I can’t seem to get Feedmap to work for me. No matter if I enter direct latitude and longitude coordinates or my address, feedmap still decides to put me somewhere in the North Yorkshire moors. Very odd.
See? Nowhere near my real location of 51.541510 , 0.145774.
A freshly gassed excimer laser delivering 200 mJ pulses of hard UV radiation to a 2 mm square spot. Now I can get back to some science.
LABOUR HOLD – Jonathan Cruddas
Result declared May 06 2005 02:23
No surprise there then.
The 2005 general election
Jonathan Cruddas, …. Labour 15,446 votes 50.1%
Michael White, …. Conservative 7,841 votes 25.4%
James Kempton, …. Liberal Democrat 3,106 votes 10.1%
Lawrence Rustem, …. British National Party 2,870 votes 9.3%
Gerard Batten, …. UK Independence Party 1,578 votes 5.1%Labour majority: 7,605
Time of declaration: May 06 2005 02:23
Turnout: 51.3 %
The results seem pretty much in line with my predictions yesterday except for the worryingly large vote for the BNP. I wonder how the council elections will pan out next time. What do we have to do to make anyone other than UKIP do some campaigning here? Will a seven thousand majority (down from ~17000 in 1997, albeit with a ~70% tunout) and several of the surrounding boroughs going to Conservative have any bearing on who visits here in 4 years time…
It is election time again, that special day once every so often when Dagenites turn out in their droves (~40% of those elegible to vote) to cast their vote and get a Labour MP regardless…
So this year we have a choice of:
Lawrence Rustem …. British National Party
James Kempton …. Liberal Democrats
Gerard Batten …. UK Independence Party, The
Jonathan Cruddas …. Labour Party, The
Michael White …. Conservative Party, The
Of these, only Michael White and Jonathan Cruddas are returning candidates. The others all being first time candidates in Dagenham.
Based on the previous election results it is a fair bet that we’ll get Cruddas again as MP with White training along on somewhere between 20 and 40% of the vote and Kempton in 3rd place with roughly half the votes that White will get. The BNP and UKIP will be lost in the statistical noise.
The only canditate I’ve seen out compaigning is Gerard Batten for UKIP. Standing outside Heathway station handing out leaflets. Batten is so far the only politician that has ever done me a favour; I was at the back of a long ticket queue Tuesday morning when he commanded his bagpiper to start playing. The noise drove about half the people from the queue – meaning I got served more quickly. He isn’t getting my vote though.
My predictions for the results are as follows:
Turnout 48%
Elected MP Cruddas with 53% of the vote
2nd place White with 31%
3rd place Kempton with 10%
One day we’ll get a non-Labour MP…
At around 6am this morning (BST) the last Skylark sounding rocket blasted off from Swedish Space Corporation’s Esrange site, near Kiruna Sweeden.
The Skylark was the last wholly designed UK rocket. First concived in 1955, the Skylark was at the forefront of low budget UK space science. In the 50 years since it first flew, the Skylark project has launched over 440 rockets carrying payloads designed to investigate everything from X-ray sources in deepspace to protein growth and frogspawn fertilisation in microgravity.
All future suborbital launches will now be made with the more expensive American-built Oriole sounding rockets. Truly the end of an era in UK space science.
Edit: The launch finally took place on Monday 2nd of May 2005 instead of Sunday 1st of May.
