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A 25% swing from Leave puts Remain on 73% and a 46% lead over Leave – politicalbetting.com
A 25% swing from Leave puts Remain on 73% and a 46% lead over Leave – politicalbetting.com
The shift towards remaining in Eurovision has come from both sides of the Brexit debate2016 Remain votersRemain in Eurovision: 43% (+11 from 2019)Leave Eurovision: 7% (-11)2016 Leave votersRemain in Eurovision: 24% (+10)Leave Eurovision: 20% (-14)https://t.co/WiAQaA2iNG
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My specialist subject will be responding to the previous thread.
British Rail was also crap.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
Perhaps organisations tend to become crap when they're effective monopolies.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/apocalypse-never-michael-shellenberger/1134858807?ean=9780063001695
rcs1000, and anyone else interested in the subject, can find much in there about California politics. (I haven't read Shellenberger's book on San Francisco.)
I remember 2019 being bonkers, but I've kinda blotted out how bonkers it was.
In a field with several pretty decent female pop acts (Sweden, Israel, the UK, and Norway and Czechia aren't too bad either,) it's very possible that they all split each others' votes and someone else comes through the middle. That leaves this as Finland's event to lose.
I can understand why TSE mentioned Croatia but they're probably a bit too mental, even for Eurovision. This year's dark horse is the French effort.
How would it differ in prices, sources of income, availability of services, levels of comfort ?
18 months or so out from the next election, it's a brave individual who bets the farm or even a small holding on the next election outcome.
I don't know what's going to happen - I'm not sure the Conservatives can rely on economic improvement to say them, after all, the economy did very well from 1995-97 but it didn't do Major and Clarke much good.
As someone else commented, why should anyone vote Conservative again? The obvious answer is "because Labour would be worse" but that's a view that can be expressed every time and is meaningless primarily because we don't know what a re-elected Conservative Government would do in 2024 any more than we did in 1997.
The truth is there's nothing left - the paucity of ideas is such as to make a vacuum seem crowded. Unlike the Thatcher/Major Government when there was a real sense of accomplishment and transformation - the Britain of 97 was light years away from 79 - this time there is a sense of a lack of accomplishment, a lack of change, a lack of progress - apart from leaving the European Union, what has happened between 2010 and now?
I suppose one could argue Covid-19 was as much a break on Johnson's radicalism as 9/11 was to Blair's but that pre-supposes either had anything radical to offer.
Starmer's problem is he inherits that vacuum and has to make sense of it.
*I'm from South Yorkshire, all the Nottinghamshire teams get called scabs to this day round here, I'm firmly on the side of British coal.
BIB - This is the kind of bitchiness I approve of.
Until now, the response of the government has been to say it would not get involved in the “independent travel decisions of a private citizen who is not a member of the government”.
This weekend, however, a Foreign Office source said: “The government has had a policy on Taiwan which is longstanding and remained unchanged for the entire time Liz Truss was foreign secretary and prime minister.”
Others in government are less willing to bite their tongue: “She seems to have waited until she was neither of those things before trying to change things.”
A close ally of another ex-Tory prime minister said: “She seems to believe she is indestructible, despite having actually been destroyed.”
Some put this down to Truss’s resilience and a lack of interest in being loved. “She’s a political cockroach,” said a semi-admiring former minister, “which does at least mean she will survive the nuclear war that she seems intent on starting.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/liz-truss-and-the-menace-of-the-back-seat-prime-ministers-2dkmrbv37
https://twitter.com/DenesTorteli/status/1657407649686736896
This time another Mi-8 crashed near Volkustichi settlement, Bryansk region. This is the 5th one of the day.
I don't think Johnson would have won a majority without Corbyn, I think the Tories have been going downhill very slowly since Cameron left and since Brexit. Where we are, I believe was always inevitable.
I think Labour will be in for a decade - but they must be more ambitious and be in power for a good amount of time. Let's hope this time they don't fall out as they have done before. There is no reason they cannot do 15 or 20 years in power if they really want to. The Tories will give them a free run for the first term as they seem intent on becoming nuttier than they already are.
Looks like Erdogan demanded @elonmusk censor his political opposition a day ahead of the election and he immediately complied.
Musk is either the world’s most sanctimonious hypocrite, coward and fraud or actually wants to censor the opposition to help Erdogan. Or both.
https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1657400686957547528
I support measures to reduce our use of fossil fuels, and the long-term transition to a renewable future.
But Extinction Rebellion and their ilk are deluded. It's *incredible* what humanity has achieved in the last 10 or 20 years. Solar and wind are now the cheapest power sources. Battery technology is immeasurably improved.
I bought the Tesla Roadster back in 2010. No range. No storage. Terribly slow charging.
Now, I have an electric pickup truck that charges in 30 minutes, and which can take the family, with all our equipment, up to the mountain and back again.
It's extraordinary progress to a renewable future that is being achieved by giving people a better version of their life, not a worse.
The real worry is that an incoming Labour Government has no effective program of reform, is overwhelmed by the scale of the problems it faces, and ends up being turfed out in favour of the aforementioned Tory nutcase at the election after next - which will leave us in an even more dire predicament than we were under Boris Johnson.
I've never minded who runs them - I do think there are unnecessary layers of complexity and the economic model of most of the operators was broken by the pandemic. I am glad to see, about a year after I first suggested it, LNER are considering moving to midweek engineering works rather than upset the lucrative and profitable weekend leisure traffic.
I will confess I travel around London and it may be the services in the north are still suffering from the Harrying by Duke William but overall I find the trains much more comfortable. The timetables have been created with so much redundancy it's almost impossible for them to run late under normal conditions.
Reliable? Yes, pretty much - there can be problems and what they do now is if a train is running late they cut out a number of stops which meant last time I came back from Winchester, I ended up on late running train which cut out stops at Basingstoke, Woking and Clapham Junction which annoyed passengers who wanted those stations but for me I got a straight run back home which helped reduce the late running - we know doing that reduces fines paid by the Train Operators.
I expect the aftermath of the next election to be more 1974 or 2010 or 1979 than 1997, the government will not have a long honeymoon under a charismatic PM as Blair did
Starmer's problem is he probably could turn the clock back to 2010 and, apart from EU membership, nothing would be different.
It's an extreme example but having reflected on it I think that scenario is scarily credible.
Hope so, since that's what I've done.
27% of LDs care a great deal or fair amount about the singing contest, compared to only 23% of Labour voters and just 14% of Conservative voters. Leavers care least, just 13% care a great deal or fair amount about it as opposed to 24% of Remainers who care about Eurovision
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/entertainment/survey-results/daily/2023/05/11/e057e/2
That sums her up rather well.
Boiling the frog on recognising Taiwan starts somewhere & this is as good a place as any.
I think the whole party could end up in serious trouble otherwise.
The new Government can spend the first term blaming everything on the previous Government and your party will be too busy fighting over its own entrails to respond effectively.
So much will depend on the size of the next Conservative Parliamentary Party.
Sunak made a serious error of judgment in prioritising the small boat problem, because he can't do anything useful about it.
The options are all very interesting: Ukrainian air-to-air (but long way from the front lines); Ukrainian SAMs (similar); Ukrainian covert teams with MANPADs (unlikely), or Russian SNAFU as they shot down their own planes. Possibly more as well.
But it does appear as though either someone’s messing with Russia’s IFF, or Ukraine have sneaked some longer range SAMs near the front,
Voters can be brutal, if they don't feel the current government is doing much for them they will swiftly turn on it, no matter how much they disliked the previous one. See the late 1960s and 1970s. Even Ed Miliband also swiftly took some poll leads over Cameron despite the thrashing Brown got a few months earlier. As did Foot over Thatcher as early as 1980.
Blair was fortunate in 1997 inflation and unemployment were low and the economy and wages growing with few strikes and relatively low taxes which sustained his honeymoon.
This was a great line, though.
“She’s a political cockroach,” said a semi-admiring former minister, “which does at least mean she will survive the nuclear war that she seems intent on starting.”
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/may/13/nurses-teachers-student-loan-reforms-biggest-squeeze
I never bloody learn. Is it correct that:
(1) The lengthy waits for each country to declare in turn are just the judges scores, which are 50% only
(2) The public votes magically appear in a massive block right at the end
I can't remember them ever announcing the number of public votes, or how they correlate to points, and I always struggle with estimating those - it's a proportional share of a fixed total of overall points, right?
Plenty of lies ahead
Early in the morning today, Russian kamikaze drones attacked Khmelnytskyy (Ukraine's west)
Reportedly, a Ukrainian ammunition dump was destroyed. At least 21 civilians have been injured
https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1657443786564280322
The Conservative Party merits being set on fire and thrown down a thousand foot mineshaft, immediately followed by a lengthy pour of quick setting cement. This does not mean it's going to happen. Even John Major in 1997 managed about 31% of the vote, and we're dealing with an older electorate and a grey porridge of a Labour Opposition this time around.
Besides, I know I keep coming back to this point ad nauseam, but it's only because I think it's very important: not nearly everyone is suffering from the current socio-economic car crash. There's a large cohort of Boomer homeowners - bought dirt cheap council houses under Thatcher, benefit from older style occupational pensions as well as the triple lock, altogether very comfortable - for whom the Conservatives have delivered in spades. Older Gen-Xers, who also managed to get on the property ladder when it was still fairly easy to do so, are coasting towards their own gold-plated retirements, and are looking forward to receiving both their triple locked pensions and enormous inheritances over the next 10-15 years, will also feel not wholly unsympathetic towards they who made all of this possible.
We also have to remember that the electoral system itself favours the two large parties, because most voters who passionately hate one of the main parties will vote negatively for the other, even if they think it is rubbish, because they view the alternative as even worse. There's a substantial number of Never Labour voters out there, and the polarising effects of Brexit and the Corbyn experiment will have increased their numbers.
We may still be getting polls coming out with outrageous shares like Lab 51, Con 24, but come a GE the likelihood of anything like that is surely remote in the extreme?
So, that's exactly what I expect to happen.
For the sake of both Belarus and Ukraine, let's hope so.
It's just another miserable consequence of our clapped out electoral system, of course. The Conservative Party spans such a broad range of opinion that its two extremes have practically nothing in common bar the rejection of socialism.
If you think your best hope of winning is improving the economy and you still lose, not only have you lost but you've given the incoming Labour Government a strong economy which it can use or abuse but from which it will undoubtedly derive shorter or longer term electoral benefit.
If the economy stagnates or weakens and you lose, Labour will be able to point the finger at you for years (much as some on here do with the Liam Byrne note from 2010) saying the Tories wrecked the economy and Labour had to try and put it right.
A case of Heads they win, Tails you lose ?
Fool.
If the economy stagnates or weakens then once Sunak resigns the new Tory leader of the Opposition will swiftly be able to poor that bucket of shit all over new PM Starmer and Chancellor Reeves' head and will do so.
Remember as I said Labour swiftly had clear poll leads by late 2010. I am not saying the Tories would win the next election but they are certainly more likely to get poll leads than Hague was when the economy continued to boom post 1997
Although the state pension is not, of course, the be all and end all of everything: as with their parents, a lot of these people will benefit from the tail end of final salary pension provision, and many will have had their fat inheritances or be getting them in the near future. If you've a final salary pension becoming payable from 60, and a quarter million already in the bank from your half-share of Mum & Dad's estate, you may not feel any particular motivation or need to work even for that long.
He spoilt his ballot.
I have nothing but contempt for the ERGers and so-called 'Conservative' brexiteers. If they want to damage their own party, fair enough. But the damage they've done to the country is unforgivable.
In previous years, it was fun to give us a kicking. This time we are on the side of the Euro-angels.
This was the position from 1997-99 when Brown continued the spending plans and policies he inherited from Ken Clarke which both maintained economic growth and spiked the Conservative guns completely. The economy continued to prosper and Labour took the benefit.
The one main difference - I doubt Reeves will sign up as avidly as Brown to Jeremy Hunt's spending plan.
It was an industrial dispute - the tanker driver strike - which allowed Hague to momentarily grab a lead in the polls for all the good it did him in 2001 when he returned a result basically as bad as John Major's four years earlier.
Our economic growth and inflation still look more mid 1970s than mid 1990s and our deficit more 2010 than 1997
It seems the Conservatives have lost all discipline after the very bad local election results. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/may/13/tory-anarchy-breaks-out-as-revolt-looms-on-brexit-laws
Croatia top 3/5/10.
Small stakes. I have a terrible betting record for EV, which I fully suspect will continue, tonight.
These people are dangerously deluded. How could they look at five years of Corbynism and go "yes let's copy that please?"
You don't however get credit for the disasters you averted.