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Labour flops in OBS as CON holds with 51.5% of vote – politicalbetting.com
Labour flops in OBS as CON holds with 51.5% of vote – politicalbetting.com
So a very comfortable night for the Tories easily holding on in the second Tory by-election defence of this parliament. This is the first hold for the party since Sleaford and North Hykeham almost exactly five years ago.
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Previous infection not protection against omicron
Lab: not great result, but not very fertile territory. Poor, but not disastrous.
Reform: despite throwing everything at the seat, totally failed to get traction. Very poor result.
Green: held up well, but small numbers
LD: poor result, but really only next week's by-election matters.
Labour gets the paper LD candidate share but not much more, most people staying at home
If not here and now, then where and when?
Tice gets his deposit back, unlike the Lib Dems.
New political parties are extremely common.
Breakthrough political parties are extremely rare.
The only ones that spring to mind are Sinn Féin (1910s), Labour (1924-29) and the Scottish National Party (1970s). Of those, only SF made their breakthrough within a decade of foundation.
All other parties either evolved slowly over time or broke off from other established parties.
Note that all three mentioned grew out of very powerful “movements” before they became political parties. Cf contemporary Green parties…
ReformUK took 3rd but will be disappointed not to have got a higher voteshare in a seat with demographics made for them. Terrible result for the LDs falling from 3rd to 5th. They will brush it off saying their focus is on North Shropshire but equally even if they win North Shropshire Boris can now dismiss it as a one off Paterson protest vote driven by the LD by electiion machine
Con by 15 to 20, and I'd want at least 6-1 to bet on the Libs.
A piece of life advice: when a child is three, don't teach him the lyrics of 'Jingle Bells' as:
"Jingle bells,
Mummy smells,
Daddy ran away,
Oh what fun it is to be,
Away from mummy's smell!"
As he'll be repeating it every Christmas for at least the next four years. Including at school ...
It might be a very naughty thing to ask, but if this kind of swing were replicated at a GE what would we be looking at?
The really impressive breakthrough into nowhere is by Rejoin EU, with 0.69% of the vote. That’s a movement on the march. By the General Election of 2068 I can see them threatening in some more Remainery constituencies in the southwest especially as by then we will all be cyber-organic flesh-bots living in tungsten podules orbiting Saturn
“BREAKING: U.S. reports 139,424 new coronavirus cases, the biggest one-day increase since September”
https://twitter.com/bnodesk/status/1466590184984780803?s=21
This is BEFORE Omicron. With reports that Omicron easily breaks through prior immunity we could be in for the worst wave of Covid yet.
Conservatives 4/9 Lads & Corals
Lib Dems 15/8 PP, BV, Bw
And similarly, flying cows would see us all spattered with cowpats.
I’m feeling very unwell too, but that’s not a virus that’s just the amount of marking I’ve had to do in the last week.
https://twitter.com/TWenseleers/status/1466501989500653568
The unknown at this point is how it compares in disease severity, and how protective are vaccines and/or prior infection in this respect (they do not seem to be greatly so against infection).
Just this brutal fatigue
Fair to assume there has been tactical voting. Lib Dems got 8.3% of the vote in 2019 + LP 23.5% = 32% combined
By Election: 34% combined..
Does this reveal the true swing?
I'm interested to see that even people outside teaching know about the paper setting process for the new GCSE and A-levels though.
IMHO OB&S not a 'good' result for anyone, really, apart perhaps for Reform. 'Satisfactory' for Tories and Labour, does suggest that anti-Tory voters are prepared to get behind the likely winner. Poor turnout, though.
That alone isn’t diagnostic of Omicron, but it’s a very good proxy for differentiating between the two, as other variants with that characteristic are largely gone for now.
Get one off Amazon if you can.
I hope I’m wrong but we could be in for a perfect winter storm of renewed Delta, followed by Omicron (which busts through prior immunity from infection).
South Africa just recorded 11,500 cases, doubling in 2 days, and up from 300 in mid November. Much faster than Delta. Hospitalisations are tracking this rise. We dunno about deaths yet but they lag, of course
We now have enough data to think: Holy Fucking Shit
Meanwhile...
The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines being used in the UK as boosters give the best overall boost response, according to a UK trial of seven different jabs.
The trial is the first study of how well Covid booster jabs work and justifies the UK's early decision to use these two vaccines for boosters.
All the vaccines tested raised immunity against Covid to some degree.
Researchers said there were promising signs the boosters would still protect against illness and death from Omicron.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59489988
I continue to maintain that the actual healthcare impact of Omicron will be limited in the UK. It might actually do more harm to the economy, as the more cautious fraction of the populace sits trembling inside their homes and doesn't go out and do anything until about June.
As to whether we might get clobbered with more rules, I'm in the same place I have been for months: if the hospitals really start to scream it's going to be because they get hit by a load of flu cases on top of the Covid ones, not because of the latter problem on its own.
Tice, while undoubtedly a parasitic scumbag richly deserving of brutal mob justice, just isn't memorably objectionable enough. They need a different and more meme-worthy leader.
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/usercode.py?scotcontrol=Y&CON=41.6&LAB=36.1&LIB=11.8&Reform=2.1&Green=2.8&UKIP=&TVCON=&TVLAB=&TVLIB=&TVReform=&TVGreen=&TVUKIP=&SCOTCON=20.5&SCOTLAB=19&SCOTLIB=6.5&SCOTReform=1&SCOTGreen=1.5&SCOTUKIP=&SCOTNAT=48&display=AllChanged&regorseat=(none)&boundary=2019base
Or on the new boundaries, Con maj of 10:
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/usercode.py?scotcontrol=Y&CON=41.6&LAB=36.1&LIB=11.8&Reform=2.1&Green=2.8&UKIP=&TVCON=&TVLAB=&TVLIB=&TVReform=&TVGreen=&TVUKIP=&SCOTCON=20.5&SCOTLAB=19&SCOTLIB=6.5&SCOTReform=1&SCOTGreen=1.5&SCOTUKIP=&SCOTNAT=48&display=AllChanged&regorseat=(none)&boundary=2019nbbase
Edit: I think I did that slightly wrong but that's the general vibe of it.
Edit again: Hang on, no, I only did half the swing didn't I
“NEW: today’s update from Gauteng, now on a log scale to better show current trajectories.
Steepness of lines shows how much faster the growth in cases and positivity is now vs past waves, and hospital admissions are now steepening too as the acceleration in cases feeds through.”
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1466480113487392769?s=21
This is bad, I’m afraid.
Even if Omicron is less severe, it still has a terrible potential to crash health systems, by the sheer number of people it infects.
However, early indications suggest it might be just as severe as Delta
Teachers read the shit I submitted as 'homework'?
Poor bastards.
Leaving aside the fact that UNS is like a Dawkinsian conception of God* only one leader has managed that since 1945 - Tony Blair in 1997
And that is because it's much harder to achieve huge swings across 650 seats than across 1.
*it's a bizarre figure made up to justify some weird contortions of logic.
Or quit the profession.
https://nypost.com/2021/12/02/woman-caught-breastfeeding-her-hairless-cat-on-a-delta-flight
At one point he speculates that Omicron might have an R of 40, making it the most infectious disease in the history of the universe, but then he falls back on the (much more likely) answer that it is simultaneously more transmissible (4-6 x Delta?) PLUS it is highly reinfective.
Basically, the virus ran out of people to infect, for the first time, in SA, so it learned how to come back and duff them up all over again
"Hey, I'll have a little more!"
Some people are glass-half-empty people:
"Ooooh, I'd better nurse this!"
Leon is an: "Ohmigod where did all the liquid go from the glass? I can't remember drinking any; it's a sign! An omen! Run, people, away from this den of iniquity! Save yourselves! The liquid has gone, and is going to take over the world! The UAPs are sucking the nectar from our glasses using invisible straws! Run! Run for your lives!"
Hope you feel better soon.
The immediate outlook is not brilliant
No context as to how the results relate to eg Az Az Pf or Mo Mo Az.
Does anyone know?
The Lab majority requires Attlee/Blair to lead the Labour party, the alliance option second is a 40%+ chance and could happen if there were a GE tomorrow; also there is quite a range of realistic results which lead to no coherent government.
Morning all.
Partly because you get a full whack of Mo
But all the combos are great against covid - with the major caveat that we don’t know how good they are against Omicron
But other than that, mine wasn't a very good prediction. Seriously overestimated the traction both Labour and Refuk would get and underestimated the Tory share.
Refuk are truly a dead duck joke of a party. Couldn't get a much more sympathetic seat, with their 'leader' running, in a by-election where the voters can give the government a risk free kicking and this is the paltry amount they get? They're not going to even feature remotely at a General Election.
Sounds a difficult issue to deal with. Hate to think how many "Rights" organisations will get involved.
Are animals allowed loose on flights?
It will mightily impact unvaxxed countries but it won’t be great for vaxxed, unless they have brilliant booster campaigns and they can somehow protect the unjabbed entirely
Anyone who thinks they are immune due to prior infection must now rethink
Will lockdowns even work against this variant?
It'll almost certainly be the final time my VO2Max is equal to (or greater than) my age.
Its hard to take something named so tiny seriously.
(PS yes I know covid genuinely is smaller than a micron)
Makes sense if they are. We are in (yet another) race
Tory vote share above 50%. More votes than Labour received at 2019 GE. Less than 1,500 votes for Tice.
Sure, it's not Hartlepool-style brilliant, but there's nothing there to concern them particularly.
Lots of people are missing the fact that this is the SKS strategy. He is absolutely on track to have a 40%+ chance of success.
ATM his biggest problem - "vote Labour, get SNP running the country" - is one he can ignore while consolidating his position. As long as he can pretend his objective is 326 seats he does not have to address it.
If the LDs do well in NS then without winning either seat the non-Tory alliance will have had a good month.
This is a tremendous result for Boris Johnson. Less good for his party, and appalling for the country.
The next GE looks sewn up, unless BJ has another few Peppa Pig moments. His advisors really ought to lock him in a broom cupboard for a couple of years.
ReformUK effectively dead men walking.
LDs still a total joke.
Labour really need to find some traction and some fire in their bellies. They just look so peely wallie.
1) To address a fundamental branding problem by showing you'll do something you wouldn't have done before
2) As a concession in an internal party fight, because it's the only way to get some faction to STFU
Looks like I got Old Bexley and Sidcup spot on so let me try for North Shropshire.
Con 48%
Libs 42%
Lab 2%
Green 3%
Others 5%
Turnout 43%
The original Moderna dose is around double that of Pfizer.
They also tested half dose boosters of Pfizer - and the effect was close to that of the full dose. Which is very goood news in terms of a worldwide booster program.
We just don’t know for certain. Every day tells us more. In 2-3 weeks we will get the first Omicron deaths. Perhaps it will be more transmissible and reinfective but less lethal? 🙏
Right now we have nothing, an empty vase. That's not a good look.
Lab spin is this swing would see Johnson personally unseated
In reality, disappointing.
A crash program to increase production of the Pfizer antiviral might help.
Still definitely worth having but not the cure-all we hoped
So we will need tweaked vaccines and continuously improved therapies (and they are improving all the time). But we’re looking at a rough winter until then
Ugh I feel shit. Time for tablets