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Sunak’s Election Schedule: When will he fight for his job? – politicalbetting.com
Sunak’s Election Schedule: When will he fight for his job? – politicalbetting.com
The people have spoken, at least those who vote at local elections. And the basic message is clear: ‘Tories out’. With rare exceptions, the Tories got battered up and down England, and while Labour aren’t at the heights they hit in the mid-90s the Tories are at the same depths. Two questions arise. When will we get an election? And will Rishi Sunak fight it?
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https://boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk/2023-review/
There seems to be two main contenders:
- Rhun Ap Iorwerth - MS for Ynys Mon - very strong media presence (ex BBC presenter) - strong support among traditionalist wing
- Delyth Jewell - regional MS for South Wales East - she is a rising star with strong support among Indy supporters
Rhun should start as favourite but he has said that he wants to stand down as MS and become a MP in UK parliament instead (presumably to work on his media presence) - in which case he can not stand for Leader (who has to be in Senedd).
A public leadership contest would give Plaid some free publicity - but I suspect this will be agreed behind closed doors to avoid any negative bickering.
My money will be on Delyth.
Probably Oct 2024 with a smaller chance of May 2024 to coincide with the local elections or June 2024 following any reasonable result for CON in those local elections.
Barring unreasonably unforeseen events it will be Rishi, Keir and Ed leading the major parties into the election.
2025 is out. So is this year.
So when in 2024?
The 'reeking of fear' point is an important one. It's possible to lose the campaign before it has even begun. John Major in 1997 not only delayed until the last minute, he also ensured the longest campaign in memory. It smacked of desperation and the newspapers smelled the fear from the outset.
Labour will win the election because the anti-tory vote is extremely strong. In the actual vote (locals) and opinion polls Lib-Lab are polling 55%. The Conservatives are in the 20's.
What has changed since 1997 is that people like me are much more savvy about tactical voting and we're also a lot more angry with the Conservatives. We will do anything to boot them out. I voted for 3 LibDems last week and we turned the council yellow. At the GE I will vote Labour in a Lab-Con marginal.
And remember, Omnisis who last polled the Labour lead at 21% also correctly called the local election NEV lead at 9%.
It's over for the tories. It's a question of when, not if.
The reason it will probably be before the clocks go back is not taking us back to a bygone era, it's because a lot of people get pretty depressed about the shortening days and darker afternoons. It's psychological. Dec 2019 was a one-off re. 'Get Brexit Done'.
Sunak, assuming it's him, won't want to look frit. So I don't rule out summer '24 either.
If he does stand, I think he will win very easily. A short term appointment by a capable media performer with a functioning brain and a moderate platform would be a refreshing change for the party and might just allow it to exploit Tory weaknesses in West Wales, which is what they need right now if they’re not to be reduced to a rump of two seats.
I think that the current odds reflect these uncertainties and that this is not as clear example of mispricing as @Quincel suggests.
Nice to have something on the betting for once.
St Ives in Cornwall stayed blue 2015-19 precisely because there was no tactical voting - Labour voters left A George high and dry
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/08/tactical-voting-helped-rescue-britain-in-1997-we-can-do-it-again
But will Plaid act like grownups or will the bickering factions (Leanne) make too much noise....
It would be interesting to see polling. Most voters tend to respond that they prefer majority government to coalition (because they’ve been taught by the press that’s the right answer) but I can’t see Lib-Lab being particularly unpopular. It would certainly suit me.
Thing is I’m torn between the attractions of a Lib-Lab pact and the implication that this would mean a relatively strong Tory showing at the election that they could bounce back from.
Incidentally where would Rhun stand if he went for Westminster? Presumably Ynys Môn but it would be a 'brave' move politically even in the current Tory doldrums.
My sense was he doesn't fancy being leader of opposition and so would probably resign in that case...
I like the talk of coalitions because I think it helps Labour, who will win a thumping majority.
As likely as not it’ll lead to a rightward lurch and the Cons becoming sort of Diet UKIP for a bit. If I could bet on them proposing reintroduction of capital punishment, I would.
What will happen is that all the boiling rage in the party will burst to the surface. There will be a massive internecine civil war.
The roots of that go back several years and people like JRM will be in the firing line.
After the bloodletting, what then? Will the Conservative party split, as it has threatened? Will they continue with their unelectable lurch to the right, as I suspect? Or will they return to one nation toryism, which I hope?
After all, what is thrown at LibDems is not that they made a coalition at all, but that they propped up the Tories. Having had a coalition with both major parties in living memory is more solution, than problem redoubled.
1) The rise of English immigration to the island since 2019, looking for cheap housing in a lovely location with decent (well, compared to most of West Wales) transport links;
2) Ynys Môn last unseated a sitting MP in 1950.
As against that, he undoubtedly does have a personal vote and one of the English immigrants in question is the MP who by all accounts is a bit of a muppet as well.
No-one wants to campaign in the dark, the clocks going back is a negatively symbolic time for many, and the heating won’t be on yet, so fuel bills not coming in.
2019 was a one-off, as that Parliament had broken down and was incapable of doing anything.
Which means Sunak will spend the summer (possibly autumn) working on a pivot - how to move away from failed promises onto things that are both deliverable and will fire up what is left of the pro-Golliwog vote.
What they are, how well they rate with the public, how they actually measure against them - all of these are key to when the election actually comes. Whilst I agree with the "surely it will be before the end of BST 2024" arguments the potential for a wild card / black swan play remains high. Desperate - and lets not forget monumentally stupid - Tory MPs about to be dumped onto the dole may force other options...
I’ve just been listening to some interesting discussion about Tucker. It appears that Fox has him in handcuffs, such that he can’t work for anyone else until January 2025, are still paying him his salary, and intend to throw a lot of lawyers at keeping him under their contract but with no show. There’s a rumour that the pulling of his show, was a condition of the agreement between Fox and Dominion.
If he’s not allowed to sign for another media company, or set up his own on Youtube, then just about the only platform he has left is his personal Twitter account. So he approached Musk, and he’s going to be the pilot user for Twitter’s attempts to monetise video on the platform. Musk will likely cover his production costs, and give him the lion’s share of the advertising revenue for the next two years. Apparently there’s no contract in place, because Carlson can’t sign one, just the Twitter terms of service that will apply to everyone who wants to use the new video platform.
Tucker’s Twitter account has 7m followers. His Tweet from last night now has 63m views in nine hours, and the video 10m views.
https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1656037032538390530
Elon’s reply to Tucker has 21m views
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1656079504778092544
More likely is a woe is me LE reaction if those elections are standalone and the depressing effect that may have on any GE called later..
Calling the GE on the day of the locals would avoid that particular bout of fallout. To me, that's the best argument to be made for May.
Not that anyone progressive wanted to give them a fair hearing at the time - because they also provided succour to a lot of terrible legislation. LDs voted more loyally for shit Tory bills than Tory MPs did. Steve Webb heavily linking himself to Lansley's terrible NHS Destruction bill.
Clegg especially seemed enamoured with his Dave bromance, unwilling to maintain a suitable distance of break it off until he last minute. More visible and public arguments, having rebellions against shit bills like Tory MPs, making a principled stand here and there - all would have made both an immediate difference to the 2015 near ELE and their reputation afterwards.
I expect any future coalition to be run very differently.
On the subject of GE date, I do not rule out August 2024. Whilst this would be remarkably unusual, there are two potentially huge advantages to the Tories.
1. The left leaning student population of cities such as Bristol will be absent. Indeed the new freshers year would most likely not even be registered in their university town.
2. Parents of school aged children will possibly be abroad on holiday, whereas more right leaning older / retired voters avoid August holidays due to increased costs.
Question is whether or not Sunak is a sufficiently unconventional thinker to take this risk.
But the "kick out the rascals" aspect of political culture is stronger now, so I doubt Sunak would be thanked for wanting to hang around.
The bigger question is this- if not in government, what are the Conservatives for, exactly?
ETA: Ah, Tory. My mistake. Not enough coffee yet.
1) There was an expectation of an imminent further election which meant nobody wanted to be caught in the middle of a divisive leadership contest (this incidentally also postponed the removal of Home for a few months in 1964-65);
2) There was at that time no mechanism for ejecting a leader, and Heath would not resign. In fact, he never did officially resign, instead asking Home to oversee a revision of the rules and then agreeing to hold an election under the new rules. Which he duly lost.
The next locals could also end up looking really bad for the Tories given how well they did, relatively speaking, when the same councils and mayoralities were last fought. If there is some indication of progress by next May, the smart move might be to go for broke on the back of a tax cutting budget before a locals defeat narrative, and further talk of tactical voting, sets in. It would give the troops hope. After all, the later Sunak goes, the stronger the message is, internally as well as externally, that he thinks the Tories will lose.
Does anyone know why and how the courts ever came to assume that "computer data is correct"? It seems like a strange thing for anyone to have ever believed in the first place, given how easy it is for bugs to be present in computer code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal#Aftermath
"Call for reform on digital evidence
In May 2021, the British Computer Society (the official body for IT professionals in the UK) called for reconsideration of courts' default presumption that computer data is correct.[342][343]
The presumption that computer evidence is correct is based on a naïve and simplistic understanding of software systems. Large systems are complex and lay people cannot discern whether these systems are reliable or be confident that they can spot errors as they happen. It is difficult even for experts to judge the reliability of systems or detect any but the simplest errors.[344]"
October likely still sees most of the students voting in their ‘home’ constituencies, because of the registration timelines.
Keep posting BTW.
#morelike
- avoids a poor LE result ahead of an election
- Doesn’t disrupt holidays
- Demonstrates a lack of desperation
- 2 months after a big tax giveaway budget
- economy sufficiently recovered and inflation sufficiently down. Leave too long and more could go wrong
Mr. Sandpit, leaving aside the legal aspects etc it'll be interesting to see how Twitter (and Tucker's) video attempts go.
YouTube has been the undisputed king of that for a long time. Twitch has outdone it on live-streaming, though that's also something YouTube offers. Microsoft's streaming effort Mixer[sp] failed fairly quickly (they pulled the plug, after a poor strategy of throwing huge sums at big names like the Fortnite chap whose name escapes me instead of trying to foster a healthy mid-tier of streamers).
Sunak’s five pledges need to have been seen to be successful, and the tax cuts need to be both substantial and actually in people’s pockets, before the vote.
Much also depends on what this winter’s energy bills look like, so need to keep up the efforts in Ukraine.
Having said that an activist down here did say the other night that she had been getting the question on the doorsteps. Not so much recently but back in the early spring.
As I've mentioned before, this is where I believe the biggest threat from AI lies: not in the fact that AI would do something terrible, but that people will 'trust' obviously faulty output *because* it came from an AI. "If the computer says it, it must be correct..."
I was in coalition myself with the Tories on the council for the first four years, and you do have to play hard ball in an arrangement like that. The accusation most commonly thrown at our administation by Labour wasn't that we were propping up the Tories, but that the LibDems were really running the council, which always made me smile, even though it wasn't really true. But being seen to stand up to pressure from the larger party is important, whereas the inexperienced LibDem ministers were a little too keen to be loyal, in public, even though most of them achieved (and blocked) a fair bit in private.
Of course it's more difficult at national level, because of the differences in media focus and attitude, having more voters who are actually paying attention, and the differences between parliamentary government (where parliament's ability to direct the executive is actually pretty limited, as we saw during the May era) and the council executive model.
Literally the only argument in favour of coalition is the carrot of ministerial posts.
Which would lay them open to the later accusation of ambition over principle (exemplified by Clegg).
A government which requires LibDem support implies the likelihood of electoral reversal at the subsequent election. Maintaining a degree of independence would be simple self preservation - and also correct as a matter of principle.
At the time, this was possibly a basically correct, if simplistic view, that became established by case law. The problem was that it very rapidly became completely out of touch with reality as systems became more complex than “a box that can do nothing more than process a pile of punched cards that represent a set of bank accounts”.
By the time the PO Horizon system was implemented it was a ludicrously out of touch principle. But the legal system can be very hard to shift, even when it’s completely wrong: Judges hate overturning principles on which previous cases have been decided, even if they are manifestly unfair & will often refuse to do so no matter how convincing the evidence.
See also astrology.
We will see.
As an aside, it now gives Fox a strong incentive to brief and leak against Carlson.
And they'll have plenty of material.
Compare with Labour: when they've stuck with an election loser e.g. Kinnock, Corbyn), they've mostly lost again (Wilson being the only exception?).
Edit: the same is true, of course, of the other Unionist parties - Slab and, indeed, the Tories.
But there are as many people who argue that the LibDems should have thrown themselves more wholeheartedly into selling the government, and the mistake was trying to be seen as internal critics. I think this is wrong - and the fact that the junior partner always suffers from coalitions around the world suggests that there may not actually be a way to avoid the damage?
There simply wasn't a majority to be had for a rainbow coalition. It would have been hugely unstable, with endless bickering until it rapidly fell over and another GE followed which surely the Tories would have won comfortably. Same result had the Tories tried to do it alone for a few months.
Forming a stable government with the Tories was the only game in town for Clegg. Whilst C&S had its supporters, I understand the argument that having argued for years about other parties than the big two it would be daft to pass up the opportunity once given. So coalition wasn't crazy, only the way they went about it.
I think October 2024. The May locals will be forgotten by then.
I think the student anti-tory vote in term time has less of an effect than is often claimed. Two examples that I know well: Bristol West might just possibly switch back to LD without the student vote, but even if it does that doesn't help the tories. Exeter has remained labour since 1997 and was considered a safe seat even in GE 2019, if the tories gain Exeter out of term time then they will comfortably win a national majority. I expect that many Constituencies with a high student population will have a similar story. OIn the other hand an election out of university term times means that the student population is much more evenly spread out across the country, and Sunak probably doesn't want even more non-tory voters in the Red-Wall and more marginal home county constituencies.
The narrative of 'sold out their principles for power' (despite the inherent lack of logic in that assertion) had taken hold though, and tuition fees strapped a jetpack on it.
Tony Blair won three general elections with majorities of 179, 167 and 66.
The last non-Tory other than Blair to win two or more majorities of more than 10 seats was William E. Gladstone, who was first elected Liberal leader in the House of Commons in 1865.
That's how dominant they have been since the 1867 Reform Act.
If in national government a difference had emerged between a LibDem minister and their Tory counterpart, it would have dominated media coverage for ages, with all manner of other politicians being repeatedly asked about it and all manner of journos looking to get a bit of career advancement on the back of 'uncovering' some new angle or tempting some junior minister into saying something dumb. And all the time the opposition would be making hay and going on about "chaos" and "division".
Which is a problem for any government, coalition or not - the media pressure to try and wedge the tiniest of internal differences and hence the huge pressure on senior politicians to tow the party line and keep their own thoughts to themselves are not good for our democracy IMHO.
A number of councils that vetoed the expansion of cost of living support such as food banks and made cuts to public services spent tens of thousands of pounds on coronation celebrations over the weekend - despite polls showing most Brits were not interested in the ceremony.
Conservative-run Bromley council, which spent £50,000 on the coronation, refused to fund so-called "warm banks" during the winter, saying the £2,500 cost per centre "isn’t a good use" of money.
According to Open Democracy, the council said it would be taking the money to fund the coronation celebrations from its community fund, which is traditionally used to give grants to charities.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/council-facing-bankruptcy-spent-£50k-on-coronation-celebrations-124845953.html
If we do any more coronations then Royals should pay for it themselves, or a special tax on monarchists should be applied.
Slightly later than the period I studied was Isaac Newton. His, to modern eyes, somewhat, shall we say, esoteric beliefs are regarded as a sideshow and embarrassment to modern science. But he really really believed in them. They were far more important to him than his lasting legacy.
So- what has to happen for Conservatives to be in a position that looks like winning, and how likely is that to happen?
As the LDs are only ever going to get into government as part of a coalition, they really should have been sharper, when given the chance.
I was planning on doing a piece along these lines on Sunday.
I'm now convinced that May or July 2024 will be when the next GE will be held.
Normally I'd say June 2024 but that will clash with Euro 2024 and bandwidth issues.
If Sunak goes long to October/November then there's the risk that the US Presidential election could dominate.
The last thing Sunak needs is Trump endorsing the Tories.
Or RDS saying the Tories should listen to the ghastly and ludicrous popinjay that Kemi Badenoch.
A Trump endorsement will be worth at least 5% to the Tory opponents.