When historical social media posts live on

I have been intrigued on looking at the traffic stats for this blog for the past several weeks to see that the most read post has been quite an old one: to be precise a 2013 post with the title

"Anorak post: regional voting patterns."

I'm not going to take it down because it is obviously interesting to somebody, but alas it is not very up-to-date. It refers to some analysis by Peter Kellner who was and I think still is President of the pollster YouGov, on why Northern voters were at that time less inclined to vote Conservative than their southern counterparts.

Interesting though it was, it should be noted that over the past ten years and particularly since the Brexit referendum, this has become significantly less true.

Just to take two examples familiar to me, at the time the article came out my former home in St Albans (in the home counties) remained in the Conservative fold to which it had returned in 2005 while Copeland here in the North West was still in the Labour column. 

But in 2017 Copeland went Conservative, returning Trudy Harrison in the by-election that year and in both the general elections we have had since, while in 2019 St Albans went Lib/Dem.

Just over ten years ago Cumbria only had one Conservative MP to four Labour MPs and one Lib/Dem. Today Cumbria has five Conservative MPs and is a Labour-MP free zone.

The Brexit saga, and perhaps other things as well, have seriously disrupted in both North and South the old regional loyalties which the original post sought to explain.

It's often a good idea to check the date on any social media posts, or indeed anything else on the internet, to which a search engine may guide you: if it is more than a year or two old it may be informative about the situation at that time but it may also contain things which were true at the time but no longer provide a full and up-to-date picture.  


Postscript 15th December 2020

Well, it's finally happened: guess which other post has finally pipped the 2013 "Anorak post: regional voting patterns" to the slot for the most read post on this blog over the last few days.

Got it in one: this one. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria

Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the
Read more

Quotes of the day 19th August 2020

Image
"Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise."  ( Cato the Elder , who lived 234 BC - 149 BC, quoted in "Lives" by Plutarch.) There is a similar saying by Germany's Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck: Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have put the same saying in a more humorous form: "Wise men profit by the mistakes of others, while fools will not learn even from their own blunders." See also this thread on the "Quote Investigator" website . Let us all be wise and learn from the events of the last few days.
Read more

Quote of the day 24th July 2020

I was moved to put the passage below forward as a quote today when I saw a horrible post on twitter from someone writing that it was "excellent" that someone who took a different view from her about Brexit had died. I won't write which way round it was so that all the Remain supporters can assume the post was from a Brexit fanatic welcoming the death of a remainer and all the Leavers can assume it was a Remainiac welcoming one less Brexiteer. There's been plenty of nasty stuff on both sides but if you catch anyone of your own viewpoint  posting something like that who might listen to you, please do call them out on it - and point out that they're giving everyone on your side of the argument a bad name. Anyway, here's the quote from John Donne.
Read more