Options
LAB lead up 7 point in 2 weeks with YouGov – politicalbetting.com

We have had a spate of polling in the past few days the most marked one has been YouGov’s 8% LAB lead which had CON just 1% behind after the local elections.
0
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Oh yes, I couldn't have done this without my family, my parents, my work colleagues and everyone else who distracts me from my actual work. Thanks to them all.
Laughable bilge from Lilico, who made a lot more sense when talking about the pandemic and models:
"The PM may well have done things that pressed the rules to their maximum licence in ways he shouldn’t have. But it was always implausible that he would have acted in ways he knew violated them. He’s jolly. He’s lax. He blurs the lines between work and play. But he isn’t cynical."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/05/20/boris-partygate-critics-have-given-humiliating-thrashing/
The Hill
Yet apparently he will run in 2024.
The headline here is risible, of course, but it's what gets the clicks.
Listening to the new French Cabinet appointments, the former ambassador to the UK has been appointed "Junior Minister in Charge of Europe." (or so says France24)
Well we already knew that @Leon stalked a well known thriller writer around the holiday destinations of Europe and beyond, but it now transpires that they were in prison together. Uncanny...
(Happily, both entirely innocent.)
But, as you say, we end up with a very polarised argument, with one either being forced to be in favour of massive lockdowns, or in favour of no restrictions whatsoever.
Bwahahahahahahahahahah fucking eejit
“My view on the increase of civic disturbances: it’s not just in football grounds. When a government breaks its own rules and there are no real consequences for those actions, society follows. Johnson has given people a licence to try and do whatever they want.”
https://twitter.com/simon_hughes__/status/1527530804187996161?s=21&t=ISOMadydnfgvQiBMc8NCcQ
Next, how Brexit is responsible for Liverpool fans being philistine c*nts that boo beautiful hymns
58% Labour-led coalition parties
35% Right wing parties
6% UK wreckers
1% Others
So the parties which it could be reasonably assumed would be willing to participate in a Labour-led coalition, that's Labour, the LDs and Greens, are 23% ahead of the Right.
I’m in Sivota. A tiny resort on the Northeast Greek coast really near Albania and it’s lovely
Why do people neglect the Greek mainland and always go to the islands?
I’m glad they do. A very charming hotel room here is £50 a night, 1 minute from the marina and the waters and the fish tavernas
I think the PM has acted disgracefully, but people are not such big children they only act because of him.
Because everyone keeps ramming down their throats to “Abide with Mykonos”
He’s actually a football hooligan (seriously - like one of those older geezers in The Firm) and he told me that HE was scared. Which means it must have been pretty bad
He’s also been telling me about renewed football hooliganism for at least 5 years. So this jerk wanker lefty journalist blaming it on “Boris” is an ignorant fool who doesn’t even know his own sport.
The hooliganism has been increasing for a while and it has now surfaced and become publicly visible, finally
Techne a bit better for them at 35%
In that atmosphere it would have been extremely difficult for a politician to make the argument, despite its validity, for less restrictions.
No10 blocks ministers from Sky News after cost of living ‘gotcha’ interview
Downing Street reportedly angry over treatment of Rachel Maclean, who suggested people struggling to pay bills should work more hours
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/05/20/no-10-blocks-ministers-sky-news-cost-of-living-gotcha-interview/ (£££)
Officials are also considering a wider review of the morning broadcast round. One source said syndicated news bulletins from Bauer Media, which owns the stations Kiss and Absolute Radio, received four times as many listeners as Ms Burley’s programme. In future, ministerial interviews may be allocated based on their ratings.
Sleazy, broken Tories on the slide - specifically Wilfred's slide in the back garden.
I wonder if there’s a correlation between listening choice between commercial/non-commercial and political leanings? I dunno, just speculating. Would the govt expect an easier ride from Bauer and the like? Don’t listen to them, as I say, so I have no idea. What does PB think?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzZ11ucO4v8&t=1807s
Perhaps to that very restaurant.
And yes it is fine, a bit touristy (there is a Mark Warner camp up the hill) but fantastic nevertheless.
Does having been to one of @Leon's destinations put me into a special PB category? One that I can put on my calling card?
The smearing of all people who were sceptical about the efficacy of lockdowns as "anti-vaxxers" was particularly egregious.
https://twitter.com/devisridhar/status/1527664698186948608?t=Bzd2q2v-CrttZIuagOl9-g&s=19
Also, everyone seems intensely happy that a decent summer season is probably underway. After two horrible years. So there is a generalised sense of Yay
Was it a boat that brought you here? Quite a few yachty types about
And that would be perfect. People decide to modify their behaviour and the government setting up a compensation scheme so that they don't suffer financially (another argument for govt lockdowns was that it was the only way to be able to compensate people).
The issue is not the lockdown - the issue is the laws dictating lockdown.
And as for segmentation, putting forward this as an alternative to mandatory lockdown was something that "we" were castigated for and we were characterised as anti-lockdown loons also at the time.
If you were going to mandate separation then make it illegal to hug granny but you yourself (fit, younger, etc) could go out clubbing if you wanted. Instead they said it's illegal to hug granny and you must stay at home also. Either way granny doesn't get hugged and I'm sure TfL for example could have made adjustments to keep night bus drivers safe from clubbers.
But from that it didn't follow that all anti-lockdowners were anti-vax.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2321212-could-monkeypox-become-a-pandemic-heres-everything-you-need-to-know/
Freight could be prioritised over passengers to counter food and petrol shortages
Fears are growing that union action on the railways billed as the biggest in modern history will bring the UK to a standstill, with empty shelves and petrol pumps running dry. Plans are being drawn up for freight trains to take priority over passenger services to keep supermarket shelves stocked...
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ministers-fear-biggest-rail-strike-in-modern-history-509fzzzlp
Similarly, Rand Paul, suspecting he had COVID, went to exercise in the Senate gym, without wearing a mask, and without warning anyone there.
(I wouldn't want either of them for a neighbor.)
I am not recommending this positively, as I am still thinking about the likely effects. And I recognize that the US has far too many lawsuits, including the one in which a cat won a big settlement, a couple of weeks ago. But it could, in principle, encourage more responsible behavior.
(The cat story, for the curious: https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/owner-miska-notorious-bellevue-cat-wins-125000-settlement/CHCLDLY42JGFNALHVRMVSYLMF4/ )
I don't see it that way. Does anyone? The government's platform is parliament, which is public and has its own channel, and the media reports anything interesting that they say. And their accountability is there and its select committees and of course to the serfs who vote. Their unfiltered media performances are risible, as is most of the questioning.
I miss Radcliffe and Maconie on weekday afternoons.
I’d hate to be listening to the same old songs for the rest of my life, as much as I love them I don’t want to stagnate.
And yes they do bash you over the head with the BBC worldview. I am a lefty but if does get a bit wearing sometimes.
https://twitter.com/leftofcentermi/status/1527390618984402944
Gay marriage leads to a culture of death, apparently.
In Michigan, anyway.
https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-oregon-primary-congress-78a759dc0b2c59b73a2259153fb8dd80
OREGON CITY, Ore. (AP) — Thousands of ballots with blurry barcodes that can’t be read by vote-counting machines will delay results by weeks in a key U.S. House race in Oregon’s primary election . . .
The fiasco affects up to 60,000 ballots, or two-thirds of the roughly 90,000 returned so far in Oregon’s third-largest county . . . 200 Clackamas County employees were getting a crash course Thursday in vote-counting after being redeployed to address the crisis.
Elections workers must pull the faulty ballots from batches of 125, transfer the voter’s intent to a fresh ballot, then double-check their entries — a painstaking process that could draw the election out until June 13, when Oregon certifies its vote. The workers operate in pairs, one Democrat and one Republican, in two shifts of 11 hours a day. . . . By Wednesday night, workers had counted 15,649. . . .
The debacle has stunned Oregon. . . . It’s also thrown into question a key U.S. House race in a redrawn district that includes a large portion of Clackamas County, which stretches nearly 2,000 square miles (5,180 square kilometers), from Portland’s liberal southern suburbs to rural conservative communities on the flanks of Mount Hood.
In the Democratic primary for Oregon’s 5th Congressional District, seven-term Rep. Kurt Schrader, a moderate, was trailing in the vote behind progressive challenger Jamie McLeod-Skinner. The outcome could have an outsized impact in November, with the possibility that voters could flip the seat for the GOP.
Hall said the problem came to light May 3, when workers put the first ballots returned through the vote-counting machine. About 70 or 80 ballots from each batch of 125 were spit out as unreadable because their barcodes were more faint and slightly blurred. It was too late to print and mail new ballots, she said.
As Election Day approached and ballots stacked up, Hall said she allowed elections workers to take the weekend off because just three people signed up to work Saturday or Sunday. “We have people mostly between the ages of 70 and 85” and they need rest, she said.
he secretary of state’s office said Hall declined help, saying Clackamas County could handle the situation. Hall told The Associated Press several county workers were assigned to the ballot problem May 11, a week after it surfaced.
Kathy Selvaggio, who lives in the county’s more urban and affluent suburbs, peered through the windows Thursday to watch the vote tally.
“Mail-in voting works, it works well here, but it does undermine my faith in (Hall),” said Selvaggio, who was there as a volunteer for the McLeod-Skinner campaign. . . .
In a low inflationary environment low wage increases are tolerable but not in the current environment and cutting the numbers of skilled professionals involved in track maintenance is a battle worth fighting for
So I'm not really sure what your point is.
Great beaches if you walk around the headland
https://www.inverness-courier.co.uk/news/the-flat-earths-controversial-hq-in-inverness-appears-to-ha-242960/
"After the pandemic began, the shopfront carried the banner “humanity is not a virus” and pushed anti-vaccination messages, also claiming the virus and lockdown was fake and a means to terrorise the masses."
And anti-lockdowners generally didn't believe "that lockdowns had no impact on the spread of Covid", but I guess you knew that already.
I have said several times that Starmer and labour have not been tested on making unpopular decisions, and it will be interesting which side of the argument they come down on and how it is received in the country
AP - Oz, McCormick tied in Pa. with thousands of ballots to count
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Vote counting in Pennsylvania’s Republican primary for the U.S. Senate dragged into a third day as Dr. Mehmet Oz and former hedge fund CEO David McCormick remained essentially tied with thousands of ballots left to tally.
Oz, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, led McCormick by 1,122 votes, or 0.08 percentage points, out of 1,337,790 ballots counted as of midday Thursday. The race remained close enough to trigger Pennsylvania’s automatic recount law, with the separation between the candidates inside the law’s 0.5% margin. . . .
. . . . Pennsylvania’s Department of State, which oversees elections, said Thursday that there are about 38,000 mail-in and absentee ballots — 8,700 in the Republican primary — left to be counted. . . .
Trump has encouraged Oz to preemptively declare victory — much like the former president did in the 2020 election that he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. But Oz has made no indication of doing so, and McCormick, when asked about it, shrugged it off, saying, “I’ve been rough and tumble before in my life, and I’m ready for it.”
Statewide, McCormick was doing better than Oz among mail ballots, while Oz was doing better among votes cast on election day. Counties also must still count provisional, overseas and military absentee ballots before they certify their results to the state by next Tuesday’s deadline.
County election officials have counted almost all ballots cast in person on election day, with the exception of Allegheny County, according to an Associated Press survey of county election officials.
McCormick leads Oz in Allegheny County among mail ballots and those that were cast on election day.
Delaware County and Philadelphia also have some precinct results from election day still left to be counted, according to the McCormick campaign.
Republican turnout exceeded 38%, the highest midterm primary turnout in at least two decades, boosted by more than $70 million in advertising and other spending in the Senate GOP campaign.
Oz was helped by the endorsement from Trump, while a super PAC backing McCormick weighed in heavily, spending about $20 million, much of it to attack Oz.
SSI - think that outstanding PDay precinct votes mentioned above may have been counted by now (12.30pm PA time). As of this moment, NYT reporting
Mehmet Oz 418,165 31.2%
Dave McCormick 417,045 31.1%
margin Oz v McC +1,020
Estimated 2k remaining to count in Allegheny Co (Pittsburgh) and 1k or less everywhere else.
Believe McC camp is hopeful the Hedge-Funder will gain over the TV Doctor in ballots cast by active military, a category that tends to vote Republican AND which McC targetted. Pointing out that Dr Oz was himself a military veteran . . . of the Turkish Army.
Starmer, if he is still LOTO, just has to sit on the fence and nod, at which PB Conservatives consider him very good.
I'm trying now to remember when it was that all the news bulletins quietly dropped the relentless daily corpse counts. Was it some time around Easter? I've not been paying so much attention to any of this kind of thing of late.
At the bare minimum you resign and go work somewhere else who will pay you more.
I do not have a problem with people asking for pay rises that match the cost of living. If the company won't pay, you go elsewhere.
It is unlikely the entire rail system would simply cease.
Rather than the headline, what's been remarkable is how stable the polls have been the past few months, despite the barrage of events.
It's been Labour c. 5% ahead for some time now.
These rules do not, of course, apply to asset values, or to the pay, allowances and bonuses of special sunflowers such as CEOs of large companies and our beloved MPs.