The Tory shape is a topless lady leaning over the side of a bed.
"No time for the old in-out, love! I've just come to read the meter!"
Yes. Tories out of love and all out of luck.
BTW I watched confessions of a window cleaner last week. So many great pairs of tits in it. I want to live in a country proud to be making films like that again.
Um, yes, of course, sentiments shared, but my quote was actually Malcolm McDowell in "A Clockwork Orange"
She reached for it, after a stumbling pause, but I for one believe Liz Truss answered it honestly and paints a true picture for us.
She was being told the market will melt down unless you throw him into the volcano to indicate an abrupt u turn. To avoid a market melt down she was led to believe was coming, she had to sack her chancellor, who only found out his about his sacking from seeing it on the news?
But now learning that she believed there would be meltdown unless indicating abrupt u turn, and she done that abrupt u turn, does undermine the argument she didn’t do much wrong. Doesn’t it?
Well yes, but it's not really about rationality, is it?
To survive in politics, you need a degree of confidence that looks like arrogance to normal people. "I basically got it right but was let down by minions" is the standard message of pretty much every political memoir.
What's unusual about the Trusster is that she's going so public so quickly, and that she genuinely seems to think that there's a way back for her.
Does she think 'there's a way back'? I've seen nothing about this much-vaunted leadership ambition from Truss herself, just anonymous briefing to that effect in The Times (where have we heard that before). What she seems to want to do is tell her side of the story, and use her platform and position as an MP to influence the Government in the direction of the policies that she believes in. Hardly stake-burning offences.
Reminds me a bit of the solution to the two guards riddle (one can only tell the truth, one always lies, you don’t know which, have one question to find which door is correct. As seen in Dr Who and the Pyramids of Mars and obviously lots of other places).
Delta is usually the best card in its hand, which makes it a very bad hand. R&W is a bit more middle-of-the-road, so 26 points is pretty terrible.
We are still 20 months out from a GE but these are exactly the sort of figures I would expect if we are on course for a LabMaj. There seems to be a significant shift in Scotland too which is not going to help Sunak one bit.
I think we can safely rule out another Conservative Government. We cannot rule out a Labour landslide.
Clearly Liz Truss to blame.
Pre Truss the Tories were in a deep dark well with just a chink of light coming down from yonder. She snuffed it out.
No, Truss was a volatile factor. The country and the party could soar or plunge with her. Sunak is really the one with his pillow firmly clamped over the airways of the Tories and of Britain. He is efficiently managing us down the plughole.
Actually, I think this analysis is 80%+ correct, and Sunak does have that problem, but thing is, so do the Tory MPs who threw Truss out, so you can't fix the problem by putting Truss back in, unless it's the prelude to a party civil war that you think she can win. It can be done: eventually Boris Johnson won a civil war by throwing out a few dozen MPs to cow the rest, but look at the offence of a cabinet that he ended up with.
29% with Deltapoll is of course the same as Labour got in 2010 when Brown got a hung parliament. So plenty still to play for
The month of January produced very nearly 26% average for Tory’s. This month so far has the polls even lower.
Of course anything is spin able “month average is 26% only 3% off what gave Brown 260 seats, all to play for”. But the more ifs and buts you put in a sentence, the more lame and unbelievable it sounds.
But, for example, Major 30.7% 165 seats.
I'd love to see the detailed Deltapoll data tables. The one meaningful comparison is looking at the 2019 Conservative vote. Stripping out the Don't Knows (and Deltapoll says nothing about the number), R&W has 60% voting Conservative and 22% Labour while Deltapoll has 68% Conservative and 18% Labour so perhaps the higher Conservative VI stems from that.
They are very consistent at finding more Tory’s. Last 4 polls 3 29’s and 1 30. Also a 32 in January.
That’s higher than the Opinium swingback goes.
You are right, d/k must be considered Tory still on more than just 2019 voting pattern with this firm? For example, if I asked voter and they said Tory in every election since 92, I would add that group to Tory column even if they said don’t know.
Pollsters have subtly different methodologies for the Kudos of being crowned Champion at the end of the day?
This is where having the data helps.
Redfield & Wilton have the Don't Knows and the fact is 46% of the total of Don't Knows were 2019 Conservative voters. Now, some will simply add those voters to the Conservative column, others may take a more equivocal view. The second largest group of Don't Knows (22%) were non-voters in 2019. That means around a third of current Don't Knows voted for other parties last time but some on here seem to think they are all going to suddenly become Tories which I don't accept.
I don't know (no pun intended) what the Don't Knows will do - some will vote in 2024 as they had in 2019, some may vote differently, many may not vote at all.
To assume they will all vote Conservative seems the epitome of stupidity (but that doesn't stop those Conservative sympathisers looking for the needle of comfort in the haystack of misery).
Well to be fair, it’s just not Tory sympathisers looking for crumbs of comfort, Mike has had headers warning Labour rampers of the size of the don’t know column and the small number switched direct to Labour column.
My guess is, if it’s a GE where a party is unpopular, it’s not just about their voters last time, and long time, switching, many just will not bother. Governments scaring voters about opposition getting in is a strong tool. But I agree with you, many of the didn’t vote last time don’t knows being sampled may not even vote next time.
So when it comes to the don’t know, we don’t know.
As Mike points to that “voted Tory now switched to Labour % column” saying it’s a low figure - do you know that figure from 97?
Not sure which famous pollster said it (Peter Kellner?) but the dictum that comes to mind is 'those that don't know, don't vote'.
You tend to see a reduction in the number of don't knows as polling day approaches. This may signify a return to the fold, or 'swingback' as some would have it.
As strawclutching goes, it's desperate stuff though when you are 20+ adrift.
Yep. And what you say points to large Tory to don’t know becoming large didn’t vote if the maxims true.
Mike Smithson keeps pointing to the current small number of switchers to Labour from 2019 Tory voters - if we knew the 97 election total who switched to Labour from 92 Tory, it would be an excellent measure if Labour are on course or not?
I suspect a lot of voting in the UK is negative. That's to say voting against a party rather than for one. So the first decision is who don't you want then when you see who has the best chance of beating them you make your choice. Which is why when a Tory vote becomes a 'don't know' it's more than likely lost.
I think we're beyond the point of worrying what anyone thinks about the opposition. As long as they're viable they'll do. Like any disaster the first job is to clear the debris.
A pity SKS hasn't got the bottle to promise he'll reverse Brexit. He's well past the point of having to be cautious. The Tories are in such a state that if he wants a radical first term now would be a good time to put it on the table.
Not again. You can't "reverse" Brexit. I wish people would stop using the phrase. You can apply to rejoin, sure, but that takes all 27 member states to agree (by no means a given) plus a long and possibly arduous accession negotiation. You and others like seem to think we can just say "sorry, all a mistake, let's 'reverse' and go back to 2015". It's too late for that. We're not Remainers anymore, we're Rejoiners.
Barnier disagrees.....
But even if you're half right now would be a good time to set out some reasonable conditions that if met would mean we could apply to rejoin in all humility and assume our rightful place at the heart of Europe. There is hardly a single person who hasn't now been adversely affected by Brexit.
Article 50(5) of the Treaty on European Union is very clear that to rejoin we have to get in the queue with everyone else -
"If a State which has withdrawn from the Union asks to rejoin, its request shall be subject to the procedure referred to in Article 49."
Article 49 is the same procedure as applying to Ukraine, Turkey, Albania etc etc.
Unless you're saying that Barnier can rewrite the Treaty on European Union. Huge if true.
There is a fundamental difference, though. The UK already has EU law and regulation on the books. Passing the Acquis would take a few seconds.
There are other obstacles that Ukraine, Turkey and Albania don’t have. It’s going to take some persuasion for Italy to be satisfied with being the third largest economy in the EU again.
I think there would be enormous reluctance among EU capitals to bring the UK in, given that we'd (a) been a pain in the butt while a member before; and (b) that there was no overwhelming support for EU membership in the UK. That is, the last thing EU countries want is an on-again, off-again relationship with the UK.
That being said... I think they would probably be relatively relaxed about the UK joining the EEA. But I just don't see the political will for that in the UK.
The Swiss-type relationship, where low skilled migration is limited by the requirement to have Swiss educational qualifications and the need to purchase health insurance, combined with the Swiss maintaining more sovereignty than happens in EFTA/EEA, is more possible.
A closer relationship between the UK and EU won't be forged for decades. The EU loathes the Swiss compromise because it's too messy and gives the Swiss all kinds of opt-outs; the UK won't accept the EEA because too much of the electorate is allergic to freedom of movement. Hence Starmer insisting that he's not going to take us back into the single market IIRC.
We are a much bigger catch than Switzerland for the EU, though.
Switzerland is a small country that exports more to the EU than it imports. The UK is a large one that imports a lot more than it exports.
And I'm not suggesting we'd have a Swiss type arrangement that required (counts...) 210 separate Treaties, I'm suggesting that we're big enough to have a custom deal.
This sounds suspiciously like the German car makers' argument for why negotiating a favourable withdrawal agreement would be a piece of cake. Remind us how that worked out.
Your argument is simply nothing is possible because, so I'm not sure I am being any more fanciful than you.
Now you sound like Liz Truss.
I sound like a Prime Minister who managed to serve under two different monarchs?
The Truss premiership was a horror show from start to finish.
I never want to hear from her ever again.
It was a horror show even before it began. Who can forget the jury being out on Macron?
That’s about the only thing she got right. Mr quasi ineffective? France are our allies and also long standing rivals. Not everything they do will be in British interests.
She reached for it, after a stumbling pause, but I for one believe Liz Truss answered it honestly and paints a true picture for us.
She was being told the market will melt down unless you throw him into the volcano to indicate an abrupt u turn. To avoid a market melt down she was led to believe was coming, she had to sack her chancellor, who only found out his about his sacking from seeing it on the news?
But now learning that she believed there would be meltdown unless indicating abrupt u turn, and she done that abrupt u turn, does undermine the argument she didn’t do much wrong. Doesn’t it?
Well yes, but it's not really about rationality, is it?
To survive in politics, you need a degree of confidence that looks like arrogance to normal people. "I basically got it right but was let down by minions" is the standard message of pretty much every political memoir.
What's unusual about the Trusster is that she's going so public so quickly, and that she genuinely seems to think that there's a way back for her.
“Well yes, but it's not really about rationality, is it?”
It comes across as throwing someone into a volcano to prevent a market crash, as your Shaman are telling you that’s what the markets demand.
Don’t you believe top level politics and economy management operates like that?
There are many things in human affairs that aren't entirely rational. Speaking as a physics teacher, I sometimes find this exasperating, but hey ho.
From a purely rational point of view, KK could have reversed his policy and stayed in post. But having lost the confidence of the markets, that wasn't going to be enough to regain it.
Rishi seems to be suffering from a similar problem. There are enough people who are sufficiently annoyed with the Conservative government 2010-23 that they simply don't care what he says or does, good or bad. They've stopped listening.
I suspect the Tories have one more step on the descent into lunacy after the next election before they turn a corner. JRM as LOTO but I’m sure either Truss or one of her ideological bedfellows will be there on the front bench too.
29% with Deltapoll is of course the same as Labour got in 2010 when Brown got a hung parliament. So plenty still to play for
The month of January produced very nearly 26% average for Tory’s. This month so far has the polls even lower.
Of course anything is spin able “month average is 26% only 3% off what gave Brown 260 seats, all to play for”. But the more ifs and buts you put in a sentence, the more lame and unbelievable it sounds.
But, for example, Major 30.7% 165 seats.
I'd love to see the detailed Deltapoll data tables. The one meaningful comparison is looking at the 2019 Conservative vote. Stripping out the Don't Knows (and Deltapoll says nothing about the number), R&W has 60% voting Conservative and 22% Labour while Deltapoll has 68% Conservative and 18% Labour so perhaps the higher Conservative VI stems from that.
They are very consistent at finding more Tory’s. Last 4 polls 3 29’s and 1 30. Also a 32 in January.
That’s higher than the Opinium swingback goes.
You are right, d/k must be considered Tory still on more than just 2019 voting pattern with this firm? For example, if I asked voter and they said Tory in every election since 92, I would add that group to Tory column even if they said don’t know.
Pollsters have subtly different methodologies for the Kudos of being crowned Champion at the end of the day?
This is where having the data helps.
Redfield & Wilton have the Don't Knows and the fact is 46% of the total of Don't Knows were 2019 Conservative voters. Now, some will simply add those voters to the Conservative column, others may take a more equivocal view. The second largest group of Don't Knows (22%) were non-voters in 2019. That means around a third of current Don't Knows voted for other parties last time but some on here seem to think they are all going to suddenly become Tories which I don't accept.
I don't know (no pun intended) what the Don't Knows will do - some will vote in 2024 as they had in 2019, some may vote differently, many may not vote at all.
To assume they will all vote Conservative seems the epitome of stupidity (but that doesn't stop those Conservative sympathisers looking for the needle of comfort in the haystack of misery).
Well to be fair, it’s just not Tory sympathisers looking for crumbs of comfort, Mike has had headers warning Labour rampers of the size of the don’t know column and the small number switched direct to Labour column.
My guess is, if it’s a GE where a party is unpopular, it’s not just about their voters last time, and long time, switching, many just will not bother. Governments scaring voters about opposition getting in is a strong tool. But I agree with you, many of the didn’t vote last time don’t knows being sampled may not even vote next time.
So when it comes to the don’t know, we don’t know.
As Mike points to that “voted Tory now switched to Labour % column” saying it’s a low figure - do you know that figure from 97?
Not sure which famous pollster said it (Peter Kellner?) but the dictum that comes to mind is 'those that don't know, don't vote'.
You tend to see a reduction in the number of don't knows as polling day approaches. This may signify a return to the fold, or 'swingback' as some would have it.
As strawclutching goes, it's desperate stuff though when you are 20+ adrift.
The first indication of whether there will be a Labour landslide will be turnout, especially in traditionally Conservative seats.
Delta is usually the best card in its hand, which makes it a very bad hand. R&W is a bit more middle-of-the-road, so 26 points is pretty terrible.
We are still 20 months out from a GE but these are exactly the sort of figures I would expect if we are on course for a LabMaj. There seems to be a significant shift in Scotland too which is not going to help Sunak one bit.
I think we can safely rule out another Conservative Government. We cannot rule out a Labour landslide.
Clearly Liz Truss to blame.
Pre Truss the Tories were in a deep dark well with just a chink of light coming down from yonder. She snuffed it out.
No, Truss was a volatile factor. The country and the party could soar or plunge with her. Sunak is really the one with his pillow firmly clamped over the airways of the Tories and of Britain. He is efficiently managing us down the plughole.
Well we saw the plunge. The 'soar' bit remains in its alternative universe.
29% with Deltapoll is of course the same as Labour got in 2010 when Brown got a hung parliament. So plenty still to play for
The month of January produced very nearly 26% average for Tory’s. This month so far has the polls even lower.
Of course anything is spin able “month average is 26% only 3% off what gave Brown 260 seats, all to play for”. But the more ifs and buts you put in a sentence, the more lame and unbelievable it sounds.
But, for example, Major 30.7% 165 seats.
I'd love to see the detailed Deltapoll data tables. The one meaningful comparison is looking at the 2019 Conservative vote. Stripping out the Don't Knows (and Deltapoll says nothing about the number), R&W has 60% voting Conservative and 22% Labour while Deltapoll has 68% Conservative and 18% Labour so perhaps the higher Conservative VI stems from that.
They are very consistent at finding more Tory’s. Last 4 polls 3 29’s and 1 30. Also a 32 in January.
That’s higher than the Opinium swingback goes.
You are right, d/k must be considered Tory still on more than just 2019 voting pattern with this firm? For example, if I asked voter and they said Tory in every election since 92, I would add that group to Tory column even if they said don’t know.
Pollsters have subtly different methodologies for the Kudos of being crowned Champion at the end of the day?
This is where having the data helps.
Redfield & Wilton have the Don't Knows and the fact is 46% of the total of Don't Knows were 2019 Conservative voters. Now, some will simply add those voters to the Conservative column, others may take a more equivocal view. The second largest group of Don't Knows (22%) were non-voters in 2019. That means around a third of current Don't Knows voted for other parties last time but some on here seem to think they are all going to suddenly become Tories which I don't accept.
I don't know (no pun intended) what the Don't Knows will do - some will vote in 2024 as they had in 2019, some may vote differently, many may not vote at all.
To assume they will all vote Conservative seems the epitome of stupidity (but that doesn't stop those Conservative sympathisers looking for the needle of comfort in the haystack of misery).
Well to be fair, it’s just not Tory sympathisers looking for crumbs of comfort, Mike has had headers warning Labour rampers of the size of the don’t know column and the small number switched direct to Labour column.
My guess is, if it’s a GE where a party is unpopular, it’s not just about their voters last time, and long time, switching, many just will not bother. Governments scaring voters about opposition getting in is a strong tool. But I agree with you, many of the didn’t vote last time don’t knows being sampled may not even vote next time.
So when it comes to the don’t know, we don’t know.
As Mike points to that “voted Tory now switched to Labour % column” saying it’s a low figure - do you know that figure from 97?
Not sure which famous pollster said it (Peter Kellner?) but the dictum that comes to mind is 'those that don't know, don't vote'.
You tend to see a reduction in the number of don't knows as polling day approaches. This may signify a return to the fold, or 'swingback' as some would have it.
As strawclutching goes, it's desperate stuff though when you are 20+ adrift.
Yep. And what you say points to large Tory to don’t know becoming large didn’t vote if the maxims true.
Mike Smithson keeps pointing to the current small number of switchers to Labour from 2019 Tory voters - if we knew the 97 election total who switched to Labour from 92 Tory, it would be an excellent measure if Labour are on course or not?
I suspect a lot of voting in the UK is negative. That's to say voting against a party rather than for one. So the first decision is who don't you want then when you see who has the best chance of beating them you make your choice. Which is why when a Tory vote becomes a 'don't know' it's more than likely lost.
That’s one of the problems with FPTP. Similar effect, but with different outcomes, to the French presidential runoff system (different outcomes because harder for a wingnut of either type to win in that system).
As I have been reporting for about a week, Something bad is going on with the Tory poll %, maybe mounting voter frustration at strikes as strikers more popular than the government position, which could be a temporary % drop recoverable before general election, or, what might me harder to recover, voters assessment of a new PM and his government is coming to an end, and they assess a weak, clueless, not just out of touch but with a nasty party streak to it, mess of a leader and party.
Yes. Mex. You know where to come for the best most unspun poll explanations 😁
What could possibly be going on with the polls?
Well, let's see. Six eggs are £2.50, if you can find them, chicken breast is up from about £3 to £5, a pint is anywhere from £5 to £7.50 depending on where you are in the country, most of my friends have stopped booking train travel in advance because it's too unreliable, I've had family wait ten hours in an ambulance to get admitted to A&E, my gas bill is coming to £200 a month and I barely heat the place above 15 degrees, relying on an electric blanket or a warm coat most of the time, rents are up 27% year on year in London, and similar rises in other major cities like Manchester. Interest rates meaning mortgages are up similar amounts for people remortgaging this year. Taxes rose substantially in the last budget, and while many in the private sector are seeing pay rises, they're largely below inflation, while others haven't seen a pay rise since before Covid.
I cannot possibly imagine why people want this shower of shit out of government.
I bought eggs today. I paid less about 1.75. I brought a pint of doom bar yesterday it cost me 4.20. Don't assume that south east inflation applies to most people
I was in London about six weeks ago, and didn't have any problem buying eggs or beer. A cursory look at Tesco delivery shows that there is less availability of eggs than normal, but that it is perfectly possible to get a delivery of six free range eggs for under £2.
As I say, the cheaper ones are always out of stock at my local. While I'm not disputing that it's still possible to get eggs at under £2, is the price paid in 2022 (£1.95) really that much comfort to people who were paying £1.29 in 2021?
These are actually fairly minor things, maybe most people don't buy more than six eggs a week, so they're out less than £4 a month more than they were before.
But these are things you notice, day in day out, and noticing prices like that going up month on month is bound to have an impact on the polls. It is the old point about Thatcher knowing the price of a pint of milk, because these are things that people notice.
The big costs are rent/mortgage/energy bills, which dwarf egg price rises. I'm spending an extra £2 a month on eggs, but an extra £200 a month on electricity and gas.
But in terms of psychological impact, seeing the price of staples like eggs, bread and pasta rise noticeably month on month has a big effect.
People sense that something is fundamentally *broken* and while it doesn't seem like the other lot has anything useful to say about it, people will vote to give the current lot a kicking either way.
Something is fundamentally broken, however its not because of brexit, the ukraine war or even covid. The price inflation has been going on since the late 90's. The headline rate of inflation has never been anywhere near what most people experiences. We kept being told there is no inflation while our rent increased above the headline rate, council tax increased above the headline rate, transport costs and food costs increased above the inflation rate. The powers that be decreased the headline rate by including a load of electrical products that did go down in price and were deflationary but which few brought every year. Example fridges....havent bought one in 20 years but they are in the basket of goods for inflation.
Every year our taxes rise above inflation council tax rise and every year we get less services for it.
On the other hand, the price of TVs, laptops and international travel collapsed, and people were able to buy things like smartphones that would have been inconceivable to people in earlier generations.
It's always possible to find a basket of goods whose prices have stagnated, and ones that have soared.
But the process for measuring RPI/CPI is pretty transparent: you can literally download the basket the government uses, and measure it yourself.
I remember walking around Dalston Sainsburys 18 years ago wondering how it is possible for 4 baked potatoes to be £3. That was what it cost then, could have been a random one off due to a potato shortage but it seemed very expensive. Rent for a houseshare was about £300 per month plus bills. I earned about £700 per month temping in an office job (after tax) It was about £3 a pint. I don't think things have changed that much. Everything has doubled in price but so has pay.
I lived in Dalston back then, we were probably neighbours!
Average rent for a room in London is actually now £935 a month. That's for a room in a houseshare, mind. Not a flat.
A quick glance at spareroom.co.uk suggests £900ish a month is the going rate for a room in Dalston these days.
They were great years, pre social media and smartphone. We didn't even have an internet connection. It was a low end house share. But also in the case of Dalston the whole area has got massively more desirable. Even a few years later I paid just £800 per month for a 2 bed flat... unthinkable now.
The strange thing is that it is only about 10 years ago that I was in London houseshare purgatory; I just stuck it out long enough to get my career off the ground, then moved out and bought a flat elsewhere... now 10 years later between my career and asset price inflation I realised that I could actually go back to Dalston and buy a flat there if I really wanted to, but it doesn't really feel like the same place.
Has any departmental re-org made things better? The usual consequence is everyone spends a week redoing letterheads, I think.
I like the idea of a department for enterprise/commerce. Don't think 'Business' has been jazzy enough. Stick employment in there which I think is still with DWP? Another place that should still be called DSS.
As I have been reporting for about a week, Something bad is going on with the Tory poll %, maybe mounting voter frustration at strikes as strikers more popular than the government position, which could be a temporary % drop recoverable before general election, or, what might me harder to recover, voters assessment of a new PM and his government is coming to an end, and they assess a weak, clueless, not just out of touch but with a nasty party streak to it, mess of a leader and party.
Yes. Mex. You know where to come for the best most unspun poll explanations 😁
What could possibly be going on with the polls?
Well, let's see. Six eggs are £2.50, if you can find them, chicken breast is up from about £3 to £5, a pint is anywhere from £5 to £7.50 depending on where you are in the country, most of my friends have stopped booking train travel in advance because it's too unreliable, I've had family wait ten hours in an ambulance to get admitted to A&E, my gas bill is coming to £200 a month and I barely heat the place above 15 degrees, relying on an electric blanket or a warm coat most of the time, rents are up 27% year on year in London, and similar rises in other major cities like Manchester. Interest rates meaning mortgages are up similar amounts for people remortgaging this year. Taxes rose substantially in the last budget, and while many in the private sector are seeing pay rises, they're largely below inflation, while others haven't seen a pay rise since before Covid.
I cannot possibly imagine why people want this shower of shit out of government.
I bought eggs today. I paid less about 1.75. I brought a pint of doom bar yesterday it cost me 4.20. Don't assume that south east inflation applies to most people
I was in London about six weeks ago, and didn't have any problem buying eggs or beer. A cursory look at Tesco delivery shows that there is less availability of eggs than normal, but that it is perfectly possible to get a delivery of six free range eggs for under £2.
As I say, the cheaper ones are always out of stock at my local. While I'm not disputing that it's still possible to get eggs at under £2, is the price paid in 2022 (£1.95) really that much comfort to people who were paying £1.29 in 2021?
These are actually fairly minor things, maybe most people don't buy more than six eggs a week, so they're out less than £4 a month more than they were before.
But these are things you notice, day in day out, and noticing prices like that going up month on month is bound to have an impact on the polls. It is the old point about Thatcher knowing the price of a pint of milk, because these are things that people notice.
The big costs are rent/mortgage/energy bills, which dwarf egg price rises. I'm spending an extra £2 a month on eggs, but an extra £200 a month on electricity and gas.
But in terms of psychological impact, seeing the price of staples like eggs, bread and pasta rise noticeably month on month has a big effect.
People sense that something is fundamentally *broken* and while it doesn't seem like the other lot has anything useful to say about it, people will vote to give the current lot a kicking either way.
Something is fundamentally broken, however its not because of brexit, the ukraine war or even covid. The price inflation has been going on since the late 90's. The headline rate of inflation has never been anywhere near what most people experiences. We kept being told there is no inflation while our rent increased above the headline rate, council tax increased above the headline rate, transport costs and food costs increased above the inflation rate. The powers that be decreased the headline rate by including a load of electrical products that did go down in price and were deflationary but which few brought every year. Example fridges....havent bought one in 20 years but they are in the basket of goods for inflation.
Every year our taxes rise above inflation council tax rise and every year we get less services for it.
On the other hand, the price of TVs, laptops and international travel collapsed, and people were able to buy things like smartphones that would have been inconceivable to people in earlier generations.
It's always possible to find a basket of goods whose prices have stagnated, and ones that have soared.
But the process for measuring RPI/CPI is pretty transparent: you can literally download the basket the government uses, and measure it yourself.
This is the entire point that Jack Monroe was making to the ONS, though. Everyone experiences inflation differently and, surprise surprise, the real rates of inflation that people experience get worse, typically, as they become poorer.
People who can - literally - afford to be dismissive of a 50p hike in the price of a four pint bottle of milk or a box of eggs aren't the ones who are poor enough to be spending a large fraction of their incomes on basic food. If you're a high earner or well-off pensioner who's mortgage-free then you're going to be largely insulated from inflation, because much of your spending is discretionary and it's either going to be on goods and services where prices have been held down more effectively than those on food and fuel, or you can cut back and make fewer of them without it making a major impact on your standard of living.
Thus, the process for calculating inflation may very well be straightforward and transparent, but that doesn't mean that the measurements made aren't partial and of limited value.
While this is true, it's also true that low-income people spend more of their incomes on almost everything in the basket, because they spend more of their incomes, and save less. The UK is not a country where people literally starve or freeze to death, except in very sad and extremely rare cases that don't reflect spending power as such. Almost everyone can afford some goods that would have been luxuries 30 years ago, like meals out, or even 15 years ago, like smartphones. So everyone notices when they have to downgrade material quality of life by cutting spending on these things.
There's also a certain element of perpetual doom around the arguments used by the Jacks Monroe of this world - the idea that at all times life was better for almost everyone 6 months ago, which is really just a kind of reactionary conservatism.
Yeah, generally speaking the poorest don't literally starve or freeze to death. They just go a bit cold and a bit hungry, so that's fine...
The general point stands. The effects of inflation grow more acute in direct proportion to poverty - although it also so happens that living standards are indeed worse for most people than they were six months ago (except for the very rich, for whom only the benefits of the constant trend of medical and technological advances are really relevant.) It's just that the upper middle class - save perhaps for a little bit of bitching about the cost of upmarket hotels, meaning that they can only afford two luxury foreign holidays this year rather than three - really doesn't suffer very much, whereas sink estate single mum now has to go without lunch altogether so she can still afford to make rounds of jam sandwiches for the kiddies to take to school.
29% with Deltapoll is of course the same as Labour got in 2010 when Brown got a hung parliament. So plenty still to play for
Just watching the Tory %:
2022 has given us 2 Tory polls in the 30s, a 30 and 31, both from Delta.
February has given us the sequence 24, 22, 27, 24, 24.
I think now you can only properly assess month to month not on weeks or part weeks, because if Opinium, Delta and Kantor had been only pollsters to report so far in February, it would have Tories averaging 29%
Actually 24% is quite awful polling figure for a current average of last 5 polls - it’s not that far off what got Truss humiliatingly booted out. If Truss and her policies were such disaster, then what should be said about a PM polling very nearly exactly the same from an average of all polls over one month?
The Tories were on only 19% with Truss with RedfieldWilton last October
Without your cherry picking, the polling average of the Truss month probably isn’t so far from Sunak’s most recent month, is it?
@benrileysmith: 🚨BREAKING: Rishi Sunak preparing a small reshuffle to be announced as early as tomorrow. To replace Nadhim Zahawi but also go wider.
Coincidence after the Truss storm this weekend? I think not. She picked her moment. This is the REAL start of the Truss comeback. This weekend’s charm offensive but paved the way. Sunak simply has to bring her back into the tent now. He needs a big beast. I’m off to put £100 on Truss as next CoE. No 11 tomorrow, No 10 by Christmas.
29% with Deltapoll is of course the same as Labour got in 2010 when Brown got a hung parliament. So plenty still to play for
Just watching the Tory %:
2022 has given us 2 Tory polls in the 30s, a 30 and 31, both from Delta.
February has given us the sequence 24, 22, 27, 24, 24.
I think now you can only properly assess month to month not on weeks or part weeks, because if Opinium, Delta and Kantor had been only pollsters to report so far in February, it would have Tories averaging 29%
Actually 24% is quite awful polling figure for a current average of last 5 polls - it’s not that far off what got Truss humiliatingly booted out. If Truss and her policies were such disaster, then what should be said about a PM polling very nearly exactly the same from an average of all polls over one month?
The Tories were on only 19% with Truss with RedfieldWilton last October
Without your cherry picking, the polling average of the Truss month probably isn’t so far from Sunak’s most recent month, is it?
Sunak is currently top of a square. The bottom of the square is 5%. The lowest ever Liz Dip is way off bottom of the square.
Sunak is now only about 3% better than Truss at her worst on the measurement you have asked us to use.
Wrong.
Opinium had the Tories under Truss on 23%, now 29%. Redfield had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Yougov had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Omnisis now had the Tories on 22% now 24%. PeoplePolling had the Tories on 14% now 22%. Techne had the Tories on 22% now 27%. Deltapoll had the Tories on 25% now 29%.
Has any departmental re-org made things better? The usual consequence is everyone spends a week redoing letterheads, I think.
Fundamentally politicians are self confident, and even if someone they respect says 'Look, I tried to find easy fixes at Defra, but it turns out it is more complicated than I thought', they will believe if only they took over it would be super simple after all. Hence believing shuffling about and reorganising departments achieves things in itself.
I guess it'll just mean yet more nonsense when Labour reorganise departments when they get in, maybe create some new ones as often slips into the manifestoes.
The Truss premiership was a horror show from start to finish.
I never want to hear from her ever again.
It was a horror show even before it began. Who can forget the jury being out on Macron?
That’s about the only thing she got right. Mr quasi ineffective? France are our allies and also long standing rivals. Not everything they do will be in British interests.
The literal question was 'friend or foe?' I suspect French politics is less obsessed with the cross channel relationship than vice versa, but just imagine the prolapsing here if Macron had answered the jury is out to the same question.
Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
As I have been reporting for about a week, Something bad is going on with the Tory poll %, maybe mounting voter frustration at strikes as strikers more popular than the government position, which could be a temporary % drop recoverable before general election, or, what might me harder to recover, voters assessment of a new PM and his government is coming to an end, and they assess a weak, clueless, not just out of touch but with a nasty party streak to it, mess of a leader and party.
Yes. Mex. You know where to come for the best most unspun poll explanations 😁
What could possibly be going on with the polls?
Well, let's see. Six eggs are £2.50, if you can find them, chicken breast is up from about £3 to £5, a pint is anywhere from £5 to £7.50 depending on where you are in the country, most of my friends have stopped booking train travel in advance because it's too unreliable, I've had family wait ten hours in an ambulance to get admitted to A&E, my gas bill is coming to £200 a month and I barely heat the place above 15 degrees, relying on an electric blanket or a warm coat most of the time, rents are up 27% year on year in London, and similar rises in other major cities like Manchester. Interest rates meaning mortgages are up similar amounts for people remortgaging this year. Taxes rose substantially in the last budget, and while many in the private sector are seeing pay rises, they're largely below inflation, while others haven't seen a pay rise since before Covid.
I cannot possibly imagine why people want this shower of shit out of government.
I bought eggs today. I paid less about 1.75. I brought a pint of doom bar yesterday it cost me 4.20. Don't assume that south east inflation applies to most people
I was in London about six weeks ago, and didn't have any problem buying eggs or beer. A cursory look at Tesco delivery shows that there is less availability of eggs than normal, but that it is perfectly possible to get a delivery of six free range eggs for under £2.
As I say, the cheaper ones are always out of stock at my local. While I'm not disputing that it's still possible to get eggs at under £2, is the price paid in 2022 (£1.95) really that much comfort to people who were paying £1.29 in 2021?
These are actually fairly minor things, maybe most people don't buy more than six eggs a week, so they're out less than £4 a month more than they were before.
But these are things you notice, day in day out, and noticing prices like that going up month on month is bound to have an impact on the polls. It is the old point about Thatcher knowing the price of a pint of milk, because these are things that people notice.
The big costs are rent/mortgage/energy bills, which dwarf egg price rises. I'm spending an extra £2 a month on eggs, but an extra £200 a month on electricity and gas.
But in terms of psychological impact, seeing the price of staples like eggs, bread and pasta rise noticeably month on month has a big effect.
People sense that something is fundamentally *broken* and while it doesn't seem like the other lot has anything useful to say about it, people will vote to give the current lot a kicking either way.
Something is fundamentally broken, however its not because of brexit, the ukraine war or even covid. The price inflation has been going on since the late 90's. The headline rate of inflation has never been anywhere near what most people experiences. We kept being told there is no inflation while our rent increased above the headline rate, council tax increased above the headline rate, transport costs and food costs increased above the inflation rate. The powers that be decreased the headline rate by including a load of electrical products that did go down in price and were deflationary but which few brought every year. Example fridges....havent bought one in 20 years but they are in the basket of goods for inflation.
Every year our taxes rise above inflation council tax rise and every year we get less services for it.
On the other hand, the price of TVs, laptops and international travel collapsed, and people were able to buy things like smartphones that would have been inconceivable to people in earlier generations.
It's always possible to find a basket of goods whose prices have stagnated, and ones that have soared.
But the process for measuring RPI/CPI is pretty transparent: you can literally download the basket the government uses, and measure it yourself.
This is the entire point that Jack Monroe was making to the ONS, though. Everyone experiences inflation differently and, surprise surprise, the real rates of inflation that people experience get worse, typically, as they become poorer.
People who can - literally - afford to be dismissive of a 50p hike in the price of a four pint bottle of milk or a box of eggs aren't the ones who are poor enough to be spending a large fraction of their incomes on basic food. If you're a high earner or well-off pensioner who's mortgage-free then you're going to be largely insulated from inflation, because much of your spending is discretionary and it's either going to be on goods and services where prices have been held down more effectively than those on food and fuel, or you can cut back and make fewer of them without it making a major impact on your standard of living.
Thus, the process for calculating inflation may very well be straightforward and transparent, but that doesn't mean that the measurements made aren't partial and of limited value.
While this is true, it's also true that low-income people spend more of their incomes on almost everything in the basket, because they spend more of their incomes, and save less. The UK is not a country where people literally starve or freeze to death, except in very sad and extremely rare cases that don't reflect spending power as such. Almost everyone can afford some goods that would have been luxuries 30 years ago, like meals out, or even 15 years ago, like smartphones. So everyone notices when they have to downgrade material quality of life by cutting spending on these things.
There's also a certain element of perpetual doom around the arguments used by the Jacks Monroe of this world - the idea that at all times life was better for almost everyone 6 months ago, which is really just a kind of reactionary conservatism.
Yeah, generally speaking the poorest don't literally starve or freeze to death. They just go a bit cold and a bit hungry, so that's fine...
The general point stands. The effects of inflation grow more acute in direct proportion to poverty - although it also so happens that living standards are indeed worse for most people than they were six months ago (except for the very rich, for whom only the benefits of the constant trend of medical and technological advances are really relevant.) It's just that the upper middle class - save perhaps for a little bit of bitching about the cost of upmarket hotels, meaning that they can only afford two luxury foreign holidays this year rather than three - really doesn't suffer very much, whereas sink estate single mum now has to go without lunch altogether so she can still afford to make rounds of jam sandwiches for the kiddies to take to school.
Unless we think everyone's incomes should be the same, there will be some group of people at the bottom. In the contemporary UK that covers some people who endured poor fortune, others will have been through unfavourable life circumstances, still others will be recent low-skilled immigrants, and a small few will be swampy activist types with low desire to work. So the question is how they live, and in general they do not go cold or hungry because we structure benefits precisely to avoid those outcomes even if you run out of money for other reasons. What makes those bad material outcomes happen is usually much more specific factors like severe mental illness, addiction or other phenomena that deprive people of will or even a sense of time.
As for the bundle, it doesn't really matter if you think "luxury foreign holidays" are intrinsically worthless, as vapid as they are immoral: if people are willing to spend 10k, they notice if they can't afford to spend it any more, and will not feel a Buddhist or socialist sense of austere acceptance. Of course, if you think that all their spending is immoral and trivial to begin with, you could support a political movement to take it all away from them, and see how that goes. (In reality, I think they'll just cut their savings rate which got inflated during Covid.)
The Truss premiership was a horror show from start to finish.
I never want to hear from her ever again.
It was a horror show even before it began. Who can forget the jury being out on Macron?
That’s about the only thing she got right. Mr quasi ineffective? France are our allies and also long standing rivals. Not everything they do will be in British interests.
The literal question was 'friend or foe?' I suspect French politics is less obsessed with the cross channel relationship than vice versa, but just imagine the prolapsing here if Macron had answered the jury is out to the same question.
Macron, and presumably previous French presidents, is hardly averse to tossing out stupid comments about the UK as a distraction or sap to his voters. It's just as stupid as when we do it.
We're friends. Yes, also rivals, and with disagreeements, but once you get to the level of a politician you shouldn't need to engage in silliness like acting like we're not friends.
The Truss premiership was a horror show from start to finish.
I never want to hear from her ever again.
It was a horror show even before it began. Who can forget the jury being out on Macron?
That’s about the only thing she got right. Mr quasi ineffective? France are our allies and also long standing rivals. Not everything they do will be in British interests.
The literal question was 'friend or foe?' I suspect French politics is less obsessed with the cross channel relationship than vice versa, but just imagine the prolapsing here if Macron had answered the jury is out to the same question.
Macron, and presumably previous French presidents, is hardly averse to tossing out stupid comments about the UK as a distraction or sap to his voters. It's just as stupid as when we do it.
We're friends. Yes, also rivals, and with disagreeements, but once you get to the level of a politician you shouldn't need to engage in silliness like acting like we're not friends.
They were not prime ministerial remarks. However we did get rid of her very quickly.
Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
Of course, once you've got your bag of rice you then need to pay for the energy to cook it.
But the general point is taken. Compared to Michael Buerk's iconic images of skeletal children breathing their last on the barren plains of Ethiopia, who cares about the odd case of rickets here and there?
Has any departmental re-org made things better? The usual consequence is everyone spends a week redoing letterheads, I think.
I like the idea of a department for enterprise/commerce. Don't think 'Business' has been jazzy enough. Stick employment in there which I think is still with DWP? Another place that should still be called DSS.
I say revert to Ministries instead of Departments. They're important government establishments, not administrative divisions of France.
29% with Deltapoll is of course the same as Labour got in 2010 when Brown got a hung parliament. So plenty still to play for
Just watching the Tory %:
2022 has given us 2 Tory polls in the 30s, a 30 and 31, both from Delta.
February has given us the sequence 24, 22, 27, 24, 24.
I think now you can only properly assess month to month not on weeks or part weeks, because if Opinium, Delta and Kantor had been only pollsters to report so far in February, it would have Tories averaging 29%
Actually 24% is quite awful polling figure for a current average of last 5 polls - it’s not that far off what got Truss humiliatingly booted out. If Truss and her policies were such disaster, then what should be said about a PM polling very nearly exactly the same from an average of all polls over one month?
The Tories were on only 19% with Truss with RedfieldWilton last October
Without your cherry picking, the polling average of the Truss month probably isn’t so far from Sunak’s most recent month, is it?
Sunak is currently top of a square. The bottom of the square is 5%. The lowest ever Liz Dip is way off bottom of the square.
Sunak is now only about 3% better than Truss at her worst on the measurement you have asked us to use.
Wrong.
Opinium had the Tories under Truss on 23%, now 29%. Redfield had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Yougov had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Omnisis now had the Tories on 22% now 24%. PeoplePolling had the Tories on 14% now 22%. Techne had the Tories on 22% now 27%. Deltapoll had the Tories on 25% now 29%.
are you cherry picking? Why? We have ALL the polls here, averaged out. What more do you need?
The graph shows average of pollsters over a long enough period to supply confidence, doesn’t it? It’s got all the polls on it, not just your favourite ones.
The graph you linked shows Truss dipping out just 3% lower than where Sunak is now. Doesn’t it?
Argue with the graph if you like, but it will tell you I’m right. The whole of the box is 5%. Sunak is now at top of the box, Truss at worse never averaged out right at bottom of the square.
Of course, many more polls as bad as the February ones so far and the graph will be updated again so Sunak might be even closer than 3% to the worst of Truss.
As I have been reporting for about a week, Something bad is going on with the Tory poll %, maybe mounting voter frustration at strikes as strikers more popular than the government position, which could be a temporary % drop recoverable before general election, or, what might me harder to recover, voters assessment of a new PM and his government is coming to an end, and they assess a weak, clueless, not just out of touch but with a nasty party streak to it, mess of a leader and party.
Yes. Mex. You know where to come for the best most unspun poll explanations 😁
What could possibly be going on with the polls?
Well, let's see. Six eggs are £2.50, if you can find them, chicken breast is up from about £3 to £5, a pint is anywhere from £5 to £7.50 depending on where you are in the country, most of my friends have stopped booking train travel in advance because it's too unreliable, I've had family wait ten hours in an ambulance to get admitted to A&E, my gas bill is coming to £200 a month and I barely heat the place above 15 degrees, relying on an electric blanket or a warm coat most of the time, rents are up 27% year on year in London, and similar rises in other major cities like Manchester. Interest rates meaning mortgages are up similar amounts for people remortgaging this year. Taxes rose substantially in the last budget, and while many in the private sector are seeing pay rises, they're largely below inflation, while others haven't seen a pay rise since before Covid.
I cannot possibly imagine why people want this shower of shit out of government.
I bought eggs today. I paid less about 1.75. I brought a pint of doom bar yesterday it cost me 4.20. Don't assume that south east inflation applies to most people
I was in London about six weeks ago, and didn't have any problem buying eggs or beer. A cursory look at Tesco delivery shows that there is less availability of eggs than normal, but that it is perfectly possible to get a delivery of six free range eggs for under £2.
As I say, the cheaper ones are always out of stock at my local. While I'm not disputing that it's still possible to get eggs at under £2, is the price paid in 2022 (£1.95) really that much comfort to people who were paying £1.29 in 2021?
These are actually fairly minor things, maybe most people don't buy more than six eggs a week, so they're out less than £4 a month more than they were before.
But these are things you notice, day in day out, and noticing prices like that going up month on month is bound to have an impact on the polls. It is the old point about Thatcher knowing the price of a pint of milk, because these are things that people notice.
The big costs are rent/mortgage/energy bills, which dwarf egg price rises. I'm spending an extra £2 a month on eggs, but an extra £200 a month on electricity and gas.
But in terms of psychological impact, seeing the price of staples like eggs, bread and pasta rise noticeably month on month has a big effect.
People sense that something is fundamentally *broken* and while it doesn't seem like the other lot has anything useful to say about it, people will vote to give the current lot a kicking either way.
Something is fundamentally broken, however its not because of brexit, the ukraine war or even covid. The price inflation has been going on since the late 90's. The headline rate of inflation has never been anywhere near what most people experiences. We kept being told there is no inflation while our rent increased above the headline rate, council tax increased above the headline rate, transport costs and food costs increased above the inflation rate. The powers that be decreased the headline rate by including a load of electrical products that did go down in price and were deflationary but which few brought every year. Example fridges....havent bought one in 20 years but they are in the basket of goods for inflation.
Every year our taxes rise above inflation council tax rise and every year we get less services for it.
On the other hand, the price of TVs, laptops and international travel collapsed, and people were able to buy things like smartphones that would have been inconceivable to people in earlier generations.
It's always possible to find a basket of goods whose prices have stagnated, and ones that have soared.
But the process for measuring RPI/CPI is pretty transparent: you can literally download the basket the government uses, and measure it yourself.
I remember walking around Dalston Sainsburys 18 years ago wondering how it is possible for 4 baked potatoes to be £3. That was what it cost then, could have been a random one off due to a potato shortage but it seemed very expensive. Rent for a houseshare was about £300 per month plus bills. I earned about £700 per month temping in an office job (after tax) It was about £3 a pint. I don't think things have changed that much. Everything has doubled in price but so has pay.
I lived in Dalston back then, we were probably neighbours!
Average rent for a room in London is actually now £935 a month. That's for a room in a houseshare, mind. Not a flat.
A quick glance at spareroom.co.uk suggests £900ish a month is the going rate for a room in Dalston these days.
They were great years, pre social media and smartphone. We didn't even have an internet connection. It was a low end house share. But also in the case of Dalston the whole area has got massively more desirable. Even a few years later I paid just £800 per month for a 2 bed flat... unthinkable now.
The strange thing is that it is only about 10 years ago that I was in London houseshare purgatory; I just stuck it out long enough to get my career off the ground, then moved out and bought a flat elsewhere... now 10 years later between my career and asset price inflation I realised that I could actually go back to Dalston and buy a flat there if I really wanted to, but it doesn't really feel like the same place.
Cans of red stripe in subterranean Turkish snooker halls until 4am, dodgy research chems on a weeknight, squat parties at the weekend and stolen kisses with girls you never knew, plus all the frisson of the constant threat of low-level violence.
It's kinda easy to idealise those days but I suspect (for me at least) a lot of it had to do with being 20 years old and feeling absolutely certain I was invincible. I often wish I could go back, but I'd be a fish out of water if I could take the first Tardis heading back to those days now.
I stayed until 2012 so I watched it gentrify around me and yes, you're right, it's not the same place now, but in retrospect, I was part of that wave of gentrification that made it what it is today so I guess I'm in no position to comment.
29% with Deltapoll is of course the same as Labour got in 2010 when Brown got a hung parliament. So plenty still to play for
Just watching the Tory %:
2022 has given us 2 Tory polls in the 30s, a 30 and 31, both from Delta.
February has given us the sequence 24, 22, 27, 24, 24.
I think now you can only properly assess month to month not on weeks or part weeks, because if Opinium, Delta and Kantor had been only pollsters to report so far in February, it would have Tories averaging 29%
Actually 24% is quite awful polling figure for a current average of last 5 polls - it’s not that far off what got Truss humiliatingly booted out. If Truss and her policies were such disaster, then what should be said about a PM polling very nearly exactly the same from an average of all polls over one month?
The Tories were on only 19% with Truss with RedfieldWilton last October
Without your cherry picking, the polling average of the Truss month probably isn’t so far from Sunak’s most recent month, is it?
Sunak is currently top of a square. The bottom of the square is 5%. The lowest ever Liz Dip is way off bottom of the square.
Sunak is now only about 3% better than Truss at her worst on the measurement you have asked us to use.
Wrong.
Opinium had the Tories under Truss on 23%, now 29%. Redfield had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Yougov had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Omnisis now had the Tories on 22% now 24%. PeoplePolling had the Tories on 14% now 22%. Techne had the Tories on 22% now 27%. Deltapoll had the Tories on 25% now 29%.
Do you remember folk breathlessly wondering whether Lab would post a 20% lead. Not that long ago. So things can change but I just do not see that Mr Sunak and those around him have anything close to the political skill required. They don't recognise opportunities, they cannot govern to an acceptable standard and they have aims that seem in fundamental opposition to the wishes and desires of the British people.
Wait two years and hope something turns up. Is that the whole width and depth of the Con strategy?
Pretty much. I'm not sure there exists someone who could grapple with the host of problems they need to confront.
The Truss premiership was a horror show from start to finish.
I never want to hear from her ever again.
It was a horror show even before it began. Who can forget the jury being out on Macron?
That’s about the only thing she got right. Mr quasi ineffective? France are our allies and also long standing rivals. Not everything they do will be in British interests.
The literal question was 'friend or foe?' I suspect French politics is less obsessed with the cross channel relationship than vice versa, but just imagine the prolapsing here if Macron had answered the jury is out to the same question.
So what? Macron is responsible to his own nation, not ours. I think it’s a reasonable answer to the question. Certainly Macron took a tough line on the U.K. during Brexit negotiations and the whole vaccine shit show was a shit show of pathetic briefings.
Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
Of course, once you've got your bag of rice you then need to pay for the energy to cook it.
But the general point is taken. Compared to Michael Buerk's iconic images of skeletal children breathing their last on the barren plains of Ethiopia, who cares about the odd case of rickets here and there?
With fewer than a hundred cases a year, yes, you can afford not to think about rickets. It certainly has next to nothing to do with inflation.
Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
Careful - that road takes you down the blaming the poor for being too stupid to budget properly etc. Jack monroe has done a lot of good work showing how you can make decent food really cheaply. It’s clearly possible, but it also takes effort and planning, and sometimes when life is shit I guess that goes out the window.
29% with Deltapoll is of course the same as Labour got in 2010 when Brown got a hung parliament. So plenty still to play for
Just watching the Tory %:
2022 has given us 2 Tory polls in the 30s, a 30 and 31, both from Delta.
February has given us the sequence 24, 22, 27, 24, 24.
I think now you can only properly assess month to month not on weeks or part weeks, because if Opinium, Delta and Kantor had been only pollsters to report so far in February, it would have Tories averaging 29%
Actually 24% is quite awful polling figure for a current average of last 5 polls - it’s not that far off what got Truss humiliatingly booted out. If Truss and her policies were such disaster, then what should be said about a PM polling very nearly exactly the same from an average of all polls over one month?
The Tories were on only 19% with Truss with RedfieldWilton last October
Without your cherry picking, the polling average of the Truss month probably isn’t so far from Sunak’s most recent month, is it?
Sunak is currently top of a square. The bottom of the square is 5%. The lowest ever Liz Dip is way off bottom of the square.
Sunak is now only about 3% better than Truss at her worst on the measurement you have asked us to use.
Wrong.
Opinium had the Tories under Truss on 23%, now 29%. Redfield had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Yougov had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Omnisis now had the Tories on 22% now 24%. PeoplePolling had the Tories on 14% now 22%. Techne had the Tories on 22% now 27%. Deltapoll had the Tories on 25% now 29%.
The Truss premiership was a horror show from start to finish.
I never want to hear from her ever again.
It was a horror show even before it began. Who can forget the jury being out on Macron?
That’s about the only thing she got right. Mr quasi ineffective? France are our allies and also long standing rivals. Not everything they do will be in British interests.
The literal question was 'friend or foe?' I suspect French politics is less obsessed with the cross channel relationship than vice versa, but just imagine the prolapsing here if Macron had answered the jury is out to the same question.
So what? Macron is responsible to his own nation, not ours. I think it’s a reasonable answer to the question. Certainly Macron took a tough line on the U.K. during Brexit negotiations and the whole vaccine shit show was a shit show of pathetic briefings.
It's a pathetic response since no one really believes the jury is out on whether they are or he is a foe, even with all the ridiculous goings on and bitter briefings from time to time.
Was it meant to be funny? As it wasn't. Was it meant to impress people that she was tough on Macron, tough on the causes of Macron? Because no matter the answer it wouldn't change how a UK PM would act toward France, they would act however they felt appropriate at the time. So it gained nothing other than looking petty.
As I have been reporting for about a week, Something bad is going on with the Tory poll %, maybe mounting voter frustration at strikes as strikers more popular than the government position, which could be a temporary % drop recoverable before general election, or, what might me harder to recover, voters assessment of a new PM and his government is coming to an end, and they assess a weak, clueless, not just out of touch but with a nasty party streak to it, mess of a leader and party.
Yes. Mex. You know where to come for the best most unspun poll explanations 😁
What could possibly be going on with the polls?
Well, let's see. Six eggs are £2.50, if you can find them, chicken breast is up from about £3 to £5, a pint is anywhere from £5 to £7.50 depending on where you are in the country, most of my friends have stopped booking train travel in advance because it's too unreliable, I've had family wait ten hours in an ambulance to get admitted to A&E, my gas bill is coming to £200 a month and I barely heat the place above 15 degrees, relying on an electric blanket or a warm coat most of the time, rents are up 27% year on year in London, and similar rises in other major cities like Manchester. Interest rates meaning mortgages are up similar amounts for people remortgaging this year. Taxes rose substantially in the last budget, and while many in the private sector are seeing pay rises, they're largely below inflation, while others haven't seen a pay rise since before Covid.
I cannot possibly imagine why people want this shower of shit out of government.
I bought eggs today. I paid less about 1.75. I brought a pint of doom bar yesterday it cost me 4.20. Don't assume that south east inflation applies to most people
I was in London about six weeks ago, and didn't have any problem buying eggs or beer. A cursory look at Tesco delivery shows that there is less availability of eggs than normal, but that it is perfectly possible to get a delivery of six free range eggs for under £2.
As I say, the cheaper ones are always out of stock at my local. While I'm not disputing that it's still possible to get eggs at under £2, is the price paid in 2022 (£1.95) really that much comfort to people who were paying £1.29 in 2021?
These are actually fairly minor things, maybe most people don't buy more than six eggs a week, so they're out less than £4 a month more than they were before.
But these are things you notice, day in day out, and noticing prices like that going up month on month is bound to have an impact on the polls. It is the old point about Thatcher knowing the price of a pint of milk, because these are things that people notice.
The big costs are rent/mortgage/energy bills, which dwarf egg price rises. I'm spending an extra £2 a month on eggs, but an extra £200 a month on electricity and gas.
But in terms of psychological impact, seeing the price of staples like eggs, bread and pasta rise noticeably month on month has a big effect.
People sense that something is fundamentally *broken* and while it doesn't seem like the other lot has anything useful to say about it, people will vote to give the current lot a kicking either way.
Something is fundamentally broken, however its not because of brexit, the ukraine war or even covid. The price inflation has been going on since the late 90's. The headline rate of inflation has never been anywhere near what most people experiences. We kept being told there is no inflation while our rent increased above the headline rate, council tax increased above the headline rate, transport costs and food costs increased above the inflation rate. The powers that be decreased the headline rate by including a load of electrical products that did go down in price and were deflationary but which few brought every year. Example fridges....havent bought one in 20 years but they are in the basket of goods for inflation.
Every year our taxes rise above inflation council tax rise and every year we get less services for it.
On the other hand, the price of TVs, laptops and international travel collapsed, and people were able to buy things like smartphones that would have been inconceivable to people in earlier generations.
It's always possible to find a basket of goods whose prices have stagnated, and ones that have soared.
But the process for measuring RPI/CPI is pretty transparent: you can literally download the basket the government uses, and measure it yourself.
I remember walking around Dalston Sainsburys 18 years ago wondering how it is possible for 4 baked potatoes to be £3. That was what it cost then, could have been a random one off due to a potato shortage but it seemed very expensive. Rent for a houseshare was about £300 per month plus bills. I earned about £700 per month temping in an office job (after tax) It was about £3 a pint. I don't think things have changed that much. Everything has doubled in price but so has pay.
I lived in Dalston back then, we were probably neighbours!
Average rent for a room in London is actually now £935 a month. That's for a room in a houseshare, mind. Not a flat.
A quick glance at spareroom.co.uk suggests £900ish a month is the going rate for a room in Dalston these days.
They were great years, pre social media and smartphone. We didn't even have an internet connection. It was a low end house share. But also in the case of Dalston the whole area has got massively more desirable. Even a few years later I paid just £800 per month for a 2 bed flat... unthinkable now.
The strange thing is that it is only about 10 years ago that I was in London houseshare purgatory; I just stuck it out long enough to get my career off the ground, then moved out and bought a flat elsewhere... now 10 years later between my career and asset price inflation I realised that I could actually go back to Dalston and buy a flat there if I really wanted to, but it doesn't really feel like the same place.
Cans of red stripe in subterranean Turkish snooker halls until 4am, dodgy research chems on a weeknight, squat parties at the weekend and stolen kisses with girls you never knew, plus all the frisson of the constant threat of low-level violence.
It's kinda easy to idealise those days but I suspect (for me at least) a lot of it had to do with being 20 years old and feeling absolutely certain I was invincible. I often wish I could go back, but I'd be a fish out of water if I could take the first Tardis heading back to those days now.
I stayed until 2012 so I watched it gentrify around me and yes, you're right, it's not the same place now, but in retrospect, I was part of that wave of gentrification that made it what it is today so I guess I'm in no position to comment.
That group of people was in Margate 10 years ago. Presumably it is now full of dog grooming cereal cafés and the bandwagon has moved onto the next affordable place like Jaywick or Sellafield.
29% with Deltapoll is of course the same as Labour got in 2010 when Brown got a hung parliament. So plenty still to play for
Just watching the Tory %:
2022 has given us 2 Tory polls in the 30s, a 30 and 31, both from Delta.
February has given us the sequence 24, 22, 27, 24, 24.
I think now you can only properly assess month to month not on weeks or part weeks, because if Opinium, Delta and Kantor had been only pollsters to report so far in February, it would have Tories averaging 29%
Actually 24% is quite awful polling figure for a current average of last 5 polls - it’s not that far off what got Truss humiliatingly booted out. If Truss and her policies were such disaster, then what should be said about a PM polling very nearly exactly the same from an average of all polls over one month?
The Tories were on only 19% with Truss with RedfieldWilton last October
Without your cherry picking, the polling average of the Truss month probably isn’t so far from Sunak’s most recent month, is it?
Sunak is currently top of a square. The bottom of the square is 5%. The lowest ever Liz Dip is way off bottom of the square.
Sunak is now only about 3% better than Truss at her worst on the measurement you have asked us to use.
Wrong.
Opinium had the Tories under Truss on 23%, now 29%. Redfield had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Yougov had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Omnisis now had the Tories on 22% now 24%. PeoplePolling had the Tories on 14% now 22%. Techne had the Tories on 22% now 27%. Deltapoll had the Tories on 25% now 29%.
are you cherry picking? Why? We have ALL the polls here, averaged out. What more do you need?
The graph shows average of pollsters over a long enough period to supply confidence, doesn’t it? It’s got all the polls on it, not just your favourite ones.
The graph you linked shows Truss dipping out just 3% lower than where Sunak is now. Doesn’t it?
Argue with the graph if you like, but it will tell you I’m right. The whole of the box is 5%. Sunak is now at top of the box, Truss at worse never averaged out right at bottom of the square.
Of course, many more polls as bad as the February ones so far and the graph will be updated again so Sunak might be even closer than 3% to the worst of Truss.
No it doesn't. I gave you most of the final polls of the Truss period and compared them to now.
The Truss premiership was a horror show from start to finish.
I never want to hear from her ever again.
It was a horror show even before it began. Who can forget the jury being out on Macron?
Credit to Graham Brady. I went into the overlong Conservative leadership contest willing to give Truss the benefit of a very big doubt, and came out of it in the absolute knowledge she should be allowed nowhere near power. Possibly even worse than Johnson, quite something given he is an actual fraud.
The Truss premiership was a horror show from start to finish.
I never want to hear from her ever again.
It was a horror show even before it began. Who can forget the jury being out on Macron?
That’s about the only thing she got right. Mr quasi ineffective? France are our allies and also long standing rivals. Not everything they do will be in British interests.
The literal question was 'friend or foe?' I suspect French politics is less obsessed with the cross channel relationship than vice versa, but just imagine the prolapsing here if Macron had answered the jury is out to the same question.
So what? Macron is responsible to his own nation, not ours. I think it’s a reasonable answer to the question. Certainly Macron took a tough line on the U.K. during Brexit negotiations and the whole vaccine shit show was a shit show of pathetic briefings.
It's a pathetic response since no one really believes the jury is out on whether they are or he is a foe, even with all the ridiculous goings on and bitter briefings from time to time.
Was it meant to be funny? As it wasn't. Was it meant to impress people that she was tough on Macron, tough on the causes of Macron? Because no matter the answer it wouldn't change how a UK PM would act toward France, they would act however they felt appropriate at the time. So it gained nothing other than looking petty.
I’d agree it was a stupid response for a politician. Something that the pub bore might say (with some justification).
Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
Of course, once you've got your bag of rice you then need to pay for the energy to cook it.
But the general point is taken. Compared to Michael Buerk's iconic images of skeletal children breathing their last on the barren plains of Ethiopia, who cares about the odd case of rickets here and there?
With fewer than a hundred cases a year, yes, you can afford not to think about rickets. It certainly has next to nothing to do with inflation.
The other relevant factor here is that the minimum wage has risen far faster than other wages. No one is pretending that life is easy for people at the bottom but in a lot of industries inflation outpacing wage increases has led to skilled jobs being paid at little more than the minimum wage. There was for instance the tik tok video of the single, 37 year old primary school teacher with 4 years experience pointing out that after his overheads are paid, he has £177 per month spending money, from a 33k per year job.... in Redcar.
The Truss premiership was a horror show from start to finish.
I never want to hear from her ever again.
It was a horror show even before it began. Who can forget the jury being out on Macron?
That’s about the only thing she got right. Mr quasi ineffective? France are our allies and also long standing rivals. Not everything they do will be in British interests.
The literal question was 'friend or foe?' I suspect French politics is less obsessed with the cross channel relationship than vice versa, but just imagine the prolapsing here if Macron had answered the jury is out to the same question.
So what? Macron is responsible to his own nation, not ours. I think it’s a reasonable answer to the question. Certainly Macron took a tough line on the U.K. during Brexit negotiations and the whole vaccine shit show was a shit show of pathetic briefings.
It was a reasonable answer to tickle the the G spots of England's Francophobes. Seems to have worked..
Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
Of course, once you've got your bag of rice you then need to pay for the energy to cook it.
But the general point is taken. Compared to Michael Buerk's iconic images of skeletal children breathing their last on the barren plains of Ethiopia, who cares about the odd case of rickets here and there?
With fewer than a hundred cases a year, yes, you can afford not to think about rickets. It certainly has next to nothing to do with inflation.
The other relevant factor here is that the minimum wage has risen far faster than other wages. No one is pretending that life is easy for people at the bottom but in a lot of industries inflation outpacing wage increases has led to skilled jobs being paid at little more than the minimum wage. There was for instance the tik tok video of the single, 37 year old primary school teacher with 4 years experience pointing out that after his overheads are paid, he has £177 per month spending money, from a 33k per year job.... in Redcar.
You’d want to know what the overheads were though, to judge.
As I have been reporting for about a week, Something bad is going on with the Tory poll %, maybe mounting voter frustration at strikes as strikers more popular than the government position, which could be a temporary % drop recoverable before general election, or, what might me harder to recover, voters assessment of a new PM and his government is coming to an end, and they assess a weak, clueless, not just out of touch but with a nasty party streak to it, mess of a leader and party.
Yes. Mex. You know where to come for the best most unspun poll explanations 😁
What could possibly be going on with the polls?
Well, let's see. Six eggs are £2.50, if you can find them, chicken breast is up from about £3 to £5, a pint is anywhere from £5 to £7.50 depending on where you are in the country, most of my friends have stopped booking train travel in advance because it's too unreliable, I've had family wait ten hours in an ambulance to get admitted to A&E, my gas bill is coming to £200 a month and I barely heat the place above 15 degrees, relying on an electric blanket or a warm coat most of the time, rents are up 27% year on year in London, and similar rises in other major cities like Manchester. Interest rates meaning mortgages are up similar amounts for people remortgaging this year. Taxes rose substantially in the last budget, and while many in the private sector are seeing pay rises, they're largely below inflation, while others haven't seen a pay rise since before Covid.
I cannot possibly imagine why people want this shower of shit out of government.
I bought eggs today. I paid less about 1.75. I brought a pint of doom bar yesterday it cost me 4.20. Don't assume that south east inflation applies to most people
I was in London about six weeks ago, and didn't have any problem buying eggs or beer. A cursory look at Tesco delivery shows that there is less availability of eggs than normal, but that it is perfectly possible to get a delivery of six free range eggs for under £2.
As I say, the cheaper ones are always out of stock at my local. While I'm not disputing that it's still possible to get eggs at under £2, is the price paid in 2022 (£1.95) really that much comfort to people who were paying £1.29 in 2021?
These are actually fairly minor things, maybe most people don't buy more than six eggs a week, so they're out less than £4 a month more than they were before.
But these are things you notice, day in day out, and noticing prices like that going up month on month is bound to have an impact on the polls. It is the old point about Thatcher knowing the price of a pint of milk, because these are things that people notice.
The big costs are rent/mortgage/energy bills, which dwarf egg price rises. I'm spending an extra £2 a month on eggs, but an extra £200 a month on electricity and gas.
But in terms of psychological impact, seeing the price of staples like eggs, bread and pasta rise noticeably month on month has a big effect.
People sense that something is fundamentally *broken* and while it doesn't seem like the other lot has anything useful to say about it, people will vote to give the current lot a kicking either way.
Something is fundamentally broken, however its not because of brexit, the ukraine war or even covid. The price inflation has been going on since the late 90's. The headline rate of inflation has never been anywhere near what most people experiences. We kept being told there is no inflation while our rent increased above the headline rate, council tax increased above the headline rate, transport costs and food costs increased above the inflation rate. The powers that be decreased the headline rate by including a load of electrical products that did go down in price and were deflationary but which few brought every year. Example fridges....havent bought one in 20 years but they are in the basket of goods for inflation.
Every year our taxes rise above inflation council tax rise and every year we get less services for it.
On the other hand, the price of TVs, laptops and international travel collapsed, and people were able to buy things like smartphones that would have been inconceivable to people in earlier generations.
It's always possible to find a basket of goods whose prices have stagnated, and ones that have soared.
But the process for measuring RPI/CPI is pretty transparent: you can literally download the basket the government uses, and measure it yourself.
This is the entire point that Jack Monroe was making to the ONS, though. Everyone experiences inflation differently and, surprise surprise, the real rates of inflation that people experience get worse, typically, as they become poorer.
People who can - literally - afford to be dismissive of a 50p hike in the price of a four pint bottle of milk or a box of eggs aren't the ones who are poor enough to be spending a large fraction of their incomes on basic food. If you're a high earner or well-off pensioner who's mortgage-free then you're going to be largely insulated from inflation, because much of your spending is discretionary and it's either going to be on goods and services where prices have been held down more effectively than those on food and fuel, or you can cut back and make fewer of them without it making a major impact on your standard of living.
Thus, the process for calculating inflation may very well be straightforward and transparent, but that doesn't mean that the measurements made aren't partial and of limited value.
While this is true, it's also true that low-income people spend more of their incomes on almost everything in the basket, because they spend more of their incomes, and save less. The UK is not a country where people literally starve or freeze to death, except in very sad and extremely rare cases that don't reflect spending power as such. Almost everyone can afford some goods that would have been luxuries 30 years ago, like meals out, or even 15 years ago, like smartphones. So everyone notices when they have to downgrade material quality of life by cutting spending on these things.
There's also a certain element of perpetual doom around the arguments used by the Jacks Monroe of this world - the idea that at all times life was better for almost everyone 6 months ago, which is really just a kind of reactionary conservatism.
Yeah, generally speaking the poorest don't literally starve or freeze to death. They just go a bit cold and a bit hungry, so that's fine...
The general point stands. The effects of inflation grow more acute in direct proportion to poverty - although it also so happens that living standards are indeed worse for most people than they were six months ago (except for the very rich, for whom only the benefits of the constant trend of medical and technological advances are really relevant.) It's just that the upper middle class - save perhaps for a little bit of bitching about the cost of upmarket hotels, meaning that they can only afford two luxury foreign holidays this year rather than three - really doesn't suffer very much, whereas sink estate single mum now has to go without lunch altogether so she can still afford to make rounds of jam sandwiches for the kiddies to take to school.
Unless we think everyone's incomes should be the same, there will be some group of people at the bottom. In the contemporary UK that covers some people who endured poor fortune, others will have been through unfavourable life circumstances, still others will be recent low-skilled immigrants, and a small few will be swampy activist types with low desire to work. So the question is how they live, and in general they do not go cold or hungry because we structure benefits precisely to avoid those outcomes even if you run out of money for other reasons. What makes those bad material outcomes happen is usually much more specific factors like severe mental illness, addiction or other phenomena that deprive people of will or even a sense of time.
As for the bundle, it doesn't really matter if you think "luxury foreign holidays" are intrinsically worthless, as vapid as they are immoral: if people are willing to spend 10k, they notice if they can't afford to spend it any more, and will not feel a Buddhist or socialist sense of austere acceptance. Of course, if you think that all their spending is immoral and trivial to begin with, you could support a political movement to take it all away from them, and see how that goes. (In reality, I think they'll just cut their savings rate which got inflated during Covid.)
I originally intervened to make a technical point about the limitations of the methods currently employed to measure inflation; however, yes, inflation is itself merely part of a broader economic landscape in which, broadly speaking, earned incomes are progressively squeezed and asset values are inflated, resulting in a net transfer of wealth and economic prosperity from the struggling to the secure.
I'm neither a killjoy nor a leveller. I don't begrudge the very comfortable their nice holidays and nor do I assert that taxation should be raised to confiscatory levels. I don't think it unreasonable, however, to assert that people who have to choose between a fortnight on the Amalfi Coast and a fortnight in the Bahamas - rather than being able comfortably to afford both - do not experience privation to anything like the degree of people who have to choose between keeping warm or eating properly, because they can no longer afford to do both.
The solution to all of this begins with taxing incomes, especially modest incomes, less and taxing assets more. Will it happen? No.
The Truss premiership was a horror show from start to finish.
I never want to hear from her ever again.
It was a horror show even before it began. Who can forget the jury being out on Macron?
That’s about the only thing she got right. Mr quasi ineffective? France are our allies and also long standing rivals. Not everything they do will be in British interests.
The literal question was 'friend or foe?' I suspect French politics is less obsessed with the cross channel relationship than vice versa, but just imagine the prolapsing here if Macron had answered the jury is out to the same question.
So what? Macron is responsible to his own nation, not ours. I think it’s a reasonable answer to the question. Certainly Macron took a tough line on the U.K. during Brexit negotiations and the whole vaccine shit show was a shit show of pathetic briefings.
It was a reasonable answer to tickle the the G spots of the England's Francophobes. Seems to have worked..
In the same way that Macron did with his vaccine nonsense?
Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
Of course, once you've got your bag of rice you then need to pay for the energy to cook it.
But the general point is taken. Compared to Michael Buerk's iconic images of skeletal children breathing their last on the barren plains of Ethiopia, who cares about the odd case of rickets here and there?
What a preposterously stupid post.
Compared to Richard Dimbleby's iconic reporting of the liberation of Belsen, who cares about the odd old person dying for lack of an ambulance?
Compared to the air quality in Hiroshima on 7 August 1945, what is all the fuss about pollution in London?
The thing that is so desperately cynical - that she now admits - is what I pointed out at the time.
She claims the problem with the OBR was that they didn’t take account the fact that she was planning to slash state spending in the medium/long term.
But at the time, she very explicitly stated that spending wouldn’t be cut.
Her plan was to lie to the Tory party members, Tory MPs, the media and the electorate, then let the market reaction “force” vicious public spending austerity.
This is what the Tory party have been reduced to.
Outright lying.
“Growth” was the latest, necessary fiction, to go along with Cameron’s “big society” (to justify slashing local services) etc etc.
These people are just fucking liars.
They want tax cuts for the rich. Politics is a game. Anyone and everyone can be played because the ends justify the means. Truth is irrelevant. People are pawns.
The Tory party laid bare.
They might have got away with it had she not been such a shit liar.
Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
Of course, once you've got your bag of rice you then need to pay for the energy to cook it.
But the general point is taken. Compared to Michael Buerk's iconic images of skeletal children breathing their last on the barren plains of Ethiopia, who cares about the odd case of rickets here and there?
With fewer than a hundred cases a year, yes, you can afford not to think about rickets. It certainly has next to nothing to do with inflation.
I was, of course, being facetious.
There are also millions of cases of obesity caused, in whole or in part, by hard-up people subsisting off cheap, ultra-processed food. Some of them doubtless can't be arsed to do any better, but many simply can't afford it. That is a serious problem and it's definitely made worse by inflation.
As I have been reporting for about a week, Something bad is going on with the Tory poll %, maybe mounting voter frustration at strikes as strikers more popular than the government position, which could be a temporary % drop recoverable before general election, or, what might me harder to recover, voters assessment of a new PM and his government is coming to an end, and they assess a weak, clueless, not just out of touch but with a nasty party streak to it, mess of a leader and party.
Yes. Mex. You know where to come for the best most unspun poll explanations 😁
What could possibly be going on with the polls?
Well, let's see. Six eggs are £2.50, if you can find them, chicken breast is up from about £3 to £5, a pint is anywhere from £5 to £7.50 depending on where you are in the country, most of my friends have stopped booking train travel in advance because it's too unreliable, I've had family wait ten hours in an ambulance to get admitted to A&E, my gas bill is coming to £200 a month and I barely heat the place above 15 degrees, relying on an electric blanket or a warm coat most of the time, rents are up 27% year on year in London, and similar rises in other major cities like Manchester. Interest rates meaning mortgages are up similar amounts for people remortgaging this year. Taxes rose substantially in the last budget, and while many in the private sector are seeing pay rises, they're largely below inflation, while others haven't seen a pay rise since before Covid.
I cannot possibly imagine why people want this shower of shit out of government.
I bought eggs today. I paid less about 1.75. I brought a pint of doom bar yesterday it cost me 4.20. Don't assume that south east inflation applies to most people
I was in London about six weeks ago, and didn't have any problem buying eggs or beer. A cursory look at Tesco delivery shows that there is less availability of eggs than normal, but that it is perfectly possible to get a delivery of six free range eggs for under £2.
As I say, the cheaper ones are always out of stock at my local. While I'm not disputing that it's still possible to get eggs at under £2, is the price paid in 2022 (£1.95) really that much comfort to people who were paying £1.29 in 2021?
These are actually fairly minor things, maybe most people don't buy more than six eggs a week, so they're out less than £4 a month more than they were before.
But these are things you notice, day in day out, and noticing prices like that going up month on month is bound to have an impact on the polls. It is the old point about Thatcher knowing the price of a pint of milk, because these are things that people notice.
The big costs are rent/mortgage/energy bills, which dwarf egg price rises. I'm spending an extra £2 a month on eggs, but an extra £200 a month on electricity and gas.
But in terms of psychological impact, seeing the price of staples like eggs, bread and pasta rise noticeably month on month has a big effect.
People sense that something is fundamentally *broken* and while it doesn't seem like the other lot has anything useful to say about it, people will vote to give the current lot a kicking either way.
Something is fundamentally broken, however its not because of brexit, the ukraine war or even covid. The price inflation has been going on since the late 90's. The headline rate of inflation has never been anywhere near what most people experiences. We kept being told there is no inflation while our rent increased above the headline rate, council tax increased above the headline rate, transport costs and food costs increased above the inflation rate. The powers that be decreased the headline rate by including a load of electrical products that did go down in price and were deflationary but which few brought every year. Example fridges....havent bought one in 20 years but they are in the basket of goods for inflation.
Every year our taxes rise above inflation council tax rise and every year we get less services for it.
On the other hand, the price of TVs, laptops and international travel collapsed, and people were able to buy things like smartphones that would have been inconceivable to people in earlier generations.
It's always possible to find a basket of goods whose prices have stagnated, and ones that have soared.
But the process for measuring RPI/CPI is pretty transparent: you can literally download the basket the government uses, and measure it yourself.
I remember walking around Dalston Sainsburys 18 years ago wondering how it is possible for 4 baked potatoes to be £3. That was what it cost then, could have been a random one off due to a potato shortage but it seemed very expensive. Rent for a houseshare was about £300 per month plus bills. I earned about £700 per month temping in an office job (after tax) It was about £3 a pint. I don't think things have changed that much. Everything has doubled in price but so has pay.
I lived in Dalston back then, we were probably neighbours!
Average rent for a room in London is actually now £935 a month. That's for a room in a houseshare, mind. Not a flat.
A quick glance at spareroom.co.uk suggests £900ish a month is the going rate for a room in Dalston these days.
They were great years, pre social media and smartphone. We didn't even have an internet connection. It was a low end house share. But also in the case of Dalston the whole area has got massively more desirable. Even a few years later I paid just £800 per month for a 2 bed flat... unthinkable now.
The strange thing is that it is only about 10 years ago that I was in London houseshare purgatory; I just stuck it out long enough to get my career off the ground, then moved out and bought a flat elsewhere... now 10 years later between my career and asset price inflation I realised that I could actually go back to Dalston and buy a flat there if I really wanted to, but it doesn't really feel like the same place.
Cans of red stripe in subterranean Turkish snooker halls until 4am, dodgy research chems on a weeknight, squat parties at the weekend and stolen kisses with girls you never knew, plus all the frisson of the constant threat of low-level violence.
It's kinda easy to idealise those days but I suspect (for me at least) a lot of it had to do with being 20 years old and feeling absolutely certain I was invincible. I often wish I could go back, but I'd be a fish out of water if I could take the first Tardis heading back to those days now.
I stayed until 2012 so I watched it gentrify around me and yes, you're right, it's not the same place now, but in retrospect, I was part of that wave of gentrification that made it what it is today so I guess I'm in no position to comment.
That group of people was in Margate 10 years ago. Presumably it is now full of dog grooming cereal cafés and the bandwagon has moved onto the next affordable place like Jaywick or Sellafield.
There is quite a good PHD thesis about St Leonards on Sea, but may also apply to Margate. The theory is that it is stuck in a loop of perpetual "frontier gentrification", so it has been stuck at the start of the process of gentrification for about 30 years, and it never quite advances to the next stage in the way that people expect it to.
Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
Of course, once you've got your bag of rice you then need to pay for the energy to cook it.
But the general point is taken. Compared to Michael Buerk's iconic images of skeletal children breathing their last on the barren plains of Ethiopia, who cares about the odd case of rickets here and there?
What a preposterously stupid post.
Compared to Richard Dimbleby's iconic reporting of the liberation of Belsen, who cares about the odd old person dying for lack of an ambulance?
Compared to the air quality in Hiroshima on 7 August 1945, what is all the fuss about pollution in London?
As I have been reporting for about a week, Something bad is going on with the Tory poll %, maybe mounting voter frustration at strikes as strikers more popular than the government position, which could be a temporary % drop recoverable before general election, or, what might me harder to recover, voters assessment of a new PM and his government is coming to an end, and they assess a weak, clueless, not just out of touch but with a nasty party streak to it, mess of a leader and party.
Yes. Mex. You know where to come for the best most unspun poll explanations 😁
What could possibly be going on with the polls?
Well, let's see. Six eggs are £2.50, if you can find them, chicken breast is up from about £3 to £5, a pint is anywhere from £5 to £7.50 depending on where you are in the country, most of my friends have stopped booking train travel in advance because it's too unreliable, I've had family wait ten hours in an ambulance to get admitted to A&E, my gas bill is coming to £200 a month and I barely heat the place above 15 degrees, relying on an electric blanket or a warm coat most of the time, rents are up 27% year on year in London, and similar rises in other major cities like Manchester. Interest rates meaning mortgages are up similar amounts for people remortgaging this year. Taxes rose substantially in the last budget, and while many in the private sector are seeing pay rises, they're largely below inflation, while others haven't seen a pay rise since before Covid.
I cannot possibly imagine why people want this shower of shit out of government.
I bought eggs today. I paid less about 1.75. I brought a pint of doom bar yesterday it cost me 4.20. Don't assume that south east inflation applies to most people
I was in London about six weeks ago, and didn't have any problem buying eggs or beer. A cursory look at Tesco delivery shows that there is less availability of eggs than normal, but that it is perfectly possible to get a delivery of six free range eggs for under £2.
As I say, the cheaper ones are always out of stock at my local. While I'm not disputing that it's still possible to get eggs at under £2, is the price paid in 2022 (£1.95) really that much comfort to people who were paying £1.29 in 2021?
These are actually fairly minor things, maybe most people don't buy more than six eggs a week, so they're out less than £4 a month more than they were before.
But these are things you notice, day in day out, and noticing prices like that going up month on month is bound to have an impact on the polls. It is the old point about Thatcher knowing the price of a pint of milk, because these are things that people notice.
The big costs are rent/mortgage/energy bills, which dwarf egg price rises. I'm spending an extra £2 a month on eggs, but an extra £200 a month on electricity and gas.
But in terms of psychological impact, seeing the price of staples like eggs, bread and pasta rise noticeably month on month has a big effect.
People sense that something is fundamentally *broken* and while it doesn't seem like the other lot has anything useful to say about it, people will vote to give the current lot a kicking either way.
Something is fundamentally broken, however its not because of brexit, the ukraine war or even covid. The price inflation has been going on since the late 90's. The headline rate of inflation has never been anywhere near what most people experiences. We kept being told there is no inflation while our rent increased above the headline rate, council tax increased above the headline rate, transport costs and food costs increased above the inflation rate. The powers that be decreased the headline rate by including a load of electrical products that did go down in price and were deflationary but which few brought every year. Example fridges....havent bought one in 20 years but they are in the basket of goods for inflation.
Every year our taxes rise above inflation council tax rise and every year we get less services for it.
On the other hand, the price of TVs, laptops and international travel collapsed, and people were able to buy things like smartphones that would have been inconceivable to people in earlier generations.
It's always possible to find a basket of goods whose prices have stagnated, and ones that have soared.
But the process for measuring RPI/CPI is pretty transparent: you can literally download the basket the government uses, and measure it yourself.
This is the entire point that Jack Monroe was making to the ONS, though. Everyone experiences inflation differently and, surprise surprise, the real rates of inflation that people experience get worse, typically, as they become poorer.
People who can - literally - afford to be dismissive of a 50p hike in the price of a four pint bottle of milk or a box of eggs aren't the ones who are poor enough to be spending a large fraction of their incomes on basic food. If you're a high earner or well-off pensioner who's mortgage-free then you're going to be largely insulated from inflation, because much of your spending is discretionary and it's either going to be on goods and services where prices have been held down more effectively than those on food and fuel, or you can cut back and make fewer of them without it making a major impact on your standard of living.
Thus, the process for calculating inflation may very well be straightforward and transparent, but that doesn't mean that the measurements made aren't partial and of limited value.
While this is true, it's also true that low-income people spend more of their incomes on almost everything in the basket, because they spend more of their incomes, and save less. The UK is not a country where people literally starve or freeze to death, except in very sad and extremely rare cases that don't reflect spending power as such. Almost everyone can afford some goods that would have been luxuries 30 years ago, like meals out, or even 15 years ago, like smartphones. So everyone notices when they have to downgrade material quality of life by cutting spending on these things.
There's also a certain element of perpetual doom around the arguments used by the Jacks Monroe of this world - the idea that at all times life was better for almost everyone 6 months ago, which is really just a kind of reactionary conservatism.
Yeah, generally speaking the poorest don't literally starve or freeze to death. They just go a bit cold and a bit hungry, so that's fine...
The general point stands. The effects of inflation grow more acute in direct proportion to poverty - although it also so happens that living standards are indeed worse for most people than they were six months ago (except for the very rich, for whom only the benefits of the constant trend of medical and technological advances are really relevant.) It's just that the upper middle class - save perhaps for a little bit of bitching about the cost of upmarket hotels, meaning that they can only afford two luxury foreign holidays this year rather than three - really doesn't suffer very much, whereas sink estate single mum now has to go without lunch altogether so she can still afford to make rounds of jam sandwiches for the kiddies to take to school.
Unless we think everyone's incomes should be the same, there will be some group of people at the bottom. In the contemporary UK that covers some people who endured poor fortune, others will have been through unfavourable life circumstances, still others will be recent low-skilled immigrants, and a small few will be swampy activist types with low desire to work. So the question is how they live, and in general they do not go cold or hungry because we structure benefits precisely to avoid those outcomes even if you run out of money for other reasons. What makes those bad material outcomes happen is usually much more specific factors like severe mental illness, addiction or other phenomena that deprive people of will or even a sense of time.
As for the bundle, it doesn't really matter if you think "luxury foreign holidays" are intrinsically worthless, as vapid as they are immoral: if people are willing to spend 10k, they notice if they can't afford to spend it any more, and will not feel a Buddhist or socialist sense of austere acceptance. Of course, if you think that all their spending is immoral and trivial to begin with, you could support a political movement to take it all away from them, and see how that goes. (In reality, I think they'll just cut their savings rate which got inflated during Covid.)
I originally intervened to make a technical point about the limitations of the methods currently employed to measure inflation; however, yes, inflation is itself merely part of a broader economic landscape in which, broadly speaking, earned incomes are progressively squeezed and asset values are inflated, resulting in a net transfer of wealth and economic prosperity from the struggling to the secure.
I'm neither a killjoy nor a leveller. I don't begrudge the very comfortable their nice holidays and nor do I assert that taxation should be raised to confiscatory levels. I don't think it unreasonable, however, to assert that people who have to choose between a fortnight on the Amalfi Coast and a fortnight in the Bahamas - rather than being able comfortably to afford both - do not experience privation to anything like the degree of people who have to choose between keeping warm or eating properly, because they can no longer afford to do both.
The solution to all of this begins with taxing incomes, especially modest incomes, less and taxing assets more. Will it happen? No.
I agree about privation, it's just that I don't think it is the only relevant factor to material quality of life. Once you admit the good things in life into the moral calculus as well as the bad things, the question as limited to suffering ends up a more complex one. I accept that the holiday is worth something to somebody, and so removing it has some positive effect on overall human well-being. That's the only difference in reasoning, I think: nobody doubts that this household will be meaningfully annoyed by the change.
I don't even think that taxing incomes less and assets more will work, sadly, because people use income to buy assets like pensions and houses into being, so those asset values will adjust with the rate of return (downward) and fewer things like business capital and houses will be created given the cost of everything else.
29% with Deltapoll is of course the same as Labour got in 2010 when Brown got a hung parliament. So plenty still to play for
Just watching the Tory %:
2022 has given us 2 Tory polls in the 30s, a 30 and 31, both from Delta.
February has given us the sequence 24, 22, 27, 24, 24.
I think now you can only properly assess month to month not on weeks or part weeks, because if Opinium, Delta and Kantor had been only pollsters to report so far in February, it would have Tories averaging 29%
Actually 24% is quite awful polling figure for a current average of last 5 polls - it’s not that far off what got Truss humiliatingly booted out. If Truss and her policies were such disaster, then what should be said about a PM polling very nearly exactly the same from an average of all polls over one month?
The Tories were on only 19% with Truss with RedfieldWilton last October
Without your cherry picking, the polling average of the Truss month probably isn’t so far from Sunak’s most recent month, is it?
Sunak is currently top of a square. The bottom of the square is 5%. The lowest ever Liz Dip is way off bottom of the square.
Sunak is now only about 3% better than Truss at her worst on the measurement you have asked us to use.
Wrong.
Opinium had the Tories under Truss on 23%, now 29%. Redfield had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Yougov had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Omnisis now had the Tories on 22% now 24%. PeoplePolling had the Tories on 14% now 22%. Techne had the Tories on 22% now 27%. Deltapoll had the Tories on 25% now 29%.
are you cherry picking? Why? We have ALL the polls here, averaged out. What more do you need?
The graph shows average of pollsters over a long enough period to supply confidence, doesn’t it? It’s got all the polls on it, not just your favourite ones.
The graph you linked shows Truss dipping out just 3% lower than where Sunak is now. Doesn’t it?
Argue with the graph if you like, but it will tell you I’m right. The whole of the box is 5%. Sunak is now at top of the box, Truss at worse never averaged out right at bottom of the square.
Of course, many more polls as bad as the February ones so far and the graph will be updated again so Sunak might be even closer than 3% to the worst of Truss.
No it doesn't. I gave you most of the final polls of the Truss period and compared them to now.
In most of them Rishi is at least 5% better
That's a bit like you claiming that you have a higher IQ than a pithed frog. It's correct, it's meaningful in one sense, but in real practical terms ...
Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
Of course, once you've got your bag of rice you then need to pay for the energy to cook it.
But the general point is taken. Compared to Michael Buerk's iconic images of skeletal children breathing their last on the barren plains of Ethiopia, who cares about the odd case of rickets here and there?
With fewer than a hundred cases a year, yes, you can afford not to think about rickets. It certainly has next to nothing to do with inflation.
The other relevant factor here is that the minimum wage has risen far faster than other wages. No one is pretending that life is easy for people at the bottom but in a lot of industries inflation outpacing wage increases has led to skilled jobs being paid at little more than the minimum wage. There was for instance the tik tok video of the single, 37 year old primary school teacher with 4 years experience pointing out that after his overheads are paid, he has £177 per month spending money, from a 33k per year job.... in Redcar.
You’d want to know what the overheads were though, to judge.
It was in the video. But roughly... Rent, bills, car, petrol, food, gym, netflix. 600+300+300+150+400+50+25....
He had a solution which was to go to dubai, pay no tax, have the same job with all your accommodation paid for you, and his disposable income rose from £177 to well over £1000 per month.
29% with Deltapoll is of course the same as Labour got in 2010 when Brown got a hung parliament. So plenty still to play for
Just watching the Tory %:
2022 has given us 2 Tory polls in the 30s, a 30 and 31, both from Delta.
February has given us the sequence 24, 22, 27, 24, 24.
I think now you can only properly assess month to month not on weeks or part weeks, because if Opinium, Delta and Kantor had been only pollsters to report so far in February, it would have Tories averaging 29%
Actually 24% is quite awful polling figure for a current average of last 5 polls - it’s not that far off what got Truss humiliatingly booted out. If Truss and her policies were such disaster, then what should be said about a PM polling very nearly exactly the same from an average of all polls over one month?
The Tories were on only 19% with Truss with RedfieldWilton last October
Without your cherry picking, the polling average of the Truss month probably isn’t so far from Sunak’s most recent month, is it?
Sunak is currently top of a square. The bottom of the square is 5%. The lowest ever Liz Dip is way off bottom of the square.
Sunak is now only about 3% better than Truss at her worst on the measurement you have asked us to use.
Wrong.
Opinium had the Tories under Truss on 23%, now 29%. Redfield had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Yougov had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Omnisis now had the Tories on 22% now 24%. PeoplePolling had the Tories on 14% now 22%. Techne had the Tories on 22% now 27%. Deltapoll had the Tories on 25% now 29%.
are you cherry picking? Why? We have ALL the polls here, averaged out. What more do you need?
The graph shows average of pollsters over a long enough period to supply confidence, doesn’t it? It’s got all the polls on it, not just your favourite ones.
The graph you linked shows Truss dipping out just 3% lower than where Sunak is now. Doesn’t it?
Argue with the graph if you like, but it will tell you I’m right. The whole of the box is 5%. Sunak is now at top of the box, Truss at worse never averaged out right at bottom of the square.
Of course, many more polls as bad as the
February ones so far and the graph will be updated again so Sunak might be even closer
than 3% to the worst of Truss.
Cometh the hour.
Cometh the leader.
The one for Britain in our hour of need.
Step forward Mary Elizabeth - matriarch and monarch.
Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
Of course, once you've got your bag of rice you then need to pay for the energy to cook it.
But the general point is taken. Compared to Michael Buerk's iconic images of skeletal children breathing their last on the barren plains of Ethiopia, who cares about the odd case of rickets here and there?
With fewer than a hundred cases a year, yes, you can afford not to think about rickets. It certainly has next to nothing to do with inflation.
The other relevant factor here is that the minimum wage has risen far faster than other wages. No one is pretending that life is easy for people at the bottom but in a lot of industries inflation outpacing wage increases has led to skilled jobs being paid at little more than the minimum wage. There was for instance the tik tok video of the single, 37 year old primary school teacher with 4 years experience pointing out that after his overheads are paid, he has £177 per month spending money, from a 33k per year job.... in Redcar.
You’d want to know what the overheads were though, to judge.
It was in the video. But roughly... Rent, bills, car, petrol, food, gym, netflix. 600+300+300+150+400+50+25....
He had a solution which was to go to dubai, pay no tax, have the same job with all your accommodation paid for you, and his disposable income rose from £177 to well over £1000 per month.
Good for him: defeat late capitalism by working for the Maktoums' prison state.
The Truss premiership was a horror show from start to finish.
I never want to hear from her ever again.
It was a horror show even before it began. Who can forget the jury being out on Macron?
That’s about the only thing she got right. Mr quasi ineffective? France are our allies and also long standing rivals. Not everything they do will be in British interests.
The literal question was 'friend or foe?' I suspect French politics is less obsessed with the cross channel relationship than vice versa, but just imagine the prolapsing here if Macron had answered the jury is out to the same question.
Personally, I wouldn't mind if he said that at all. Liz was being characteristically (often alarmingly) blunt and honest. Macron talked a good game, but she had experienced several of his decisions being against Britain's interests. That's why she clearly said she would judge him on deeds not words. She also took her US opposite numbers to task as Foreign Sec when she felt that the deeds weren't matching the words. Now Sunak is here it's back to flattering and appeasing everyone and getting shit all in return.
29% with Deltapoll is of course the same as Labour got in 2010 when Brown got a hung parliament. So plenty still to play for
Just watching the Tory %:
2022 has given us 2 Tory polls in the 30s, a 30 and 31, both from Delta.
February has given us the sequence 24, 22, 27, 24, 24.
I think now you can only properly assess month to month not on weeks or part weeks, because if Opinium, Delta and Kantor had been only pollsters to report so far in February, it would have Tories averaging 29%
Actually 24% is quite awful polling figure for a current average of last 5 polls - it’s not that far off what got Truss humiliatingly booted out. If Truss and her policies were such disaster, then what should be said about a PM polling very nearly exactly the same from an average of all polls over one month?
The Tories were on only 19% with Truss with RedfieldWilton last October
Without your cherry picking, the polling average of the Truss month probably isn’t so far from Sunak’s most recent month, is it?
Sunak is currently top of a square. The bottom of the square is 5%. The lowest ever Liz Dip is way off bottom of the square.
Sunak is now only about 3% better than Truss at her worst on the measurement you have asked us to use.
Wrong.
Opinium had the Tories under Truss on 23%, now 29%. Redfield had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Yougov had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Omnisis now had the Tories on 22% now 24%. PeoplePolling had the Tories on 14% now 22%. Techne had the Tories on 22% now 27%. Deltapoll had the Tories on 25% now 29%.
Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
Of course, once you've got your bag of rice you then need to pay for the energy to cook it.
But the general point is taken. Compared to Michael Buerk's iconic images of skeletal children breathing their last on the barren plains of Ethiopia, who cares about the odd case of rickets here and there?
With fewer than a hundred cases a year, yes, you can afford not to think about rickets. It certainly has next to nothing to do with inflation.
The other relevant factor here is that the minimum wage has risen far faster than other wages. No one is pretending that life is easy for people at the bottom but in a lot of industries inflation outpacing wage increases has led to skilled jobs being paid at little more than the minimum wage. There was for instance the tik tok video of the single, 37 year old primary school teacher with 4 years experience pointing out that after his overheads are paid, he has £177 per month spending money, from a 33k per year job.... in Redcar.
You’d want to know what the overheads were though, to judge.
It was in the video. But roughly... Rent, bills, car, petrol, food, gym, netflix. 600+300+300+150+400+50+25....
He had a solution which was to go to dubai, pay no tax, have the same job with all your accommodation paid for you, and his disposable income rose from £177 to well over £1000 per month.
So his disposable income is £177 + £50 + £25 = £252
29% with Deltapoll is of course the same as Labour got in 2010 when Brown got a hung parliament. So plenty still to play for
Just watching the Tory %:
2022 has given us 2 Tory polls in the 30s, a 30 and 31, both from Delta.
February has given us the sequence 24, 22, 27, 24, 24.
I think now you can only properly assess month to month not on weeks or part weeks, because if Opinium, Delta and Kantor had been only pollsters to report so far in February, it would have Tories averaging 29%
Actually 24% is quite awful polling figure for a current average of last 5 polls - it’s not that far off what got Truss humiliatingly booted out. If Truss and her policies were such disaster, then what should be said about a PM polling very nearly exactly the same from an average of all polls over one month?
The Tories were on only 19% with Truss with RedfieldWilton last October
Without your cherry picking, the polling average of the Truss month probably isn’t so far from Sunak’s most recent month, is it?
Sunak is currently top of a square. The bottom of the square is 5%. The lowest ever Liz Dip is way off bottom of the square.
Sunak is now only about 3% better than Truss at her worst on the measurement you have asked us to use.
Wrong.
Opinium had the Tories under Truss on 23%, now 29%. Redfield had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Yougov had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Omnisis now had the Tories on 22% now 24%. PeoplePolling had the Tories on 14% now 22%. Techne had the Tories on 22% now 27%. Deltapoll had the Tories on 25% now 29%.
are you cherry picking? Why? We have ALL the polls here, averaged out. What more do you need?
The graph shows average of pollsters over a long enough period to supply confidence, doesn’t it? It’s got all the polls on it, not just your favourite ones.
The graph you linked shows Truss dipping out just 3% lower than where Sunak is now. Doesn’t it?
Argue with the graph if you like, but it will tell you I’m right. The whole of the box is 5%. Sunak is now at top of the box, Truss at worse never averaged out right at bottom of the square.
Of course, many more polls as bad as the February ones so far and the graph will be updated again so Sunak might be even closer than 3% to the worst of Truss.
The thing that is so desperately cynical - that she now admits - is what I pointed out at the time.
She claims the problem with the OBR was that they didn’t take account the fact that she was planning to slash state spending in the medium/long term.
But at the time, she very explicitly stated that spending wouldn’t be cut.
Her plan was to lie to the Tory party members, Tory MPs, the media and the electorate, then let the market reaction “force” vicious public spending austerity.
This is what the Tory party have been reduced to.
Outright lying.
“Growth” was the latest, necessary fiction, to go along with Cameron’s “big society” (to justify slashing local services) etc etc.
These people are just fucking liars.
They want tax cuts for the rich. Politics is a game. Anyone and everyone can be played because the ends justify the means. Truth is irrelevant. People are pawns.
The Tory party laid bare.
They might have got away with it had she not been such a shit liar.
I don't think that actually was Truss's critique of the OBR forecasts. You may be a bit better informed if you read it, rather than spend more time than that would take listening to foam flecked responses to it.
29% with Deltapoll is of course the same as Labour got in 2010 when Brown got a hung parliament. So plenty still to play for
Just watching the Tory %:
2022 has given us 2 Tory polls in the 30s, a 30 and 31, both from Delta.
February has given us the sequence 24, 22, 27, 24, 24.
I think now you can only properly assess month to month not on weeks or part weeks, because if Opinium, Delta and Kantor had been only pollsters to report so far in February, it would have Tories averaging 29%
Actually 24% is quite awful polling figure for a current average of last 5 polls - it’s not that far off what got Truss humiliatingly booted out. If Truss and her policies were such disaster, then what should be said about a PM polling very nearly exactly the same from an average of all polls over one month?
The Tories were on only 19% with Truss with RedfieldWilton last October
Without your cherry picking, the polling average of the Truss month probably isn’t so far from Sunak’s most recent month, is it?
Sunak is currently top of a square. The bottom of the square is 5%. The lowest ever Liz Dip is way off bottom of the square.
Sunak is now only about 3% better than Truss at her worst on the measurement you have asked us to use.
Wrong.
Opinium had the Tories under Truss on 23%, now 29%. Redfield had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Yougov had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Omnisis now had the Tories on 22% now 24%. PeoplePolling had the Tories on 14% now 22%. Techne had the Tories on 22% now 27%. Deltapoll had the Tories on 25% now 29%.
are you cherry picking? Why? We have ALL the polls here, averaged out. What more do you need?
The graph shows average of pollsters over a long enough period to supply confidence, doesn’t it? It’s got all the polls on it, not just your favourite ones.
The graph you linked shows Truss dipping out just 3% lower than where Sunak is now. Doesn’t it?
Argue with the graph if you like, but it will tell you I’m right. The whole of the box is 5%. Sunak is now at top of the box, Truss at worse never averaged out right at bottom of the square.
Of course, many more polls as bad as the
February ones so far and the graph will be updated again so Sunak might be even closer
than 3% to the worst of Truss.
Cometh the hour.
Cometh the leader.
The one for Britain in our hour of need.
Step forward Mary Elizabeth - matriarch and monarch.
Some call her The Truss.
To many, she is simply:
‘Liz’.
On Smarkets there is 100/1 for Truss as next Con leader.
They would have to be completely bonkers, but that looks nailed on...
The thing that is so desperately cynical - that she now admits - is what I pointed out at the time.
She claims the problem with the OBR was that they didn’t take account the fact that she was planning to slash state spending in the medium/long term.
But at the time, she very explicitly stated that spending wouldn’t be cut.
Her plan was to lie to the Tory party members, Tory MPs, the media and the electorate, then let the market reaction “force” vicious public spending austerity.
This is what the Tory party have been reduced to.
Outright lying.
“Growth” was the latest, necessary fiction, to go along with Cameron’s “big society” (to justify slashing local services) etc etc.
These people are just fucking liars.
They want tax cuts for the rich. Politics is a game. Anyone and everyone can be played because the ends justify the means. Truth is irrelevant. People are pawns.
The Tory party laid bare.
They might have got away with it had she not been such a shit liar.
Yeah. They had the Uber liar. Replaced him with a shit one once all was revealed. Now they have the one who's too cowardly and guileless to speak anything but the depressing truth.
29% with Deltapoll is of course the same as Labour got in 2010 when Brown got a hung parliament. So plenty still to play for
Just watching the Tory %:
2022 has given us 2 Tory polls in the 30s, a 30 and 31, both from Delta.
February has given us the sequence 24, 22, 27, 24, 24.
I think now you can only properly assess month to month not on weeks or part weeks, because if Opinium, Delta and Kantor had been only pollsters to report so far in February, it would have Tories averaging 29%
Actually 24% is quite awful polling figure for a current average of last 5 polls - it’s not that far off what got Truss humiliatingly booted out. If Truss and her policies were such disaster, then what should be said about a PM polling very nearly exactly the same from an average of all polls over one month?
The Tories were on only 19% with Truss with RedfieldWilton last October
Without your cherry picking, the polling average of the Truss month probably isn’t so far from Sunak’s most recent month, is it?
Sunak is currently top of a square. The bottom of the square is 5%. The lowest ever Liz Dip is way off bottom of the square.
Sunak is now only about 3% better than Truss at her worst on the measurement you have asked us to use.
Wrong.
Opinium had the Tories under Truss on 23%, now 29%. Redfield had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Yougov had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Omnisis now had the Tories on 22% now 24%. PeoplePolling had the Tories on 14% now 22%. Techne had the Tories on 22% now 27%. Deltapoll had the Tories on 25% now 29%.
are you cherry picking? Why? We have ALL the polls here, averaged out. What more do you need?
The graph shows average of pollsters over a long enough period to supply confidence, doesn’t it? It’s got all the polls on it, not just your favourite ones.
The graph you linked shows Truss dipping out just 3% lower than where Sunak is now. Doesn’t it?
Argue with the graph if you like, but it will tell you I’m right. The whole of the box is 5%. Sunak is now at top of the box, Truss at worse never averaged out right at bottom of the square.
Of course, many more polls as bad as the
February ones so far and the graph will be updated again so Sunak might be even closer
than 3% to the worst of Truss.
Cometh the hour.
Cometh the leader.
The one for Britain in our hour of need.
Step forward Mary Elizabeth - matriarch and monarch.
Some call her The Truss.
To many, she is simply:
‘Liz’.
I heard the interview. She really doesn't even have the most basic grasp of how the economy works. Like any school swot she revised her lines by rote and regurgitated them without any understanding.
She is living proof that academic qualifications can be churned out without the foggiest idea of what anything actually means.
29% with Deltapoll is of course the same as Labour got in 2010 when Brown got a hung parliament. So plenty still to play for
Just watching the Tory %:
2022 has given us 2 Tory polls in the 30s, a 30 and 31, both from Delta.
February has given us the sequence 24, 22, 27, 24, 24.
I think now you can only properly assess month to month not on weeks or part weeks, because if Opinium, Delta and Kantor had been only pollsters to report so far in February, it would have Tories averaging 29%
Actually 24% is quite awful polling figure for a current average of last 5 polls - it’s not that far off what got Truss humiliatingly booted out. If Truss and her policies were such disaster, then what should be said about a PM polling very nearly exactly the same from an average of all polls over one month?
The Tories were on only 19% with Truss with RedfieldWilton last October
Without your cherry picking, the polling average of the Truss month probably isn’t so far from Sunak’s most recent month, is it?
Sunak is currently top of a square. The bottom of the square is 5%. The lowest ever Liz Dip is way off bottom of the square.
Sunak is now only about 3% better than Truss at her worst on the measurement you have asked us to use.
Wrong.
Opinium had the Tories under Truss on 23%, now 29%. Redfield had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Yougov had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Omnisis now had the Tories on 22% now 24%. PeoplePolling had the Tories on 14% now 22%. Techne had the Tories on 22% now 27%. Deltapoll had the Tories on 25% now 29%.
are you cherry picking? Why? We have ALL the polls here, averaged out. What more do you need?
The graph shows average of pollsters over a long enough period to supply confidence, doesn’t it? It’s got all the polls on it, not just your favourite ones.
The graph you linked shows Truss dipping out just 3% lower than where Sunak is now. Doesn’t it?
Argue with the graph if you like, but it will tell you I’m right. The whole of the box is 5%. Sunak is now at top of the box, Truss at worse never averaged out right at bottom of the square.
Of course, many more polls as bad as the
February ones so far and the graph will be updated again so Sunak might be even closer
than 3% to the worst of Truss.
Cometh the hour.
Cometh the leader.
The one for Britain in our hour of need.
Step forward Mary Elizabeth - matriarch and monarch.
Some call her The Truss.
To many, she is simply:
‘Liz’.
On Smarkets there is 100/1 for Truss as next Con leader.
They would have to be completely bonkers, but that looks nailed on...
Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
Of course, once you've got your bag of rice you then need to pay for the energy to cook it.
But the general point is taken. Compared to Michael Buerk's iconic images of skeletal children breathing their last on the barren plains of Ethiopia, who cares about the odd case of rickets here and there?
With fewer than a hundred cases a year, yes, you can afford not to think about rickets. It certainly has next to nothing to do with inflation.
The other relevant factor here is that the minimum wage has risen far faster than other wages. No one is pretending that life is easy for people at the bottom but in a lot of industries inflation outpacing wage increases has led to skilled jobs being paid at little more than the minimum wage. There was for instance the tik tok video of the single, 37 year old primary school teacher with 4 years experience pointing out that after his overheads are paid, he has £177 per month spending money, from a 33k per year job.... in Redcar.
You’d want to know what the overheads were though, to judge.
It was in the video. But roughly... Rent, bills, car, petrol, food, gym, netflix. 600+300+300+150+400+50+25....
He had a solution which was to go to dubai, pay no tax, have the same job with all your accommodation paid for you, and his disposable income rose from £177 to well over £1000 per month.
So his disposable income is £177 + £50 + £25 = £252
This type of attitude is exactly why there should be a general strike until pay in the public sector is corrected to account for historic inflation. People doing skilled work with lots of responsibility deserve to be paid properly, not sneered at for wanting to go to the gym.
Edit: Stephen Swinford thinks he will. FFS! Changes to the structure of government, huh? A night of the long knives? It could happen. So many people think Sunak hasn't got it in him. We shall see. Not that an NLK would necessarily mean bye-bye Raab.
Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
Of course, once you've got your bag of rice you then need to pay for the energy to cook it.
But the general point is taken. Compared to Michael Buerk's iconic images of skeletal children breathing their last on the barren plains of Ethiopia, who cares about the odd case of rickets here and there?
With fewer than a hundred cases a year, yes, you can afford not to think about rickets. It certainly has next to nothing to do with inflation.
The other relevant factor here is that the minimum wage has risen far faster than other wages. No one is pretending that life is easy for people at the bottom but in a lot of industries inflation outpacing wage increases has led to skilled jobs being paid at little more than the minimum wage. There was for instance the tik tok video of the single, 37 year old primary school teacher with 4 years experience pointing out that after his overheads are paid, he has £177 per month spending money, from a 33k per year job.... in Redcar.
You’d want to know what the overheads were though, to judge.
It was in the video. But roughly... Rent, bills, car, petrol, food, gym, netflix. 600+300+300+150+400+50+25....
He had a solution which was to go to dubai, pay no tax, have the same job with all your accommodation paid for you, and his disposable income rose from £177 to well over £1000 per month.
So his disposable income is £177 + £50 + £25 = £252
I spent more than that last weekend - and all I did was go to Glasgow with the Mrs to watch the ice hockey.
29% with Deltapoll is of course the same as Labour got in 2010 when Brown got a hung parliament. So plenty still to play for
Just watching the Tory %:
2022 has given us 2 Tory polls in the 30s, a 30 and 31, both from Delta.
February has given us the sequence 24, 22, 27, 24, 24.
I think now you can only properly assess month to month not on weeks or part weeks, because if Opinium, Delta and Kantor had been only pollsters to report so far in February, it would have Tories averaging 29%
Actually 24% is quite awful polling figure for a current average of last 5 polls - it’s not that far off what got Truss humiliatingly booted out. If Truss and her policies were such disaster, then what should be said about a PM polling very nearly exactly the same from an average of all polls over one month?
The Tories were on only 19% with Truss with RedfieldWilton last October
Without your cherry picking, the polling average of the Truss month probably isn’t so far from Sunak’s most recent month, is it?
Sunak is currently top of a square. The bottom of the square is 5%. The lowest ever Liz Dip is way off bottom of the square.
Sunak is now only about 3% better than Truss at her worst on the measurement you have asked us to use.
Wrong.
Opinium had the Tories under Truss on 23%, now 29%. Redfield had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Yougov had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Omnisis now had the Tories on 22% now 24%. PeoplePolling had the Tories on 14% now 22%. Techne had the Tories on 22% now 27%. Deltapoll had the Tories on 25% now 29%.
The differences are: 6%, 3%, 5%, 2%, 8%, 5%, 4%, 1%, -1%, and 0%.
Which averages 3.3%. Sunak has increased Tory support by 3.3% over Truss at her worst.
The last Redfield you are referring to was AFTER Truss had resigned and Sunak was already PM elect effectively anyway. Truss resigned on 20 October and it was taken on 23 October.
The same applies to the Savanta you refer to taken on 21-23 Oct. So again taken AFTER Truss had resigned.
The BMG you refer to was taken largely before the markets crashed after the mini budget. Even the Ipsos shows no change between Sunak and Truss.
So none really show the Tories not doing significantly better under Sunak now than Truss did after the mini budget and before her resignation
Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
Of course, once you've got your bag of rice you then need to pay for the energy to cook it.
But the general point is taken. Compared to Michael Buerk's iconic images of skeletal children breathing their last on the barren plains of Ethiopia, who cares about the odd case of rickets here and there?
With fewer than a hundred cases a year, yes, you can afford not to think about rickets. It certainly has next to nothing to do with inflation.
The other relevant factor here is that the minimum wage has risen far faster than other wages. No one is pretending that life is easy for people at the bottom but in a lot of industries inflation outpacing wage increases has led to skilled jobs being paid at little more than the minimum wage. There was for instance the tik tok video of the single, 37 year old primary school teacher with 4 years experience pointing out that after his overheads are paid, he has £177 per month spending money, from a 33k per year job.... in Redcar.
You’d want to know what the overheads were though, to judge.
It was in the video. But roughly... Rent, bills, car, petrol, food, gym, netflix. 600+300+300+150+400+50+25....
He had a solution which was to go to dubai, pay no tax, have the same job with all your accommodation paid for you, and his disposable income rose from £177 to well over £1000 per month.
So his disposable income is £177 + £50 + £25 = £252
This type of attitude is exactly why there should be a general strike until pay in the public sector is corrected to account for historic inflation. People doing skilled work with lots of responsibility deserve to be paid properly, not sneered at for wanting to go to the gym.
Has gym membership become the successor to flat screen telly then smartphone that folk who do a week's work are greedy and entitled for aspiring to? There used to be Council Leisure Centres of course, too.
I think we're beyond the point of worrying what anyone thinks about the opposition. As long as they're viable they'll do. Like any disaster the first job is to clear the debris.
A pity SKS hasn't got the bottle to promise he'll reverse Brexit. He's well past the point of having to be cautious. The Tories are in such a state that if he wants a radical first term now would be a good time to put it on the table.
Not again. You can't "reverse" Brexit. I wish people would stop using the phrase. You can apply to rejoin, sure, but that takes all 27 member states to agree (by no means a given) plus a long and possibly arduous accession negotiation. You and others like seem to think we can just say "sorry, all a mistake, let's 'reverse' and go back to 2015". It's too late for that. We're not Remainers anymore, we're Rejoiners.
Barnier disagrees.....
But even if you're half right now would be a good time to set out some reasonable conditions that if met would mean we could apply to rejoin in all humility and assume our rightful place at the heart of Europe. There is hardly a single person who hasn't now been adversely affected by Brexit.
Article 50(5) of the Treaty on European Union is very clear that to rejoin we have to get in the queue with everyone else -
"If a State which has withdrawn from the Union asks to rejoin, its request shall be subject to the procedure referred to in Article 49."
Article 49 is the same procedure as applying to Ukraine, Turkey, Albania etc etc.
Unless you're saying that Barnier can rewrite the Treaty on European Union. Huge if true.
There is a fundamental difference, though. The UK already has EU law and regulation on the books. Passing the Acquis would take a few seconds.
There are other obstacles that Ukraine, Turkey and Albania don’t have. It’s going to take some persuasion for Italy to be satisfied with being the third largest economy in the EU again.
I think there would be enormous reluctance among EU capitals to bring the UK in, given that we'd (a) been a pain in the butt while a member before; and (b) that there was no overwhelming support for EU membership in the UK. That is, the last thing EU countries want is an on-again, off-again relationship with the UK.
That being said... I think they would probably be relatively relaxed about the UK joining the EEA. But I just don't see the political will for that in the UK.
The Swiss-type relationship, where low skilled migration is limited by the requirement to have Swiss educational qualifications and the need to purchase health insurance, combined with the Swiss maintaining more sovereignty than happens in EFTA/EEA, is more possible.
Nick Tyrone seems pretty convinced they'd have us back, at least part because it would be seen as a vindication that leaving the EU is a bad idea. There is an interview on his substack he did with the former French Ambassador to the US who seems adamant the French would want us back. You don't think Stella Creasy and other very pro-EU Labour MPs will be getting on Starmer's case come 2028/9 if he hasn't started making noises about re-entering the single market?
Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
Of course, once you've got your bag of rice you then need to pay for the energy to cook it.
But the general point is taken. Compared to Michael Buerk's iconic images of skeletal children breathing their last on the barren plains of Ethiopia, who cares about the odd case of rickets here and there?
With fewer than a hundred cases a year, yes, you can afford not to think about rickets. It certainly has next to nothing to do with inflation.
The other relevant factor here is that the minimum wage has risen far faster than other wages. No one is pretending that life is easy for people at the bottom but in a lot of industries inflation outpacing wage increases has led to skilled jobs being paid at little more than the minimum wage. There was for instance the tik tok video of the single, 37 year old primary school teacher with 4 years experience pointing out that after his overheads are paid, he has £177 per month spending money, from a 33k per year job.... in Redcar.
You’d want to know what the overheads were though, to judge.
It was in the video. But roughly... Rent, bills, car, petrol, food, gym, netflix. 600+300+300+150+400+50+25....
He had a solution which was to go to dubai, pay no tax, have the same job with all your accommodation paid for you, and his disposable income rose from £177 to well over £1000 per month.
So his disposable income is £177 + £50 + £25 = £252
This type of attitude is exactly why there should be a general strike until pay in the public sector is corrected to account for historic inflation. People doing skilled work with lots of responsibility deserve to be paid properly, not sneered at for wanting to go to the gym.
I am not sneering. If somebody wants to join a gym or subscribe to Netflix that is their choice. But making out that these are essentials rather than discretionary spend is just bollocks.
Should people in Britain really be starving? I'm sure I saw a 1kg bag of rice going for 35p in Tesco not that long ago. Now you might be malnourished if you rely on that but actually starving? With the number of goods available it's possible that people aren't necessarily aware of what the cheapest staples are.
Of course, once you've got your bag of rice you then need to pay for the energy to cook it.
But the general point is taken. Compared to Michael Buerk's iconic images of skeletal children breathing their last on the barren plains of Ethiopia, who cares about the odd case of rickets here and there?
With fewer than a hundred cases a year, yes, you can afford not to think about rickets. It certainly has next to nothing to do with inflation.
The other relevant factor here is that the minimum wage has risen far faster than other wages. No one is pretending that life is easy for people at the bottom but in a lot of industries inflation outpacing wage increases has led to skilled jobs being paid at little more than the minimum wage. There was for instance the tik tok video of the single, 37 year old primary school teacher with 4 years experience pointing out that after his overheads are paid, he has £177 per month spending money, from a 33k per year job.... in Redcar.
You’d want to know what the overheads were though, to judge.
It was in the video. But roughly... Rent, bills, car, petrol, food, gym, netflix. 600+300+300+150+400+50+25....
He had a solution which was to go to dubai, pay no tax, have the same job with all your accommodation paid for you, and his disposable income rose from £177 to well over £1000 per month.
So his disposable income is £177 + £50 + £25 = £252
I spent more than that last weekend - and all I did was go to Glasgow with the Mrs to watch the ice hockey.
And that is 80%+ of a teaching assistant's take home pay. Which they don't get in their ludicrously generous 13 weeks a year holiday.
Comments
"Keir Starmer isn't Tony Blair"
Cool!
From a purely rational point of view, KK could have reversed his policy and stayed in post. But having lost the confidence of the markets, that wasn't going to be enough to regain it.
Rishi seems to be suffering from a similar problem. There are enough people who are sufficiently annoyed with the Conservative government 2010-23 that they simply don't care what he says or does, good or bad. They've stopped listening.
It's no coincidence that it came a week after some "Bring Back Boris" ramping.
They were great years, pre social media and smartphone. We didn't even have an internet connection. It was a low end house share. But also in the case of Dalston the whole area has got massively more desirable. Even a few years later I paid just £800 per month for a 2 bed flat... unthinkable now.
The strange thing is that it is only about 10 years ago that I was in London houseshare purgatory; I just stuck it out long enough to get my career off the ground, then moved out and bought a flat elsewhere... now 10 years later between my career and asset price inflation I realised that I could actually go back to Dalston and buy a flat there if I really wanted to, but it doesn't really feel like the same place.
The general point stands. The effects of inflation grow more acute in direct proportion to poverty - although it also so happens that living standards are indeed worse for most people than they were six months ago (except for the very rich, for whom only the benefits of the constant trend of medical and technological advances are really relevant.) It's just that the upper middle class - save perhaps for a little bit of bitching about the cost of upmarket hotels, meaning that they can only afford two luxury foreign holidays this year rather than three - really doesn't suffer very much, whereas sink estate single mum now has to go without lunch altogether so she can still afford to make rounds of jam sandwiches for the kiddies to take to school.
Sunak is currently top of a square. The bottom of the square is 5%. The lowest ever Liz Dip is way off bottom of the square.
Sunak is now only about 3% better than Truss at her worst on the measurement you have asked us to use.
Opinium had the Tories under Truss on 23%, now 29%. Redfield had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Yougov had the Tories on 19%, now 24%. Omnisis now had the Tories on 22% now 24%. PeoplePolling had the Tories on 14% now 22%. Techne had the Tories on 22% now 27%. Deltapoll had the Tories on 25% now 29%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election#Graphical_summary
Waffling vague nonsense when you have no answer is a core political skills (some have it as their only skill unfortunately).
I guess it'll just mean yet more nonsense when Labour reorganise departments when they get in, maybe create some new ones as often slips into the manifestoes.
As for the bundle, it doesn't really matter if you think "luxury foreign holidays" are intrinsically worthless, as vapid as they are immoral: if people are willing to spend 10k, they notice if they can't afford to spend it any more, and will not feel a Buddhist or socialist sense of austere acceptance. Of course, if you think that all their spending is immoral and trivial to begin with, you could support a political movement to take it all away from them, and see how that goes. (In reality, I think they'll just cut their savings rate which got inflated during Covid.)
We're friends. Yes, also rivals, and with disagreeements, but once you get to the level of a politician you shouldn't need to engage in silliness like acting like we're not friends.
But the general point is taken. Compared to Michael Buerk's iconic images of skeletal children breathing their last on the barren plains of Ethiopia, who cares about the odd case of rickets here and there?
The graph shows average of pollsters over a long enough period to supply confidence, doesn’t it? It’s got all the polls on it, not just your favourite ones.
The graph you linked shows Truss dipping out just 3% lower than where Sunak is now. Doesn’t it?
Argue with the graph if you like, but it will tell you I’m right. The whole of the box is 5%. Sunak is now at top of the box, Truss at worse never averaged out right at bottom of the square.
Of course, many more polls as bad as the February ones so far and the graph will be updated again so Sunak might be even closer than 3% to the worst of Truss.
It's kinda easy to idealise those days but I suspect (for me at least) a lot of it had to do with being 20 years old and feeling absolutely certain I was invincible. I often wish I could go back, but I'd be a fish out of water if I could take the first Tardis heading back to those days now.
I stayed until 2012 so I watched it gentrify around me and yes, you're right, it's not the same place now, but in retrospect, I was part of that wave of gentrification that made it what it is today so I guess I'm in no position to comment.
Was it meant to be funny? As it wasn't. Was it meant to impress people that she was tough on Macron, tough on the causes of Macron? Because no matter the answer it wouldn't change how a UK PM would act toward France, they would act however they felt appropriate at the time. So it gained nothing other than looking petty.
In most of them Rishi is at least 5% better
I'm neither a killjoy nor a leveller. I don't begrudge the very comfortable their nice holidays and nor do I assert that taxation should be raised to confiscatory levels. I don't think it unreasonable, however, to assert that people who have to choose between a fortnight on the Amalfi Coast and a fortnight in the Bahamas - rather than being able comfortably to afford both - do not experience privation to anything like the degree of people who have to choose between keeping warm or eating properly, because they can no longer afford to do both.
The solution to all of this begins with taxing incomes, especially modest incomes, less and taxing assets more. Will it happen? No.
Compared to Richard Dimbleby's iconic reporting of the liberation of Belsen, who cares about the odd old person dying for lack of an ambulance?
Compared to the air quality in Hiroshima on 7 August 1945, what is all the fuss about pollution in London?
Matt Chorley’s “red box” is, imo, the best of the bunch;
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-red-box-politics-podcast/id660638948
(Skip to the discussion with Paul Johnson)
The thing that is so desperately cynical - that she now admits - is what I pointed out at the time.
She claims the problem with the OBR was that they didn’t take account the fact that she was planning to slash state spending in the medium/long term.
But at the time, she very explicitly stated that spending wouldn’t be cut.
Her plan was to lie to the Tory party members, Tory MPs, the media and the electorate, then let the market reaction “force” vicious public spending austerity.
This is what the Tory party have been reduced to.
Outright lying.
“Growth” was the latest, necessary fiction, to go along with Cameron’s “big society” (to justify slashing local services) etc etc.
These people are just fucking liars.
They want tax cuts for the rich. Politics is a game. Anyone and everyone can be played because the ends justify the means. Truth is irrelevant. People are pawns.
The Tory party laid bare.
They might have got away with it had she not been such a shit liar.
There are also millions of cases of obesity caused, in whole or in part, by hard-up people subsisting off cheap, ultra-processed food. Some of them doubtless can't be arsed to do any better, but many simply can't afford it. That is a serious problem and it's definitely made worse by inflation.
https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/thesis/Coastal_gentrification_the_coastification_of_St_Leonards-on-Sea/9487232
I think the game changer for these coastal towns though was Covid and WFH.
I don't even think that taxing incomes less and assets more will work, sadly, because people use income to buy assets like pensions and houses into being, so those asset values will adjust with the rate of return (downward) and fewer things like business capital and houses will be created given the cost of everything else.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/salman-rushdie-recovery-victory-city
But roughly...
Rent, bills, car, petrol, food, gym, netflix.
600+300+300+150+400+50+25....
He had a solution which was to go to dubai, pay no tax, have the same job with all your accommodation paid for you, and his disposable income rose from £177 to well over £1000 per month.
https://twitter.com/electpoliticsuk/status/1622701839195209728?t=JBeTgwODZiKweZdAZiFK5g&s=19
Cometh the leader.
The one for Britain in our hour of need.
Step forward Mary Elizabeth - matriarch and monarch.
Some call her The Truss.
To many, she is simply:
‘Liz’.
The last Redfield under Truss had the Tories on 21%, not 19%.
Of pollsters who have polled during both Truss's and Sunak's premierships, you have omitted:
Savanta (Truss 25%, Sunak 26%)
BMG (Truss 30%, Sunak 29%)
Ipsos (Truss 26%, Sunak 26%)
So now we have (Tory support%: Truss / Sunak / improvement)
Opinium (23% / 29% / 6%)
R&W (21% / 24% / 3%)
Yougov (19% / 24% / 5%)
Omnisis (22% / 24% / 2%)
PeoplePolling (14% / 22% / 8%)
Techne (22% / 27% / 5%)
Deltapoll (25% / 29% / 4%)
Savanta (25% / 26% / 1%)
BMG (30% / 29% / -1%)
Ipsos (26% / 26% / 0%)
The differences are: 6%, 3%, 5%, 2%, 8%, 5%, 4%, 1%, -1%, and 0%.
Which averages 3.3%. Sunak has increased Tory support by 3.3% over Truss at her worst.
They would have to be completely bonkers, but that looks nailed on...
They had the Uber liar. Replaced him with a shit one once all was revealed.
Now they have the one who's too cowardly and guileless to speak anything but the depressing truth.
She is living proof that academic qualifications can be churned out without the foggiest idea of what anything actually means.
Edit: Stephen Swinford thinks he will. FFS! Changes to the structure of government, huh? A night of the long knives? It could happen. So many people think Sunak hasn't got it in him. We shall see. Not that an NLK would necessarily mean bye-bye Raab.
The same applies to the Savanta you refer to taken on 21-23 Oct. So again taken AFTER Truss had resigned.
The BMG you refer to was taken largely before the markets crashed after the mini budget. Even the Ipsos shows no change between Sunak and Truss.
So none really show the Tories not doing significantly better under Sunak now than Truss did after the mini budget and before her resignation
There used to be Council Leisure Centres of course, too.
You don't think Stella Creasy and other very pro-EU Labour MPs will be getting on Starmer's case come 2028/9 if he hasn't started making noises about re-entering the single market?
Which they don't get in their ludicrously generous 13 weeks a year holiday.