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If we all agreed about an outcome there would be no betting – politicalbetting.com
If we all agreed about an outcome there would be no betting – politicalbetting.com
In his regular Saturday morning slot Quincel argued that I was wrong in my assessment of the coming by-election on Thursday in Southend West.
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Is there any effect from the regard held locally for the previous MP?
So I'll stick with my prediction of
Con 80%
UKIP 10%
Others 10%.
Turnout 20%.
I just can't believe Lab/LD voters would bother to turn out for this. Southend W is usually a safe Tory seat but can swing strongly to Lab or LD in the right circumstances.
I know UKIP is running an active social media campaign but surely they don't have an active GOTV operation and the UKIP of now is relatively moribund compared to the UKIP of a few years ago.
I can't see that Lab or LD voters will turn out for a UKIP candidate, even in these circumstances. I think they'll either not vote or vote for one of the 'odd' candidates; personally I'd be tempted by the Psychedelic Movement, although they seem, like all the others, to be right-wingers.
Evidence for the latter; attack on Black Lives matter.
In other news, just looked at the BBC site and note that
'Portugal's ruling Socialist Party has won an unexpected outright majority in Sunday's snap general election for only the second time in its history.'
Whereas, if a disgruntled Tory, I feel I would see staying at home as a way of washing my hands of the current state of affairs. The only two things that would drag me out would be if I felt so strongly that I wanted to protest by voting UKiP or whatever, or an appeal based on the tragic events that led to the election in the first place - and that would have to be very carefully pitched indeed.
Or, of course, if I was a loyal Tory and wanted to support both the candidate and our clown-led government . Are there enough of these people in Southend to reach 50%?
This morning I'm not so sure and I think we're heading for a crunch week.
There are two principal issues which are causing me to question his chances of clinging on.
1. Authenticity.
It's all very well doing these right wing reboots but Boris Johnson is such a schmuck that no one believes him anymore. It's not just the soft left who don't. Many people on the right no longer trust the man. And it's easy to see why. He is blown around like chaff in the wind and no one knows where they stand. Not only does he throw people like Owen Patterson under the bus to save his own skin, he lets Sunak push the NI tax hike through. His right-wing reboot is set alongside a load of green and soft-left policies (courtesy of Carrie?) that are totally incongruous with some of his other positions. Besides, the idea that this 1.5% tax increase is specifically for social care is of course total guff. There is only one pot of money and most people can see through hypothecated tax.
So that's the first problem. No one trusts Boris Johnson.
2. Cummings
The man's a complete menace but he's not one to give up and it is to be assumed that he still has plenty of poison left with which to strike.
To be charitable to Cummings, if such a thing is possible, I don't think it's just personal animus. He clearly thinks Johnson is unfit to be PM and, frankly, a lot of people now agree with him.
FWIW, I think OGH is wrong on this one. I think Cons will get 70-75% of a pretty meagre turnout.
Day 5 today, so LFT time, apyrexial but still coughing and sneezing.
However severe you consider the pandemic to have been, every single one of us has also contemplated the 'what if I die' moment at some point over the last couple of years. The pandemic has caused a significant number of people to reevaluate their priorities. To the chagrin of the Telegraph columnists, lots of people don't wish to return to a 5-day commute. The cities no longer have their allure. If you need to work then you can do many jobs from pretty much anywhere in the world. Lots of people think they're more 'productive' working from home but there's also a resurgence in reconnecting with the land and local communities, in cutting back on working hours and realising that there's more to life.
I forecast 34% turnout too. There are a lot of permanent postal voters and this is the new Tory heartland. SE England Leaverstan.
Re COVID - with the changes to cases numbers today - which biscuits are being served at the panic and who is getting the tonic water for @Leon?
If the Liberal Democrats want to survive and be relevant, they need to have a base of positive voters who will vote for the party because they agree with it, not because they hate it slightly less than the others.
We have put through a lot of staff through the ringer emotionally. I know we are doing what we have been told and it's our job, but right now I find it difficult to focus on seeing it that way.
Does anyone think that iSage will condemn the revocation of the vaccine mandate for the NHS - if it happens?
Possibly coalition but definitely not the tuition fees U-turn
Sounds like a tough time though. Sympathies.
And once again, the main use of COVID case numbers is comparison over time. Are they higher or lower? Today amounts to a reset of the trend line.
I'm quite sure that there will be people here, at 4pm, arguing "But it's higher!" and demanding "a change in policy"
Mr. 83, I thought it was daft to start with, and while the u-turn is better than not having it, the policy was mistaken from the off.
Reducing healthcare staff just wasn't smart.
Basically: I would not trust any medical practioner who did not get vaccinated for *reasons* to give me good medical advice.
"Deaths within 28 days of positive test and deaths within 60 days of positive test will also be updated on 1 February 2022 to include deaths following the most recent episode of infection using the new episode-based case definition in England."
Which implies that death within 28 or 60 days of reinfection haven't previously been included.
Trade red tape? Imposed by this government insisting on 3rd country status? I'd be ecstatic if they ripped all that up, but that only returns us to the status quo ante.
Health and Safety red tape? Perhaps we need less namby pamby rules that make our cars safer or force employers to do a risk assessment before sending someone up a ladder
Food standards red tape? To be fair we'd all benefit from more botulism
On the latter two haven't this government pledged *not* to do such things?
It's a bit mad that I had to test negative and isolate before coming in, but on arrival could have immediately interacted with a non-vaxxed member of staff.
I see refusal to get vaccinated as synonymous with either idiocy or nastiness. Get them the **** out of the NHS.
https://euobserver.com/news/149607
It was heading to be a very dangerous April to be born.
The Saj could not solve that conundrum, hence the U-turn.
We could always roll back Brexit and return to a decent pool of workforce from around Europe
They should not be let anywhere near patients. It is gross negligence.
Which is no worse than the flu. What does the NHS routinely do to stop staff infecting vulnerable patients with the flu?
What’s all that lovely British red tape going to do to the British sparkling wine miracle?
u-turn must be due within hours then.
Edit: though flu is bad for the old. The NHS does have regular annual vaccination programmes. It would be interesting to know what the uptake for those is for NHS staff as opposed to covid.
There is a faction for "natural child birth" that sees medical intervention as a forceful invasion of a female space. There is too a a view amongst some doctors that midwives leave it too late to call for medical intervention, and refuse to take responsibility when things go badly wrong.
This ideological and cultural split isn't the only reason for the recurrent scandals in maternity units, but it can be part of the toxic culture on some units. Some midwives see themselves as the vanguard of feminism, some doctors refer to "madwives", with little common ground. Not referring to my own Trust here.
And Boris is ready to answer what people want, not just listen to the London elite. He's gearing up to go to the Ukraine tomorrow, as a start - which is just what the Ukrainian government has asked for - and he's going to be dealing with the people's priorities there, too, not wasting his time with tittle-tattle and nonsense about cakes from inside the westminster bubble.
The PM's chief of staff & No10 team must be fully committed to delivering the Government's agenda. They can't have agendas of their own or disagree with government policy.
2 I believe policy change is needed if the government is going to succeed.
In particular I don't support the decision this weekend to proceed with tax increases, so obviously I could not return to help implement it.
https://twitter.com/DavidGHFrost/status/1488061346344312833
Full of the empty bottles Boris wants recycled far away from No 10 so he doesn't look like a complete drunkard alcoholic to the neighbours.
Will be interesting later.
In short, it's bloody stupid. I do wonder why they bother with things like that.
I can get people being stupidly lazy, or selfish. But this? Even the people cooking up the crap aren't going to benefit from it.
Food and drink has been reamed by this government tying it up in red tape. I'd welcome that all being ripped up but that is not a "benefit" of Brexit as it was created for Brexit. The EU also understood how to set dutiess and were well-practiced experts at it. We have largely forgotten and have "be different to the EU" as an objective. Which leads to bullshit like 23 rates on wine.
Yes, we are making sovereign choices. To make things unworkably shit.
To believe you can lie to the public and get away with it is, to borrow a phrase, nothing more than rhubarb, an inverted pyramid of piffle."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/01/30/tory-mps-allow-boris-johnson-ride-crisis-will-inviting-defeat/
The Express, who never knowingly fail to spin numbers conveniently, put it at 1 billion pounds a year.
In the context of the UK economy, and set against the cost of all the extra border guff, that's peanuts.
This is now unthinkable. Why and how the change?
What is happening is rather like the Home Office problem - in the absence of someone saying "Fuck, NO!" to a list of policies that crawl out of the woodwork, repeatedly.
Out on the streets, the public are desperate for red-tape cutting obviously. It's a groundswell - people want to be heard.
- The hard line breast milk only until 6 months change. Yes, choking is a real hazard when going to solid food, but the number of babies who go through a couple of months where they are utterly distraught trying to hold this line is unbelievable.
- The no medication in pregnancy line - the we won't tell you if anything is safe, even if it has been used on pregnant women for decades. OK, I'm happy with a level of caution, but where Britain said no, the Australian pharmacopeia was a no nonsense godsend, when the Mrs got badly allergic to something and wanted a Benadryl.
There are more, but at the risk of going on I'll stop there.
The problem areas for vaccination should be flashing red lights to NICE and the care quality folks to say that 'medical practices might be a problem here'.
I know there are a lot of counter arguments to this line of thinking, and I'm not sure what my own views really are on the issue but the above might be an explanation. You're right it does seem to be a shift in attitudes, though.
The government couldn't risk going ahead as we clearly could not handle even a small number quitting over this, but to me it's a hollow victory, knowing heajty services are apparently riddled with anti vaxxers.
Who the heck knows what else they dont believe in or what other safe practices they dont wish to do.
(In the real world the covid numbers have been looking really encouraging)
Noteworthy the significant Brexit benefit claimed:
Data and AI – moving in a faster, more agile way to regulate new digital markets and AI and creating a more proportionate and less burdensome data rights regime compared to the EU’s GDPR
This is an interesting one because you a trading an ability to do new and interesting things against a weakening of data privacy rules and accountability. This will almost certainly result in the loss of EU data adequacy agreements (the government claims not). You can't do AI unless you have the data to do it on. The UK could do clever AI things with UK data subjects but it won't be a world centre of it. Also people may not be happy that important decisions are made about them entirely by black box algorithms - which is a big difference between the EU and the proposed UK regime. On the other hand more automation of data is the way the world is going and the UK may well lose access to EU data anyway. Generally countries are tightening up on data flows - the EU would be the biggest source of such data. In that case you might as well be hung for a sheep as a goat. It isn't exactly a Brexit "benefit" but it kind of makes sense.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-pledges-brexit-freedoms-bill-to-cut-eu-red-tape
As to why, it seems like its about it being wrong to switch due to someone's violent actions, but I dont know why that became accepted.
They are not going to back date the data on the dashboard - the historical data is not available - there will be a step change.
So all the muppets will scream......
And gloating that he'd made a good profit, at a LOT less than I'd been charged.
He's been dead a few years now.
The argument that murderers shouldn't be able to alter the composition of parliament is wrong. They do that anyway, and murder is already illegal.
There is room for debate concerning medicalisation of birth, and the much higher intervention rates that result, and a more holistic woman centred experience, but that debate needs to involve listening as well as speaking.