The best election bet – LAB NOT to get a majority – politicalbetting.com
The best election bet – LAB NOT to get a majority – politicalbetting.com
If you look through the latest polls and the reporting of them you would assume that has been a massive switch of Conservative voters to LAB.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/zp5c42/elon_musk_hanging_out_with_jared_kushner_at_the/
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604617643973124097?s=46&t=-5SWP7Qzm0T5EoFqaiGHOQ
One statistic supporting Mike’s tip: despite all the Keir Starmer hype, and the support of the Scottish media, his party is still facing a mountainous 15 point deficit in Scotland.
Good on LibDems, very poor on Labour. So-so on tories.
He has got this one wrong.
It will be a shellacking. You'd better believe or you'll lose money.
SCon voters: 8% DK
SLD voters: 7% DK
SLab voters: 6% DK
SNP voters: 2% DK
(YG/Times;6-9Dec)
Interestingly, voter motivation to actually cast a vote is also higher in Scotland, where those replying 10 out of 10 certain to vote is consistently higher than in England.
Also noteworthy is that Scottish Tories are way more loyal to their party than English ones. A whopping 89% are planning on sticking with their party, way above the equivalent English level. (Other parties: SLab 81%, SLD 90%, SNP 96%)
I'm certain they will win a thumping majority.
Mike is looking at this from completely the wrong perspective. Stop looking at 'what can Labour do?' And begin approaching it from 'how badly might the Conservatives fare?' The reason for saying this is the visceral anger out there, the pent up frustration, the real time catastrophic economic situation, the desire for seismic change.
It's like 1997 but far, far, worse. And things are not going to get any better.
The tories will be lucky to get 100 seats. They might scrape to 150 max.
Take it from there.
Because if you're going to implore people to believe you, so they don't lose money, you'd better have plenty of your own at stake.
The fact is that Labour are doing increasingly well in Scotland under Anas Sarwar and they are currently polling at, or a little above, 30% https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/polls_scot.html
Labour could win 6-10 Scottish Westminster seats, perhaps more. Particularly so as there is still a sizeable pro-unionist sentiment north of the border. And I write that as someone who is pro-independence.
Yes I have bets on.
But I will bet you my house that Labour will win an outright majority if you match my stake with your house. You won't dare of course: all mouth and no trousers.
Meanwhile your prep for today is to go away, read, and inwardly digest Luke Chapter 21 verses 2-4
xx
Interesting idea. I'm probably not touching the market, though, as I backed and hedged so I'm either flat if they don't or ahead if they do.
Young conservatives send mixed messages on Trump at MAGA gathering
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/18/young-conservatives-trump-turning-point-americafest-00074517
This made me gag slightly, but it makes the point quite nicely that even devoted followers aren't all going to vote for him. That's not something you turn around.
“I love both of them so much. So I don’t really want to deal with the fact that they might have to run against each other,” said Kevin Flaherty, a 19-year-old conference attendee from Detroit. But Flaherty said he would support DeSantis over Trump, believing the Florida governor would have greater appeal to independent voters....
And again.
....“What I’m hearing from people my age is — everyone who says ‘Let’s go Brandon’ at these football games, you ask them — they’ll say Ron DeSantis is our leader,” Duke continued. “Not Trump. And they all like Trump.”
Kari Lake calls for imprisoning Maricopa County election officials
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/3780237-kari-lake-calls-for-imprisoning-maricopa-county-election-officials/
Rishi and Co are going to work hard to try to avoid that.
Sunak appears to be better then Truss (and that's a very low bar), but the problem is not Sunak. The problem is his party - and that won't change. Therefore I expect more self-inflicted damage over the next two years.
So I think that Labour will get a majority, and possibly a stonking one. And although I am not a Labour supporter, I think the country needs a Labour government. Heck, the Conservative Party needs a Labour government.
(I don't expect that Labour government to be very good either).
Moscow seemed the same as ever. Decadent, crime-ridden, expensive, filthy, glamorous. It's the Eurasian maximum city. Mumbai in a blizzard. Less Western stuff and more Chinese tat for sale but it's hard to say how much different that was from the situation before sanctions.
Nobody I met thinks that Russia will lose the SMO for whatever ambiguous definition of 'lose' you care to adopt. It's just question of whether they stop at Kherson, Kiev or Lviv.
I watched Solovyov's tv show. He reckons the plan is a series of rolling mobilisations until they get to 3 million people in the armed forces. Which was reckoned by the coterie of beardie weirdos (it was like the LibDem conference) on the show to be sufficient to prevail against NATO in the existential conflict.
Casualities don't hurt VVP politically and you are kidding yourself if you think it does. On some level, they fucking like it.
There is a modest fraction of the population who are absolutely fanatical about it and are known as the Z-Publik. They have merch and VK/Telegram groups where they breathlessly follow the latest atrocities. The British equivalent would be those fucking arseholes who drive around with Comic Relief noses on R56 Minis 365 days/year.
Saw a fucking amazing road rage incident on the M7 motorway near Nizhny Novgorod involving an axe, a scaffold pole and a fire extinguisher. Some fat chybak tumbled out of a UK registered Audi A4 and started waving a Browning HP (SMO booty?) around which calmed everybody down.
Krasnov pretty much predicted all of this in 'Beyond the Thistle' in 1923. I might re-read it to see how it ends.
Endex.
"Bus fares in England to be capped at £2 for three months, says DfT"
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/sep/03/bus-fares-in-england-to-be-capped-at-2-for-three-months-says-dft
It'll be interesting to see how this works out - it seems well targeted if you want to help people with teh cost-of-living crisis.
Putin's regime needs to fall.
Incidentally, how did you get to Moscow? Was it a roundabout route?
I went to see my mate's dad who is dying of Malignant Russian Cancer before he pops off.
https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/z-generation/
Putins war requires increasingly deranged propaganda to keep it going, but it also requires functioning economy and logistics. It all works up to a point, then it doesn't.
Betfair has Lab majority more or less as evens at 2.02, to lay at 2.12. That doesn't look great value on either side. We pretty much all don't believe that current polling with a 15% lead to be sustained, even if our resident booster bunny is rather over egging how much swingback.
Value bets are often going against the herd opinion. Either Con most seats or Lab 400 seats perhaps, but the seats markets on Smarkets have poor liquidity at present. Con most seats at 3.7 isn't attractive enough.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/12/an-electric-kia-thats-faster-than-a-lamborghini-the-2023-ev6-gt-driven/
But at £45,245 OTR for a base model, I won't be getting one soon.
It is these resale issues rather than the base cost that has made me hesitate to date. I am reasonably confident that the additional base cost can be saved in fuel costs within a reasonable period but will there be a market for my purchase when I want to sell it?
I really want my next car to be electric but between the two of us, think we could only afford about £10k. So not going to happen.
We might not even get one. As long as trains and buses continue to roll out space for bikes, and the car club scheme gets extended, there isn't much reason to have one in Edinburgh.
My 2 1/2 year old Kia e-niro has depreciated about 20% over its 25 000 miles were I to trade it in, about £6 000. That is pretty good compared to historical depreciation. If you can charge at home it is less than half the running costs too. Battery capacity hasn't reduced either over those years.
Mostly though it is much nicer to drive electric. Once used to the smoothness and power, IC powered cars seem very crude.
Admittedly this is due to the craziness of the second hand car market.
I'd never bet the house on anything. That'd be totally irresponsible.
I'm happy to offer you 3/2 on the Tories getting 150 seats or less, if you like. Given how confident you are of this result this should be a cracking bet for you.
If I win, you pay me £100. If you win, I pay you £150.
Deal?
It's not representative - anymore than it would be to film a people's march for a second referendum - but it's not a truth we are comfortable hearing.
The limiting factor is batteries, and until the dozens of new plants in construction start manufacturing, most of the supply will go into the highest margin vehicles.
The new plants and battery formats will bring the cost of production down, but just as importantly, they will make production of lower margin high volume production possible.
I am not sure he will be our next PM.
And aside from earliest EVs, the batteries are holding up pretty well.
Are they actually as big a bunch of rude, arrogant, lazy, incompetent bellends as they are coming across as, or am I just incredibly unlucky?
- The tories to be utterly hopeless and at the nadir of popularity
- Labour to be galvanised, led by a political genius and with strength in depth
Whereas for a conservative majority we just need them to be mediocre and not completely hated.
https://www.kia.com/uk/new-cars/niro/pricing/
A base Hyundai I20 (a really nice car (*)) is about £19,035 OTR.
EVs are still far too expensive for most people.
(*) Don't snigger, @Dura_Ace ...
For me the real challenge is the public charging network. An absurd myriad of networks, of apps where you need to give them you date of birth and inside leg measurement to do pay as you go, of new chargers either broken or running at half power whilst charging £stupid per kWh, and a stack of legacy charge points seemingly abandoned.
All this needs sorting for EVs to properly take off. Until then, as my YouTube channel says, Just Get A Tesla.
IMV we are really waiting on a new, better battery chemistry (depending on how you define 'better' ...)
I try to get around on two wheels where I can though; porridge oats are an even more efficient and sustainable fuel.
My son in laws father took a turn for the worse in his nursing home yesterday and needs urgent medical care. The home phoned for an ambulances to take him to Glan Clwyd hospital at 3.00pm yesterday afternoon and as I write this, and despite pleas throughout the night ,no ambulance has arrived yet.
This is Wales NHS under labour in Cardiff and demonstrates just how it is failing across the devolved administration as well as in England
His son has held his hand all night utterly helpless to see him in so much pain, choking and not eating or drinking and just wanting him to receive the care he so urgently needs
On the other hand, Keith is interesting as linoleum, the lack of a huge swingback in Scotland makes it hard and the boundary review makes it worse. And there is no way out of the economic Trusssterfuck - blaming the Tories will carry them so far, but they need to offer hope to really win big and thats hard to find.
So too many variables to call it this far out. I think @Heathener is right that the political mood is about as hardened against the Tories and the corrupt incompetence they stand for. But that isn't the same as "therefore Labour win by a Blair". I think the party winning the biggest vote share will be the apathy party. Several million non-voters were persuaded to vote for the first time ever in 2016. And the second time ever in 2019. Most will revert to not voting. Which makes all kinds of seats much harder to read...
Don't really know what more to say except to hope that the ambulance arrives soon.
I've got a book somewhere in the loft called Russia 2010, written in the mid 90s and posits a few different potential scenarios for the post-communist state - the most pessimistic pretty accurately describes were the country has ended up.
*yeah.
The new larger cylindrical battery format will reduced manufacturing costs significantly.
Without radical chemistries we'll probably see at least a 50% drop in costs this decade.
Then there's stuff like iron/sulphur chemistries - which would cost a fraction of current materials - and solid state batteries. The latter will take a while (maybe ten years), but will radically improve what's possible.
It's remarkable that it just continues and people accept it.
https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/7713/electric-car-battery-prices/
The driver seems mainly to be the price of lithium itself. Massively up in 2021 but that looks like a bubble.
Who benefits most from the lithium boom? Australia by some margin, the same country that has most to lose from ditching coal, helpfully:
https://www.statista.com/chart/28038/countries-with-the-biggest-lithium-production-and-reserves/
One of Dave's problems in 2010 was the size of the Lib Dem block. They took seats away from Labour but didn't help the Conservatives get nearer a majority.
2024 could well be even harder for Starmer- a moderate Lib Dem revival and bam there are 100 seats out of play for the big two. Getting 326/550 is a tall order. It would mean forcing the Conservatives below about 225 seats, maybe less if the Lib Dems advance a lot. That's not impossible (I think the economy is going to minimise the amount of swingback we get this time, and a lot of the 2019 win was wide but shallow), but it's not easy.
But it's not just Wales, and not just now.
A similar thing happened to my father when he had a fall in his care home nearly a decade ago which burst his eyeball.
conservatives but it’s difficult to untangle cause and effect. The worse the Tories do the higher the LD seat count. Much stronger correlation than with LD vote share.
Whereas a strong SNP performance is almost entirely to the detriment of Labour.
Lovely chap by the way. Wikipedia lists his allegiances as:
Russian Empire (1888–1917)
Don Republic (White Movement) (1918–1920)
Nazi Germany (1933–1944)
Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (1944–1945)
There is an interesting Vanadium battery concept knocking out around as well.
They are compounding an existing fertility
decline with a loss of potentially several years worth of fighting age (and fathering age) men being lost to death or simple absence from home. The more mobilised, the starker the effect.
I wonder if Trump will make the smart move and endorse RDS for the good of country & party (& Trump who needs a friendly prez to help with the avalanche of legal shit building up behind the fan). Hope not.
On current polling (and the new boundaries), it’s looking like the SNP will gain all 6 Scottish Tory seats (or gain 5 at the worst). That is a boon for Labour.
From the latest YouGov the breakdown of Conservative 2019 voters is (Con - Lab - Don't Know/Won't Vote/Refused - RefUK):
40 - 9 - 31 - 14
Let's compare that with a random YouGov chosen from April 2008. Oh. We can't. YouGov don't seem to have the data tables online anywhere, and the links from Wikipedia are dead.
On the face of it the 31% no longer giving a voting intention is very large, but in the absence of numbers to compare it to from the time of the last change in government it's quite hard to draw a firm conclusion. The 9% switching to Labour might be unusually high.
We can compare to a YouGov in mid-October, the nadir in Tory polling in YouGov under Truss was 19%, 37 points behind 20-21 October. Then the breakdown in the Tory 2019 vote was:
34 - 14 - 36 - 9
Labour have lost about one-third of their switchers. Interestingly the combined don't know and Reform proportion is steady at 45%. That is high.
I have said a lot recently that I thought the Tories were done and would be buried at the next election, but now I'm not so sure. That's a lot of voters who are open to being won back by an improved Tory performance, or scared off by Labour mistakes.
Russian identity is - to a large extent - bound up in opposition to Western liberal values, which they see as weak/pathetic and not universal. I don't think they have much desire to emulate.
I'd say the most important things (arguably the only important things) are to maintain a fiction of Mother Russia being strong and feared, and the population fed and watered.
Anyway who wants more will emigrate.
Top tip: double check any life insurance/assurance payouts or indeed anything where the figures don't seem right. I noticed one for my late father seemed lower than the figures in the bumf in the file, and put it down to market variations. But then thought twice and wrote in to query it. Instant 10K cheque and grovelling apologies.
Today is my last working day before Christmas, and I just got Wordle in 2. Not a bad start.
And, on topic, I agree with OGH. Because Scotland.
What's doubly annoying here is that there's no money in this account. It was just used for overseas transfers. So I only let them know their client was dead out of politeness. And now I'm being bombarded with rubbish demanding things I can't give them and which are difficult to reply to because of the crazy nature of their systems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH0yAGhBOfw
Re closing accounts - oh dear. I'm just grateful my dad didn't have any online accounts, too.
"Everything that is wrong with the upper ranks of British policing — in particular a culture of failing ever upwards — is evident in the case of the former chief constable under investigation for alleged serious misconduct who has just been handed a new job upholding police standards. "
I have been saying this for years.
What the actual fuck does the Policing Minister do every day?
Will they vote Labour? No, though they aren't alarmed by Starmer. LibDem? Possibly. But just sitting it out seems the most likely for many. That, as I recall, was what happened in 1997. There wasn't a huge "Tories for Blair" movement, just low turnout among traditionally Tory voters. That, for me, is the weakness of the "no overall majority because Starmer isn't charismatic" thesis. Few people see a positive reason to vote Tory, or a terror of Labour to make them vote anyway. A Labour majority on a lowish turnout seems to me the most likely.
They hated the war, but ultimately, they said: Russia had to prevail, could not lose, and they would reluctantly take up arms for Putin if needs be
If that’s how the sophisticated Muscovites feel…
For now, there simply wasn't enough material to make it worthwhile, but companies are already running pilot plants for recycling, and major players like VW are planning it into their future manufacturing.
Point is that the entire industry is undergoing a complete re-engineering. That doesn't happen overnight; it will take a decade at least - but all the major manufacturers have committed their futures to it.
better) is part of the problem, I think.
It's not that they're somehow just failing to notice.
⚠️THERMONUCLEAR BAD—Hospitals completely overwhelmed in China ever since restrictions dropped. Epidemiologist estimate >60% of 🇨🇳 & 10% of Earth’s population likely infected over next 90 days. Deaths likely in the millions—plural. This is just the start—🧵
https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1604748747640119296?s=46&t=5voMRJVsBEIKUqEoHjpwbg