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The big worry for LAB and the LDs is Johnson going – politicalbetting.com
The big worry for LAB and the LDs is Johnson going – politicalbetting.com
The Redfield and Wilton Strategies chart tells the story of the last two and a bit years in UK politics from the perspective of the Johnson and Starmer net approval ratings. The latest poll out today has the LAB leader just in negative territory but a net 22% ahead of the PM.
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And so he stays.
Just noticed this, not sure if it has been reported yet
A flight to take asylum seekers from the UK to Rwanda next Tuesday has been allowed to go ahead by the High Court. Campaigners failed in their legal bid to halt the removals to the east African country, but the case will be heard by the Court of Appeal on Monday.
Under the policy, those entering the UK illegally will be flown to Rwanda to apply for asylum there. About 31 people have been told they may be on the first flight.
The government hopes the scheme will discourage asylum seekers from crossing the English Channel, by making it clear many cases will now be dealt with by Rwanda.
Also, if Boris goes the media narrative shifts and SKS will get some scrutiny.
Gets less and less likely every day, mind.
Bang on the money, I would also add the SNP in Scotland into that mix. I am just really disappointed that only 148 Conservative MPs have so far worked this out. Far better for the longer term electorally prospects of the Conservative party that Boris goes sooner rather than later, a summer leadership contest this year would have been ideal. The longer Boris remains insitu in No10, the more chance he has of causing wider damage to the party's chances at the next GE. Fully expect the Conservatives to take an even bigger hit in the up coming by-elections now because MPs voted to keep him in place.
Edit. I realise that isn't classic swingback.
Found this ancient piece.
https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2010/01/02/the-swingback-myth-do-governments-really-recover/
The theory's sound enough in a conventional parliament where nothing significant happens politically that massively upends voting intention and causes a very early election.
The other is, of course, that the government takes all the difficult decisions early then hands out gifts.
Can't see that applying this time much.
Actually implementing the policy has risks. Sentiment can change. Lots of Tory voters are not racists.
(BTW I am not propounding an alternative solution. No good outcomes are available in the world's current dismal state. This is merely another, even worse than the some of the other bad ones.)
There aren't any easy options when you are maxed out already on debt, deficit, taxes, spending, inflation, energy costs, Brexit, stagnation while at the same time NHS, education, housing, transport social care all want gazillions more expenditure.
A handful of retail bargains and hand waving is what you are going to get + a few misleading promises, on all sides.
https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1535296993173684224
Nothing to see here.
https://russiavsworld.org/russian-soldiers-had-been-raping-her-for-a-week-the-story-of-a-19-year-old-girl-who-went-through-hell-in-mariupol/
That is the horror you are condemning the Ukrainians to. There have been similar, and possibly worse, stories coming out of the areas of LNR and DNR that have been under Russian control for the last eight years.
Right now I'm just battling through, our friends have been really good, the few that have come to visit already have kids so know the struggle. My friend's wife actually asked me how I was getting on and I got that guilty sensation again but it was nice to be considered. My sister has also been a star, she has a really tough time for her first so has been checking in with video calls, has visited loads and left her kids with her in laws, she's been great just sensing exactly what to do or say in any situation. I think she realises that we have a lot less of a support network that she did because my mother in law is in Switzerland and has so far not come to visit (though I'm minded to just let that stay as is, I can't see a visit from her being helpful) so she's stepped up a bit.
Anyway, thanks for asking mate, sorry to unload!
It's a.depressing state of affairs.
The Channel crossings problem can only be solved in one of two ways: by letting the unwanted migrants stay and pissing off a very large chunk of the electorate, or throwing them out and crushing their hopes and dreams in the process.
That's life. As in so many cases, the fantasy of a scenario in which everyone can be kept happy doesn't exist.
Plus on PB you have a ton of older guys who’ve been through parenting and can advise, it’s a resource
One slightly underhand thing I did was sneak off to work in my “office” in central London and sometimes I’d go there and simply sleep through the day. Not very honourable but it worked for me and kept me sane, once every couple of weeks, in the worst moments. Maybe buy yourself a hotel room for the day if it gets too much?
No one needs a breadwinning Dad who can barely function
We have known, since the announcement of this policy, that Rwanda only plan to take a few hundred people who land on British shores a year. One of their ministers made that clear on announcement day. They are not idiots and they have less capacity to assimilate tens of thousands of people than the UK does.
So a 1% or so risk of deportation is meant to dissuade people from making the perilous Channel crossing. It's going to get overwhelmed now, which means it will never work.
I know that telling people "you have been conned" is a very ineffective way of persuading them to change their minds. But if you have been persuaded that the Patel Plan has any hope of working on its own terms, that it's anyting other than a bit of (fairly nasty) perfomance...
You've been conned.
In the old days, you paid some bloke with a lorry £150 to lie on the floor behind a bunch of sacks of onions. Now, with travel volumes having collapsed, and there being far more checks your chance of being discovered has worsened.
Or, in the old days, you flew into Leeds Airport and discarded your passport before landing.
The overall number of migrants hasn't changed (in fact it's probably fallen quite sharply), it's just they've all being coming the same way.
It really is not good enough to just say Oh let them all in. Indeed it is dangerously pathetic
Pathetic, because you are unwilling to face reality, dangerous because by saying Let them all in you encourage millions more to try and you condemn thousands to death by drowning, trafficking, etc , and eventually you DO have to face the problem because it has got much worse, at which point you will face precisely the same dilemma
Once again it's all too easy to view the future through the prism of the past and assume what happened then will happen now. The events since the last GE make this a unique Parliament and assuming past polling characteristics will occur in the second half of the Parliament when they didn't in the first seems unwise.
Will Johnson going make the difference some on here hope? Short answer, I don't know - it depends the event to which the anger has been internalised against Johnson himself or whether there is a deeper malaise against the Conservatives in general - arguably understandable after 12 years as the leading party.
Any successor will face the same horrendous economic backdrop and it's hard to see (thought I note some on here have now called for the complete suspension of fuel duty. That was worth 26 billion in 2021/22 and of course with the petrol price running presumably even more as more people are coming back on to the roads.
I don't see any Chancellor voluntarily wanting to give up £26-30 billion in revenue.
Thus the central arguments for Johnson going - is he a loser? Is there anyone who would be a proven winner for the Conservatives? - remain unresolved. Hunt is no Heseltine and Sunak is no Major so the death spiral potentially goes on.
This winter, assuming the conflict in Ukraine drags on, is going to be very difficult for a lot of people even those who have perhaps weathered the storm quite well to date.
None of this would pose a particularly serious problem if there were a couple of thousand people who wanted to come to the UK each year, but there are tens of thousands trying to get across in the boats and many millions more who would ideally like to come if it were easier to get here. So somebody has to be disappointed - the voters or the migrants.
I'd add ID cards for all too.
*But*, the reality is that the problem seemed much worse than it was because - for a few weeks over the summer - large numbers of people were arriving by boat.
If we go back to a world where there's two migrants coming in in fifty different ways a day, then it will fade from the headlines, even if it's actually many more people over the course of the year.
But pretending to be Well Hard when there's negligable capacity to enforce your Well Hardness nixes your credibility in short order. And then you're worse off than you were before, because people clock that your threats have all the force of marshmallow.
This is literally lesson one of behaviour management. Don't make stupid threats, because people work through them and then you look stupid. So don't tell me I'm not facing reality.
(But to expand on my simple answer... Cameron was onto something when he suggested processing assylum applications much nearer to the place of need. The downside of that is that it will lead to the UK having to get much more involved... our distance from global trouble spots leaves us pretty well insulated. Compare how many people we give assylum to with France or Gremany, say.)
Even if you did all that they will keep coming, in increasing numbers because we won’t send them back, they get free healthcare, welfare and food, and we speak English and we are humane
So yours is no answer at all
The only method that has been shown to work, around the world, is Australia’s. Send them somewhere else, which is safe but undesirable. Tolerable but displeasing. Then they soon stop coming and people stop drowning
Hence Patel’s bid for Rwanda, hence Biden looking at Spain, hence Denmark considering something similar, hence the EU going even further and pushing back the boats thereby consigning thousands to slavery in Libya
If the Labour patty gains power and the boat people keep coming (and I see no reason why they should stop) then Labour will face the same intense dilemma and I bet in the end they go for the same laborious solution: send them elsewhere. It’s either that or Let them all in (politically and socially unacceptable) or shoot at the boats as a deterrent (morally abhorrent, of course)
Again, there is no cosy or particularly good solution to this problem. It doesn't exist. Even somehow making the chronically dysfunctional Home Office much more efficient at processing asylum claims, and setting up a system that allows for processing near to some particularly shitty countries that people are fleeing from (with successful applicants flown directly into Heathrow) won't solve anything, because the rejects won't give up and will try to come anyway.
Fundamentally, the entire post-WW2 system for managing migration and asylum claims was devised in an era in which people were very much less mobile, and flows of millions of both refugees and economic migrants from distant corners of the Earth did not happen and was not anticipated. Its continuing operation is now coming into direct conflict with the established will of democratically elected Governments and their people, as seen not just here but in places like Greece, where they've had to cope with a much more serious boat people problem than us, and have tried to deal with it with a chain of internment camps. How do you reform it in such a fashion that both resident and migrant populations are satisfied? You can't.
The current Government is not a good one, but no successor is going to do very much better at dealing with irregular migration either. There is no approach available that's not both very expensive and liable to upset an awful lot of people.
And being quite ruthless and unfair to migrants NOW means you can avoid being much crueller and way more unfair later. No one dies trying to reach Australia now
Many of those western countries were liberated by others from Nazis. Yet they aren't even prepared to provide the weapons so that Ukrainians can liberate themselves from the modern day equivalent.
Note too Sunak does no better than Boris v Starmer as preferred PM either
The point about this scheme is that, for all of the noise, all the headlines, all the shouting... it simply doesn't have the capacity to work. The Rwandan government have made it clear that they are planning on taking a few thousand people over five years.
Let's say that a planeload of migrants is sent to Africa next Tuesday. All that hype, all those headlines... that's probably how many will arrive on small boats in a day or so. And the boats will keep coming faster than the planes will leave. And compared with the risk of crossing the Channel, the additional risk of being deported afterwards simply isn't worth worrying about.
Now there are two possibilities. One is that the government is too innumerate to work this out. The can't work out that "a few hundred a year" is less than "tens of thousands a year". I hope that isn't true, but with the incumbents, it's possible.
The other is worse. That the government know this is vanishingly unlikely to work, but don't care. Get some headlines, blame lawyers and bishops and let the real problem fester. It's all just a debating game.
It's only the nation and the reputation of the Conservative Party that will suffer.
I urge those who have not seen or heard this yet to listen. Clear, measured, unequivocal, just superb.
You'd really like to think that this is it for Trump but in a country now enduring a mass shooting a day which cannot agree about banning semi automatic rifles, who knows. Tremendous courage though. Really exceptional.
They have now resorted to cannibalism
(I am reading The Hundred Year Walk, it is compelling but harrowing)
Like a Boris "reset" speech.
There are plenty of places - such as Switzerland and Norway - that are richer than us, which have open borders, and which have very low levels of illegal immigration. (The difference between Sweden and Norway is particularly stark - literally a 100x difference in the number of illegal immigrants.)
The issue is that it implementing measures to remove demand pull is hard, and we (as a country) are understandably loathe to implement measures such as ID cards which make separating the legal from the illegal much easier.
The only post-VoNC poll I can see in wiki is the Redfield&Wilton poll giving Labour and 8% lead (up from 4%)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election
Thank god the British empire was the altruistic, non racist force for good it was. Phew.
Commonwealth migration to the UK post-WW2 was large-scale but was also planned and invited. The acceptance of the Ugandan Asian refugees in the 1970s was done in a hurry, but involved a finite and manageable number of people, not an open-ended commitment. Contemporary irregular migration is something different.
https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1535223935230410752?s=20&t=xzfH5e9XA14sOK3Ao5ixGg
Same as we Conservatives wanted to get rid of general election winner Blair and correctly as Labour has lost 4 consecutive general elections since he went
Still, I wouldn't underestimate the extent to which indigenous people (of all kinds) were unhappy with newcomers. There was certainly considerable opposition to - for example - Kenyan Asians coming to the UK.
It is essentially impossible to live as an illegal immigrant in Norway, because you can't get a bank account, a job, or a place to stay. Nor can you sleep rough.
Neither is a panacea. Our strategy allows Albanians (and others) to arrive on tourist visas and never leave. The Swiss/Norwegian one means that regular people are required to check and confirm that Franz is allowed to rent a room to sleep in.
"leftwingers" are those who want to get rid of Mr Johnson
Novel definitions of conservatives ...
"E-Verify compares information from an employee's Employment Eligibility Verification Form I-9 to data from U.S. government records. If the information matches, that employee is eligible to work in the United States. If there is a mismatch, E-Verify alerts the employer and the employee is allowed to work while he or she resolves the problem; they must contact the appropriate agency to resolve the mismatch within eight federal government work days from the referral date.[4] The program is operated by the DHS in partnership with the Social Security Administration. According to the DHS website, more than 700,000 employers used E-Verify as of 2018.[5]
Research shows that E-Verify harms the labor market outcomes of illegal immigrants and improves the labor market outcomes of Mexican legal immigrants and U.S.-born Hispanics, but has no impact on labor market outcomes for non-Hispanic white Americans.[6] A 2016 study suggests that E-Verify reduces the number of illegal immigrants in states that have mandated use of E-Verify for all employers, and further notes that the program may deter illegal immigration to the United States in general."
(Links omitted.)
If you read the entire article, you'll learn that some states require using E-Verify -- and some states forbid using it. And that it is opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Farm Bureau, which mostly represents wealthier farmers, and corporate farms.
source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/01/27/key-findings-about-black-immigrants-in-the-u-s/