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The PB 18th Birthday Celebration – March 2nd – politicalbetting.com
The PB 18th Birthday Celebration – March 2nd – politicalbetting.com
The event will be held at the offices of Smarkets at Katherine Docks close to the Tower of London, from 6 30pm to 9.pm. The address is 1 Commodity Quay, St Katharine Docks, London E1W 1AZ. Phone 020 7617 7413. These are nice offices overlooking the Dock.
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Anyone know if that old scallywag JackW will be dropping in, or does Matron still keep him under lock and key?
I look forward to meeting you and other PBers.
BBC News at 10 leads on Johnson's desperate change to covid rules.
Granted, the conversation changes, but the polling ain’t budging.
Moreover, not a day goes by now without some government minister effectively pissing on your leg and telling you it’s raining, and the media is not really going along with it anymore.
Like Kwarteng, “fraud doesn’t matter”.
Or Elphicke, “queues are Brussels’s fault”
Or Spencer, “people don’t care about Boris’s partying in the real world”
Labour is pretty much guaranteed to win the next election.
Sorry to miss it, but have fun and go easy on the peanuts.
It’s now up to individual shops and restaurants to enforce; will be interesting to see how they respond.
I am however heartened that with ons figures of 1 in 19 people in England testing positive the admissions to hospital are falling, and gradually the hospital pressure is easing. Hopeful for a better spring summer for you guys.
Remarkably it was, apparently, the first time they’ve held face to face dinners in the dining rooms since the pandemic started. I’d assumed - especially given the Downing St parties - that Westminster had been quite quick to open up.
No discussion of Boris despite a minister and 2 MPs being present. It was like the taboo that dare not speak its name.
The obvious person to investigate this as cash for access I think would be Kathryn Stone. But Labour, in their infinite lawyerly wisdom seem to be pushing the Met route first. 🤔
Although even before this I found a few coffee shops where they don’t seem to care. Which is reassuring.
This is the second and likely last freedom day announced by Boris. But can we rule out the next Covid mutant not being as kittenish as Omicron?
There's no prospect of SSP being made more generous (after all, it goes to workers not pensioners,) so I fully expect that we'll return to the status quo ante-2020, in which ill people drag themselves to work because they can't afford to fall back on SSP and/or their employers are crap. And when it comes to sickness absence there are an awful lot of bad employers: quite apart from the mercenary scalper bosses, there are also many otherwise not so bad firms that have Draconian policies on sick leave, that basically place anybody who doesn't turn up to work on exactly 100% of the days on which they are expected under suspicion of skiving.
For good or ill, the Government is obviously now relying entirely on population immunity (whether acquired through infection, vaccination or both) to keep serious Covid illness down to manageable levels.
I FaceTimed quite excited by politics, but it ended up a bit of a downer. He has been a Conservative member for decades, but is a remainer so keeps his head down, so no doxing him. When it was quiet after Christmas and the polls closing up, and I said it’s all going to kick off and Boris gone soon, and quite a lot of you disagreed, it wasn’t my thinking it was my Dad telling me it was going to happen.
I’ll bullet point relevant bits to be brief.
If there is a leadership election how would you vote? Rishi Sunak. Is a vote of no conference going to happen? At some point, maybe anytime now. But surely they only let it to happen if they aren’t going to hand Boris a win in it? Nope. It could happen any time. Boris could win it. Like Steve Baker said they may need more than one vote. once it’s going to happen everyone on the fence will have to get off it. But you don’t like Steve Baker? This is not a Brexit/Remain thing. This is about propriety in politics. If Steve Baker was in Boris government he would have resigned by now over this, maybe didn’t join because he suspected this end and saw Boris packing the cabinet with useless sycophants.
I said I have bets on both Harper and Javid, will they win? Nope was the reply. So I explained my thinking Is they could get on a roll because the media will like them, a Top Tory brought up in flat above a high street shop. And he said nope, Javid has a long way to go convincing people in a leadership election he is good choice for leader. Actually before that he said, do a lot of people bet on politics? 🤦♀️
There was then a more complicated discussion where he felt I didn’t appreciate how significant September and October 2019 was. Which is probably true, I was shopping and partying a lot before and during the election. Dads point was, not the Maastricht rebels or wets under Lady Thatcher were thrown or driven out the party before, it was always important to respect one another and keep the wings working together, Boris wrecked the party being a broad church, it lost many experienced and talented up and coming moderate conservatives, just look at the talent in the list of names that disappeared. I said will the next leader after Boris allow them to come back? He answered it will be more complicated than that as it changed the party at parliament, but many moderate members in the party took a que from that to stop paying subs and drift away - what top quality moderate candidates will moderate members have they can vote for in a leadership election, what Boris done changed the party, the price for the damage will be paid for a long time.
And there you have it. Make of it what you will.
It all sounds a bit unexpectedly sad 🙁
https://longbets.org/
Look at bet 9. Not settled yet!
We are all lying in the gutter but some of us are looking up Rishi Sunak's left nostril.
As per my FPT comment:
A short interview with relevant evidence for each interviewee in a file to be referred to as needed is the minimum I would expect.
I'm beginning to think, you know, that the police are a bit rubbish at their job.
Anyway ....
I plan to be at this shindig.
I do hope we get some sort of surprise guest bursting out of a cake - Carrie, perhaps.
Edited: Or @Leon!
https://longbets.org/11/
No. 704 is looking fairly safe as well
Would I isolate if I had covid? Absolutely. Should this be mandated by law? Absolutely not.
There's a general principle here that we should be very hesitant to change 'should' to 'must'.
It is very, very hard to get rid of laws, so I am very pleased to see this being done, even if I'd also argue these laws should never have been introduced in the first place.
Now for the rest of the world to follow suit (not Denmark, of course - all credit to them for getting there first).
2) I once had a girlfriend who lived near St. Katherine's Dock. Good news - she is no longer my girlfriend: she is now my wife. Bad news: since she now lives in the same house as me in suburban Manchester, rather than near St. Katherine's Dock, no obvious opportunities for a trip to the pb.c party. I hope it is tremendous fun and I hope to make it to one one day.
Labour 33.0% (-2.5% from December)
National 35.0% (+3.5%)
Greens 10.5% (+2.0%)
ACT 13.5% (-5.0%)
Maori 2.5% (+1.5%)
NZ First 2.5% (+0.5%)
This poll would allow National/Act to govern.
Clearly you have not been following his life on the street.
One caveat is that, if a party really wants to change and moderate, it can do so remarkably quickly. The Conservatives took less than five years to go from electing IDS to electing Cameron. Starmer is showing similar efficiency in moving on from the Corbyn years. I'm hopeful that, once the party is ready to listen, there will be sufficient numbers of sufficiently smart, sufficiently attractive people prepared to think about sane Conservative politics.
The tricky part is getting to a point where the party really does want to change. Milestone 1 will be ditching Bozza. Milestone 2 will be recognising that the 2019 manifesto, whilst electorally popular, is a con trick that's impossible to implement. You can't be low tax and high spend for long without the roof falling in.
And there's no sign at all that the Conservatives have begun that journey. It's not easy to see how they can without being in opposition first.
By the end of this year I reckon it'll be like Covid never happened.
Even on this poll, ACT+NAT is still about neck and neck with Lab+Grn+NZF+MRI.
Is that the sort of thing? It will be the talk of PB on slow news days forever.
What is my reasoning? No one but the guilty would want such a loophole, so if everyone want to prove there is no loophole without suggesting changing current codes and law, they will do so.
Dave Nellist - A Socialist MP For Erdington
@Dave4Erdington
Working-class people in Erdington have been thrown under the bus for years now by the council and property developers. While luxury apartments appear in the city centre, social housing declines elsewhere.
[1/8]
https://twitter.com/Dave4Erdington/status/1491515238709174278
Interest x axis, capital y axis
https://rpubs.com/Pulpstar/Mortgage
15% +1.5 = 16.5% / 75k = £1034.46
0.5% + 1.5 = 2% / 275k = £1057.87
Maybe this is why houses have gone up so much..
Pedantic quibble: NZF will not get back, so should effectively be ignored.
In my limited experience in company audits, if I ever uncover..... things that aren't right.... it is usually management who have deliberately done it.
The days of the cash clerk snaffling half the takings are long gone. These days its all tax evasion or bank fraud (depending on what they want) by management.
Earlier this morning I drove a couple of ladies to a club for dementia sufferers at a local community garden, and they and the organisers seemed very laid back about masks and distancing.
I sense the country has lost the fear, and unless something extreme happens, it’s not coming back.
However, one of the things that I hoped the Plague Experience would teach us was the folly of presenteeism. If you have an infection, it's in everyone's interests (including your employer's) that you stay at home so you don't make other people sick. That's true even if it means paying people not to come to work. Even if it means having spare staff some of the time.
Unofrtunately, it seems that Britain isn't planning on learning many lessons from the last couple of years.
Taz, Gallowgate, Pulpstar (?), Cyclefree, eek, cookie, Mr.Ed (?), Another Richard, TSE, Barty, even Big G, maybe, flatlander, etc...?
Apologies to anyone I have missed. BJO too? And Valiant.
I have no idea about local issues or the un/popularity of Bham Council but I'm still predicting an easy Lab hold with 55%+.
I was just thinking out loud about today's allegations that there is a potential police interest in Boris Johnson's wallpaper, and whether someone with deep pockets might decide to make trouble for Boris if the police decide there're better things to do.
The idea the Conservatives are going to go on any journey back to the centre for a decade or more is laughable. The party has won most seats for 4 general elections in a row and been in power for 12 years. Once Boris goes if anything the party will move further to the Thatcherite right economically and if it loses the next general election even further to the populist right too.
It took 8 years in opposition and 3 general election defeats and the leaderships of Hague, IDS and Howard before the party decided to move to the centre with Cameron. It took 10 years in opposition and 4 general election defeats and the leaderships of Ed Miliband and Corbyn for Labour to move to the centre under Starmer.
In fact the journey to the right of the Tories has barely even begun
There always was something wrong with us agreeing with each other. I felt dirty. 😆
But I don't totally take Dave Nellist's line.
I am very supportive of Manchester CC supporting the development of high value apartments in the city centre. We need fundamentally different city centres to what we used to have - places where people aspire to live, rather than just get put. People don't need city centres any more - they have to want them.
I'm also not sure (and again, I'm looking at Manchester, not Birmingham, but from what I've seen Birmingham's experience is very similar) that social housing declines elsewhere. There has been a revolution in the quality of social housing in Manchester in my lifetime. It's not all there yet - but back in the 80s and early 90s, ALL council housing in Manchester was horrible and depressing and vaguely threatening. Whereas now you get some really quite nice estates. They're not all nice - but the process of replacing horrible council housing* from the post war era is a long one.
I do agree that housing is a problem. Demand for housing has outstripped supply. The population of Manchester has increased by about a quarter in the past 20 years. But the problem is supply, not quality of supply (which, as I said, is not yet perfect, but is being addressed heroically). And even this is a problem Manchester is addressing (take a look at proposals for Victoria North - a massive, mixed neighbourhood on the northern edges of the city centre).
Having worked in planning and development in the past, I'm pretty sceptical of the argument that we provide social housing by compelling developers to provide larger proportions of their output as 'affordable'. There is a belief amongst the dimmer elements of the public sector that by increasing the requirement for affordable housing you increase the amount of affordable housing delivered. You don't: developers go elsewhere and you reduce the quanta delivered.
So what's the answer? Well I'd say MCC's approach at Victoria North is a good model, although I'm nervous of the amount of Chinese money involved. Other than that, I'd be keen to explore the council-as-developer model, which we have discussed on here before.
*Note that while post war social housing is almost all horrible, there remains a pretty good stock of housing from the 1930 built as social housing. Drive around some of the older bits of Wythenshawe and blur your eyes a bit and you could be in Welwyn Garden City or Letchworth. It's not a given that the public sector cannot develop attractive housing stock.
Ardern also still leads as preferred PM