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Why the next election might not be a 1997 redux – politicalbetting.com
Why the next election might not be a 1997 redux – politicalbetting.com
Two other big differences between pre-1997 and now: 1. As Starmer repeatedly says, Lab starts from so much further back: 202 seats vs 2712. Electoral geography is adverse for Lab: 1997 vote shares would give Lab 60 fewer seats, per @ElectCalculushttps://t.co/fhgc7aGCVD
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Is it too much to hope that Theresa May will join in? Or David Cameron?
Good morning all.
1. Starmer doesn't need to up his game
2. It's good that he is no Blair. Boris and Cameron have made that kind of politician toxic.
3. Starmer has expunged Corbyn's anti-semitic legacy
4. Labour don't need Scotland but they are recovering well there.
5. Believe the polls
6. I am not merely confident, I am certain, that Labour will win a thumping great majority. We have witnessed a sea change.
7. But you are right. This won't be 1997 Redux. It will be far, far, worse for the tories. In 1997 the economy was in great shape. Now it has tanked. Everyone I know is STILL talking about that Liz Truss budget and Labour will continue to remind us of it. The tories have done 1000x worse in the last 4 years than they did back then on every level, including corruption and sleaze. Which is really saying something.
They are in for an absolute pounding. 100-150 seats but my latest reckoning is that they may go sub 100.
It does not follow from that that Starmer "needs to up his game". Starmer has done remarkably well to turn the -20% polling deficit he inherited into a 20% or so poll lead. Even if that lead has moderated significantly by the GE, it will still be a huge achievement for Starmer if Labour ends up in a position to govern with some sort of agreement with the LDs, tacit or overt.
Mr. Phil, also worth noting much of the work was done for Starmer, starting with the foolish decision of the PCP making an egotistical buffoon PM...
Whatever the respective MP tallies end up being, I would like to see a decisive, unequivocal rejection of the Tories and the havoc they have wrought on this country over the past 13 years. They deserve it. It will take a long time to repair the damage they’ve wilfully, gleefully caused. They need to sideline ERG types. Their right wing are the lunatics in charge of the asylum, gleefully burning down the country, and making millions of people’s lives poorer in myriad, incremental ways, in pursuit of their naive, simplistic ideological illusions.
Oh look! Second post-resignation poll in a row with SNP well above that YouGov level (which was 38% incidentally, not the 29% shouted out in the PB piece.)
Funny how neither the Savanta (SNP 42%) nor this Survation poll got reported by PB. I thought this was meant to be a service for punters?
The SNP remain in a strong position in our 1st poll that has fieldwork conducted after Nicola Sturgeon’s surprise resignation last week. At 43% the party would be just 2% shy of their solid 2019 Westminster showing.
SNP 43% (+1)
LAB 30% (+1)
CON 17% (-)
LD 6% (-1)
Others 3% (-1)
https://twitter.com/survation/status/1627002594676690946?s=46&t=eNsBLMSATSn17GYQMqF1Tw
I was wrong.
And no, it wasn’t the debates. His polling figures slumped before that. In fact, he was fortunate that Labour’s figures never really recovered either.
Incidentally, nice to have some light outside.
The 100-150 band ought to be possible with a half-decent leader. But the Tories don’t have a half-decent leader.
There's no Hollywood gloss in this heroic masterpiece. Instead, it's ordinary men doing extraordinary things
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/greatest-war-film-ever-made/ (£££)
The Cruel Sea. (BAFTAs tonight btw.)
Further, the road is running out. Last year 2024 still seemed an awful long way away. Now it doesn’t. You say you “cant see how it will fight in 2024”. That encapsulates the entire problem. It’s far too late to be working on the fundamentals.
Heck, even Heath stuck to sour muttering in the main.
Oh, sorry, you didn't mean the SNP?
Take a look, for example, at clunky old Electoral Calculus. OK we all know its limitations but it is suggesting 83 Tory seats, ffs. And there is no reason to think that if it is wrong it is wrong on the downside. It could be worse. Reason? Well, tactical voting for a start.
I wouldn't be betting on NOM. I don't think I'd be majoring on a LabMaj.
I think I might be chancing my arm on a meltdown. That, I suspect, is where the value lies.
And given that Sunak's ratings are still falling from their honeymoon, I wouldn't be shocked if the gap between the two leaders ends up in a similar place to 1997.
It's annoying. Just as we get our best team in decades together, they have a shower of shite to bring over for the Ashes.
It's going to be no fun marmalising them.
Edit - ah, it's a scoreboard error and it was Iyer who hit the six. That makes a lot more sense.
Edit edit - six and out! Do Australia have a sniff? If so @Peter_the_Punter has some grovelling to do.
Perhaps Ms Braverman should refuse them entry.
That (plus right wing copium) might be why there's a difference of opinion on how bad it will be for the blue team. I'd be confident that people plugged into the left have got a better sense of how how that is playing than people connected to the right.
But the simple lack of anti-Labour tactical voting next time will shift a fair few seats.
Yet John Major’s government was still soundly thrashed in 1997. Barring a nuclear attack on Lviv or Taipei, a Storegga Slide II, or a global Marburg Virus pandemic, it is hard to conceive of an external event large enough to save the Tories.
https://deltapoll.co.uk/why-its-very-hard-to-know-who-will-win-the-next-election-analysing-pre-election-polling-fluctuations-since-1997
Unless you're BJO, of course
Not much yet in the betting markets yet on this. There is very poor liquidity on Smarkets for this.
Strangely, he appears to be a normal person.
Although early, it does not appear that SNP voters are apt to desert the party, or even become more undecided post the announced departure of Nicola Sturgeon – who is surely one of Britain’s most successful politicians ever in terms of winning elections. When we put to voters in the poll to what extent (did Sturgeon’s departure) make you more or less likely to vote for the SNP? looking at those who said more likely minus those saying less likely actually resulted in a +5% net more likely to vote SNP figure when viewing attitudes of those who voted for the party in the 2021 Holyrood constituency vote.
It is therefore entirely possible therefore that the SNP’s loyal voter base are really not voting for the party based on it’s leader to any meaningful extent, and/or potentially see the Sturgeon years as having run their course – a sentiment seemingly shared by the FM herself. Three-quarters of 2014 Yes voters would vote SNP at a Westminster election, and so it remains clear that independence attitudes loom large as a strong driver for SNP party choice.
https://www.survation.com/scotlands-political-landscape-after-nicola-sturgeon/
Labour need to do some serious thinking beyond simply mouthing platitudes.
Is Isla Bryson a woman? “The recent case?” Looking slightly thrown, she starts talking about guidelines, processes, safeguards, circumstances. “So from what I know about the case, I would not have been putting that person in a women-only prison.”
https://thetimes.co.uk/article/a243ac9c-a7d0-11ed-999f-64d8c8a46b78?shareToken=6774e68b5dfb35e0f79de017c7d41dcc… 1/
Bryson, 31, claims to have known she was a woman since she was four. Does that mean she was a woman when she raped her victims? Rayner looks puzzled.
“Well, I don’t know. Because I don’t know what’s inside that person’s head.” 8/
I agree, it is impossible for anyone to know. But according to the principle of self-ID, what’s inside someone’s head should determine their legal right to access female-only spaces. 9/
…“Yeah, sure, I mean …” She looks cross & flustered. “It doesn’t matter whether it was a penis or some implementation.” I think Bryson’s victims would say her penis played an important part in her crimes. Does the phrase “her penis” even make any sense? 12/
https://twitter.com/Scot_Feminists/status/1627059752118407168?s=20
Labour are going to be every bit as disastrous as the Conservatives have been.
One SNP MP remarked of Sturgeon’s government: “They couldn’t deliver a pizza. If they were asked to deliver a pizza they would set up a working group, would have a public consultation, then an over-engineered plan. The pizza would be square instead of round, would cost twice as much as originally thought and take three time as long to make.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/nicola-sturgeon-resignation-future-snp-scottish-independence-questions-26sn0rrk9
Would they put pineapple on it?
3% of the Scottish electorate believe Stuart Lewis would do a good job as First Minister. But twice as many believe he would do a bad job as FM.
Stuart Lewis is a fictional name in the survey.😂
#StuartLewis4FM
https://twitter.com/jamesrwithers/status/1626652144337096707?s=46&t=eNsBLMSATSn17GYQMqF1Tw
Criminally underrated player.
For value bets, I'd wait for the seats bands to be offered and go for the extreme ends. That's where the value will be.
Edit: I see India have won already. This Australian side is poor.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/scotland-after-nicola-sturgeon-divided-uncertain-and-bereft-of-political-heavyweights-0f5pl9dck
#EmptyShelves
Apparently “supply issues”
#BrexitBritain
Also British greenhouses cannot afford to put on the heating
#ToryCostOfLivingCrisis
https://twitter.com/jonnyfawr/status/1626632317056712710?s=46&t=eNsBLMSATSn17GYQMqF1Tw
Looks pretty likely to me. One side effect is that half the Lab MPs will be in their first term. It will be a very green government, with few survivors from the last Labour government. Not that experience of government is everything, after all Truss, Kwarteng, Sunak etc are running a shitshow and have been in government on and off for years.
Otherwise am I right in thinking all of the Shadow Cabinet are novices to government and many of them weren't even in Parliament in 2010?
Not that that's radically different from 2010, where the only surviving cabinet ministers were Hague and Clarke, 1997, where it was Cunningham (and Beckett as a junior minister) or 1964 where Wilson and the unique Patrick Gordon Walker were the only former Cabinet ministers at the top table.
Simple.
I have now finished "Spare" and it is an interesting listen/read. There is a degree of estrangement obviously, but from Harry's description of Will and Charles, he sees them as much trapped by the institution as he was, with little autonomy. On a personal level he is fond of them.
Supposedly, one woman complained about the lack of fresh produce and was told by an employee that it was due to bad weather affecting crops. The employee then helpfully added that that’s what management had told them to say, but really it’s because of Brexit.
If it is due to crop shortages, they don’t seem to have affected yields in the EU.
Sturgeon’s tactic was route one all the time. If plan A didn’t work, switch to plan A but harder this time. For all her other qualities, the outgoing first minister is neither a deep thinker nor someone emotionally equipped to understand her opponents. Convinced of her own righteousness and armour-plated by her faith in destiny, she never paused to consider how she might look to those not already aboard the nationalist hype-train. The limitations of this approach should surely be apparent by now.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sturgeon-left-at-a-loss-by-union-s-resilience-5p9zl9vwk
🏴Scottish History Quiz🏴
Who said:
"The trouble with Scotland is that it's full of Scots?"
A) Edward Longshanks in Braveheart?
https://twitter.com/okbiology/status/1322737092246593536?s=46&t=JRrTzS44JSqhTJWuAKv38g
And Good Morning!
He will just have to find a detached house in Surrey
“February 18
Leon
ON topic, I wonder if - counter-intuitively - we might see the SNP stabilize in the polls, or even benefit from a slightly uptick
The reason? Patriotic Scots will clamour to the defense of THE patriotic Scotch party as everyone else - especially the Hunnish yoons - scoffs at Sturgeon’s departure and her failure on Indy. For the same reason we might see an uptick in Yes
it’s the same paradoxical psychology which saw a surge to the Nats after Scotland voted NO
However, unlike that earlier paradoxical uplift, I don’t expect this one to last. Sturgeon’s departure IS a blow, and she was a unifying figure in what is a deeply divided party, I can’t see any of the aspiring candidates matching her ability in this way - Forbes is too right wing and Wee Free, Robertson is too boring and tainted, etc
There will surely be tartan blood on the carpet. So the Nats will eventually suffer for this, and the YES vote might enter a gentle but less spectacular decline “
By that measure I think even a Labour majority of 50 or 60 would feel like a landslide even if it wouldn’t be in majority terms.
Compared to Starmer, whose speeches make watching paint dry exciting, Sunak is a perfectly good speaker
https://twitter.com/hoodwink795/status/1626628106864689169?s=46&t=JRrTzS44JSqhTJWuAKv38g
Both May and Boris absolutely should feel the right to do so as both are still MPs. Any interventions should be judged on merit.
Osborne was never leader so why shouldn't he become a pundit?
In recent* years Blair, Hague, Cameron, Miliband, May and Johnson were all good orators. Brown, Howard, Corbyn, Starmer and Sunak mediocre. Truss and IDS awful. Kinnock was world class.
Corbyn was overrated as a speaker. His fans loved him but I always felt his oratory was awkward and disjointed.
*as I get older “recent” takes on a more extended meaning.
That is before the Labour attack machine lays into Kate Forbes as an anti abortion member of an anti homosexual marriage church, if as is likely she succeeds Sturgeon as FM
The reality is there has to be a border somewhere after we decided we didn't want frictionless trading terms and freedom of movement with the EU. So that border has to be a) in the Irish Sea, which is very bad or b) at Dundalk and two miles West of Derry which is very, very bad.
I am disappointed that when Mr Johnson wrote himself two cost- benefit analyses of what Brexit would mean, he omitted to consider putting a border either in the North Channel or along the A1 to Dublin would be problematic.
The fact that the corpulent one-trick pony believes for the third time he can fell a Conservative Prime Minister using the same page in his playbook, and the reality is that he might actually succeed, beggars belief.
Yes. Fine. Now let's talk details. Because under any executive summary needs to be a fuckton of detail which can be called up for justification. And they simply don't know. Or in reality they do know but won't talk about it.
When you are selling romance, a warm fuzzy idea, the detail spoils it. What one person might prefer is bad to another. So they say nothing. And a big leap in the dark off a cliff is a Bad Idea. As Brexit demonstrated.
Boris was more amusing than great speaker
Marco Biagi, who voted for gay marriage while an MSP, said Forbes’s past refusal to say she supported the policy was “enough” for him to oppose any leadership pitch from the Finance Secretary.
Forbes made a comment against abortion at an event in 2018 and repeatedly evaded questions on her stance on equal marriage during a podcast interview with The Guardian in 2020.
https://www.thenational.scot/news/23331359.kate-forbes-slammed-past-lgbt-rights-comments-ex-snp-minister/
I also enjoy Ravey Mikey Govey. He has given some brilliant dispatch box performances, albeit coked off his tits.
Another example is the anger toward Truss and the 'Growth Group', who have actually been very loyal, just formed a caucus and suggested pro-growth policies to the Chancellor and PM. By contrast, the Sunakites spent the Truss era constantly briefing the papers about how deluded, mad, and awful Truss was, the dreadful fractious state of the party etc. I didn't see them gathering a dossier of 'pro-tax' (or whatever they're into) policies and trying to make their case to Kwasi. But apparently they're the better behaved ones.
Reasons for thinking it's not likely:
- none of the parties inspire
- residual distrust of Labour and what it stands for, particularly on cultural issues
- While Brexit has faded as an issue, it is still an issue for some
The best chance of a meltdown bet coming off is a historically very low turnout election with Labour eking out a large number of fairly narrow wins and the LDs expanding the map.
If florid language and outrageous pomposity is your bag well fair enough, but on the flip side we have Peppa Pig.