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Four CON MPs to become peers – but no by-elections – politicalbetting.com
Four CON MPs to become peers – but no by-elections – politicalbetting.com
The Times is reporting that four current Tory MPs are to be made peers in the Johnson resignation honours list.
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Is polling different in the US? I understand UK polling is governed by a Council, and pollsters sign up agree rules to be followed. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/rules-and-practices-of-political-opinion-polls/
Quite right too. If Opinion polls are biased it can be used to distort democratic elections. But if you are going to have rules, then you are going down the road of monitoring and policing.
Are the rules, and monitoring and policing, across the pond robust enough? Put another way, are views and political bets being shaped by tracking successive polls from more highly and trusted pollsters, or is the head being turned by “interesting” polls from less highly and trusted and experienced pollsters? I’m suspicious of the small amount of polling in these mid terms from respected pollsters, and the large amount from, ahem, can we call them cowboys?
On this basis I have a feeling the current balance in the Senate won’t go anywhere - 1 pick up for each side. Nor will the defeat for Democrats in the house be a large one - if red wave was ever on, Roe v Wade announcement in June aborted it prematurely.
Despite the no change senate, I’m also predicting, because of so many obvious close races, another bout of the old Red Mirage - red leads with blue votes counted later.
This is not to say it won’t be a concerning night for the democrats - Stacey Abrams has crashed and burned in her own fight, and Latino voting GOP will again be a thing - this will have to be analysed and correct lessons learned.
And then the big one in two years. Should we presume the Republican Nomination is Trumps for the taking? With ever decreasing circles of problematic expensive legal proceedings getting closer to Trump, what about strong, ambitious challengers appealing to primary voters for a fresh start from it all?
Nikki Haley. If she ran against him, how exactly would Trump and his fan club tackle her? She sounds like him, only without his baggage.
https://politicalwire.com/2022/11/07/nikki-haley-suggests-deporting-raphael-warnock/
Is it a Johnson wheeze, or is this a Sunak wheeze? This is exactly what Sunak wanted, avoiding by elections. Johnson likely don’t give a toss either way.
I presume the MPs involved have been consulted and on board?
Will the furious row also involve unhappy Tories, if this drags the king into endorsing this change in procedure and tradition?
For all the fuss this could provoke, is this really a great affront to democracy, or wholly impractical way of doing things. Maybe it’s just me slow on the uptake, but what is so terribly bad about this needs a bit more clarifying.
The idea PMs sacked in disgrace can create so many unelected voters in the upper house seems a lot more wrong.
Today (Tuesday) will be a better than expected night for the Democrats.
Why?
Four things:
(1) The mood music (& betting) is monumentally negative on the Dem chances. And if everyone is facing in one direction... well, one of two things is likely. Either the Dems are going to do much worse (and lose GA/AZ/NV and one of NH/CO), or they're going to do surprisingly well, and pick up PA, and only lose one of the three. (And maybe they pick up Wisconsin or North Carolina.)
(2) The Dems actually have performed pretty well in Special Elections in the last four or five months, and those have tended to be pretty predictive.
(3) The general assumption is that polling overstates the Dems. And my gut is that these things go in cycles.
(4) There might well be a surge in voting (as in 2016) from historically low turnout groups - in particular younger women.
So.
I have a little snifter, by selling Republican majority. (Which can also payout in the event that the Republicans end up net +1 against the Dems, and also lose Utah.)
We do know that the highest earning MP last year was Theresa May, who sell speeches in the £150k range and made over a million in 2021. Yes, it would be good to know Tony Blair’s sources of wealth.
By-elections are fun and, as Mike Smithson has demonstrated, good betting opportunities.
What I really want is a General Election. Time to reboot British politics.
https://news.sky.com/story/gavin-williamson-strongly-rejects-telling-civil-servant-to-slit-your-throat-12741279
What does he have on Sunak that the PM had to appoint a nasty, incompetent, piece of work like him back into Cabinet?
I was prepared to give Sunak time after the Liz Truss fiasco but his appointments of Braverman and Williamson, together with his COP27 stance and U-turn, make me think he's a weak man. This was evidenced when he failed to take down Boris at the opportune time 12 months ago. The fact that he's now PM owes to chance and the Conservative Party's election of a dud predecessor.
I think Sunak lacks political nous.
Anyway nonsense needs challenging. Deferring the peerages is neither sleaze nor corruption. It’s a ridiculous comment. I’m also amused at how many people online post they are not bothered about something and then continue to talk about what they are not bothered by. 😂😂😂😂
https://twitter.com/srleeds_/status/1589539176231612416?s=61&t=Q67cLepfr_N78NtIAYPa-g
Republic Now!
The honours system as a whole needs reform.
Heathener was talking about 4 people deferring their elevation to the lords as sleaze and corruption. It isn’t.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/08/developing-countries-climate-crisis-funding-2030-report-nicholas-stern
We should not be governed by lifelong appointments of cronies.
The House of Lords has less democratic legitimacy than the European Parliament.
Fucks sake. Blue shift in Pennsylvania will be loooooooooong
We need *fewer* political cronies in the second chamber, not more.
What has always been done is that a retiring PM gets the opportunity to make a batch of people into peers at the point of their retirement, and these people then become peers, there and then.
The Conservatives are now effectively changing the rules such that, in the case of serving politicians, their appointment can be deferred until the end of their elected term. This will almost certainly become a permanent change in procedure, since what governing party would want to volunteer to defend a set of by-elections?
The most obvious effect of this change is that there'll now be fewer by-elections.
The second effect will be that a greater proportion of people nominated to the upper house through this route will be serving MPs (and therefore correspondingly fewer from other walks of life, on the assumption that the retiring PM has in mind a figure of how many to appoint in total). In the past, the prospect of tricky by-elections will have acted as a brake on a retiring PM sending too many of his or her friends on the green benches straight to the red benches; this brake has now been removed.
The third effect is that the electors of the affected constituencies have someone who is guaranteed a plumb job as one of our lawmakers, for life, and therefore little incentive to 'go the extra mile' in their current role. At the extreme, they could simply follow Johnson into a series of beach holidays and let their constituents go hang. Of course, most MPs will have more sense of duty than Johnson does (they could hardly have less!), but which of us could say - if we were guaranteed a plumb lifetime paid role in our field, starting in a couple of years' time, that it wouldn't affect our attitude and approach to our current role?
Having a by-election right away gave the electors the opportunity to choose someone fresh to represent us, now that our chosen representative is effectively retiring from the arena. That opportunity is now taken away.
He doesn't give a shit about the Conservative Party. Why would he care if it lost a few by-elections?
Looking at Target Smart data there is no surge of non-voter participation anywhere. Unless they are turning out on the day then young (and old) women are not saving the Dems
Will they protest on their behalf against their right to protest?
Seriously though - I doubt this will be a commitment by the King. Just a political promise by the PM
Edit — and WTF is wrong with Vanilla this morning?
We're not the fucking Romans.
“What we see in these competitive states are the Democrats are returning their ballots at a greater rate than Republicans,” McDonald told ABC News. “But if you look nationally, and you look at some of the states where there’s not these, these hot races are not happening — places like Florida or California — Democrats actually have a lower mail ballot return rate in those states.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/what-voter-turnout-is-foreshadowing-as-we-head-into-election-day/ar-AA13R0MU
Stellar company!
(Honourable mention to Vatican City.)
Nut Nut must be happy.
Really?
An elected HoL / second chamber would just give yet more power to political parties. I want political parties to have less power.
As someone said the other week, the Irish system seems a reasonable model.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seanad_Éireann
As wiki opines, "In practice the nominees are party members, often, though not always, failed or aspiring Dáil candidates"
In sharp contrast to all the 'nothing to see here' posts.
A revising chamber needs experts. The HoL as-is actually does have a fair few experts.
Is the British electorate any more clued up ?
https://mobile.twitter.com/jh_swanson/status/1589363886607962114
The obsession with supposed Jewish power in the United States seems important to contextualize in light of the fact that Americans somehow estimate that 30% of Americans are Jewish.
However Florida isn't that competitive and "What we see in these competitive states are the Democrats are returning their ballots at a greater rate than Republicans,"
The mix of those voting will be important, will young people vote more than usual, will women, will minorities?
So, we shall see in the next few days whether that is making enough of a difference.
NZ is Unicameral. Works fine.
https://twitter.com/marcuscarslaw1/status/1589748205222121473?s=46&t=rQOqdv6JJuv9ToRbhmh1hQ
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/03/15/americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population
...When people’s average perceptions of group sizes are compared to actual population estimates, an intriguing pattern emerges: Americans tend to vastly overestimate the size of minority groups. This holds for sexual minorities, including the proportion of gays and lesbians (estimate: 30%, true: 3%), bisexuals (estimate: 29%, true: 4%), and people who are transgender (estimate: 21%, true: 0.6%).
It also applies to religious minorities, such as Muslim Americans (estimate: 27%, true: 1%) and Jewish Americans (estimate: 30%, true: 2%). And we find the same sorts of overestimates for racial and ethnic minorities, such as Native Americans (estimate: 27%, true: 1%), Asian Americans (estimate: 29%, true: 6%), and Black Americans (estimate: 41%, true: 12%)...
And according to this from Jan 2022:
https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/how-are-the-members-of-upper-houses-chosen-around-the-world/
Out of "all 82 countries classed by Freedom House as Free Democracies"
15 have directly elected upper houses (eg US or Italy)
7 indirectly elected (eg France or Austria)
12 appointed (eg UK or Germany)
48 unicameral (New Zealand or Finland)
I think it's much more likely that nobody has nominated anyone apart from Major, who declined. Blair was extremely unpopular on leaving office and Brown wanted him out of public view, especially given the cash for peerages scandal that was reverberating at the time. Brown himself left office under a cloud that's never really lifted. May didn't like Cameron and got rid of pretty much all his placemen, the likes of Osborne and Morgan, as soon as she could - why would she want him in the Lords? Similarly, Johnson and May can't stand each other, Johnson left at a moment the government couldn't afford a by-election (and clearly still cherished hopes of a comeback) and Truss, well...
The Garter is a different story, where it's rumoured Philip's personal opposition to Blair being knighted led to a bed-block for other candidates.
*until 1984, that is.
It’s doesn’t really do any of its roles well.
A revising chamber needs access to experts. They don't have to be in the chamber.
Also no real expert would consent to having many hours of their time wasted, sitting around a second chamber & listening to a load of wank.
Experts (if they are actually expert at anything) need to keep their skills honed.
https://campaigncommonsense.com/resources/overestimating-demographics-new-ccs-poll-by-yougov/
That is her full-time job. Maintaining her professional skills & research in forensic anthropology, running an Oxford College & sorting out the quarrels of the Fellows will take all her time.
I am sure she is intellectually very able, but the suggestion that she is regularly attending the HoL to revise bills is just bonkers.
Unicameral legislatures are commoner in the smaller countries of the world. So I will try to save some face by saying I meant most counties weighted by population!
I would like to question the categorisations in the website you offer. The German second house is effectively indirectly elected. Representatives are appointed by state governments and state governments are elected. It’s nothing like the House of Lords.
The Budesrat consists of members/ministers from the states, which have been elected in the state elections. The people who are present at the sessions are usually representataives of the state governments, but that is mainly for practical reasons, and they are still politically aligned to make up of state government. It should definately be in the indirectly elected category.
Introduce voting systems that allow for infra-party choice, be that STV (plenty of independents in Ireland) or something else.
Yet, in recent years, we have witnessed a series of bad laws passing through the Scottish Parliament, only to be later struck down or amended in the courts, repealed in parliament or simply not enacted. The “named person” scheme, a central part of the Children and Young People Act. The Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications Act. The Railway Policing Act.
The latest of these inadequate, incompetent laws is the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which is currently making its way through parliament.
https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/bad-laws-written-in-flimsy-terms-undermine-the-founding-purpose-of-holyrood-susan-dalgety-3905976
"Although there is some question-by-question variability, the results from our survey show that inaccurate perceptions of group size are not limited to the types of socially charged group divisions typically explored in similar studies: race, religion, sexuality, education, and income. Americans are equally likely to misestimate the size of less widely discussed groups, such as adults who are left-handed. While respondents estimated that 34% of U.S. adults are left-handed, the real estimate lies closer to 10-12%. Similar misperceptions are found regarding the proportion of American adults who own a pet, have read a book in the past year, or reside in various cities or states. This suggests that errors in judgment are not due to the specific context surrounding a certain group."
And:
"Why is demographic math so difficult? One recent meta-study suggests that when people are asked to make an estimation they are uncertain about, such as the size of a population, they tend to rescale their perceptions in a rational manner. When a person’s lived experience suggests an extreme value — such as a small proportion of people who are Jewish or a large proportion of people who are Christian — they often assume, reasonably, that their experiences are biased. In response, they adjust their prior estimate of a group’s size accordingly by shifting it closer to what they perceive to be the mean group size (that is, 50%). This can facilitate misestimation in surveys, such as ours, which don’t require people to make tradeoffs by constraining the sum of group proportions within a certain category to 100%.
This reasoning process — referred to as uncertainty-based rescaling — leads people to systematically overestimate the size of small values and underestimate the size of large values. It also explains why estimates of populations closer to 0% (e.g., LGBT people, Muslims, and Native Americans) and populations closer to 100% (e.g., adults with a high school degree or who own a car) are less accurate than estimates of populations that are closer to 50%, such as the percentage of American adults who are married or have a child."
At the bottom they also have a chart of median estimates, which are more accurate than the mean estimates.
As always with the debate about the Lords, the starting point has to be the question of what the Lords is *for*. Once we’ve decided what it’s for, we can discuss how it should be formed.