the day after the deadline: can the union survive brexit and other deep questions

It will offer sport, media and business courses and will be near Old Trafford.

finally these under-represented subjects will be available to HE students

yeah i didn't check the credentials of my local Labour councillors and one of them who is a friend of a friend is pretty centrist iirc but i'm just all about getting the boot into the Lib Dems tbh

i'm in one of their "Tories can't win here" zones so it's the right thing to do

short of literally physically putting the boot in which would be more satisfying obv but they didn't have anybody trolling the polling station at 7.30 this morning

good luck uk

you get the feeling most local councillors trend centrist anyway but whether they've got Blair tattooed on their arse or not every seat they win will be an embiggenment of the Momentum agenda on the news cycle unless the BBC decides to pretend there haven't been elections at all if the results go well enough

peace out point at potholes every day

meanwhile, in 'man the guillotines' news:

The invitation is meant to build bridges between the royal family and some of the most deprived parts of British society. Twelve-hundred handpicked members of the public – including inner-city youth workers from Coventry and community leaders from Bolton – will crowd inside the grounds of Windsor Castle to be among the first to see Prince Harry and Meghan Markle emerge as a married couple on Saturday 19 May.

But it seems the hospitality won’t extend far. Representatives of the royal family, which has an estimated net worth well in excess of £400m, have sent letters to these guests encouraging them to bring their own picnics, in a move described by one invitee as “unfathomable”.

Debrett’s guide to etiquette advises at least six canapés per person pre-lunch at a wedding, but guests have been encouraged in letters from lord lieutenants, the Queen’s representatives in the counties, “to bring a picnic lunch as it will not be possible to buy food and drink on site”.

seems like a good opportunity to take a picnic basket of rotten veg with which to pelt the newlyweds imo

anybody who turns up this shit is a stooge who doesn't deserve to be fed

Booting Lib Dems is great but I didn't get an opportunity (unlike the General election with all of their Remainer bullshit talk). They didn't show up around here.

Polling I've seen indicate Labour will do well but perhaps not well enough to scare the shit out of the Tories. Anyone seen any different? Sadly not that exciting. xps

http://www.theargus.co.uk/resources/images/7269110.jpg

next-level pointing there, transitioning into touching

he's got my vote

he's just come along and taken the pointing game to the next level. horizontal! genius

he's disrupting the pointing industry

local councillors HATE him! learn his one weird trick to dominate the pages of the local press

NV: have you found yourself becoming harder left/more militant recently? I dont recall you being so strident. (It a good thing. Not criticising)

I get to vote in a celebrity polling station, since Corbyn became leader, so a camera crew and few photographers kicking about. And one Labour person - not much point in anyone from any other party showing up round here tbh.

One of the many stupid fallacies pedalled by Labour members of all stripes is that voters (and I mean the minority who actually vote in local elections) care about whether their local candidates are centrist or 'moderate' or socialist or whatever. They'll vote according to which party they feel impelled to vote for at national level, driven at least in part by a load of factors that local councillors can't really influence in any case.

There are exceptions to this - Haringey for example, and Kensington & Chelsea is going to be a unique circumstance - but most people will just vote for whoever is wearing the appropriately coloured rosette.

dowd i don't know. i don't think so - i've been somewhere on the Marxian end of the left since I was a teenager, really. i might be getting grumpier and more vocal about it as the prospect of rescuing some kind of civilization from an increasingly atomized, privatized society gets more remote but i think it largely depends on what kind of month i'm having. plus sometimes it's just devilment for fun.

i'm v shortly hopefully taking voluntary redundancy as part of a huge swathe of potential lay-offs and seeing the effect that's having on people less lucky than me might be hyping me up a bit at the moment

There are exceptions to this - Haringey for example, and Kensington & Chelsea is going to be a unique circumstance - but most people will just vote for whoever is wearing the appropriately coloured rosette.

exactly, hence the meaninglessness

Really sorry to hear that NV

for me it's liberating tbh. unfortunately not for many of my colleagues.

Cricklewood Mum OTM

For the past FOUR years we've had no enforcement whatsoever to help the community around our school with that kind of selfish, illegal & dangerous behaviour but out of nowhere, this non sense got requested, approved, funded & installed. Thanks for nothing @CityWestminster -> pic.twitter.com/iBRiykTN9k

— Sylvia #FBPE (@CricklewoodMum) May 2, 2018

what the fuck is that supposed to be

A lot of Jolyons saying they’ve not voted/voted LibDem today.

Grade A pointing opportunity right there xpx

BTW good luck with whatever the future flings at you next NV

i'm getting a yurt and some breeding camels, i shd be good

humping camels shurely

scrawled #FBPE on the ballot paper in my own shit, football's coming home

— Ed Jefferson (@edjeff) May 3, 2018

camels are surprisingly expensive, i blame the Tories

comin' over 'ere, storin' our precious fluids in their 'umps

enough to make you sick, it is

wot's wrong wiv good old-fashioned seaside donkeys, i say

*hoists bosom, sucks on benson & hedges, dies*

All the focus is on K+C and London today obv, but still voted Labour today. Just on the strength that when my candidate recently visited our estate, there was a dead rat on the ginnel. And rather having a photo taken pointing at it with disapproving frown, he got one of his assistants to dispose/eat/burn it or whatever, it was gone! And also he faced off a bunch of ugly-ass Britain First twats outside a mosque a few years back. He's still probably completely corrupt and useless like. But I have developed a probably misplaced liking/electoral loyalty for the fool!

what's his stance on hepatitis?

he is campaigning for daily bottles of hep c for school children, he's one of the good guys!

a rat in every belly, hep c in every bloodstream

30 years ago a child would kick a rat in the street.

I had 2 votes today, normally when that happens I vote Labour with one and Green or some variety of Socialist with the other, but I chucked both to Labour. I looked into the 2 Lab candidates and looks like one is centre-left (but pro-Corbyn) and the other is hard left. That'll do for me. It does seem pretty meaningless but a bad result for Labour will be spun to fuck by the media so they need all the help they can get.

I had 2 votes today

sssshhhh we're supposed to keep our widespread and highly-organised voter fraud a secret

I used my partner's postal vote as well, as she couldn't be arsed voting. But to no great tactical avail tbh, but doing something to stop Tories/LibDems not winning anything is a sort of a win, or making their loss bigger than marginal, if only personally to me.

last sentence didn't make sense, but you know worra mean

yep

Considerably easier to hate the Tories and Lib Dems than love the Labour Party.

'twas ever thus

good luck uk

luv2suppress voters

Voters have been turned away from polling stations in at least two of the five areas trialling the government’s controversial compulsory ID scheme, prompting concerns that some people are being disenfranchised.

Angela Wilkins, the leader of the Labour group on Bromley council in south-east London, one of the boroughs involved in the pilot project, said four polling stations being used for the local elections on Thursday had told her that by 10.30am, they had already turned away five people between them for not having ID.

“By that stage, there had been 25 votes at one of the stations, which could mean just 100 votes cast overall, and already five people turned away,” she said.

“If that turns out to be the case, it’s a much higher rate of people having difficulties than anyone expected.”

grrrrr

I gather it will be another 6-7+ hrs before we can start to expect exit polling and results and the like?