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The next government – politicalbetting.com
The next government – politicalbetting.com
Smarkets have this market up on the type of government formed after the next election. For those who still have doubts about if Starmer will win a majority given the level of gains he needs to win a majority. There may well be some value in here, though I would advise reading the terms and conditions.
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My week in Surrey has been lovely. I've been staying with my friend, who has never voted anything other than Conservative.
We didn't need to have any arguments because she had nothing good to say about them. For the first time in her life 'as things currently stand she would not vote Conservative.'
It's an anecdote, of course, and the polls tell us that the Party is still polling in the high 20's. But if they are losing people like her then this is going to be worse than 1997.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s deep-red district is part of the Biden administration’s best bet for keeping the president’s signature climate law in place.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/11/marjorie-taylor-greene-district-climate-biden-00104848
The conditions are FAR worse than 1997 when, despite Black Wednesday five years previously, the economy was in good shape.
This time the Conservatives have trashed their brand AND presided over increasing financial turmoil. I do agree with that article in that once you touch people's homes, even if only by implied threat, you're in deep trouble.
The state of things.
And so it was that, in July 2023, Angus Brendan MacNeil did the nation an unusual, rare, service and blurted out a truth of the sort that is universally recognised but generally left unspoken: the SNP currently has no idea about how it may advance the cause of Scottish independence.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/angus-brendan-macneil-has-inadvertantly-done-the-nationa-service-6xrjnjcsv
The only thing the Conservatives have going for them at the moment is that Starmer has no charisma or convinving answers to the country's problems. That might just be enough to prevent complete calamity.
The UK economy shrank by 0.1% in May, partly down to the extra bank holiday for the King's Coronation.
This followed growth of 0.2% in April, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.
The manufacturing and construction sectors fell in May as some industries were hit by there being one fewer working day than normal.
It comes as the cost of living and rising interest rates continue to put pressure on households and businesses.
The ONS said the UK economy had shown "no growth" for the three months to May.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66179998
The Sun claims tonight it "never alleged criminality" and blames other media for "reading too much" into its reporting. Like yesterday's Sun story (still on website) saying the BBC figure "could be charged by cops & face years in prison."
https://twitter.com/arusbridger/status/1679227488155598848/photo/2
To say they're disingenuous would be extremely generous. And this is not an organisation which deserves generosity.
EXC: IPSA announce investigation into the Tory Northern Research Group after Sky News Westminster Accounts investigation into public money payments
With
@TomLarkinSky
@EdClowes
@_BvdM
Read: https://news.sky.com/story/westminster-accounts-powerful-group-of-tory-mps-scrutinised-by-expenses-watchdog-after-sky-news-investigation-12919851
This is a statement by IPSA
https://twitter.com/SamCoatesSky/status/1679381866900606983?s=20
My tory friend said that although she doesn't particularly like Rachel Reeves she thinks Keir Starmer may be good. 'He's dull and steady and perhaps that's just what we need after everything.'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/66174418
Women's football wibble:
"On proposals to provide one source of funding from levelling FA Cup prize money across the men's and women's game, she added: "I'd hope there would not be a backlash.
"There are so many issues and women's sport has struggled for so long I'd hope there'd be an understanding but with anything there'll always be someone who will challenge it.
"I could have said equalise prize money right now but that would have taken down the pyramid of men's football. We should absolutely be going for equal prize money [in the future] from the FA Cup and the FA should be putting a timescale on that.""
Prize money is a consequence of revenue and income generated. It's not given to the men because they're men, but because men's football is a massive sport. And while women's football has grown a lot lately, it's nowhere near in the same league. When women can generate the same revenue, they'll deserve the same prize money. When they generate more than the men, they'll deserve more prize money than the men.
That's interesting.
Also: why the hell do we have to give the goddamn Sun the benefit of the doubt here? Their reputation is trash. They are one of the most homophobic publications in the UK, they themselves published sexual photos of 16 year olds in the last decade, they clearly are not good actors here. So why all the bending backwards to treat them like a respectable journalistic institution?
It's clear what happened - BBC presenter has affairs (we still don't know if it was with his wife's knowledge or not) and likely paid the people he had affairs with, either because they were sex workers or because he wanted his name kept out of the press. He seemed to bit cringey and needy, and seems to have been pretty angry when one of these people suggested they could out him (a typical reaction, if still potentially not a great one), but everyone seems to have been a consenting adult. The Sun, finding out about this story and using the framing of the parents of one of the people the BBC presenter had an affair with, specifically conflated the presenter first meeting this young person at 17 with the exchange of potentially sexual pictures, and then dug around for any other misdeeds to make that seem like a reasonable story to run. And over a week of trying to deal with the story, much of the public discourse is about how this BBC presenter was a paedo, how the BBC is a hive of child abusers, and how the BBC should be burnt to the ground.
In any reasonable country this would put the Sun out of business - but I doubt anything will happen to it. Hell, barely any politicians and only a few journalists have actively said that the Sun have some serious explaining to do. And the Sun will do it again. Whether it was to just sell papers, or if those people who have been made so cynical by the right wing press' relationships with politicians are correct that this was a dead cat to cover up bad stories for Johnson or whoever, the Sun will do all this again and continue to make money off of it and people will shake their heads and say how sad it is and our politicians will do nothing because one old rich guy can command so much of what print media says about you that it is too politically harmful to do anything about it. It's obscene.
That’s what I really want to know.
Had their reporting been genuine, it could indeed have been a criminal offence that could lead to prison.
Since the Police have investigated and found no crime was committed, that doesn't question what the expert says, it questions the reporting that Edwards allegedly "paid child for sex photos".
Why would they be doing that, when the police have said, explicitly, that there is no evidence of criminality ?
https://www.thefa.com/competitions/thefacup/prize-fund
The FA Prize Fund comes mostly from sales of TV rights to the competition.
Most reading most of us do most of the time isn't that careful- I'm thinking lawyers reading a document or scientists reading an academic paper. Careful reading isn't morally better, but it is a different thing.
Questions are whether the Frankie Howerd/Humphrey Lyttleton "I didn't say the bad thing and you have a filthy mind if you think I did" defence holds up in an actual court or the court of public opinion.
I can see them lose a stack of seats, but not as many as dropping to just 100. Yes of course it's possible, it just feels extraordinary unlikely. No matter how egregiously unpopular and awful they are - and they truly are - unless the alternative clearly has a plan (as Tony Blair did) I just can't see it happening on that scale
Why senior politicians are still paying court to the old slimeball is beyond me.
Page 3 photos of 16 year olds were legal at the time it was done, the law has subsequently changed.
Of all the things to criticise the Sun for, its history with Page 3 is round about the bottom of the list.
From watching the BBC’s own reporting on the subject, including notes that two employees have come forward with details of incidents of sexual harrasment, it’s pretty clear that it was common knowledge within the media industry that this guy was a bit of a wrong’un, and was being protected by the higher echelons at the Corporation.
No amount of weasel words gets out of that. They alleged a crime, when none was committed. They've crossed the line.
The only defence I think they could have is if they had a genuine good faith reason to report the alleged lawbreaking, eg the parents statement, but for them to now pretend no crime was alleged is just patently false.
Given that it's now claiming there was never any question if its alleging criminality, the justification for the prominence of the story is effectively public morality.
Questioning its status as an arbiter of any such thing seems fairly reasonable to me.
The men under 21s is the second highest quality level of international football played and yet there would be on the same day one match roundup in the guardian compared to a number of articles on Women’s football. The players involved in the Men under 21s were virtually all premier league players so not just the kids at a low quality.
There would have been a shitstorm of epic proportions if a women’s senior tournament had not been on UK terrestrial tv.
The media push every large crowd at a women’s match but fail to add that the tickets are sold very cheaply and the usual crowds are lower than the second tier of men’s football.
The Women’s game also piggybacks off the men’s game by mirroring the men’s teams and the resources developed by those teams - so for example Liverpool just bought back their old Melwood training ground for their women’s team and juniors to train at. If Doncaster Belles hadn’t been forced out by money then there is no way they could generate the revenue to buy a major training base.
So when supporters of the women’s game start demanding equal pay to men they need to think about it and make their game attractive enough, high enough quality and lucrative enough to justify it - if it is as great as it’s pushers insist then they should have no problem selling tickets at a higher price and filling grounds to the same level as the men’s game.
They have an opportunity to do this - change their season dates, create their own competitions and formats and make it a standalone attraction but they seem to want the comfort of association with the men’s game when it’s good for them but not accept their limitations finanacially as lower tier teams and leagues in the men’s do.
I have been presuming that people read these together and took away the notion that images had been involved from the time the "child" was 17. However, apparently the Sun "updated" the story at some point, and I'm not sure whether what I saw was the original.
I agree on the high on its own supply comment too, which is encouraged by the media giving it more coverage than support would suggest is reasonable on its own (I get why they start with men's football, then women's, then move to other sports, but women's football on its own is well behind many other sports).
So each women's match in a grand slam can be over in about an hour, while a men's match can take 5 hours and often spill into a second day.
Women's grand slam tennis should be best of 5 sets IMHO.
If I just said "I know a 17 yo who says they sold pictures to @BartholomewRoberts, so they are a nonce" is that a reasonable statement to suggest is believable based on that statement alone? The Sun never claimed to see any evidence, just the testimony of the mother and step dad. The young person disagreed with the framing and contacted the Sun to say so - the Sun didn't even just put that at the end of their story as a disclaimer (likely because if they did it would be obvious what a non front page story this was).
Compare that to the Beeb's follow up report on the second individual; they spoke directly to them, disclosed they had directly seen the messages - both from the individual and the BBC presenter involved - they made clear that the individual was in their early 20s when anything happened and that they met through a dating app, so made clear everything was part of what started as a consensual adult relationship.
If the conversation was "should a 50-60 year old BBC presenter be paying for relationships with 20 somethings" the Sun would still have had a story, but that's not what they made it. They deliberately conflated the "met at 17" with the "sharing of images" - and then almost immediately walked that back when it became clear that those things didn't happen at the same time.
Mostly, they kept a decent cordon sanitaire between the key phrases. Because tabloid papers have mastered the art of maximising the sizzle from a small sausage.
They didn't just allege any old crime. They branded him a nonce.
Being from Merseyside, I've never read the Sun in my life, but from the quotes I've read shared here they specifically alleged in a single sentence that the images were sent "since 17".
That literally means that it happened at 17. If it started at 20, then "since 17" is just plain false, not inferable.
1. Basic journalism ethics - do not knowingly print lies. PE regularly digs into topics which leave it accused of lying, but I am very clear their team never actively print something they know is false. As the S*n just did
2. Basic defamation laws. If a media outlet libels you, sue them. I hope Edwards does so to the S*n and they go the way of News of the World. PE is regularly threatened with being sued - most recently by Ben Houchen International Airport and Simon Ding Dong Clarke for their ongoing expose into the Teesport scandal. And yet no litigation follows which suggests the gobshite twins know they would lose.
The more accurate comparison is outside of grand slams where the LTA and WTA play separate events where there are different levels of prize money related to different levels of interest and therefore ticket sale revenue and broadcasting revenue.
Note the repeated use of the word child in all of their articles. This has been investigated by the polis and found not to be true. The supposed victim told them it wasn't true before they published, and yet there we are "paid child for sex images". They tried to portray him as a paedophile. Knowing he wasn't.
Goodness only knows how that would work in the post match interviews...
The BBC could cut Edwards loose because of his behaviour or support him through a substantial mental health crisis. That is a choice for them as the organisation that pays for him.
The Sun had a double agenda here, damage the BBC (the BBC seem to be doing quite well at that without any assistance) and take down a (not my) national treasure celebrity. It looks to me like the Sun blew it's own doors off whilst aiming at Edwards. I hope someone sues the salacious barstewards for every last Australian cent.
Edwards would have to prove innuendo on the part of the Sun (ie people reading the story would guess that they were referring to Edwards.) The Sun might well have a public interest defence (if it were truly the case that an eminent man were paying an addict for sexual images); and Edwards might be in danger of being awarded only nominal damages, given his current reputation, even if he won his case.
He represents that proportion of customary Tory voters who are not enamoured with the current party (far from it) but look upon voting Tory as an act of duty, akin to standing up for the national anthem, bowing one's head when at prayer, etc. etc.
There will truly be a rock-bottom level of support the Tories cannot fall under.
The choice of presenters for the next election night on the Beeb will be between Jon Sopel, Jeremy Vine and Laura Kuennsberg.
Dismissed for an act within the bounds of the law that has no direct impact on the workplace seems like an unhealthy precedent.
Yes, they did punctuate it that way, leaving out a fairly significant inverted comma.
Underneath many others referred to my fellow Welshmen in less than flattering terms...
And that's about how writers write, editors edit, and readers choose what to buy- trying to legislate out all the grey is a mug's game (though I'm sure we could do better than we currently do in the UK.)
There was that hack who lost his job at The Times for making stuff up. Wonder whatever became of him?
As for them not printing his name, they printed enough so that we all knew days before the final big reveal yesterday. Well established in defamation law that you don't actually need to print a name if it is clear who the person is. Especially as they went back for another few days of P1 leads denouncing the BBC.
The election affects us all.
The issue isn't that they used the word child, the issue is it never happened at 17 apparently when they outright claimed that it did.
Plenty of time to train up the next sycophants.
It's another event that should make people think of their own circumstances and their own legal protections.
My constituency of Tewkesbury is a good example. By EC's reckoning, the sitting MP, Laurence Robertson, would just about hold on from Labour in a 100 seat scenario. Locals will tell you however that the real challenge would come from the LDs, who did well at the May elections. There is also a scandal to work on, so I wouldn't be too surprised if he was edged out by the Yellow Peril.
I think there are other seats where the 'swingometer' makes Labour the challenger when it is really the LDs who threaten, albeit at dismal levels of Tory support. Anyway I think that amswers your question.
Btw I should in fairness add that Robertson is a perfectly decent MP. 'Bit lazy' is about the worst that is generally said of him. As for the 'scandal', it seems he may have overindulged in hospitality at the annual bash known as The Cheltenham Festival. That is a sin for which I think clemency would be in ample supply on a forum such as this.
Equally, I don't know that it's ever arisen. So it might be if they had somebody they knew didn't speak English they would have an interpreter handy.