p>The local election in May will be a bigger and better test of the coalition&#8217;s unpopularity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Three and a half months ago, I did a posting suggesting that what British politics now needed was a by-election. I pointed out: &#8220;In the \u2018old days\u2019 of British politics, typically there used to be three or four by-elections a year. These days, Members of Parliament tend to be younger and healthier so there is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4567"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4575,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4567\/revisions\/4575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}