"Every police officer in Northern Ireland has data compromised in 'monumental' breach due to human error
The PSNI Assistant Chief Constable admitted the breach was made in "human error" and apologised to colleagues whose data was made public for two and a half to three hours."
Amazingly, some dangerous idiots still want the government to have yet more of our intimate personal data, even though it's obvious they can't keep it safe. Last year Labour were advocating ID cards to control illegal immigration.
... I would regard id cards as a sensible and proportionate measure...
UK 2020s politics is a long stream of illiberal measures designed to burden law-abiding citizens with whatever the fashionable nostrums of the day are. ID cards is a thing that keeps popping up, and it gets knocked down every time.
Not very effectively knocked down then. It's about 1% as scary to me as the surveillance by facial/numberplate recognition/cell phone which goes on 24/7 so if it has any practical value let's do it.
Again, coercing the individual. The question is not whether it is a good idea, but whether it is moral to fine/jail somebody for refusing to carry one. That would be state overkill.
When I lived in Switzerland i was legally obliged to carry my ID card/foreigner permit (carte des etrangers) at all times and if it was requested by the police or an official and I didn’t have it then I was liable to a fine. There was not one second where I felt that it was oppression by the state or an intrusion into my civil liberties.
In fact it was actually great to have one as with it so many activities were quicker - opening a bank account, collecting a parcel, registering with a gov department re tax or similar - because it was an official compulsory ID card that no functionary would refuse to accept as ID.
Sigh.
For the nth time. The problem isn’t the ID card. The problem isn’t the unique identifying code on it. The problem isn’t even the potential use of that unique code as a key on databases.
The problem is that every single time ID cards have been proposed (and he time that they were, briefly, actually implemented), they come with an attempt to link all our personal information together. And link it to biometric data - finger prints, face recognition. etc. and the make it accessible to everyone.
In the last such scheme, they were going to make everything the NHS had on you (for instance) available to council officials investigating fly tipping. When asked why, the response was that segregating data would be difficult and slow things down.
So if your finger print day was stolen, you’d just have to get new finger prints, eh?
It should be noted that personal for Important People (Politicians, senior civil servants, famous people who the government liked) *was* to be segregated. #NU10K
The only saving grace was that such an insane breach of every concept of data security would have gone the way of all such government projects. Collapsed after spending billions. Though in this case it would have got to the data leaking stage
Tbh I'd be in favour of data being given by whoever to stop fly tippers. They're a real blight.
"Every police officer in Northern Ireland has data compromised in 'monumental' breach due to human error
The PSNI Assistant Chief Constable admitted the breach was made in "human error" and apologised to colleagues whose data was made public for two and a half to three hours."
Amazingly, some dangerous idiots still want the government to have yet more of our intimate personal data, even though it's obvious they can't keep it safe. Last year Labour were advocating ID cards to control illegal immigration.
... I would regard id cards as a sensible and proportionate measure...
UK 2020s politics is a long stream of illiberal measures designed to burden law-abiding citizens with whatever the fashionable nostrums of the day are. ID cards is a thing that keeps popping up, and it gets knocked down every time.
Not very effectively knocked down then. It's about 1% as scary to me as the surveillance by facial/numberplate recognition/cell phone which goes on 24/7 so if it has any practical value let's do it.
Again, coercing the individual. The question is not whether it is a good idea, but whether it is moral to fine/jail somebody for refusing to carry one. That would be state overkill.
When I lived in Switzerland i was legally obliged to carry my ID card/foreigner permit (carte des etrangers) at all times and if it was requested by the police or an official and I didn’t have it then I was liable to a fine. There was not one second where I felt that it was oppression by the state or an intrusion into my civil liberties.
In fact it was actually great to have one as with it so many activities were quicker - opening a bank account, collecting a parcel, registering with a gov department re tax or similar - because it was an official compulsory ID card that no functionary would refuse to accept as ID.
Internet suggests there is no legal requirement to carry ID at all times in Switzerland and there is no fine for not carrying ID.
Hard to find anything to argue with in OGH's summary. At least for yours truly!
Morning all.
@MikeSmithson keeps taking GE2019 as the benchmark. Whilst this looks right on paper, it's an illusion and for punters it's an error. GE2019 was a one-off 'Get Brexit Done' election to unblock the jam created during the Remainer Parliament. Boris Johnson galvanised the voters against the unelectable trotskyite anti-semitic Jeremy Corbyn with the sole aim of Getting Brexit Done. Hence the December election. In many ways GE2019 was NOT a General Election.
The last proper General Election in the UK was June 2017, which resulted in a hung parliament. That's your benchmark.
Bet accordingly.
p.s. I'm personally very glad that Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair.
I think I understand the point you are making - whilst the 2019 election is the status quo, its artificial. Ordinarily the Labour task would be considered politically unlikely - as we all said in the aftermath.
But if we consider the 2019 result to be the aberration, then a revision to the norm can be expected to happen as the start of any new electoral move. There are swathes of red wall seats which endless polls have shows will not just revert to Labour but will deliver them 5 figure majorities.
If we bake that 2017 reversion in, the task facing Starmer is much smaller, and much more attainable. Then we look at the two other political low tides from 2015 likely to come back in:
The absence of unionist MPs in Scotland feels like a situation that can't be sustained - so expect 20-30 seats to switch from the motorhome party. The absence of yellow MPs in rural England is already a tide rushing back in. The focus is always on Labour, but as is clear it is the LibDems who will mop up disaffected sane voters in places where "Sink the Boats" makes people feel sick.
So, we reset the Red Wall. We drain out the SNP flood. We remove the dam from the LibDems. And suddenly a thumping Tory defeat is not just possible, it feels likely. To stay in power they need to preserve all three of these artificial positions. Which politically means they need to be Janus, a task they are spectacularly failing to pull off.
The point is that we are two nations.
A handful of floating voters have joined Labour's tribe, out of exasperation with the Conservatives, and much of the other tribe will simply sit on their hands.
That's what is different to GE2017, which was largely stalemated, and is what is going to deliver Starmer's majority. And, by the same token, means we could get another GE2017 result, or something like it, at the end of his 1st term.
Are there any markets on turnout at the GE? I reckon 55-60% range, down from 67% last time.
"Despite the government’s focus on levelling up, the NIESR found wage growth had been fastest in London. It predicted real wage growth of 7% in the capital between the end of 2019 and 2024, compared with a fall of 5% in the West Midlands."
Indeed. Minimum wage is no longer the maximum wage in many industries, especially so in London. Thanks to Brexit, unskilled employees have seen large rises in their pay, especially those who changed jobs during the pandemic.
And yet...
In its quarterly update on the state of the economy, the NIESR said the poorest tenth of the population had been especially hard hit by Britain’s cost of living crisis and would need an income boost of £4,000 a year to have the same living standards they enjoyed in the year before Covid-19 arrived.
The poorest households – hit by weak wage growth, higher debt, the need to devote more of their budgets to expensive energy, food and housing costs; and with few if any savings – would be 17% worse off by the end of 2024 than they were five years earlier. The richest households would be 5% worse off.
And yet ...
Its almost as if two distinct things have happened. The pandemic, expensive food, energy etc is because of what has happened across the globe and would have happened with or without Brexit. That the cost of gas has shot up globally, and the UK relies upon gas, is not a Brexit issue.
The fact that the cost of housing is so high is a British issue, but not a Brexit issue. Build more houses to solve that one.
The single largest Brexit issue is that our government has spent the last decade concentrating on little else.
There are precious few benefits, significant ongoing costs, and a large majority of the electorate wish it had never happened.
"Despite the government’s focus on levelling up, the NIESR found wage growth had been fastest in London. It predicted real wage growth of 7% in the capital between the end of 2019 and 2024, compared with a fall of 5% in the West Midlands."
Indeed. Minimum wage is no longer the maximum wage in many industries, especially so in London. Thanks to Brexit, unskilled employees have seen large rises in their pay, especially those who changed jobs during the pandemic.
And yet...
In its quarterly update on the state of the economy, the NIESR said the poorest tenth of the population had been especially hard hit by Britain’s cost of living crisis and would need an income boost of £4,000 a year to have the same living standards they enjoyed in the year before Covid-19 arrived.
The poorest households – hit by weak wage growth, higher debt, the need to devote more of their budgets to expensive energy, food and housing costs; and with few if any savings – would be 17% worse off by the end of 2024 than they were five years earlier. The richest households would be 5% worse off.
And yet ...
Its almost as if two distinct things have happened. The pandemic, expensive food, energy etc is because of what has happened across the globe and would have happened with or without Brexit. That the cost of gas has shot up globally, and the UK relies upon gas, is not a Brexit issue.
The fact that the cost of housing is so high is a British issue, but not a Brexit issue. Build more houses to solve that one.
I think that's probably largely fair but Brexit certainly hasn't helped.
And after years of blaming the EU for all our ills, Leavers can hardly expect those of us who deeply regret Brexit not to blame it for adding to our present woes.
"Despite the government’s focus on levelling up, the NIESR found wage growth had been fastest in London. It predicted real wage growth of 7% in the capital between the end of 2019 and 2024, compared with a fall of 5% in the West Midlands."
Indeed. Minimum wage is no longer the maximum wage in many industries, especially so in London. Thanks to Brexit, unskilled employees have seen large rises in their pay, especially those who changed jobs during the pandemic.
Also thanks to Brexit, they are worse off despite their higher wages...
Are you suggesting that Stuart Rose (wages would be expected to go up but that's not necessarily a good thing) was right about the economics even if he was foolish about soundbites?
QTWAIN.
Gas prices would be higher even without Brexit, and if people weren't having pay rises then real wages would be even lower.
The mention of Sinn Fein MPs is interesting - whilst they do not sit in the Commons they are in Westminster. I think the GB media largely ignore them but from what I can read they are active both as constituency MPs and in lobbying ministers.
Should the elected Sinn Fein block be even bigger after the election, and should they start to project a presence in Westminster (from outside the Commons - would be entertaining if they swore allegiance for the purpose of destroying it but its unlikely), they could magnify the moaning from the remaining SNP/Alba/PC MPs.
Won't affect the maths. Might affect the politics.
Final point. Your average Sinn Fein MP does more work than Nadine Dorries.
You think there will be Alba MPs after the next GE?
Hard to find anything to argue with in OGH's summary. At least for yours truly!
Morning all.
@MikeSmithson keeps taking GE2019 as the benchmark. Whilst this looks right on paper, it's an illusion and for punters it's an error. GE2019 was a one-off 'Get Brexit Done' election to unblock the jam created during the Remainer Parliament. Boris Johnson galvanised the voters against the unelectable trotskyite anti-semitic Jeremy Corbyn with the sole aim of Getting Brexit Done. Hence the December election. In many ways GE2019 was NOT a General Election.
The last proper General Election in the UK was June 2017, which resulted in a hung parliament. That's your benchmark.
Bet accordingly.
p.s. I'm personally very glad that Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair.
I think I understand the point you are making - whilst the 2019 election is the status quo, its artificial. Ordinarily the Labour task would be considered politically unlikely - as we all said in the aftermath.
But if we consider the 2019 result to be the aberration, then a revision to the norm can be expected to happen as the start of any new electoral move. There are swathes of red wall seats which endless polls have shows will not just revert to Labour but will deliver them 5 figure majorities.
If we bake that 2017 reversion in, the task facing Starmer is much smaller, and much more attainable. Then we look at the two other political low tides from 2015 likely to come back in:
The absence of unionist MPs in Scotland feels like a situation that can't be sustained - so expect 20-30 seats to switch from the motorhome party. The absence of yellow MPs in rural England is already a tide rushing back in. The focus is always on Labour, but as is clear it is the LibDems who will mop up disaffected sane voters in places where "Sink the Boats" makes people feel sick.
So, we reset the Red Wall. We drain out the SNP flood. We remove the dam from the LibDems. And suddenly a thumping Tory defeat is not just possible, it feels likely. To stay in power they need to preserve all three of these artificial positions. Which politically means they need to be Janus, a task they are spectacularly failing to pull off.
The point is that we are two nations.
A handful of floating voters have joined Labour's tribe, out of exasperation with the Conservatives, and much of the other tribe will simply sit on their hands.
That's what is different to GE2017, which was largely stalemated, and is what is going to deliver Starmer's majority. And, by the same token, means we could get another GE2017 result, or something like it, at the end of his 1st term.
A reset of the Red Wall gets us back to GE2017. But that ignores the two other political tides which are moving: Scotland and southern moderates, and those are GE2015 effects.
We know the Red Wall reversion is happening - unless every poll up there is massively wrong. We know the southern moderates reversion is happening. We can see signs of the Scottish reversion and Rutherglen will give us a measure of how fierce that will be.
That gets us back to a political mean. Then we apply the effects of this government to the newly levelled voter pool. As you say, many Tories will stay home - and we saw what that did to so many seats in 1997. And the tides will not just neatly slosh back to where they were - signs that the movement will overtop the 2015 position ands sweep away Tory seats in all kind of interesting places.
The Labour position, including supporting sex and gender as distinct protected characteristics, will be tough for the Tories to create a political divide over except for: 1) Actively demonise trans people (the GOP approach) 2) Try to associate Labour with the trans activists whose views they have rejected (the Tory approach to Extinction Rebellion / Labour)
I expect they mostly go down route 2, but the trouble is no one believes Starmer is a radical. It will fall flat.
"Despite the government’s focus on levelling up, the NIESR found wage growth had been fastest in London. It predicted real wage growth of 7% in the capital between the end of 2019 and 2024, compared with a fall of 5% in the West Midlands."
Indeed. Minimum wage is no longer the maximum wage in many industries, especially so in London. Thanks to Brexit, unskilled employees have seen large rises in their pay, especially those who changed jobs during the pandemic.
And yet...
In its quarterly update on the state of the economy, the NIESR said the poorest tenth of the population had been especially hard hit by Britain’s cost of living crisis and would need an income boost of £4,000 a year to have the same living standards they enjoyed in the year before Covid-19 arrived.
The poorest households – hit by weak wage growth, higher debt, the need to devote more of their budgets to expensive energy, food and housing costs; and with few if any savings – would be 17% worse off by the end of 2024 than they were five years earlier. The richest households would be 5% worse off.
And yet ...
Its almost as if two distinct things have happened. The pandemic, expensive food, energy etc is because of what has happened across the globe and would have happened with or without Brexit. That the cost of gas has shot up globally, and the UK relies upon gas, is not a Brexit issue.
The fact that the cost of housing is so high is a British issue, but not a Brexit issue. Build more houses to solve that one.
I think that's probably largely fair but Brexit certainly hasn't helped.
And after years of blaming the EU for all our ills, Leavers can hardly expect those of us who deeply regret Brexit not to blame it for adding to our present woes.
One of the biggest Brexit benefits, is that the government is now accountable to the electorate.
The mention of Sinn Fein MPs is interesting - whilst they do not sit in the Commons they are in Westminster. I think the GB media largely ignore them but from what I can read they are active both as constituency MPs and in lobbying ministers.
Should the elected Sinn Fein block be even bigger after the election, and should they start to project a presence in Westminster (from outside the Commons - would be entertaining if they swore allegiance for the purpose of destroying it but its unlikely), they could magnify the moaning from the remaining SNP/Alba/PC MPs.
Won't affect the maths. Might affect the politics.
Final point. Your average Sinn Fein MP does more work than Nadine Dorries.
You think there will be Alba MPs after the next GE?
"Despite the government’s focus on levelling up, the NIESR found wage growth had been fastest in London. It predicted real wage growth of 7% in the capital between the end of 2019 and 2024, compared with a fall of 5% in the West Midlands."
Indeed. Minimum wage is no longer the maximum wage in many industries, especially so in London. Thanks to Brexit, unskilled employees have seen large rises in their pay, especially those who changed jobs during the pandemic.
And yet...
In its quarterly update on the state of the economy, the NIESR said the poorest tenth of the population had been especially hard hit by Britain’s cost of living crisis and would need an income boost of £4,000 a year to have the same living standards they enjoyed in the year before Covid-19 arrived.
The poorest households – hit by weak wage growth, higher debt, the need to devote more of their budgets to expensive energy, food and housing costs; and with few if any savings – would be 17% worse off by the end of 2024 than they were five years earlier. The richest households would be 5% worse off.
And yet ...
Its almost as if two distinct things have happened. The pandemic, expensive food, energy etc is because of what has happened across the globe and would have happened with or without Brexit. That the cost of gas has shot up globally, and the UK relies upon gas, is not a Brexit issue.
The fact that the cost of housing is so high is a British issue, but not a Brexit issue. Build more houses to solve that one.
I think that's probably largely fair but Brexit certainly hasn't helped.
And after years of blaming the EU for all our ills, Leavers can hardly expect those of us who deeply regret Brexit not to blame it for adding to our present woes.
One of the biggest Brexit benefits, is that the government is now accountable to the electorate.
If it were, then Rejoin would be on the cards. Politicians cannot ignore it forever.
‘The war changed everything’: Hungarians in Ukraine turn against Orbán https://www.ft.com/content/88d6ffab-5cab-4db1-bf43-d44a7eac00c8 ...After Russia annexed Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine from 2014, Kyiv sought to boost national identity and in 2017 passed a law curtailing minority rights, including in education. That angered the Hungarian community and drove them to support Orbán.
But since last year’s full-scale invasion, most Hungarians in Zakarpattia have changed their minds.
“I used to identify as a Hungarian with Ukrainian citizenship,” said György Buleca, the director of a company that imports goods from Hungary. “That changed when Orbán said this was not his war and that we should agree to a ceasefire.”..
Hard to find anything to argue with in OGH's summary. At least for yours truly!
Morning all.
@MikeSmithson keeps taking GE2019 as the benchmark. Whilst this looks right on paper, it's an illusion and for punters it's an error. GE2019 was a one-off 'Get Brexit Done' election to unblock the jam created during the Remainer Parliament. Boris Johnson galvanised the voters against the unelectable trotskyite anti-semitic Jeremy Corbyn with the sole aim of Getting Brexit Done. Hence the December election. In many ways GE2019 was NOT a General Election.
The last proper General Election in the UK was June 2017, which resulted in a hung parliament. That's your benchmark.
Bet accordingly.
p.s. I'm personally very glad that Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair.
I think I understand the point you are making - whilst the 2019 election is the status quo, its artificial. Ordinarily the Labour task would be considered politically unlikely - as we all said in the aftermath.
But if we consider the 2019 result to be the aberration, then a revision to the norm can be expected to happen as the start of any new electoral move. There are swathes of red wall seats which endless polls have shows will not just revert to Labour but will deliver them 5 figure majorities.
If we bake that 2017 reversion in, the task facing Starmer is much smaller, and much more attainable. Then we look at the two other political low tides from 2015 likely to come back in:
The absence of unionist MPs in Scotland feels like a situation that can't be sustained - so expect 20-30 seats to switch from the motorhome party. The absence of yellow MPs in rural England is already a tide rushing back in. The focus is always on Labour, but as is clear it is the LibDems who will mop up disaffected sane voters in places where "Sink the Boats" makes people feel sick.
So, we reset the Red Wall. We drain out the SNP flood. We remove the dam from the LibDems. And suddenly a thumping Tory defeat is not just possible, it feels likely. To stay in power they need to preserve all three of these artificial positions. Which politically means they need to be Janus, a task they are spectacularly failing to pull off.
Yes, I think the Tories have snookered themselves. It is hard to see any of those 3 fronts being contained next GE. While Scotland is unique, the other 2 fronts play out across most E and W constituencies. They are sociological rather than geographical waves.
Tory unpopularity with the working age population is astonishing. I doubt there’s been anything like it in the history of two-party politics in this country.
What possible reason is there at the minute for someone who works for a living to support the Tories?
Sunak has made his bed and shown that working people only exist in his eyes to be taxed ever higher to provide welfare for those who don't work. That's something you can understand from Labour, but from the Tories?
The working-age population is increasingly left wing, and the trends show that the natural swing to the right as you age isn't happening to the same extent for millennials.
I'm not convinced cutting taxes will work. The Tories have largely brought this onto themselves - beholden to retirees and people who own their homes outright.
Hard to find anything to argue with in OGH's summary. At least for yours truly!
Morning all.
@MikeSmithson keeps taking GE2019 as the benchmark. Whilst this looks right on paper, it's an illusion and for punters it's an error. GE2019 was a one-off 'Get Brexit Done' election to unblock the jam created during the Remainer Parliament. Boris Johnson galvanised the voters against the unelectable trotskyite anti-semitic Jeremy Corbyn with the sole aim of Getting Brexit Done. Hence the December election. In many ways GE2019 was NOT a General Election.
The last proper General Election in the UK was June 2017, which resulted in a hung parliament. That's your benchmark.
Bet accordingly.
p.s. I'm personally very glad that Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair.
I think I understand the point you are making - whilst the 2019 election is the status quo, its artificial. Ordinarily the Labour task would be considered politically unlikely - as we all said in the aftermath.
But if we consider the 2019 result to be the aberration, then a revision to the norm can be expected to happen as the start of any new electoral move. There are swathes of red wall seats which endless polls have shows will not just revert to Labour but will deliver them 5 figure majorities.
If we bake that 2017 reversion in, the task facing Starmer is much smaller, and much more attainable. Then we look at the two other political low tides from 2015 likely to come back in:
The absence of unionist MPs in Scotland feels like a situation that can't be sustained - so expect 20-30 seats to switch from the motorhome party. The absence of yellow MPs in rural England is already a tide rushing back in. The focus is always on Labour, but as is clear it is the LibDems who will mop up disaffected sane voters in places where "Sink the Boats" makes people feel sick.
So, we reset the Red Wall. We drain out the SNP flood. We remove the dam from the LibDems. And suddenly a thumping Tory defeat is not just possible, it feels likely. To stay in power they need to preserve all three of these artificial positions. Which politically means they need to be Janus, a task they are spectacularly failing to pull off.
There's also the demographic wave: more younger voters moving into traditionally safer seats in England (e.g. south coast seats) because they've moved out of more expensive cities like London; and what I suspect (and it would be good to see some analysis on this) lots of Con voters who have died since 2019 (Covid, excess deaths, NHS delays, the ambulance didn't turn up etc. )
"Despite the government’s focus on levelling up, the NIESR found wage growth had been fastest in London. It predicted real wage growth of 7% in the capital between the end of 2019 and 2024, compared with a fall of 5% in the West Midlands."
Indeed. Minimum wage is no longer the maximum wage in many industries, especially so in London. Thanks to Brexit, unskilled employees have seen large rises in their pay, especially those who changed jobs during the pandemic.
And yet...
In its quarterly update on the state of the economy, the NIESR said the poorest tenth of the population had been especially hard hit by Britain’s cost of living crisis and would need an income boost of £4,000 a year to have the same living standards they enjoyed in the year before Covid-19 arrived.
The poorest households – hit by weak wage growth, higher debt, the need to devote more of their budgets to expensive energy, food and housing costs; and with few if any savings – would be 17% worse off by the end of 2024 than they were five years earlier. The richest households would be 5% worse off.
And yet ...
Its almost as if two distinct things have happened. The pandemic, expensive food, energy etc is because of what has happened across the globe and would have happened with or without Brexit. That the cost of gas has shot up globally, and the UK relies upon gas, is not a Brexit issue.
The fact that the cost of housing is so high is a British issue, but not a Brexit issue. Build more houses to solve that one.
I think that's probably largely fair but Brexit certainly hasn't helped.
And after years of blaming the EU for all our ills, Leavers can hardly expect those of us who deeply regret Brexit not to blame it for adding to our present woes.
One of the biggest Brexit benefits, is that the government is now accountable to the electorate.
It doesn’t seem to have increased the quality, competence or popularity of said government, quite the reverse in fact.
"Despite the government’s focus on levelling up, the NIESR found wage growth had been fastest in London. It predicted real wage growth of 7% in the capital between the end of 2019 and 2024, compared with a fall of 5% in the West Midlands."
Indeed. Minimum wage is no longer the maximum wage in many industries, especially so in London. Thanks to Brexit, unskilled employees have seen large rises in their pay, especially those who changed jobs during the pandemic.
Total fiction again from our correspondent on the spot in the desert.
Minimum wage was never the maximum wage in any industry, because... managers, of course.
However, my guess, supported by anecdotal evidence here in the south west, is that a larger proportion of the workforce than ever are on the minimum wage.
This report from February supports that but the change this year (minimum wage up by inflation, most wages up by less than inflation) will have increased the numbers on MW even further.
Strong trade unions are the best guarantor of decent wages and working conditions there are.
Yes I saw that in action at the retail bank I worked for - not through industrial action but through continual negotiation to improve conditions, manage the impact of changes, and protect employees rights. I am sure that without the unions, senior management would have ridden roughshod over working conditions, pension provision, etc.
The key point for the next election is surely whether or not there has been a significant increase in volatility or party disloyalty. Rather than suggesting that 2019 was a freak that can be ignored (as @Heathener has done this morning) it was a vivid demonstration of the weakening of old party loyalties. The red wall seats were all about a collapse in Labour loyalty towards a party that was not listening to them. Many, many Tory voters now feel the same.
I think that there is good evidence to support this increase. Party membership has declined from a low base, people seem to be much more issue orientated and no political party seems to be offering a coherent set of principles based on an underlying ideology. It is far more pick and mix for the parties and for the voters.
This volatility, if it exists, makes a big Labour win much more likely than the history that Mike sets out would suggest. Cameron's seat gain, which was very substantial, was not enough to give Labour a majority this time around. Only Blair got enough. But I can't help feeling that the game has changed and so has the electorate. I therefore find myself sympathetic to @Heathener's conclusion for the exactly opposite reasons to her reasoning!
FWIW Labour membership hasn't declined, though there's been a substantial turnover, as leftwingers who weren't hardcore loyalists resigned and centrists joined. I wouldn't say that members were especially cheerful as a rule - the general attitude is that "things aren't very inspiring but we've got to remove this ridiculous government before they get another sodding 5 years". Expectations of Labour government among members are frankly modest. But it is now much easier than a couple of years ago to find candidates for local elections and volunteers to deliver.
Hard to find anything to argue with in OGH's summary. At least for yours truly!
Morning all.
@MikeSmithson keeps taking GE2019 as the benchmark. Whilst this looks right on paper, it's an illusion and for punters it's an error. GE2019 was a one-off 'Get Brexit Done' election to unblock the jam created during the Remainer Parliament. Boris Johnson galvanised the voters against the unelectable trotskyite anti-semitic Jeremy Corbyn with the sole aim of Getting Brexit Done. Hence the December election. In many ways GE2019 was NOT a General Election.
The last proper General Election in the UK was June 2017, which resulted in a hung parliament. That's your benchmark.
Bet accordingly.
p.s. I'm personally very glad that Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair.
I think I understand the point you are making - whilst the 2019 election is the status quo, its artificial. Ordinarily the Labour task would be considered politically unlikely - as we all said in the aftermath.
But if we consider the 2019 result to be the aberration, then a revision to the norm can be expected to happen as the start of any new electoral move. There are swathes of red wall seats which endless polls have shows will not just revert to Labour but will deliver them 5 figure majorities.
If we bake that 2017 reversion in, the task facing Starmer is much smaller, and much more attainable. Then we look at the two other political low tides from 2015 likely to come back in:
The absence of unionist MPs in Scotland feels like a situation that can't be sustained - so expect 20-30 seats to switch from the motorhome party. The absence of yellow MPs in rural England is already a tide rushing back in. The focus is always on Labour, but as is clear it is the LibDems who will mop up disaffected sane voters in places where "Sink the Boats" makes people feel sick.
So, we reset the Red Wall. We drain out the SNP flood. We remove the dam from the LibDems. And suddenly a thumping Tory defeat is not just possible, it feels likely. To stay in power they need to preserve all three of these artificial positions. Which politically means they need to be Janus, a task they are spectacularly failing to pull off.
Yes, I think the Tories have snookered themselves. It is hard to see any of those 3 fronts being contained next GE. While Scotland is unique, the other 2 fronts play out across most E and W constituencies. They are sociological rather than geographical waves.
Tory unpopularity with the working age population is astonishing. I doubt there’s been anything like it in the history of two-party politics in this country.
Yes, it is deeply concerning.
The only people they seem to look after (and protect fr
The key point for the next election is surely whether or not there has been a significant increase in volatility or party disloyalty. Rather than suggesting that 2019 was a freak that can be ignored (as @Heathener has done this morning) it was a vivid demonstration of the weakening of old party loyalties. The red wall seats were all about a collapse in Labour loyalty towards a party that was not listening to them. Many, many Tory voters now feel the same.
I think that there is good evidence to support this increase. Party membership has declined from a low base, people seem to be much more issue orientated and no political party seems to be offering a coherent set of principles based on an underlying ideology. It is far more pick and mix for the parties and for the voters.
This volatility, if it exists, makes a big Labour win much more likely than the history that Mike sets out would suggest. Cameron's seat gain, which was very substantial, was not enough to give Labour a majority this time around. Only Blair got enough. But I can't help feeling that the game has changed and so has the electorate. I therefore find myself sympathetic to @Heathener's conclusion for the exactly opposite reasons to her reasoning!
Hard to find anything to argue with in OGH's summary. At least for yours truly!
Morning all.
@MikeSmithson keeps taking GE2019 as the benchmark. Whilst this looks right on paper, it's an illusion and for punters it's an error. GE2019 was a one-off 'Get Brexit Done' election to unblock the jam created during the Remainer Parliament. Boris Johnson galvanised the voters against the unelectable trotskyite anti-semitic Jeremy Corbyn with the sole aim of Getting Brexit Done. Hence the December election. In many ways GE2019 was NOT a General Election.
The last proper General Election in the UK was June 2017, which resulted in a hung parliament. That's your benchmark.
Bet accordingly.
p.s. I'm personally very glad that Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair.
I think I understand the point you are making - whilst the 2019 election is the status quo, its artificial. Ordinarily the Labour task would be considered politically unlikely - as we all said in the aftermath.
But if we consider the 2019 result to be the aberration, then a revision to the norm can be expected to happen as the start of any new electoral move. There are swathes of red wall seats which endless polls have shows will not just revert to Labour but will deliver them 5 figure majorities.
If we bake that 2017 reversion in, the task facing Starmer is much smaller, and much more attainable. Then we look at the two other political low tides from 2015 likely to come back in:
The absence of unionist MPs in Scotland feels like a situation that can't be sustained - so expect 20-30 seats to switch from the motorhome party. The absence of yellow MPs in rural England is already a tide rushing back in. The focus is always on Labour, but as is clear it is the LibDems who will mop up disaffected sane voters in places where "Sink the Boats" makes people feel sick.
So, we reset the Red Wall. We drain out the SNP flood. We remove the dam from the LibDems. And suddenly a thumping Tory defeat is not just possible, it feels likely. To stay in power they need to preserve all three of these artificial positions. Which politically means they need to be Janus, a task they are spectacularly failing to pull off.
The point is that we are two nations.
A handful of floating voters have joined Labour's tribe, out of exasperation with the Conservatives, and much of the other tribe will simply sit on their hands.
That's what is different to GE2017, which was largely stalemated, and is what is going to deliver Starmer's majority. And, by the same token, means we could get another GE2017 result, or something like it, at the end of his 1st term.
Are there any markets on turnout at the GE? I reckon 55-60% range, down from 67% last time.
It is also worth noting that a fairly large part of the inefficiency of the Labour vote in 2019 came from Scotland where more than 500k votes generated 1 MP. It is entirely possible this time around that something like 600k* votes will produce more than 20 MPs or an MP for every 30k votes. That will make a real difference.
*assuming quite a lot of erstwhile SNP supporters sit on their hands.
"Despite the government’s focus on levelling up, the NIESR found wage growth had been fastest in London. It predicted real wage growth of 7% in the capital between the end of 2019 and 2024, compared with a fall of 5% in the West Midlands."
Indeed. Minimum wage is no longer the maximum wage in many industries, especially so in London. Thanks to Brexit, unskilled employees have seen large rises in their pay, especially those who changed jobs during the pandemic.
And yet...
In its quarterly update on the state of the economy, the NIESR said the poorest tenth of the population had been especially hard hit by Britain’s cost of living crisis and would need an income boost of £4,000 a year to have the same living standards they enjoyed in the year before Covid-19 arrived.
The poorest households – hit by weak wage growth, higher debt, the need to devote more of their budgets to expensive energy, food and housing costs; and with few if any savings – would be 17% worse off by the end of 2024 than they were five years earlier. The richest households would be 5% worse off.
And yet ...
Its almost as if two distinct things have happened. The pandemic, expensive food, energy etc is because of what has happened across the globe and would have happened with or without Brexit. That the cost of gas has shot up globally, and the UK relies upon gas, is not a Brexit issue.
The fact that the cost of housing is so high is a British issue, but not a Brexit issue. Build more houses to solve that one.
I think that's probably largely fair but Brexit certainly hasn't helped.
And after years of blaming the EU for all our ills, Leavers can hardly expect those of us who deeply regret Brexit not to blame it for adding to our present woes.
One of the biggest Brexit benefits, is that the government is now accountable to the electorate.
If it were, then Rejoin would be on the cards. Politicians cannot ignore it forever.
It could be that many voters regret Brexit (not me) but simply absolutely never want to go there again.
It's far more likely that there's deal after deal that aligns us ever more closely with the EU than Rejoin, IMHO.
"Despite the government’s focus on levelling up, the NIESR found wage growth had been fastest in London. It predicted real wage growth of 7% in the capital between the end of 2019 and 2024, compared with a fall of 5% in the West Midlands."
Indeed. Minimum wage is no longer the maximum wage in many industries, especially so in London. Thanks to Brexit, unskilled employees have seen large rises in their pay, especially those who changed jobs during the pandemic.
I haven't read the paper behind the article, but this is another astonishing line:
the poorest tenth of the population had been especially hard hit by Britain’s cost of living crisis and would need an income boost of £4,000 a year to have the same living standards they enjoyed in the year before Covid-19 arrived.
Sadly, a massive increase in fuel prices has a larger impact on the poorest people.
We can blame Vladimir Putin for that one.
Fortunately, many people have managed to get better jobs than they had in 2019, which makes them better off than they would have been if they were still earning minimum wage, even if their living standard has declined in practice.
Yes, I understand that this is difficult to sell electorally, most people are not better off now than they were four years ago.
We should all be lobbying OPEC to start pumping oil, which will have the dual effects of reducing inflation and starving Putin of dollars.
Hasn't Saudi just last month announced they are reducing oil production? As are Russia.
"Despite the government’s focus on levelling up, the NIESR found wage growth had been fastest in London. It predicted real wage growth of 7% in the capital between the end of 2019 and 2024, compared with a fall of 5% in the West Midlands."
Indeed. Minimum wage is no longer the maximum wage in many industries, especially so in London. Thanks to Brexit, unskilled employees have seen large rises in their pay, especially those who changed jobs during the pandemic.
And yet...
In its quarterly update on the state of the economy, the NIESR said the poorest tenth of the population had been especially hard hit by Britain’s cost of living crisis and would need an income boost of £4,000 a year to have the same living standards they enjoyed in the year before Covid-19 arrived.
The poorest households – hit by weak wage growth, higher debt, the need to devote more of their budgets to expensive energy, food and housing costs; and with few if any savings – would be 17% worse off by the end of 2024 than they were five years earlier. The richest households would be 5% worse off.
And yet ...
Its almost as if two distinct things have happened. The pandemic, expensive food, energy etc is because of what has happened across the globe and would have happened with or without Brexit. That the cost of gas has shot up globally, and the UK relies upon gas, is not a Brexit issue.
The fact that the cost of housing is so high is a British issue, but not a Brexit issue. Build more houses to solve that one.
I think that's probably largely fair but Brexit certainly hasn't helped.
And after years of blaming the EU for all our ills, Leavers can hardly expect those of us who deeply regret Brexit not to blame it for adding to our present woes.
One of the biggest Brexit benefits, is that the government is now accountable to the electorate.
Hard to find anything to argue with in OGH's summary. At least for yours truly!
Morning all.
@MikeSmithson keeps taking GE2019 as the benchmark. Whilst this looks right on paper, it's an illusion and for punters it's an error. GE2019 was a one-off 'Get Brexit Done' election to unblock the jam created during the Remainer Parliament. Boris Johnson galvanised the voters against the unelectable trotskyite anti-semitic Jeremy Corbyn with the sole aim of Getting Brexit Done. Hence the December election. In many ways GE2019 was NOT a General Election.
The last proper General Election in the UK was June 2017, which resulted in a hung parliament. That's your benchmark.
Bet accordingly.
p.s. I'm personally very glad that Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair.
I think I understand the point you are making - whilst the 2019 election is the status quo, its artificial. Ordinarily the Labour task would be considered politically unlikely - as we all said in the aftermath.
But if we consider the 2019 result to be the aberration, then a revision to the norm can be expected to happen as the start of any new electoral move. There are swathes of red wall seats which endless polls have shows will not just revert to Labour but will deliver them 5 figure majorities.
If we bake that 2017 reversion in, the task facing Starmer is much smaller, and much more attainable. Then we look at the two other political low tides from 2015 likely to come back in:
The absence of unionist MPs in Scotland feels like a situation that can't be sustained - so expect 20-30 seats to switch from the motorhome party. The absence of yellow MPs in rural England is already a tide rushing back in. The focus is always on Labour, but as is clear it is the LibDems who will mop up disaffected sane voters in places where "Sink the Boats" makes people feel sick.
So, we reset the Red Wall. We drain out the SNP flood. We remove the dam from the LibDems. And suddenly a thumping Tory defeat is not just possible, it feels likely. To stay in power they need to preserve all three of these artificial positions. Which politically means they need to be Janus, a task they are spectacularly failing to pull off.
Yes, I think the Tories have snookered themselves. It is hard to see any of those 3 fronts being contained next GE. While Scotland is unique, the other 2 fronts play out across most E and W constituencies. They are sociological rather than geographical waves.
Tory unpopularity with the working age population is astonishing. I doubt there’s been anything like it in the history of two-party politics in this country.
What possible reason is there at the minute for someone who works for a living to support the Tories?
Sunak has made his bed and shown that working people only exist in his eyes to be taxed ever higher to provide welfare for those who don't work. That's something you can understand from Labour, but from the Tories?
The working-age population is increasingly left wing, and the trends show that the natural swing to the right as you age isn't happening to the same extent for millennials.
I'm not convinced cutting taxes will work. The Tories have largely brought this onto themselves - beholden to retirees and people who own their homes outright.
Cutting taxes hasn't happened. The issue isn't that the older generation owns their own home outright, its that they have stood in the way of the younger generation having the same chances.
The fact that the older generation are doing well is in part legacy from the actions that the Tories took 40 years ago to help ensure that people could own their own home.
The Government over the past 13 years has no such legacy. Under Cameron and Osborne they made some decent moves, arrested the decline in home ownership that started under Blair and Brown, saw it start to rebound but there simply hasn't been enough construction to cope. And any good ideas they've had for housing post-Osborne haven't made it past their MPs since.
"Every police officer in Northern Ireland has data compromised in 'monumental' breach due to human error
The PSNI Assistant Chief Constable admitted the breach was made in "human error" and apologised to colleagues whose data was made public for two and a half to three hours."
Amazingly, some dangerous idiots still want the government to have yet more of our intimate personal data, even though it's obvious they can't keep it safe. Last year Labour were advocating ID cards to control illegal immigration.
... I would regard id cards as a sensible and proportionate measure...
UK 2020s politics is a long stream of illiberal measures designed to burden law-abiding citizens with whatever the fashionable nostrums of the day are. ID cards is a thing that keeps popping up, and it gets knocked down every time.
Not very effectively knocked down then. It's about 1% as scary to me as the surveillance by facial/numberplate recognition/cell phone which goes on 24/7 so if it has any practical value let's do it.
Again, coercing the individual. The question is not whether it is a good idea, but whether it is moral to fine/jail somebody for refusing to carry one. That would be state overkill.
When I lived in Switzerland i was legally obliged to carry my ID card/foreigner permit (carte des etrangers) at all times and if it was requested by the police or an official and I didn’t have it then I was liable to a fine. There was not one second where I felt that it was oppression by the state or an intrusion into my civil liberties.
In fact it was actually great to have one as with it so many activities were quicker - opening a bank account, collecting a parcel, registering with a gov department re tax or similar - because it was an official compulsory ID card that no functionary would refuse to accept as ID.
Sigh.
For the nth time. The problem isn’t the ID card. The problem isn’t the unique identifying code on it. The problem isn’t even the potential use of that unique code as a key on databases.
The problem is that every single time ID cards have been proposed (and he time that they were, briefly, actually implemented), they come with an attempt to link all our personal information together. And link it to biometric data - finger prints, face recognition. etc. and the make it accessible to everyone.
In the last such scheme, they were going to make everything the NHS had on you (for instance) available to council officials investigating fly tipping. When asked why, the response was that segregating data would be difficult and slow things down.
So if your finger print day was stolen, you’d just have to get new finger prints, eh?
It should be noted that personal for Important People (Politicians, senior civil servants, famous people who the government liked) *was* to be segregated. #NU10K
The only saving grace was that such an insane breach of every concept of data security would have gone the way of all such government projects. Collapsed after spending billions. Though in this case it would have got to the data leaking stage
Time to repost this admittedly brilliant analysis from a couple of years ago:
I’ve always said I’m in favour of ID cards, if the following conditions are met:
1) They’re issued for free
2) You don’t have to carry them at all times
3) You can use them chip and pin to access all government services - so they would replace passports and driving licences, not augment them
4) That you had the power to access all information the government holds on you, and amend it where it is wrong
5) That civil servants who access your data are logged, and you can see who they are and why they accessed it
6) That if somebody has accessed your data inappropriately you have the right to take legal action against them, funded by the government.
And numbers 4-6 will not happen while any civil servant breathes air.
Civil Servants are only human, and humans are nosy, so the more information you make available to government officials the more information they will see.
If you think that if you had free access to a super-government database that you wouldn't be looking at your neighbour's income then you are kidding yourself. The best that can be hoped for is that you would have the good sense not to tell anyone that you had done so and keep the information to yourself.
"Despite the government’s focus on levelling up, the NIESR found wage growth had been fastest in London. It predicted real wage growth of 7% in the capital between the end of 2019 and 2024, compared with a fall of 5% in the West Midlands."
Indeed. Minimum wage is no longer the maximum wage in many industries, especially so in London. Thanks to Brexit, unskilled employees have seen large rises in their pay, especially those who changed jobs during the pandemic.
Also thanks to Brexit, they are worse off despite their higher wages...
Are you suggesting that Stuart Rose (wages would be expected to go up but that's not necessarily a good thing) was right about the economics even if he was foolish about soundbites?
QTWAIN.
Gas prices would be higher even without Brexit, and if people weren't having pay rises then real wages would be even lower.
Except that real pay was beginning to turn negative before gas prices shot up.
The question that "pay rise for Britain" types never answered was where the money for the pay rises was coming from. Businesses didn't have a Scrooge McDuck Swimming Pool Full Of Money to dip into, so of course prices were going to go up. Higher pay to pay higher prices doesn't really help us overall, and tends to screw the poor most of all.
So productivity, investment. The only things that have ever supported rising living standards. And 2016 was at best irrelevant to that, at worst harmful.
"Despite the government’s focus on levelling up, the NIESR found wage growth had been fastest in London. It predicted real wage growth of 7% in the capital between the end of 2019 and 2024, compared with a fall of 5% in the West Midlands."
Indeed. Minimum wage is no longer the maximum wage in many industries, especially so in London. Thanks to Brexit, unskilled employees have seen large rises in their pay, especially those who changed jobs during the pandemic.
Is Brexit also responsible for "British wages are sinking while German and French salaries rebound"?
Hard to find anything to argue with in OGH's summary. At least for yours truly!
Morning all.
@MikeSmithson keeps taking GE2019 as the benchmark. Whilst this looks right on paper, it's an illusion and for punters it's an error. GE2019 was a one-off 'Get Brexit Done' election to unblock the jam created during the Remainer Parliament. Boris Johnson galvanised the voters against the unelectable trotskyite anti-semitic Jeremy Corbyn with the sole aim of Getting Brexit Done. Hence the December election. In many ways GE2019 was NOT a General Election.
The last proper General Election in the UK was June 2017, which resulted in a hung parliament. That's your benchmark.
Bet accordingly.
p.s. I'm personally very glad that Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair.
I think I understand the point you are making - whilst the 2019 election is the status quo, its artificial. Ordinarily the Labour task would be considered politically unlikely - as we all said in the aftermath.
But if we consider the 2019 result to be the aberration, then a revision to the norm can be expected to happen as the start of any new electoral move. There are swathes of red wall seats which endless polls have shows will not just revert to Labour but will deliver them 5 figure majorities.
If we bake that 2017 reversion in, the task facing Starmer is much smaller, and much more attainable. Then we look at the two other political low tides from 2015 likely to come back in:
The absence of unionist MPs in Scotland feels like a situation that can't be sustained - so expect 20-30 seats to switch from the motorhome party. The absence of yellow MPs in rural England is already a tide rushing back in. The focus is always on Labour, but as is clear it is the LibDems who will mop up disaffected sane voters in places where "Sink the Boats" makes people feel sick.
So, we reset the Red Wall. We drain out the SNP flood. We remove the dam from the LibDems. And suddenly a thumping Tory defeat is not just possible, it feels likely. To stay in power they need to preserve all three of these artificial positions. Which politically means they need to be Janus, a task they are spectacularly failing to pull off.
Yes, I think the Tories have snookered themselves. It is hard to see any of those 3 fronts being contained next GE. While Scotland is unique, the other 2 fronts play out across most E and W constituencies. They are sociological rather than geographical waves.
Tory unpopularity with the working age population is astonishing. I doubt there’s been anything like it in the history of two-party politics in this country.
What possible reason is there at the minute for someone who works for a living to support the Tories?
Sunak has made his bed and shown that working people only exist in his eyes to be taxed ever higher to provide welfare for those who don't work. That's something you can understand from Labour, but from the Tories?
The working-age population is increasingly left wing, and the trends show that the natural swing to the right as you age isn't happening to the same extent for millennials.
I'm not convinced cutting taxes will work. The Tories have largely brought this onto themselves - beholden to retirees and people who own their homes outright.
Cutting taxes hasn't happened. The issue isn't that the older generation owns their own home outright, its that they have stood in the way of the younger generation having the same chances.
The fact that the older generation are doing well is in part legacy from the actions that the Tories took 40 years ago to help ensure that people could own their own home.
The Government over the past 13 years has no such legacy. Under Cameron and Osborne they made some decent moves, arrested the decline in home ownership that started under Blair and Brown, saw it start to rebound but there simply hasn't been enough construction to cope. And any good ideas they've had for housing post-Osborne haven't made it past their MPs since.
I was just suggesting that a "Vote Tory to cut taxes" approach might not work.
Indeed, tax increases by Labour on second homes, landlords etc might be more popular.
The key point for the next election is surely whether or not there has been a significant increase in volatility or party disloyalty. Rather than suggesting that 2019 was a freak that can be ignored (as @Heathener has done this morning) it was a vivid demonstration of the weakening of old party loyalties. The red wall seats were all about a collapse in Labour loyalty towards a party that was not listening to them. Many, many Tory voters now feel the same.
I think that there is good evidence to support this increase. Party membership has declined from a low base, people seem to be much more issue orientated and no political party seems to be offering a coherent set of principles based on an underlying ideology. It is far more pick and mix for the parties and for the voters.
This volatility, if it exists, makes a big Labour win much more likely than the history that Mike sets out would suggest. Cameron's seat gain, which was very substantial, was not enough to give Labour a majority this time around. Only Blair got enough. But I can't help feeling that the game has changed and so has the electorate. I therefore find myself sympathetic to @Heathener's conclusion for the exactly opposite reasons to her reasoning!
I agree with this, but it follows from the extra volatility that the electorate haven't formed the firm opinion that Starmer is better than the Tories, and so the game may yet change again, possibly even during the course of the election campaign.
Hard to find anything to argue with in OGH's summary. At least for yours truly!
Morning all.
@MikeSmithson keeps taking GE2019 as the benchmark. Whilst this looks right on paper, it's an illusion and for punters it's an error. GE2019 was a one-off 'Get Brexit Done' election to unblock the jam created during the Remainer Parliament. Boris Johnson galvanised the voters against the unelectable trotskyite anti-semitic Jeremy Corbyn with the sole aim of Getting Brexit Done. Hence the December election. In many ways GE2019 was NOT a General Election.
The last proper General Election in the UK was June 2017, which resulted in a hung parliament. That's your benchmark.
Bet accordingly.
p.s. I'm personally very glad that Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair.
I think I understand the point you are making - whilst the 2019 election is the status quo, its artificial. Ordinarily the Labour task would be considered politically unlikely - as we all said in the aftermath.
But if we consider the 2019 result to be the aberration, then a revision to the norm can be expected to happen as the start of any new electoral move. There are swathes of red wall seats which endless polls have shows will not just revert to Labour but will deliver them 5 figure majorities.
If we bake that 2017 reversion in, the task facing Starmer is much smaller, and much more attainable. Then we look at the two other political low tides from 2015 likely to come back in:
The absence of unionist MPs in Scotland feels like a situation that can't be sustained - so expect 20-30 seats to switch from the motorhome party. The absence of yellow MPs in rural England is already a tide rushing back in. The focus is always on Labour, but as is clear it is the LibDems who will mop up disaffected sane voters in places where "Sink the Boats" makes people feel sick.
So, we reset the Red Wall. We drain out the SNP flood. We remove the dam from the LibDems. And suddenly a thumping Tory defeat is not just possible, it feels likely. To stay in power they need to preserve all three of these artificial positions. Which politically means they need to be Janus, a task they are spectacularly failing to pull off.
Yes, I think the Tories have snookered themselves. It is hard to see any of those 3 fronts being contained next GE. While Scotland is unique, the other 2 fronts play out across most E and W constituencies. They are sociological rather than geographical waves.
Tory unpopularity with the working age population is astonishing. I doubt there’s been anything like it in the history of two-party politics in this country.
What possible reason is there at the minute for someone who works for a living to support the Tories?
Sunak has made his bed and shown that working people only exist in his eyes to be taxed ever higher to provide welfare for those who don't work. That's something you can understand from Labour, but from the Tories?
The working-age population is increasingly left wing, and the trends show that the natural swing to the right as you age isn't happening to the same extent for millennials.
I'm not convinced cutting taxes will work. The Tories have largely brought this onto themselves - beholden to retirees and people who own their homes outright.
Cutting taxes hasn't happened. The issue isn't that the older generation owns their own home outright, its that they have stood in the way of the younger generation having the same chances.
The fact that the older generation are doing well is in part legacy from the actions that the Tories took 40 years ago to help ensure that people could own their own home.
The Government over the past 13 years has no such legacy. Under Cameron and Osborne they made some decent moves, arrested the decline in home ownership that started under Blair and Brown, saw it start to rebound but there simply hasn't been enough construction to cope. And any good ideas they've had for housing post-Osborne haven't made it past their MPs since.
I was just suggesting that a "Vote Tory to cut taxes" approach might not work.
Indeed, tax increases by Labour on second homes, landlords etc might be more popular.
It won't work because its not happening, the opposite is happening.
If the opposite wasn't happening, it might have worked.
But if the Government keeps whacking up taxes on working people, then gives a fraction of that back, then it doesn't deserve and won't get any gratitude.
Electorates change. My generation grew up in the shadow of WW2. We saw the bombsites, our parents had hidden away in air raid shelters, our grandparents had been in the services. Standing Alone, whether historically accurate or not, was ingrained into us. Everywhere we looked, from comics to TV, the war was present. It shaped us and all those around us. Of course it did. But as we die off, that way of seeing the world becomes less politically visceral. For my kids, the end of WW2 is as far away as the end of the Boer War was for me. It inevitably affects how they look at the world and the UK’s place in it.
Hard to find anything to argue with in OGH's summary. At least for yours truly!
Morning all.
@MikeSmithson keeps taking GE2019 as the benchmark. Whilst this looks right on paper, it's an illusion and for punters it's an error. GE2019 was a one-off 'Get Brexit Done' election to unblock the jam created during the Remainer Parliament. Boris Johnson galvanised the voters against the unelectable trotskyite anti-semitic Jeremy Corbyn with the sole aim of Getting Brexit Done. Hence the December election. In many ways GE2019 was NOT a General Election.
The last proper General Election in the UK was June 2017, which resulted in a hung parliament. That's your benchmark.
Bet accordingly.
p.s. I'm personally very glad that Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair.
I think I understand the point you are making - whilst the 2019 election is the status quo, its artificial. Ordinarily the Labour task would be considered politically unlikely - as we all said in the aftermath.
But if we consider the 2019 result to be the aberration, then a revision to the norm can be expected to happen as the start of any new electoral move. There are swathes of red wall seats which endless polls have shows will not just revert to Labour but will deliver them 5 figure majorities.
If we bake that 2017 reversion in, the task facing Starmer is much smaller, and much more attainable. Then we look at the two other political low tides from 2015 likely to come back in:
The absence of unionist MPs in Scotland feels like a situation that can't be sustained - so expect 20-30 seats to switch from the motorhome party. The absence of yellow MPs in rural England is already a tide rushing back in. The focus is always on Labour, but as is clear it is the LibDems who will mop up disaffected sane voters in places where "Sink the Boats" makes people feel sick.
So, we reset the Red Wall. We drain out the SNP flood. We remove the dam from the LibDems. And suddenly a thumping Tory defeat is not just possible, it feels likely. To stay in power they need to preserve all three of these artificial positions. Which politically means they need to be Janus, a task they are spectacularly failing to pull off.
Yes, I think the Tories have snookered themselves. It is hard to see any of those 3 fronts being contained next GE. While Scotland is unique, the other 2 fronts play out across most E and W constituencies. They are sociological rather than geographical waves.
Tory unpopularity with the working age population is astonishing. I doubt there’s been anything like it in the history of two-party politics in this country.
What possible reason is there at the minute for someone who works for a living to support the Tories?
Sunak has made his bed and shown that working people only exist in his eyes to be taxed ever higher to provide welfare for those who don't work. That's something you can understand from Labour, but from the Tories?
The working-age population is increasingly left wing, and the trends show that the natural swing to the right as you age isn't happening to the same extent for millennials.
I'm not convinced cutting taxes will work. The Tories have largely brought this onto themselves - beholden to retirees and people who own their homes outright.
Cutting taxes hasn't happened. The issue isn't that the older generation owns their own home outright, its that they have stood in the way of the younger generation having the same chances.
The fact that the older generation are doing well is in part legacy from the actions that the Tories took 40 years ago to help ensure that people could own their own home.
The Government over the past 13 years has no such legacy. Under Cameron and Osborne they made some decent moves, arrested the decline in home ownership that started under Blair and Brown, saw it start to rebound but there simply hasn't been enough construction to cope. And any good ideas they've had for housing post-Osborne haven't made it past their MPs since.
I was just suggesting that a "Vote Tory to cut taxes" approach might not work.
Indeed, tax increases by Labour on second homes, landlords etc might be more popular.
It won't work because its not happening, the opposite is happening.
If the opposite wasn't happening, it might have worked.
But if the Government keeps whacking up taxes on working people, then gives a fraction of that back, then it doesn't deserve and won't get any gratitude.
We're back to a point on which I believe we agree: that taxes on earned income need to be reduced and taxes on wealth and unearned income increased (at least relatively).
Electorates change. My generation grew up in the shadow of WW2. We saw the bombsites, our parents had hidden away in air raid shelters, our grandparents had been in the services. Standing Alone, whether historically accurate or not, was ingrained into us. Everywhere we looked, from comics to TV, the war was present. It shaped us and all those around us. Of course it did. But as we die off, that way of seeing the world becomes less politically visceral. For my kids, the end of WW2 is as far away as the end of the Boer War was for me. It inevitably affects how they look at the world and the UK’s place in it.
And, every generation is different.
It may be that Generation Alpha (who will succeed Zoomers/Millennials) will find some of their views and obsessions quaint.
"Every police officer in Northern Ireland has data compromised in 'monumental' breach due to human error
The PSNI Assistant Chief Constable admitted the breach was made in "human error" and apologised to colleagues whose data was made public for two and a half to three hours."
Amazingly, some dangerous idiots still want the government to have yet more of our intimate personal data, even though it's obvious they can't keep it safe. Last year Labour were advocating ID cards to control illegal immigration.
... I would regard id cards as a sensible and proportionate measure...
UK 2020s politics is a long stream of illiberal measures designed to burden law-abiding citizens with whatever the fashionable nostrums of the day are. ID cards is a thing that keeps popping up, and it gets knocked down every time.
Not very effectively knocked down then. It's about 1% as scary to me as the surveillance by facial/numberplate recognition/cell phone which goes on 24/7 so if it has any practical value let's do it.
Again, coercing the individual. The question is not whether it is a good idea, but whether it is moral to fine/jail somebody for refusing to carry one. That would be state overkill.
When I lived in Switzerland i was legally obliged to carry my ID card/foreigner permit (carte des etrangers) at all times and if it was requested by the police or an official and I didn’t have it then I was liable to a fine. There was not one second where I felt that it was oppression by the state or an intrusion into my civil liberties.
In fact it was actually great to have one as with it so many activities were quicker - opening a bank account, collecting a parcel, registering with a gov department re tax or similar - because it was an official compulsory ID card that no functionary would refuse to accept as ID.
Sigh.
For the nth time. The problem isn’t the ID card. The problem isn’t the unique identifying code on it. The problem isn’t even the potential use of that unique code as a key on databases.
The problem is that every single time ID cards have been proposed (and he time that they were, briefly, actually implemented), they come with an attempt to link all our personal information together. And link it to biometric data - finger prints, face recognition. etc. and the make it accessible to everyone.
In the last such scheme, they were going to make everything the NHS had on you (for instance) available to council officials investigating fly tipping. When asked why, the response was that segregating data would be difficult and slow things down.
So if your finger print day was stolen, you’d just have to get new finger prints, eh?
It should be noted that personal for Important People (Politicians, senior civil servants, famous people who the government liked) *was* to be segregated. #NU10K
The only saving grace was that such an insane breach of every concept of data security would have gone the way of all such government projects. Collapsed after spending billions. Though in this case it would have got to the data leaking stage
Time to repost this admittedly brilliant analysis from a couple of years ago:
I’ve always said I’m in favour of ID cards, if the following conditions are met:
1) They’re issued for free
2) You don’t have to carry them at all times
3) You can use them chip and pin to access all government services - so they would replace passports and driving licences, not augment them
4) That you had the power to access all information the government holds on you, and amend it where it is wrong
5) That civil servants who access your data are logged, and you can see who they are and why they accessed it
6) That if somebody has accessed your data inappropriately you have the right to take legal action against them, funded by the government.
And numbers 4-6 will not happen while any civil servant breathes air.
Civil Servants are only human, and humans are nosy, so the more information you make available to government officials the more information they will see.
If you think that if you had free access to a super-government database that you wouldn't be looking at your neighbour's income then you are kidding yourself. The best that can be hoped for is that you would have the good sense not to tell anyone that you had done so and keep the information to yourself.
Meanwhile in Estonia, all of those qualifiers apply, and the Estonian X-road (google) decentralizes the stores of data and provides a sentry programme for greater security, so there is no central store of data that can be so compromised.
The benefits in terms of efficiency are truly staggering, especially in health care, but the ability to verify your identity in a secure online environment saves a fortune in things like tax collection and financial transactions too.
Eventually Britain will need to adopt at least some part of these systems (and in the DVLA and the Passport Office it did use advice from Estonia)., the problem is that it involves understanding the issues involved and the UK political system is missing leaders with that kind of understanding.
There will be fireworks at the Labour Party conference this year! The activist base definitely won’t be approving of the change in stance, even if it’s the sensible thing to do.
I know literally hundreds of Labour activists (do you?). None of them are raising this. There will be a row about PR, since the constituencies and some unions favour it and the leadership doesn't want to be pinned down (on that or anything else). Otherwise I'll be surprised if there are fireworks on anything. The party is boringly focused on winning, in the manner of smokers who have had a bout of lung disease - we wish we could have a puff, but we suppose we'd better not.
"Every police officer in Northern Ireland has data compromised in 'monumental' breach due to human error
The PSNI Assistant Chief Constable admitted the breach was made in "human error" and apologised to colleagues whose data was made public for two and a half to three hours."
Amazingly, some dangerous idiots still want the government to have yet more of our intimate personal data, even though it's obvious they can't keep it safe. Last year Labour were advocating ID cards to control illegal immigration.
... I would regard id cards as a sensible and proportionate measure...
UK 2020s politics is a long stream of illiberal measures designed to burden law-abiding citizens with whatever the fashionable nostrums of the day are. ID cards is a thing that keeps popping up, and it gets knocked down every time.
Not very effectively knocked down then. It's about 1% as scary to me as the surveillance by facial/numberplate recognition/cell phone which goes on 24/7 so if it has any practical value let's do it.
Again, coercing the individual. The question is not whether it is a good idea, but whether it is moral to fine/jail somebody for refusing to carry one. That would be state overkill.
When I lived in Switzerland i was legally obliged to carry my ID card/foreigner permit (carte des etrangers) at all times and if it was requested by the police or an official and I didn’t have it then I was liable to a fine. There was not one second where I felt that it was oppression by the state or an intrusion into my civil liberties.
In fact it was actually great to have one as with it so many activities were quicker - opening a bank account, collecting a parcel, registering with a gov department re tax or similar - because it was an official compulsory ID card that no functionary would refuse to accept as ID.
Sigh.
For the nth time. The problem isn’t the ID card. The problem isn’t the unique identifying code on it. The problem isn’t even the potential use of that unique code as a key on databases.
The problem is that every single time ID cards have been proposed (and he time that they were, briefly, actually implemented), they come with an attempt to link all our personal information together. And link it to biometric data - finger prints, face recognition. etc. and the make it accessible to everyone.
In the last such scheme, they were going to make everything the NHS had on you (for instance) available to council officials investigating fly tipping. When asked why, the response was that segregating data would be difficult and slow things down.
So if your finger print day was stolen, you’d just have to get new finger prints, eh?
It should be noted that personal for Important People (Politicians, senior civil servants, famous people who the government liked) *was* to be segregated. #NU10K
The only saving grace was that such an insane breach of every concept of data security would have gone the way of all such government projects. Collapsed after spending billions. Though in this case it would have got to the data leaking stage
Time to repost this admittedly brilliant analysis from a couple of years ago:
I’ve always said I’m in favour of ID cards, if the following conditions are met:
1) They’re issued for free
2) You don’t have to carry them at all times
3) You can use them chip and pin to access all government services - so they would replace passports and driving licences, not augment them
4) That you had the power to access all information the government holds on you, and amend it where it is wrong
5) That civil servants who access your data are logged, and you can see who they are and why they accessed it
6) That if somebody has accessed your data inappropriately you have the right to take legal action against them, funded by the government.
And numbers 4-6 will not happen while any civil servant breathes air.
Civil Servants are only human, and humans are nosy, so the more information you make available to government officials the more information they will see.
If you think that if you had free access to a super-government database that you wouldn't be looking at your neighbour's income then you are kidding yourself. The best that can be hoped for is that you would have the good sense not to tell anyone that you had done so and keep the information to yourself.
Meanwhile in Estonia, all of those qualifiers apply, and the Estonian X-road (google) decentralizes the stores of data and provides a sentry programme for greater security, so there is no central store of data that can be so compromised.
The benefits in terms of efficiency are truly staggering, especially in health care, but the ability to verify your identity in a secure online environment saves a fortune in things like tax collection and financial transactions too.
Eventually Britain will need to adopt at least some part of these systems (and in the DVLA and the Passport Office it did use advice from Estonia)., the problem is that it involves understanding the issues involved and the UK political system is missing leaders with that kind of understanding.
Electorates change. My generation grew up in the shadow of WW2. We saw the bombsites, our parents had hidden away in air raid shelters, our grandparents had been in the services. Standing Alone, whether historically accurate or not, was ingrained into us. Everywhere we looked, from comics to TV, the war was present. It shaped us and all those around us. Of course it did. But as we die off, that way of seeing the world becomes less politically visceral. For my kids, the end of WW2 is as far away as the end of the Boer War was for me. It inevitably affects how they look at the world and the UK’s place in it.
Another manifestation of the same problem, courtesy John Oxley,
Almost all of the optics of the party are now geared towards the ageing. Last week Rishi Sunak posed in Thatcher’s old Rover. No one under the age of 55 at the next election could have ever voted for a party led by her. Her first election was as far from us today as Baldwin was from hers. The tortured nostalgia for the half-remembered matriarch can be aimed only at voters collecting their pensions.
"Despite the government’s focus on levelling up, the NIESR found wage growth had been fastest in London. It predicted real wage growth of 7% in the capital between the end of 2019 and 2024, compared with a fall of 5% in the West Midlands."
Indeed. Minimum wage is no longer the maximum wage in many industries, especially so in London. Thanks to Brexit, unskilled employees have seen large rises in their pay, especially those who changed jobs during the pandemic.
And yet...
In its quarterly update on the state of the economy, the NIESR said the poorest tenth of the population had been especially hard hit by Britain’s cost of living crisis and would need an income boost of £4,000 a year to have the same living standards they enjoyed in the year before Covid-19 arrived.
The poorest households – hit by weak wage growth, higher debt, the need to devote more of their budgets to expensive energy, food and housing costs; and with few if any savings – would be 17% worse off by the end of 2024 than they were five years earlier. The richest households would be 5% worse off.
And yet ...
Its almost as if two distinct things have happened. The pandemic, expensive food, energy etc is because of what has happened across the globe and would have happened with or without Brexit. That the cost of gas has shot up globally, and the UK relies upon gas, is not a Brexit issue.
The fact that the cost of housing is so high is a British issue, but not a Brexit issue. Build more houses to solve that one.
The single largest Brexit issue is that our government has spent the last decade concentrating on little else.
There are precious few benefits, significant ongoing costs, and a large majority of the electorate wish it had never happened.
Would we really be better off if Rees Mogg, Williamson, Truss, Patel, Bozo, Raab, Kwarteng etc had set their "talents" onto improving the NHS or education or the economy instead of Brexit?
I'd say the biggest costs of Brexit are societal division and a decline in the calibre of politicians and political debate.
Electorates change. My generation grew up in the shadow of WW2. We saw the bombsites, our parents had hidden away in air raid shelters, our grandparents had been in the services. Standing Alone, whether historically accurate or not, was ingrained into us. Everywhere we looked, from comics to TV, the war was present. It shaped us and all those around us. Of course it did. But as we die off, that way of seeing the world becomes less politically visceral. For my kids, the end of WW2 is as far away as the end of the Boer War was for me. It inevitably affects how they look at the world and the UK’s place in it.
And, every generation is different.
It may be that Generation Alpha (who will succeed Zoomers/Millennials) will find some of their views and obsessions quaint.
Both my children will be in that cohort.
I could never predict what my kids are going to think. That’s probably a good thing!
As a leader of a left-wing party, Starmer has sent an important sign by disassociating himself from the radical postmodern idea that the distinction between males and females is a social construct, and that biology has nothing to do with women’s historical oppression……
Labour’s new position represents a big ideological shift, but it wasn’t presented as one. That is typical of Starmer’s personality, which is unshowy but ruthless. Unlike many American politicians on either side of the spectrum, he has tried to find a position that will make the debate less inflammatory, and to appeal to the wider country rather than his activist base.
This topic is an obsession of right wing reactionaries and, on here, by yourself and two other people.
I don't need a man to lecture me about what constitutes the biology of a woman thanks, not to pretend to be protecting me and my rights.
This is a highly complex subject which should not be a political football, even less so part of a trolling war on a political betting forum.
Have a nice day.
So Sir Keir Starmer is a right wing reactionary?
...well, now you come to ask the question 😀
[to which the answer is no, he isn't. He is an authoritarian tho - witness the online safety bill - and considers the state as something that does things to people for their own good, instead of doing things for people]
"Despite the government’s focus on levelling up, the NIESR found wage growth had been fastest in London. It predicted real wage growth of 7% in the capital between the end of 2019 and 2024, compared with a fall of 5% in the West Midlands."
Indeed. Minimum wage is no longer the maximum wage in many industries, especially so in London. Thanks to Brexit, unskilled employees have seen large rises in their pay, especially those who changed jobs during the pandemic.
Also thanks to Brexit, they are worse off despite their higher wages...
Are you suggesting that Stuart Rose (wages would be expected to go up but that's not necessarily a good thing) was right about the economics even if he was foolish about soundbites?
QTWAIN.
Gas prices would be higher even without Brexit, and if people weren't having pay rises then real wages would be even lower.
Except that real pay was beginning to turn negative before gas prices shot up.
The question that "pay rise for Britain" types never answered was where the money for the pay rises was coming from. Businesses didn't have a Scrooge McDuck Swimming Pool Full Of Money to dip into, so of course prices were going to go up. Higher pay to pay higher prices doesn't really help us overall, and tends to screw the poor most of all.
So productivity, investment. The only things that have ever supported rising living standards. And 2016 was at best irrelevant to that, at worst harmful.
I've answered the question many times before, but despite having almost grasped it you come to the completely wrong conclusion.
The problem in this country is a lack of investment, as you say, and in particular that has been driven by an effectively-infinite pool of minimum wage workers.
When employers complain that they can't find enough workers, then the answer is to pay people more - and any businesses that can't afford to do so, are the least productive and go out of business.
If the least productive businesses go out of business, then that frees up their labour, capital, land, customers etc to be acquired and used my more productive businesses instead. Which can help boost their productivity even further, and fund further pay rises.
Full employment seeing market-led wage growth isn't a problem, market driven wage-price spirals aren't a problem, they're a success.
The problem is when wages and employment get out of sync. When wages are spiralling even when there's mass unemployment, because the market forces aren't working.
Electorates change. My generation grew up in the shadow of WW2. We saw the bombsites, our parents had hidden away in air raid shelters, our grandparents had been in the services. Standing Alone, whether historically accurate or not, was ingrained into us. Everywhere we looked, from comics to TV, the war was present. It shaped us and all those around us. Of course it did. But as we die off, that way of seeing the world becomes less politically visceral. For my kids, the end of WW2 is as far away as the end of the Boer War was for me. It inevitably affects how they look at the world and the UK’s place in it.
Another manifestation of the same problem, courtesy John Oxley,
Almost all of the optics of the party are now geared towards the ageing. Last week Rishi Sunak posed in Thatcher’s old Rover. No one under the age of 55 at the next election could have ever voted for a party led by her. Her first election was as far from us today as Baldwin was from hers. The tortured nostalgia for the half-remembered matriarch can be aimed only at voters collecting their pensions.
That is truly mind-jolting. I remember the 1979 election pretty - the first one I voted in. The thought of a pre-war PM being invoked would have seemed utterly crazy.
Hard to find anything to argue with in OGH's summary. At least for yours truly!
Morning all.
@MikeSmithson keeps taking GE2019 as the benchmark. Whilst this looks right on paper, it's an illusion and for punters it's an error. GE2019 was a one-off 'Get Brexit Done' election to unblock the jam created during the Remainer Parliament. Boris Johnson galvanised the voters against the unelectable trotskyite anti-semitic Jeremy Corbyn with the sole aim of Getting Brexit Done. Hence the December election. In many ways GE2019 was NOT a General Election.
The last proper General Election in the UK was June 2017, which resulted in a hung parliament. That's your benchmark.
Bet accordingly.
p.s. I'm personally very glad that Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair.
I think I understand the point you are making - whilst the 2019 election is the status quo, its artificial. Ordinarily the Labour task would be considered politically unlikely - as we all said in the aftermath.
But if we consider the 2019 result to be the aberration, then a revision to the norm can be expected to happen as the start of any new electoral move. There are swathes of red wall seats which endless polls have shows will not just revert to Labour but will deliver them 5 figure majorities.
If we bake that 2017 reversion in, the task facing Starmer is much smaller, and much more attainable. Then we look at the two other political low tides from 2015 likely to come back in:
The absence of unionist MPs in Scotland feels like a situation that can't be sustained - so expect 20-30 seats to switch from the motorhome party. The absence of yellow MPs in rural England is already a tide rushing back in. The focus is always on Labour, but as is clear it is the LibDems who will mop up disaffected sane voters in places where "Sink the Boats" makes people feel sick.
So, we reset the Red Wall. We drain out the SNP flood. We remove the dam from the LibDems. And suddenly a thumping Tory defeat is not just possible, it feels likely. To stay in power they need to preserve all three of these artificial positions. Which politically means they need to be Janus, a task they are spectacularly failing to pull off.
Yes, I think the Tories have snookered themselves. It is hard to see any of those 3 fronts being contained next GE. While Scotland is unique, the other 2 fronts play out across most E and W constituencies. They are sociological rather than geographical waves.
Tory unpopularity with the working age population is astonishing. I doubt there’s been anything like it in the history of two-party politics in this country.
Yes, it is deeply concerning.
The only people they seem to look after (and protect from policy) is the retired and they've dug a hole so deep there I struggle to see how they get out now.
Cut NI Make training and further education tax deductible for workers Affordable housing
And start talking about full employment - if something good has happened claim credit for it.
Of course, many Conservatives regard full employment as a bad thing.
The Conservatives and Labour will always be the two main parties... until they are not.
Time was when: ...every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!
Neither party has a divine right to compete for power; it's not inconceivable that the LDs replace the Tories permanently (until the next change).
The oddness of the current polling is that we keep getting mad predictions of Labour winning everything everywhere. Supposedly that Channel 4 Poll last night had Labour taking Richmond off Sunak.
The electorate have shown they are well up for tactical voting. There is no mass desire for Sunak in the way there was for Blair. But there is a mass demand to get shut of this government. And people showing that they are motivated and well informed about how to vote to bring that about.
If there truly was a Tory collapse, surely there would be scores more LibDems elected rather than Labour winning Richmond. Some Greens too. But in what gets simplified as a two party choice the pollsters interpret national polls nationally instead of looking at reality.
Compare and contrast the LD vote in a seat we're the ABC choice in vs a seat where its Labour. In one seat we pick up a 5 figure majority, In the other seat we lose our deposit. That is what we can expect in the GE - Labour and LD candidates winning outrageous seats whilst their colleagues elsewhere lose their deposit.
The Conservatives and Labour will always be the two main parties... until they are not.
Time was when: ...every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!
Neither party has a divine right to compete for power; it's not inconceivable that the LDs replace the Tories permanently (until the next change).
The oddness of the current polling is that we keep getting mad predictions of Labour winning everything everywhere. Supposedly that Channel 4 Poll last night had Labour taking Richmond off Sunak.
The electorate have shown they are well up for tactical voting. There is no mass desire for Sunak in the way there was for Blair. But there is a mass demand to get shut of this government. And people showing that they are motivated and well informed about how to vote to bring that about.
If there truly was a Tory collapse, surely there would be scores more LibDems elected rather than Labour winning Richmond. Some Greens too. But in what gets simplified as a two party choice the pollsters interpret national polls nationally instead of looking at reality.
Compare and contrast the LD vote in a seat we're the ABC choice in vs a seat where its Labour. In one seat we pick up a 5 figure majority, In the other seat we lose our deposit. That is what we can expect in the GE - Labour and LD candidates winning outrageous seats whilst their colleagues elsewhere lose their deposit.
Forget UNS.
All sounds entirely sensible, until you remember how poorly the LDs have performed at national elections since 2010.
The Conservatives and Labour will always be the two main parties... until they are not.
Time was when: ...every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!
Neither party has a divine right to compete for power; it's not inconceivable that the LDs replace the Tories permanently (until the next change).
The oddness of the current polling is that we keep getting mad predictions of Labour winning everything everywhere. Supposedly that Channel 4 Poll last night had Labour taking Richmond off Sunak.
The electorate have shown they are well up for tactical voting. There is no mass desire for Sunak in the way there was for Blair. But there is a mass demand to get shut of this government. And people showing that they are motivated and well informed about how to vote to bring that about.
If there truly was a Tory collapse, surely there would be scores more LibDems elected rather than Labour winning Richmond. Some Greens too. But in what gets simplified as a two party choice the pollsters interpret national polls nationally instead of looking at reality.
Compare and contrast the LD vote in a seat we're the ABC choice in vs a seat where its Labour. In one seat we pick up a 5 figure majority, In the other seat we lose our deposit. That is what we can expect in the GE - Labour and LD candidates winning outrageous seats whilst their colleagues elsewhere lose their deposit.
Forget UNS.
All sounds entirely sensible, until you remember how poorly the LDs have performed at national elections since 2010.
I don’t get the anger about ID cards. You all already have ID set up - NHS number from birth, then most will have National Insurance number, and a driving licence.
Let’s not get started on that Waitrose loyalty card.
If the fear is of being required to produce the ID card then fine, I have some sympathy. I would note that there is no requirement to have your driving licence on you when you drive, so why would you need an ID card to breath?
So what is the real issue? Fear of a British Gestapo saying “papers please?”
"Despite the government’s focus on levelling up, the NIESR found wage growth had been fastest in London. It predicted real wage growth of 7% in the capital between the end of 2019 and 2024, compared with a fall of 5% in the West Midlands."
Indeed. Minimum wage is no longer the maximum wage in many industries, especially so in London. Thanks to Brexit, unskilled employees have seen large rises in their pay, especially those who changed jobs during the pandemic.
Is Brexit also responsible for "British wages are sinking while German and French salaries rebound"?
The Government is now spending more money on welfare, than it is on public sector wages.
Yet despite that, it is increasing welfare by double digits via the Triple Lock, while it is suppressing wages.
That is a choice. Not Brexit, not the market, not inevitable. It is a political choice, and the Government should be held to account for it.
If the Government want to suppress wages and tax workers in order to fund welfare then they can do so, and they can campaign on that basis at the next General Election, but if they do, it will be without my vote.
Electorates change. My generation grew up in the shadow of WW2. We saw the bombsites, our parents had hidden away in air raid shelters, our grandparents had been in the services. Standing Alone, whether historically accurate or not, was ingrained into us. Everywhere we looked, from comics to TV, the war was present. It shaped us and all those around us. Of course it did. But as we die off, that way of seeing the world becomes less politically visceral. For my kids, the end of WW2 is as far away as the end of the Boer War was for me. It inevitably affects how they look at the world and the UK’s place in it.
Another manifestation of the same problem, courtesy John Oxley,
Almost all of the optics of the party are now geared towards the ageing. Last week Rishi Sunak posed in Thatcher’s old Rover. No one under the age of 55 at the next election could have ever voted for a party led by her. Her first election was as far from us today as Baldwin was from hers. The tortured nostalgia for the half-remembered matriarch can be aimed only at voters collecting their pensions.
And what on earth is a Rover??
The Tories are the old people’s party and so package their messaging for the old. But even there, they seem to believe the UK is populated by radicalised over-60s who read the Daily Mail and watch GBNews. Has any government known less about the country it governs than this one?
Electorates change. My generation grew up in the shadow of WW2. We saw the bombsites, our parents had hidden away in air raid shelters, our grandparents had been in the services. Standing Alone, whether historically accurate or not, was ingrained into us. Everywhere we looked, from comics to TV, the war was present. It shaped us and all those around us. Of course it did. But as we die off, that way of seeing the world becomes less politically visceral. For my kids, the end of WW2 is as far away as the end of the Boer War was for me. It inevitably affects how they look at the world and the UK’s place in it.
And, every generation is different.
It may be that Generation Alpha (who will succeed Zoomers/Millennials) will find some of their views and obsessions quaint.
Both my children will be in that cohort.
I could never predict what my kids are going to think. That’s probably a good thing!
The only constant in my children's constantly evolving ideological framework is their firm belief that their father is an idiot. My son goes so far as to call me a "Tory" - which is the worst insult imaginable for his demographic.
I don’t get the anger about ID cards. You all already have ID set up - NHS number from birth, then most will have National Insurance number, and a driving licence.
Let’s not get started on that Waitrose loyalty card.
If the fear is of being required to produce the ID card then fine, I have some sympathy. I would note that there is no requirement to have your driving licence on you when you drive, so why would you need an ID card to breath?
So what is the real issue? Fear of a British Gestapo saying “papers please?”
The main issue is that independent IDs that are separate and firewalled from each other are much less intrusive and dangerous than a solitary ID that links all of them together. If you get access to someone's NI number you don't get access to their health records, driving records etc all linked together.
The introduction of ID cards is meant to improve efficiency by linking all that stuff together. That improvement of efficiency is repellent, dangerous and not something anyone should be trusted with.
The Conservatives and Labour will always be the two main parties... until they are not.
Time was when: ...every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!
Neither party has a divine right to compete for power; it's not inconceivable that the LDs replace the Tories permanently (until the next change).
The oddness of the current polling is that we keep getting mad predictions of Labour winning everything everywhere. Supposedly that Channel 4 Poll last night had Labour taking Richmond off Sunak.
The electorate have shown they are well up for tactical voting. There is no mass desire for Sunak in the way there was for Blair. But there is a mass demand to get shut of this government. And people showing that they are motivated and well informed about how to vote to bring that about.
If there truly was a Tory collapse, surely there would be scores more LibDems elected rather than Labour winning Richmond. Some Greens too. But in what gets simplified as a two party choice the pollsters interpret national polls nationally instead of looking at reality.
Compare and contrast the LD vote in a seat we're the ABC choice in vs a seat where its Labour. In one seat we pick up a 5 figure majority, In the other seat we lose our deposit. That is what we can expect in the GE - Labour and LD candidates winning outrageous seats whilst their colleagues elsewhere lose their deposit.
Forget UNS.
All sounds entirely sensible, until you remember how poorly the LDs have performed at national elections since 2010.
He is deeply boring, but Sir Ed Nice is exactly the leader we needed. Calm, reassuring, campaigning but in a non-threatening way. Speaking from the heart and persona experience.
Compare and contrast with Clegg (an early AI experiment to create a deep fake of Tony Blair), Farron (happy clappy scary), Cable (a race to see who will fall asleep faster, us or him), Swinson (Icarus ascending).
Davey is the right guy at the right time. And we can see the results. A LibDem vote which is hyper concentrated in target seats, and is seen as finally safe again for Labour voters to support in their attempt to oust the Tory.
Electorates change. My generation grew up in the shadow of WW2. We saw the bombsites, our parents had hidden away in air raid shelters, our grandparents had been in the services. Standing Alone, whether historically accurate or not, was ingrained into us. Everywhere we looked, from comics to TV, the war was present. It shaped us and all those around us. Of course it did. But as we die off, that way of seeing the world becomes less politically visceral. For my kids, the end of WW2 is as far away as the end of the Boer War was for me. It inevitably affects how they look at the world and the UK’s place in it.
And, every generation is different.
It may be that Generation Alpha (who will succeed Zoomers/Millennials) will find some of their views and obsessions quaint.
Both my children will be in that cohort.
You mean, your children may end up thinking like you?
Electorates change. My generation grew up in the shadow of WW2. We saw the bombsites, our parents had hidden away in air raid shelters, our grandparents had been in the services. Standing Alone, whether historically accurate or not, was ingrained into us. Everywhere we looked, from comics to TV, the war was present. It shaped us and all those around us. Of course it did. But as we die off, that way of seeing the world becomes less politically visceral. For my kids, the end of WW2 is as far away as the end of the Boer War was for me. It inevitably affects how they look at the world and the UK’s place in it.
And, every generation is different.
It may be that Generation Alpha (who will succeed Zoomers/Millennials) will find some of their views and obsessions quaint.
Both my children will be in that cohort.
You mean, your children may end up thinking like you?
A dangerous assumption for any parent in any generation, surely. And one prone to lead to disappointment.
The Conservatives and Labour will always be the two main parties... until they are not.
Time was when: ...every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!
Neither party has a divine right to compete for power; it's not inconceivable that the LDs replace the Tories permanently (until the next change).
The oddness of the current polling is that we keep getting mad predictions of Labour winning everything everywhere. Supposedly that Channel 4 Poll last night had Labour taking Richmond off Sunak.
The electorate have shown they are well up for tactical voting. There is no mass desire for Sunak in the way there was for Blair. But there is a mass demand to get shut of this government. And people showing that they are motivated and well informed about how to vote to bring that about.
If there truly was a Tory collapse, surely there would be scores more LibDems elected rather than Labour winning Richmond. Some Greens too. But in what gets simplified as a two party choice the pollsters interpret national polls nationally instead of looking at reality.
Compare and contrast the LD vote in a seat we're the ABC choice in vs a seat where its Labour. In one seat we pick up a 5 figure majority, In the other seat we lose our deposit. That is what we can expect in the GE - Labour and LD candidates winning outrageous seats whilst their colleagues elsewhere lose their deposit.
Forget UNS.
Because I am a Labour member I cannot advocate for a LibDem vote in the new constituency of Honiton and Sidmouth, but I bet a lot of Labour members will be voting LibDem down here when the election happens.
Electorates change. My generation grew up in the shadow of WW2. We saw the bombsites, our parents had hidden away in air raid shelters, our grandparents had been in the services. Standing Alone, whether historically accurate or not, was ingrained into us. Everywhere we looked, from comics to TV, the war was present. It shaped us and all those around us. Of course it did. But as we die off, that way of seeing the world becomes less politically visceral. For my kids, the end of WW2 is as far away as the end of the Boer War was for me. It inevitably affects how they look at the world and the UK’s place in it.
And, every generation is different.
It may be that Generation Alpha (who will succeed Zoomers/Millennials) will find some of their views and obsessions quaint.
Both my children will be in that cohort.
I could never predict what my kids are going to think. That’s probably a good thing!
The only constant in my children's constantly evolving ideological framework is their firm belief that their father is an idiot. My son goes so far as to call me a "Tory" - which is the worst insult imaginable for his demographic.
"Despite the government’s focus on levelling up, the NIESR found wage growth had been fastest in London. It predicted real wage growth of 7% in the capital between the end of 2019 and 2024, compared with a fall of 5% in the West Midlands."
Indeed. Minimum wage is no longer the maximum wage in many industries, especially so in London. Thanks to Brexit, unskilled employees have seen large rises in their pay, especially those who changed jobs during the pandemic.
And yet...
In its quarterly update on the state of the economy, the NIESR said the poorest tenth of the population had been especially hard hit by Britain’s cost of living crisis and would need an income boost of £4,000 a year to have the same living standards they enjoyed in the year before Covid-19 arrived.
The poorest households – hit by weak wage growth, higher debt, the need to devote more of their budgets to expensive energy, food and housing costs; and with few if any savings – would be 17% worse off by the end of 2024 than they were five years earlier. The richest households would be 5% worse off.
And yet ...
Its almost as if two distinct things have happened. The pandemic, expensive food, energy etc is because of what has happened across the globe and would have happened with or without Brexit. That the cost of gas has shot up globally, and the UK relies upon gas, is not a Brexit issue.
The fact that the cost of housing is so high is a British issue, but not a Brexit issue. Build more houses to solve that one.
I think that's probably largely fair but Brexit certainly hasn't helped.
And after years of blaming the EU for all our ills, Leavers can hardly expect those of us who deeply regret Brexit not to blame it for adding to our present woes.
One of the biggest Brexit benefits, is that the government is now accountable to the electorate.
It doesn’t seem to have increased the quality, competence or popularity of said government, quite the reverse in fact.
In that case, the electorate will get their say at the election. From what we see in polls, it looks pretty likely that we’ll have a change of government. All of which is much better for democracy, than being ruled by a bunch of appointed Commissionsers and judges in Brussels, and a Parliament with no Opposition that can’t propose legislation.
"Despite the government’s focus on levelling up, the NIESR found wage growth had been fastest in London. It predicted real wage growth of 7% in the capital between the end of 2019 and 2024, compared with a fall of 5% in the West Midlands."
Indeed. Minimum wage is no longer the maximum wage in many industries, especially so in London. Thanks to Brexit, unskilled employees have seen large rises in their pay, especially those who changed jobs during the pandemic.
And yet...
In its quarterly update on the state of the economy, the NIESR said the poorest tenth of the population had been especially hard hit by Britain’s cost of living crisis and would need an income boost of £4,000 a year to have the same living standards they enjoyed in the year before Covid-19 arrived.
The poorest households – hit by weak wage growth, higher debt, the need to devote more of their budgets to expensive energy, food and housing costs; and with few if any savings – would be 17% worse off by the end of 2024 than they were five years earlier. The richest households would be 5% worse off.
And yet ...
Its almost as if two distinct things have happened. The pandemic, expensive food, energy etc is because of what has happened across the globe and would have happened with or without Brexit. That the cost of gas has shot up globally, and the UK relies upon gas, is not a Brexit issue.
The fact that the cost of housing is so high is a British issue, but not a Brexit issue. Build more houses to solve that one.
The single largest Brexit issue is that our government has spent the last decade concentrating on little else.
There are precious few benefits, significant ongoing costs, and a large majority of the electorate wish it had never happened.
Would we really be better off if Rees Mogg, Williamson, Truss, Patel, Bozo, Raab, Kwarteng etc had set their "talents" onto improving the NHS or education or the economy instead of Brexit?
I'd say the biggest costs of Brexit are societal division and a decline in the calibre of politicians and political debate.
Societal division was already happening.
But a demographic which thought it would always win discovered in 2016 that it too could be on the losing side.
Which was a good thing - fairness in society requires every group having a chance to win but also every group having the risk of losing.
I'd say it was time for affluent oldies to lose out a little.
Electorates change. My generation grew up in the shadow of WW2. We saw the bombsites, our parents had hidden away in air raid shelters, our grandparents had been in the services. Standing Alone, whether historically accurate or not, was ingrained into us. Everywhere we looked, from comics to TV, the war was present. It shaped us and all those around us. Of course it did. But as we die off, that way of seeing the world becomes less politically visceral. For my kids, the end of WW2 is as far away as the end of the Boer War was for me. It inevitably affects how they look at the world and the UK’s place in it.
Another manifestation of the same problem, courtesy John Oxley,
Almost all of the optics of the party are now geared towards the ageing. Last week Rishi Sunak posed in Thatcher’s old Rover. No one under the age of 55 at the next election could have ever voted for a party led by her. Her first election was as far from us today as Baldwin was from hers. The tortured nostalgia for the half-remembered matriarch can be aimed only at voters collecting their pensions.
And what on earth is a Rover??
The Tories are the old people’s party and so package their messaging for the old. But even there, they seem to believe the UK is populated by radicalised over-60s who read the Daily Mail and watch GBNews. Has any government known less about the country it governs than this one?
The youth are au fait with Rovers although maybe not with Lady Thatcher's - perhaps this was a subtle effort to woo them?
"I'm just a block boy sittin' in a Rover I got my friends and my fam on my shoulder I been cold but my money got me colder..."
As a leader of a left-wing party, Starmer has sent an important sign by disassociating himself from the radical postmodern idea that the distinction between males and females is a social construct, and that biology has nothing to do with women’s historical oppression……
Labour’s new position represents a big ideological shift, but it wasn’t presented as one. That is typical of Starmer’s personality, which is unshowy but ruthless. Unlike many American politicians on either side of the spectrum, he has tried to find a position that will make the debate less inflammatory, and to appeal to the wider country rather than his activist base.
The Conservatives and Labour will always be the two main parties... until they are not.
Time was when: ...every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!
Neither party has a divine right to compete for power; it's not inconceivable that the LDs replace the Tories permanently (until the next change).
The oddness of the current polling is that we keep getting mad predictions of Labour winning everything everywhere. Supposedly that Channel 4 Poll last night had Labour taking Richmond off Sunak.
The electorate have shown they are well up for tactical voting. There is no mass desire for Sunak in the way there was for Blair. But there is a mass demand to get shut of this government. And people showing that they are motivated and well informed about how to vote to bring that about.
If there truly was a Tory collapse, surely there would be scores more LibDems elected rather than Labour winning Richmond. Some Greens too. But in what gets simplified as a two party choice the pollsters interpret national polls nationally instead of looking at reality.
Compare and contrast the LD vote in a seat we're the ABC choice in vs a seat where its Labour. In one seat we pick up a 5 figure majority, In the other seat we lose our deposit. That is what we can expect in the GE - Labour and LD candidates winning outrageous seats whilst their colleagues elsewhere lose their deposit.
Forget UNS.
All sounds entirely sensible, until you remember how poorly the LDs have performed at national elections since 2010.
Which is where Dave'n'George were smarter than the current team.
If Lib and Lab take potshots at each other (2015 due to coalition fallout, 2019 due to the awfulness of Jez 2.0), Conservatives can do well without too much difficulty.
By being so awful, the 2019-now government has made it clear to the red and yellow teams where they should be aiming their fire. And that's good for the Lib Dems in the 50(?) seats they can put on a decent show in, and good for Labour everywhere else in England.
The Conservatives and Labour will always be the two main parties... until they are not.
Time was when: ...every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!
Neither party has a divine right to compete for power; it's not inconceivable that the LDs replace the Tories permanently (until the next change).
The oddness of the current polling is that we keep getting mad predictions of Labour winning everything everywhere. Supposedly that Channel 4 Poll last night had Labour taking Richmond off Sunak.
The electorate have shown they are well up for tactical voting. There is no mass desire for Sunak in the way there was for Blair. But there is a mass demand to get shut of this government. And people showing that they are motivated and well informed about how to vote to bring that about.
If there truly was a Tory collapse, surely there would be scores more LibDems elected rather than Labour winning Richmond. Some Greens too. But in what gets simplified as a two party choice the pollsters interpret national polls nationally instead of looking at reality.
Compare and contrast the LD vote in a seat we're the ABC choice in vs a seat where its Labour. In one seat we pick up a 5 figure majority, In the other seat we lose our deposit. That is what we can expect in the GE - Labour and LD candidates winning outrageous seats whilst their colleagues elsewhere lose their deposit.
Forget UNS.
All sounds entirely sensible, until you remember how poorly the LDs have performed at national elections since 2010.
He is deeply boring, but Sir Ed Nice is exactly the leader we needed. Calm, reassuring, campaigning but in a non-threatening way. Speaking from the heart and persona experience.
Compare and contrast with Clegg (an early AI experiment to create a deep fake of Tony Blair), Farron (happy clappy scary), Cable (a race to see who will fall asleep faster, us or him), Swinson (Icarus ascending).
Davey is the right guy at the right time. And we can see the results. A LibDem vote which is hyper concentrated in target seats, and is seen as finally safe again for Labour voters to support in their attempt to oust the Tory.
My gut feeling is that largely people have forgotten about the LD's existence.
They're going to get squeezed in Lab/LD marginals, and seem unable to run national campaigns. For that reason, I'd be surprised to see them over 25 seats.
The Conservatives and Labour will always be the two main parties... until they are not.
Time was when: ...every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!
Neither party has a divine right to compete for power; it's not inconceivable that the LDs replace the Tories permanently (until the next change).
The oddness of the current polling is that we keep getting mad predictions of Labour winning everything everywhere. Supposedly that Channel 4 Poll last night had Labour taking Richmond off Sunak.
The electorate have shown they are well up for tactical voting. There is no mass desire for Sunak in the way there was for Blair. But there is a mass demand to get shut of this government. And people showing that they are motivated and well informed about how to vote to bring that about.
If there truly was a Tory collapse, surely there would be scores more LibDems elected rather than Labour winning Richmond. Some Greens too. But in what gets simplified as a two party choice the pollsters interpret national polls nationally instead of looking at reality.
Compare and contrast the LD vote in a seat we're the ABC choice in vs a seat where its Labour. In one seat we pick up a 5 figure majority, In the other seat we lose our deposit. That is what we can expect in the GE - Labour and LD candidates winning outrageous seats whilst their colleagues elsewhere lose their deposit.
Forget UNS.
All sounds entirely sensible, until you remember how poorly the LDs have performed at national elections since 2010.
Which is where Dave'n'George were smarter than the current team.
If Lib and Lab take potshots at each other (2015 due to coalition fallout, 2019 due to the awfulness of Jez 2.0), Conservatives can do well without too much difficulty.
By being so awful, the 2019-now government has made it clear to the red and yellow teams where they should be aiming their fire. And that's good for the Lib Dems in the 50(?) seats they can put on a decent show in, and good for Labour everywhere else in England.
Damned with faint praise there, much?
Electorally the current Tory team are simply not up to it. Activists locally getting restless. Suspect another bad set of locals would be Rishi's last.
Electorates change. My generation grew up in the shadow of WW2. We saw the bombsites, our parents had hidden away in air raid shelters, our grandparents had been in the services. Standing Alone, whether historically accurate or not, was ingrained into us. Everywhere we looked, from comics to TV, the war was present. It shaped us and all those around us. Of course it did. But as we die off, that way of seeing the world becomes less politically visceral. For my kids, the end of WW2 is as far away as the end of the Boer War was for me. It inevitably affects how they look at the world and the UK’s place in it.
And, every generation is different.
It may be that Generation Alpha (who will succeed Zoomers/Millennials) will find some of their views and obsessions quaint.
Both my children will be in that cohort.
I could never predict what my kids are going to think. That’s probably a good thing!
The only constant in my children's constantly evolving ideological framework is their firm belief that their father is an idiot. My son goes so far as to call me a "Tory" - which is the worst insult imaginable for his demographic.
My grandson’s favourite insult is Boomer!!
Yes I am a Boomer as well as a Tory apparently (despite being born in 1975 and a Labour Party member since 1992...).
Hard to find anything to argue with in OGH's summary. At least for yours truly!
Morning all.
@MikeSmithson keeps taking GE2019 as the benchmark. Whilst this looks right on paper, it's an illusion and for punters it's an error. GE2019 was a one-off 'Get Brexit Done' election to unblock the jam created during the Remainer Parliament. Boris Johnson galvanised the voters against the unelectable trotskyite anti-semitic Jeremy Corbyn with the sole aim of Getting Brexit Done. Hence the December election. In many ways GE2019 was NOT a General Election.
The last proper General Election in the UK was June 2017, which resulted in a hung parliament. That's your benchmark.
Bet accordingly.
p.s. I'm personally very glad that Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair.
I think I understand the point you are making - whilst the 2019 election is the status quo, its artificial. Ordinarily the Labour task would be considered politically unlikely - as we all said in the aftermath.
But if we consider the 2019 result to be the aberration, then a revision to the norm can be expected to happen as the start of any new electoral move. There are swathes of red wall seats which endless polls have shows will not just revert to Labour but will deliver them 5 figure majorities.
If we bake that 2017 reversion in, the task facing Starmer is much smaller, and much more attainable. Then we look at the two other political low tides from 2015 likely to come back in:
The absence of unionist MPs in Scotland feels like a situation that can't be sustained - so expect 20-30 seats to switch from the motorhome party. The absence of yellow MPs in rural England is already a tide rushing back in. The focus is always on Labour, but as is clear it is the LibDems who will mop up disaffected sane voters in places where "Sink the Boats" makes people feel sick.
So, we reset the Red Wall. We drain out the SNP flood. We remove the dam from the LibDems. And suddenly a thumping Tory defeat is not just possible, it feels likely. To stay in power they need to preserve all three of these artificial positions. Which politically means they need to be Janus, a task they are spectacularly failing to pull off.
Yes, I think the Tories have snookered themselves. It is hard to see any of those 3 fronts being contained next GE. While Scotland is unique, the other 2 fronts play out across most E and W constituencies. They are sociological rather than geographical waves.
Tory unpopularity with the working age population is astonishing. I doubt there’s been anything like it in the history of two-party politics in this country.
Yes, it is deeply concerning.
The only people they seem to look after (and protect from policy) is the retired and they've dug a hole so deep there I struggle to see how they get out now.
Opposition will do a lot of the work.
Labour, in government, will be unlikely to resist the temptation to try to buy pensioner votes. I think some of the bias of the old to the Tories is in fact a bias of the old to the incumbent government.
Things could change quite rapidly, at least in terms of rhetoric and polling. But would a new Tory government, after a Starmer interregnum, be able to resist the temptation to buy pensioner votes? I have my doubts. (Well, okay, not many doubts, I'm fairly confident that governments of both sides will follow the path of least resistance and genuflect to the pensioner vote.)
"Despite the government’s focus on levelling up, the NIESR found wage growth had been fastest in London. It predicted real wage growth of 7% in the capital between the end of 2019 and 2024, compared with a fall of 5% in the West Midlands."
Indeed. Minimum wage is no longer the maximum wage in many industries, especially so in London. Thanks to Brexit, unskilled employees have seen large rises in their pay, especially those who changed jobs during the pandemic.
I haven't read the paper behind the article, but this is another astonishing line:
the poorest tenth of the population had been especially hard hit by Britain’s cost of living crisis and would need an income boost of £4,000 a year to have the same living standards they enjoyed in the year before Covid-19 arrived.
Sadly, a massive increase in fuel prices has a larger impact on the poorest people.
We can blame Vladimir Putin for that one.
Fortunately, many people have managed to get better jobs than they had in 2019, which makes them better off than they would have been if they were still earning minimum wage, even if their living standard has declined in practice.
Yes, I understand that this is difficult to sell electorally, most people are not better off now than they were four years ago.
We should all be lobbying OPEC to start pumping oil, which will have the dual effects of reducing inflation and starving Putin of dollars.
Hasn't Saudi just last month announced they are reducing oil production? As are Russia.
Yes, before Putin decided to ignore the production cuts and then weaponise the food supply to the Middle East.
There was a Ukraine summit in Jeddah last weekend, attended by China and India - the destinations for Russia’s black market oil - as well as Zelensky.
They agreed to keep talking, and that the Ukranian terms - the 1991 border - should form the basis of any agreement.
The contrary view, put forward by American commentator Saagar Enjeti https://youtube.com/watch?v=ns_1EJkalx8 His view is that Russia and OPEC are still on the same page.
Hard to find anything to argue with in OGH's summary. At least for yours truly!
Morning all.
@MikeSmithson keeps taking GE2019 as the benchmark. Whilst this looks right on paper, it's an illusion and for punters it's an error. GE2019 was a one-off 'Get Brexit Done' election to unblock the jam created during the Remainer Parliament. Boris Johnson galvanised the voters against the unelectable trotskyite anti-semitic Jeremy Corbyn with the sole aim of Getting Brexit Done. Hence the December election. In many ways GE2019 was NOT a General Election.
The last proper General Election in the UK was June 2017, which resulted in a hung parliament. That's your benchmark.
Bet accordingly.
p.s. I'm personally very glad that Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair.
I think I understand the point you are making - whilst the 2019 election is the status quo, its artificial. Ordinarily the Labour task would be considered politically unlikely - as we all said in the aftermath.
But if we consider the 2019 result to be the aberration, then a revision to the norm can be expected to happen as the start of any new electoral move. There are swathes of red wall seats which endless polls have shows will not just revert to Labour but will deliver them 5 figure majorities.
If we bake that 2017 reversion in, the task facing Starmer is much smaller, and much more attainable. Then we look at the two other political low tides from 2015 likely to come back in:
The absence of unionist MPs in Scotland feels like a situation that can't be sustained - so expect 20-30 seats to switch from the motorhome party. The absence of yellow MPs in rural England is already a tide rushing back in. The focus is always on Labour, but as is clear it is the LibDems who will mop up disaffected sane voters in places where "Sink the Boats" makes people feel sick.
So, we reset the Red Wall. We drain out the SNP flood. We remove the dam from the LibDems. And suddenly a thumping Tory defeat is not just possible, it feels likely. To stay in power they need to preserve all three of these artificial positions. Which politically means they need to be Janus, a task they are spectacularly failing to pull off.
Yes, I think the Tories have snookered themselves. It is hard to see any of those 3 fronts being contained next GE. While Scotland is unique, the other 2 fronts play out across most E and W constituencies. They are sociological rather than geographical waves.
Tory unpopularity with the working age population is astonishing. I doubt there’s been anything like it in the history of two-party politics in this country.
Yes, it is deeply concerning.
The only people they seem to look after (and protect from policy) is the retired and they've dug a hole so deep there I struggle to see how they get out now.
Opposition will do a lot of the work.
Labour, in government, will be unlikely to resist the temptation to try to buy pensioner votes. I think some of the bias of the old to the Tories is in fact a bias of the old to the incumbent government.
Things could change quite rapidly, at least in terms of rhetoric and polling. But would a new Tory government, after a Starmer interregnum, be able to resist the temptation to buy pensioner votes? I have my doubts. (Well, okay, not many doubts, I'm fairly confident that governments of both sides will follow the path of least resistance and genuflect to the pensioner vote.)
OTOH, many pensioners will still vote Tory regardless, so why should SKS bother going all out Tory? Or (as remarked to me yesterday) so cowardly in his approach to Brexit etc. that he might as well be Tory. And ditto with baby starving, Scottish referendum, and so on and so forth.
The Tories have gone so far (as already remarked in the thread) it's probably impossible to rebalance things and make a fairer balance with the people actually doing the work without upsetting the pensioner vote irreparably (for instance, by imposing NI on all, or merging it with income tax, or cutting IHT allowances or converting them to CGT).
The Conservatives and Labour will always be the two main parties... until they are not.
Time was when: ...every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!
Neither party has a divine right to compete for power; it's not inconceivable that the LDs replace the Tories permanently (until the next change).
The oddness of the current polling is that we keep getting mad predictions of Labour winning everything everywhere. Supposedly that Channel 4 Poll last night had Labour taking Richmond off Sunak.
The electorate have shown they are well up for tactical voting. There is no mass desire for Sunak in the way there was for Blair. But there is a mass demand to get shut of this government. And people showing that they are motivated and well informed about how to vote to bring that about.
If there truly was a Tory collapse, surely there would be scores more LibDems elected rather than Labour winning Richmond. Some Greens too. But in what gets simplified as a two party choice the pollsters interpret national polls nationally instead of looking at reality.
Compare and contrast the LD vote in a seat we're the ABC choice in vs a seat where its Labour. In one seat we pick up a 5 figure majority, In the other seat we lose our deposit. That is what we can expect in the GE - Labour and LD candidates winning outrageous seats whilst their colleagues elsewhere lose their deposit.
Forget UNS.
All sounds entirely sensible, until you remember how poorly the LDs have performed at national elections since 2010.
Which is where Dave'n'George were smarter than the current team.
If Lib and Lab take potshots at each other (2015 due to coalition fallout, 2019 due to the awfulness of Jez 2.0), Conservatives can do well without too much difficulty.
By being so awful, the 2019-now government has made it clear to the red and yellow teams where they should be aiming their fire. And that's good for the Lib Dems in the 50(?) seats they can put on a decent show in, and good for Labour everywhere else in England.
Damned with faint praise there, much?
Electorally the current Tory team are simply not up to it. Activists locally getting restless. Suspect another bad set of locals would be Rishi's last.
Blimey, that would make six Tory PMs since 2016... Hardly screams strong and stable. You want to give the people who chose Truss another pop at selecting the leader of a UN P5 and G7 economy? Remind me of the definition of insanity, again.
Hard to find anything to argue with in OGH's summary. At least for yours truly!
Morning all.
@MikeSmithson keeps taking GE2019 as the benchmark. Whilst this looks right on paper, it's an illusion and for punters it's an error. GE2019 was a one-off 'Get Brexit Done' election to unblock the jam created during the Remainer Parliament. Boris Johnson galvanised the voters against the unelectable trotskyite anti-semitic Jeremy Corbyn with the sole aim of Getting Brexit Done. Hence the December election. In many ways GE2019 was NOT a General Election.
The last proper General Election in the UK was June 2017, which resulted in a hung parliament. That's your benchmark.
Bet accordingly.
p.s. I'm personally very glad that Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair.
I think I understand the point you are making - whilst the 2019 election is the status quo, its artificial. Ordinarily the Labour task would be considered politically unlikely - as we all said in the aftermath.
But if we consider the 2019 result to be the aberration, then a revision to the norm can be expected to happen as the start of any new electoral move. There are swathes of red wall seats which endless polls have shows will not just revert to Labour but will deliver them 5 figure majorities.
If we bake that 2017 reversion in, the task facing Starmer is much smaller, and much more attainable. Then we look at the two other political low tides from 2015 likely to come back in:
The absence of unionist MPs in Scotland feels like a situation that can't be sustained - so expect 20-30 seats to switch from the motorhome party. The absence of yellow MPs in rural England is already a tide rushing back in. The focus is always on Labour, but as is clear it is the LibDems who will mop up disaffected sane voters in places where "Sink the Boats" makes people feel sick.
So, we reset the Red Wall. We drain out the SNP flood. We remove the dam from the LibDems. And suddenly a thumping Tory defeat is not just possible, it feels likely. To stay in power they need to preserve all three of these artificial positions. Which politically means they need to be Janus, a task they are spectacularly failing to pull off.
The point is that we are two nations.
A handful of floating voters have joined Labour's tribe, out of exasperation with the Conservatives, and much of the other tribe will simply sit on their hands.
That's what is different to GE2017, which was largely stalemated, and is what is going to deliver Starmer's majority. And, by the same token, means we could get another GE2017 result, or something like it, at the end of his 1st term.
The point is that we are two nations.
I think this is a misread of the situation, made possible by overstating the so-called culture wars the Tories are stoking.
@DavidL ’s post is much more on the money imo - we used to be two nations but the borders between us have been weakened or smashed and we are now a loose federation of states that ally based on convenience. And as @RochdalePioneers suggests those alliances are currently almost all against the Tories.
Electorates change. My generation grew up in the shadow of WW2. We saw the bombsites, our parents had hidden away in air raid shelters, our grandparents had been in the services. Standing Alone, whether historically accurate or not, was ingrained into us. Everywhere we looked, from comics to TV, the war was present. It shaped us and all those around us. Of course it did. But as we die off, that way of seeing the world becomes less politically visceral. For my kids, the end of WW2 is as far away as the end of the Boer War was for me. It inevitably affects how they look at the world and the UK’s place in it.
And, every generation is different.
It may be that Generation Alpha (who will succeed Zoomers/Millennials) will find some of their views and obsessions quaint.
Both my children will be in that cohort.
You mean, your children may end up thinking like you?
I have no idea.
I will equip my children to think for themselves and to thrive in the modern world, such as it is then.
"Despite the government’s focus on levelling up, the NIESR found wage growth had been fastest in London. It predicted real wage growth of 7% in the capital between the end of 2019 and 2024, compared with a fall of 5% in the West Midlands."
Electorates change. My generation grew up in the shadow of WW2. We saw the bombsites, our parents had hidden away in air raid shelters, our grandparents had been in the services. Standing Alone, whether historically accurate or not, was ingrained into us. Everywhere we looked, from comics to TV, the war was present. It shaped us and all those around us. Of course it did. But as we die off, that way of seeing the world becomes less politically visceral. For my kids, the end of WW2 is as far away as the end of the Boer War was for me. It inevitably affects how they look at the world and the UK’s place in it.
And, every generation is different.
It may be that Generation Alpha (who will succeed Zoomers/Millennials) will find some of their views and obsessions quaint.
Both my children will be in that cohort.
You mean, your children may end up thinking like you?
A dangerous assumption for any parent in any generation, surely. And one prone to lead to disappointment.
I was lucky, my mother was a Thatcher hating, Labour supporting Unionist, my father a Thatcher loving, royalist Scottish nationalist. A veritable smörgåsbord.
"Every police officer in Northern Ireland has data compromised in 'monumental' breach due to human error
The PSNI Assistant Chief Constable admitted the breach was made in "human error" and apologised to colleagues whose data was made public for two and a half to three hours."
Amazingly, some dangerous idiots still want the government to have yet more of our intimate personal data, even though it's obvious they can't keep it safe. Last year Labour were advocating ID cards to control illegal immigration.
... I would regard id cards as a sensible and proportionate measure...
UK 2020s politics is a long stream of illiberal measures designed to burden law-abiding citizens with whatever the fashionable nostrums of the day are. ID cards is a thing that keeps popping up, and it gets knocked down every time.
Not very effectively knocked down then. It's about 1% as scary to me as the surveillance by facial/numberplate recognition/cell phone which goes on 24/7 so if it has any practical value let's do it.
Again, coercing the individual. The question is not whether it is a good idea, but whether it is moral to fine/jail somebody for refusing to carry one. That would be state overkill.
When I lived in Switzerland i was legally obliged to carry my ID card/foreigner permit (carte des etrangers) at all times and if it was requested by the police or an official and I didn’t have it then I was liable to a fine. There was not one second where I felt that it was oppression by the state or an intrusion into my civil liberties.
In fact it was actually great to have one as with it so many activities were quicker - opening a bank account, collecting a parcel, registering with a gov department re tax or similar - because it was an official compulsory ID card that no functionary would refuse to accept as ID.
Sigh.
For the nth time. The problem isn’t the ID card. The problem isn’t the unique identifying code on it. The problem isn’t even the potential use of that unique code as a key on databases.
The problem is that every single time ID cards have been proposed (and he time that they were, briefly, actually implemented), they come with an attempt to link all our personal information together. And link it to biometric data - finger prints, face recognition. etc. and the make it accessible to everyone.
In the last such scheme, they were going to make everything the NHS had on you (for instance) available to council officials investigating fly tipping. When asked why, the response was that segregating data would be difficult and slow things down.
So if your finger print day was stolen, you’d just have to get new finger prints, eh?
It should be noted that personal for Important People (Politicians, senior civil servants, famous people who the government liked) *was* to be segregated. #NU10K
The only saving grace was that such an insane breach of every concept of data security would have gone the way of all such government projects. Collapsed after spending billions. Though in this case it would have got to the data leaking stage
Time to repost this admittedly brilliant analysis from a couple of years ago:
I’ve always said I’m in favour of ID cards, if the following conditions are met:
1) They’re issued for free
2) You don’t have to carry them at all times
3) You can use them chip and pin to access all government services - so they would replace passports and driving licences, not augment them
4) That you had the power to access all information the government holds on you, and amend it where it is wrong
5) That civil servants who access your data are logged, and you can see who they are and why they accessed it
6) That if somebody has accessed your data inappropriately you have the right to take legal action against them, funded by the government.
And numbers 4-6 will not happen while any civil servant breathes air.
Civil Servants are only human, and humans are nosy, so the more information you make available to government officials the more information they will see.
If you think that if you had free access to a super-government database that you wouldn't be looking at your neighbour's income then you are kidding yourself. The best that can be hoped for is that you would have the good sense not to tell anyone that you had done so and keep the information to yourself.
Meanwhile in Estonia, all of those qualifiers apply, and the Estonian X-road (google) decentralizes the stores of data and provides a sentry programme for greater security, so there is no central store of data that can be so compromised.
The benefits in terms of efficiency are truly staggering, especially in health care, but the ability to verify your identity in a secure online environment saves a fortune in things like tax collection and financial transactions too.
Eventually Britain will need to adopt at least some part of these systems (and in the DVLA and the Passport Office it did use advice from Estonia)., the problem is that it involves understanding the issues involved and the UK political system is missing leaders with that kind of understanding.
Hard to find anything to argue with in OGH's summary. At least for yours truly!
Morning all.
@MikeSmithson keeps taking GE2019 as the benchmark. Whilst this looks right on paper, it's an illusion and for punters it's an error. GE2019 was a one-off 'Get Brexit Done' election to unblock the jam created during the Remainer Parliament. Boris Johnson galvanised the voters against the unelectable trotskyite anti-semitic Jeremy Corbyn with the sole aim of Getting Brexit Done. Hence the December election. In many ways GE2019 was NOT a General Election.
The last proper General Election in the UK was June 2017, which resulted in a hung parliament. That's your benchmark.
Bet accordingly.
p.s. I'm personally very glad that Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair.
I think I understand the point you are making - whilst the 2019 election is the status quo, its artificial. Ordinarily the Labour task would be considered politically unlikely - as we all said in the aftermath.
But if we consider the 2019 result to be the aberration, then a revision to the norm can be expected to happen as the start of any new electoral move. There are swathes of red wall seats which endless polls have shows will not just revert to Labour but will deliver them 5 figure majorities.
If we bake that 2017 reversion in, the task facing Starmer is much smaller, and much more attainable. Then we look at the two other political low tides from 2015 likely to come back in:
The absence of unionist MPs in Scotland feels like a situation that can't be sustained - so expect 20-30 seats to switch from the motorhome party. The absence of yellow MPs in rural England is already a tide rushing back in. The focus is always on Labour, but as is clear it is the LibDems who will mop up disaffected sane voters in places where "Sink the Boats" makes people feel sick.
So, we reset the Red Wall. We drain out the SNP flood. We remove the dam from the LibDems. And suddenly a thumping Tory defeat is not just possible, it feels likely. To stay in power they need to preserve all three of these artificial positions. Which politically means they need to be Janus, a task they are spectacularly failing to pull off.
Yes, I think the Tories have snookered themselves. It is hard to see any of those 3 fronts being contained next GE. While Scotland is unique, the other 2 fronts play out across most E and W constituencies. They are sociological rather than geographical waves.
Tory unpopularity with the working age population is astonishing. I doubt there’s been anything like it in the history of two-party politics in this country.
Yes, it is deeply concerning.
The only people they seem to look after (and protect from policy) is the retired and they've dug a hole so deep there I struggle to see how they get out now.
Opposition will do a lot of the work.
Labour, in government, will be unlikely to resist the temptation to try to buy pensioner votes. I think some of the bias of the old to the Tories is in fact a bias of the old to the incumbent government.
Things could change quite rapidly, at least in terms of rhetoric and polling. But would a new Tory government, after a Starmer interregnum, be able to resist the temptation to buy pensioner votes? I have my doubts. (Well, okay, not many doubts, I'm fairly confident that governments of both sides will follow the path of least resistance and genuflect to the pensioner vote.)
I don't think the bias of the old to the Tories is a bias to the incumbent Government.
The Tories are supported more by homeowners and the old are disproportionately homeowners.
The elderly have always been more likely to be homeowners, and thus more likely to be Tory, but that has become more true than ever before because of both 1 good and 1 bad Tory government.
Good - The Tory government of the 80s worked very hard to get people onto the property ladder. Working people able to get onto the property ladder in the 1980s are now increasingly the pensioners of today.
Bad - This government rather than doing the same work to get people onto the property ladder has instead rested on the laurels of relying on the votes won by the actions of the past.
There are very few working people who will support the Tories on the basis of "hey, if my parents peg it then I'll get an inheritance". About HYUFD and that's it.
The Conservatives and Labour will always be the two main parties... until they are not.
Time was when: ...every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!
Neither party has a divine right to compete for power; it's not inconceivable that the LDs replace the Tories permanently (until the next change).
The oddness of the current polling is that we keep getting mad predictions of Labour winning everything everywhere. Supposedly that Channel 4 Poll last night had Labour taking Richmond off Sunak.
The electorate have shown they are well up for tactical voting. There is no mass desire for Sunak in the way there was for Blair. But there is a mass demand to get shut of this government. And people showing that they are motivated and well informed about how to vote to bring that about.
If there truly was a Tory collapse, surely there would be scores more LibDems elected rather than Labour winning Richmond. Some Greens too. But in what gets simplified as a two party choice the pollsters interpret national polls nationally instead of looking at reality.
Compare and contrast the LD vote in a seat we're the ABC choice in vs a seat where its Labour. In one seat we pick up a 5 figure majority, In the other seat we lose our deposit. That is what we can expect in the GE - Labour and LD candidates winning outrageous seats whilst their colleagues elsewhere lose their deposit.
Forget UNS.
All sounds entirely sensible, until you remember how poorly the LDs have performed at national elections since 2010.
Which is where Dave'n'George were smarter than the current team.
If Lib and Lab take potshots at each other (2015 due to coalition fallout, 2019 due to the awfulness of Jez 2.0), Conservatives can do well without too much difficulty.
By being so awful, the 2019-now government has made it clear to the red and yellow teams where they should be aiming their fire. And that's good for the Lib Dems in the 50(?) seats they can put on a decent show in, and good for Labour everywhere else in England.
Damned with faint praise there, much?
Electorally the current Tory team are simply not up to it. Activists locally getting restless. Suspect another bad set of locals would be Rishi's last.
Blimey, that would make six Tory PMs since 2016... Hardly screams strong and stable. You want to give the people who chose Truss another pop at selecting the leader of a UN P5 and G7 economy? Remind me of the definition of insanity, again.
So its better to have the person who lost to Truss?
It's not about strong and stable; it's about scraping the barnacles off the boat preparing the party for an election.
For the 2019 voting Tory brand AND most of the recent activist base, the biggest barnacles are in No 10 and No 11.
There will be fireworks at the Labour Party conference this year! The activist base definitely won’t be approving of the change in stance, even if it’s the sensible thing to do.
I know literally hundreds of Labour activists (do you?). None of them are raising this. There will be a row about PR, since the constituencies and some unions favour it and the leadership doesn't want to be pinned down (on that or anything else). Otherwise I'll be surprised if there are fireworks on anything. The party is boringly focused on winning, in the manner of smokers who have had a bout of lung disease - we wish we could have a puff, but we suppose we'd better not.
I’ll admit that you know a lot more Labour activists than I do
Do you think that the hardcore gender activists will move towards the Greens and LDs, but perhaps vote Lab tactically at the election?
"Every police officer in Northern Ireland has data compromised in 'monumental' breach due to human error
The PSNI Assistant Chief Constable admitted the breach was made in "human error" and apologised to colleagues whose data was made public for two and a half to three hours."
Amazingly, some dangerous idiots still want the government to have yet more of our intimate personal data, even though it's obvious they can't keep it safe. Last year Labour were advocating ID cards to control illegal immigration.
... I would regard id cards as a sensible and proportionate measure...
UK 2020s politics is a long stream of illiberal measures designed to burden law-abiding citizens with whatever the fashionable nostrums of the day are. ID cards is a thing that keeps popping up, and it gets knocked down every time.
Not very effectively knocked down then. It's about 1% as scary to me as the surveillance by facial/numberplate recognition/cell phone which goes on 24/7 so if it has any practical value let's do it.
Again, coercing the individual. The question is not whether it is a good idea, but whether it is moral to fine/jail somebody for refusing to carry one. That would be state overkill.
When I lived in Switzerland i was legally obliged to carry my ID card/foreigner permit (carte des etrangers) at all times and if it was requested by the police or an official and I didn’t have it then I was liable to a fine. There was not one second where I felt that it was oppression by the state or an intrusion into my civil liberties.
In fact it was actually great to have one as with it so many activities were quicker - opening a bank account, collecting a parcel, registering with a gov department re tax or similar - because it was an official compulsory ID card that no functionary would refuse to accept as ID.
Sigh.
For the nth time. The problem isn’t the ID card. The problem isn’t the unique identifying code on it. The problem isn’t even the potential use of that unique code as a key on databases.
The problem is that every single time ID cards have been proposed (and he time that they were, briefly, actually implemented), they come with an attempt to link all our personal information together. And link it to biometric data - finger prints, face recognition. etc. and the make it accessible to everyone.
In the last such scheme, they were going to make everything the NHS had on you (for instance) available to council officials investigating fly tipping. When asked why, the response was that segregating data would be difficult and slow things down.
So if your finger print day was stolen, you’d just have to get new finger prints, eh?
It should be noted that personal for Important People (Politicians, senior civil servants, famous people who the government liked) *was* to be segregated. #NU10K
The only saving grace was that such an insane breach of every concept of data security would have gone the way of all such government projects. Collapsed after spending billions. Though in this case it would have got to the data leaking stage
Time to repost this admittedly brilliant analysis from a couple of years ago:
I’ve always said I’m in favour of ID cards, if the following conditions are met:
1) They’re issued for free
2) You don’t have to carry them at all times
3) You can use them chip and pin to access all government services - so they would replace passports and driving licences, not augment them
4) That you had the power to access all information the government holds on you, and amend it where it is wrong
5) That civil servants who access your data are logged, and you can see who they are and why they accessed it
6) That if somebody has accessed your data inappropriately you have the right to take legal action against them, funded by the government.
And numbers 4-6 will not happen while any civil servant breathes air.
Civil Servants are only human, and humans are nosy, so the more information you make available to government officials the more information they will see.
If you think that if you had free access to a super-government database that you wouldn't be looking at your neighbour's income then you are kidding yourself. The best that can be hoped for is that you would have the good sense not to tell anyone that you had done so and keep the information to yourself.
Meanwhile in Estonia, all of those qualifiers apply, and the Estonian X-road (google) decentralizes the stores of data and provides a sentry programme for greater security, so there is no central store of data that can be so compromised.
The benefits in terms of efficiency are truly staggering, especially in health care, but the ability to verify your identity in a secure online environment saves a fortune in things like tax collection and financial transactions too.
Eventually Britain will need to adopt at least some part of these systems (and in the DVLA and the Passport Office it did use advice from Estonia)., the problem is that it involves understanding the issues involved and the UK political system is missing leaders with that kind of understanding.
I’ve actually spoken with civil servants on this issue.
The problem is that they are hard wired to believe in the Big Central Database. Access controls are seen as Impeding Good Government.
So all the briefing papers reflect this.
You would need to fire the top five ranks of the Home Office, en masse.
These were the people who thought it was a great idea for the DVLA to sell registered keeper information, to any cowboy parking extortion company that asks nicely.
The Conservatives and Labour will always be the two main parties... until they are not.
Time was when: ...every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!
Neither party has a divine right to compete for power; it's not inconceivable that the LDs replace the Tories permanently (until the next change).
The oddness of the current polling is that we keep getting mad predictions of Labour winning everything everywhere. Supposedly that Channel 4 Poll last night had Labour taking Richmond off Sunak.
The electorate have shown they are well up for tactical voting. There is no mass desire for Sunak in the way there was for Blair. But there is a mass demand to get shut of this government. And people showing that they are motivated and well informed about how to vote to bring that about.
If there truly was a Tory collapse, surely there would be scores more LibDems elected rather than Labour winning Richmond. Some Greens too. But in what gets simplified as a two party choice the pollsters interpret national polls nationally instead of looking at reality.
Compare and contrast the LD vote in a seat we're the ABC choice in vs a seat where its Labour. In one seat we pick up a 5 figure majority, In the other seat we lose our deposit. That is what we can expect in the GE - Labour and LD candidates winning outrageous seats whilst their colleagues elsewhere lose their deposit.
Forget UNS.
All sounds entirely sensible, until you remember how poorly the LDs have performed at national elections since 2010.
Which is where Dave'n'George were smarter than the current team.
If Lib and Lab take potshots at each other (2015 due to coalition fallout, 2019 due to the awfulness of Jez 2.0), Conservatives can do well without too much difficulty.
By being so awful, the 2019-now government has made it clear to the red and yellow teams where they should be aiming their fire. And that's good for the Lib Dems in the 50(?) seats they can put on a decent show in, and good for Labour everywhere else in England.
Damned with faint praise there, much?
Electorally the current Tory team are simply not up to it. Activists locally getting restless. Suspect another bad set of locals would be Rishi's last.
May 24 is much too far into the endgame for a putsch.
Channelling @NickPalmer from yesterday, can I just say what a pleasure it is to be discussing party politics again, rather than woke cycle-friendly house design.
The Conservatives and Labour will always be the two main parties... until they are not.
Time was when: ...every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!
Neither party has a divine right to compete for power; it's not inconceivable that the LDs replace the Tories permanently (until the next change).
The oddness of the current polling is that we keep getting mad predictions of Labour winning everything everywhere. Supposedly that Channel 4 Poll last night had Labour taking Richmond off Sunak.
The electorate have shown they are well up for tactical voting. There is no mass desire for Sunak in the way there was for Blair. But there is a mass demand to get shut of this government. And people showing that they are motivated and well informed about how to vote to bring that about.
If there truly was a Tory collapse, surely there would be scores more LibDems elected rather than Labour winning Richmond. Some Greens too. But in what gets simplified as a two party choice the pollsters interpret national polls nationally instead of looking at reality.
Compare and contrast the LD vote in a seat we're the ABC choice in vs a seat where its Labour. In one seat we pick up a 5 figure majority, In the other seat we lose our deposit. That is what we can expect in the GE - Labour and LD candidates winning outrageous seats whilst their colleagues elsewhere lose their deposit.
Forget UNS.
Because I am a Labour member I cannot advocate for a LibDem vote in the new constituency of Honiton and Sidmouth, but I bet a lot of Labour members will be voting LibDem down here when the election happens.
The lunacy of Labour rules. You want a Labour government. Yet voting Labour could help maintain a Tory government. You may well vote against your own party in the privacy of the ballot box - Labour may well lose its deposit. But you can't openly talk about it - madness.
"Every police officer in Northern Ireland has data compromised in 'monumental' breach due to human error
The PSNI Assistant Chief Constable admitted the breach was made in "human error" and apologised to colleagues whose data was made public for two and a half to three hours."
Amazingly, some dangerous idiots still want the government to have yet more of our intimate personal data, even though it's obvious they can't keep it safe. Last year Labour were advocating ID cards to control illegal immigration.
... I would regard id cards as a sensible and proportionate measure...
UK 2020s politics is a long stream of illiberal measures designed to burden law-abiding citizens with whatever the fashionable nostrums of the day are. ID cards is a thing that keeps popping up, and it gets knocked down every time.
Not very effectively knocked down then. It's about 1% as scary to me as the surveillance by facial/numberplate recognition/cell phone which goes on 24/7 so if it has any practical value let's do it.
Again, coercing the individual. The question is not whether it is a good idea, but whether it is moral to fine/jail somebody for refusing to carry one. That would be state overkill.
When I lived in Switzerland i was legally obliged to carry my ID card/foreigner permit (carte des etrangers) at all times and if it was requested by the police or an official and I didn’t have it then I was liable to a fine. There was not one second where I felt that it was oppression by the state or an intrusion into my civil liberties.
In fact it was actually great to have one as with it so many activities were quicker - opening a bank account, collecting a parcel, registering with a gov department re tax or similar - because it was an official compulsory ID card that no functionary would refuse to accept as ID.
Sigh.
For the nth time. The problem isn’t the ID card. The problem isn’t the unique identifying code on it. The problem isn’t even the potential use of that unique code as a key on databases.
The problem is that every single time ID cards have been proposed (and he time that they were, briefly, actually implemented), they come with an attempt to link all our personal information together. And link it to biometric data - finger prints, face recognition. etc. and the make it accessible to everyone.
In the last such scheme, they were going to make everything the NHS had on you (for instance) available to council officials investigating fly tipping. When asked why, the response was that segregating data would be difficult and slow things down.
So if your finger print day was stolen, you’d just have to get new finger prints, eh?
It should be noted that personal for Important People (Politicians, senior civil servants, famous people who the government liked) *was* to be segregated. #NU10K
The only saving grace was that such an insane breach of every concept of data security would have gone the way of all such government projects. Collapsed after spending billions. Though in this case it would have got to the data leaking stage
Time to repost this admittedly brilliant analysis from a couple of years ago:
I’ve always said I’m in favour of ID cards, if the following conditions are met:
1) They’re issued for free
2) You don’t have to carry them at all times
3) You can use them chip and pin to access all government services - so they would replace passports and driving licences, not augment them
4) That you had the power to access all information the government holds on you, and amend it where it is wrong
5) That civil servants who access your data are logged, and you can see who they are and why they accessed it
6) That if somebody has accessed your data inappropriately you have the right to take legal action against them, funded by the government.
And numbers 4-6 will not happen while any civil servant breathes air.
Civil Servants are only human, and humans are nosy, so the more information you make available to government officials the more information they will see.
If you think that if you had free access to a super-government database that you wouldn't be looking at your neighbour's income then you are kidding yourself. The best that can be hoped for is that you would have the good sense not to tell anyone that you had done so and keep the information to yourself.
Meanwhile in Estonia, all of those qualifiers apply, and the Estonian X-road (google) decentralizes the stores of data and provides a sentry programme for greater security, so there is no central store of data that can be so compromised.
The benefits in terms of efficiency are truly staggering, especially in health care, but the ability to verify your identity in a secure online environment saves a fortune in things like tax collection and financial transactions too.
Eventually Britain will need to adopt at least some part of these systems (and in the DVLA and the Passport Office it did use advice from Estonia)., the problem is that it involves understanding the issues involved and the UK political system is missing leaders with that kind of understanding.
Electorates change. My generation grew up in the shadow of WW2. We saw the bombsites, our parents had hidden away in air raid shelters, our grandparents had been in the services. Standing Alone, whether historically accurate or not, was ingrained into us. Everywhere we looked, from comics to TV, the war was present. It shaped us and all those around us. Of course it did. But as we die off, that way of seeing the world becomes less politically visceral. For my kids, the end of WW2 is as far away as the end of the Boer War was for me. It inevitably affects how they look at the world and the UK’s place in it.
And, every generation is different.
It may be that Generation Alpha (who will succeed Zoomers/Millennials) will find some of their views and obsessions quaint.
Both my children will be in that cohort.
I could never predict what my kids are going to think. That’s probably a good thing!
The only constant in my children's constantly evolving ideological framework is their firm belief that their father is an idiot. My son goes so far as to call me a "Tory" - which is the worst insult imaginable for his demographic.
My grandson’s favourite insult is Boomer!!
Yes I am a Boomer as well as a Tory apparently (despite being born in 1975 and a Labour Party member since 1992...).
We'll have to compare notes. Right now my daughter would elect granny and grandad's dog to be PM.
The Conservatives and Labour will always be the two main parties... until they are not.
Time was when: ...every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!
Neither party has a divine right to compete for power; it's not inconceivable that the LDs replace the Tories permanently (until the next change).
The oddness of the current polling is that we keep getting mad predictions of Labour winning everything everywhere. Supposedly that Channel 4 Poll last night had Labour taking Richmond off Sunak.
The electorate have shown they are well up for tactical voting. There is no mass desire for Sunak in the way there was for Blair. But there is a mass demand to get shut of this government. And people showing that they are motivated and well informed about how to vote to bring that about.
If there truly was a Tory collapse, surely there would be scores more LibDems elected rather than Labour winning Richmond. Some Greens too. But in what gets simplified as a two party choice the pollsters interpret national polls nationally instead of looking at reality.
Compare and contrast the LD vote in a seat we're the ABC choice in vs a seat where its Labour. In one seat we pick up a 5 figure majority, In the other seat we lose our deposit. That is what we can expect in the GE - Labour and LD candidates winning outrageous seats whilst their colleagues elsewhere lose their deposit.
Forget UNS.
All sounds entirely sensible, until you remember how poorly the LDs have performed at national elections since 2010.
Which is where Dave'n'George were smarter than the current team.
If Lib and Lab take potshots at each other (2015 due to coalition fallout, 2019 due to the awfulness of Jez 2.0), Conservatives can do well without too much difficulty.
By being so awful, the 2019-now government has made it clear to the red and yellow teams where they should be aiming their fire. And that's good for the Lib Dems in the 50(?) seats they can put on a decent show in, and good for Labour everywhere else in England.
Damned with faint praise there, much?
Electorally the current Tory team are simply not up to it. Activists locally getting restless. Suspect another bad set of locals would be Rishi's last.
May 24 is much too far into the endgame for a putsch.
If May 2024 shows Tory MPs down to the 91st safest (as per recent polling) losing their seats, 24 hours would be time enough.
The Conservatives and Labour will always be the two main parties... until they are not.
Time was when: ...every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!
Neither party has a divine right to compete for power; it's not inconceivable that the LDs replace the Tories permanently (until the next change).
The oddness of the current polling is that we keep getting mad predictions of Labour winning everything everywhere. Supposedly that Channel 4 Poll last night had Labour taking Richmond off Sunak.
The electorate have shown they are well up for tactical voting. There is no mass desire for Sunak in the way there was for Blair. But there is a mass demand to get shut of this government. And people showing that they are motivated and well informed about how to vote to bring that about.
If there truly was a Tory collapse, surely there would be scores more LibDems elected rather than Labour winning Richmond. Some Greens too. But in what gets simplified as a two party choice the pollsters interpret national polls nationally instead of looking at reality.
Compare and contrast the LD vote in a seat we're the ABC choice in vs a seat where its Labour. In one seat we pick up a 5 figure majority, In the other seat we lose our deposit. That is what we can expect in the GE - Labour and LD candidates winning outrageous seats whilst their colleagues elsewhere lose their deposit.
Forget UNS.
All sounds entirely sensible, until you remember how poorly the LDs have performed at national elections since 2010.
Which is where Dave'n'George were smarter than the current team.
If Lib and Lab take potshots at each other (2015 due to coalition fallout, 2019 due to the awfulness of Jez 2.0), Conservatives can do well without too much difficulty.
By being so awful, the 2019-now government has made it clear to the red and yellow teams where they should be aiming their fire. And that's good for the Lib Dems in the 50(?) seats they can put on a decent show in, and good for Labour everywhere else in England.
Damned with faint praise there, much?
Electorally the current Tory team are simply not up to it. Activists locally getting restless. Suspect another bad set of locals would be Rishi's last.
Blimey, that would make six Tory PMs since 2016... Hardly screams strong and stable. You want to give the people who chose Truss another pop at selecting the leader of a UN P5 and G7 economy? Remind me of the definition of insanity, again.
So its better to have the person who lost to Truss?
It's not about strong and stable; it's about scraping the barnacles off the boat preparing the party for an election.
For the 2019 voting Tory brand AND most of the recent activist base, the biggest barnacles are in No 10 and No 11.
But to an outsider, the recent activist base seems a little…fringe, to put it politely. Not sure the party will fare well by playing to them.
In that case, the electorate will get their say at the election. From what we see in polls, it looks pretty likely that we’ll have a change of government. All of which is much better for democracy, than being ruled by a bunch of appointed Commissionsers and judges in Brussels, and a Parliament with no Opposition that can’t propose legislation.
Great to see you converted to the notion of Scotland not being ruled by a bunch of politicians elected by the voters of another country while the politicians we elect are ignored when they propose legislation.
The Conservatives and Labour will always be the two main parties... until they are not.
Time was when: ...every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!
Neither party has a divine right to compete for power; it's not inconceivable that the LDs replace the Tories permanently (until the next change).
The oddness of the current polling is that we keep getting mad predictions of Labour winning everything everywhere. Supposedly that Channel 4 Poll last night had Labour taking Richmond off Sunak.
The electorate have shown they are well up for tactical voting. There is no mass desire for Sunak in the way there was for Blair. But there is a mass demand to get shut of this government. And people showing that they are motivated and well informed about how to vote to bring that about.
If there truly was a Tory collapse, surely there would be scores more LibDems elected rather than Labour winning Richmond. Some Greens too. But in what gets simplified as a two party choice the pollsters interpret national polls nationally instead of looking at reality.
Compare and contrast the LD vote in a seat we're the ABC choice in vs a seat where its Labour. In one seat we pick up a 5 figure majority, In the other seat we lose our deposit. That is what we can expect in the GE - Labour and LD candidates winning outrageous seats whilst their colleagues elsewhere lose their deposit.
Forget UNS.
All sounds entirely sensible, until you remember how poorly the LDs have performed at national elections since 2010.
Which is where Dave'n'George were smarter than the current team.
If Lib and Lab take potshots at each other (2015 due to coalition fallout, 2019 due to the awfulness of Jez 2.0), Conservatives can do well without too much difficulty.
By being so awful, the 2019-now government has made it clear to the red and yellow teams where they should be aiming their fire. And that's good for the Lib Dems in the 50(?) seats they can put on a decent show in, and good for Labour everywhere else in England.
Damned with faint praise there, much?
Electorally the current Tory team are simply not up to it. Activists locally getting restless. Suspect another bad set of locals would be Rishi's last.
Blimey, that would make six Tory PMs since 2016... Hardly screams strong and stable. You want to give the people who chose Truss another pop at selecting the leader of a UN P5 and G7 economy? Remind me of the definition of insanity, again.
So its better to have the person who lost to Truss?
It's not about strong and stable; it's about scraping the barnacles off the boat preparing the party for an election.
For the 2019 voting Tory brand AND most of the recent activist base, the biggest barnacles are in No 10 and No 11.
Can we decouple this: "the 2019 voting Tory brand" - you have lost almost all of the ex Labour red wall voters and repulsed large numbers of conservatives. "the most recent activist base" is the reason for repelling so many voters from your 2019 vote. The remaining activists are *mental*
The Conservatives and Labour will always be the two main parties... until they are not.
Time was when: ...every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!
Neither party has a divine right to compete for power; it's not inconceivable that the LDs replace the Tories permanently (until the next change).
The oddness of the current polling is that we keep getting mad predictions of Labour winning everything everywhere. Supposedly that Channel 4 Poll last night had Labour taking Richmond off Sunak.
The electorate have shown they are well up for tactical voting. There is no mass desire for Sunak in the way there was for Blair. But there is a mass demand to get shut of this government. And people showing that they are motivated and well informed about how to vote to bring that about.
If there truly was a Tory collapse, surely there would be scores more LibDems elected rather than Labour winning Richmond. Some Greens too. But in what gets simplified as a two party choice the pollsters interpret national polls nationally instead of looking at reality.
Compare and contrast the LD vote in a seat we're the ABC choice in vs a seat where its Labour. In one seat we pick up a 5 figure majority, In the other seat we lose our deposit. That is what we can expect in the GE - Labour and LD candidates winning outrageous seats whilst their colleagues elsewhere lose their deposit.
Forget UNS.
All sounds entirely sensible, until you remember how poorly the LDs have performed at national elections since 2010.
Which is where Dave'n'George were smarter than the current team.
If Lib and Lab take potshots at each other (2015 due to coalition fallout, 2019 due to the awfulness of Jez 2.0), Conservatives can do well without too much difficulty.
By being so awful, the 2019-now government has made it clear to the red and yellow teams where they should be aiming their fire. And that's good for the Lib Dems in the 50(?) seats they can put on a decent show in, and good for Labour everywhere else in England.
Damned with faint praise there, much?
Electorally the current Tory team are simply not up to it. Activists locally getting restless. Suspect another bad set of locals would be Rishi's last.
Blimey, that would make six Tory PMs since 2016... Hardly screams strong and stable. You want to give the people who chose Truss another pop at selecting the leader of a UN P5 and G7 economy? Remind me of the definition of insanity, again.
So its better to have the person who lost to Truss?
It's not about strong and stable; it's about scraping the barnacles off the boat preparing the party for an election.
For the 2019 voting Tory brand AND most of the recent activist base, the biggest barnacles are in No 10 and No 11.
But to an outsider, the recent activist base seems a little…fringe, to put it politely. Not sure the party will fare well by playing to them.
Nope, the recent activist base is the most diverse (in every respect) that I can remember since 2005. It is also the largest in living memory.
It is a shame that the statist centrism of Sunak has alienated such a broad coalition.
The Conservatives and Labour will always be the two main parties... until they are not.
Time was when: ...every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!
Neither party has a divine right to compete for power; it's not inconceivable that the LDs replace the Tories permanently (until the next change).
The oddness of the current polling is that we keep getting mad predictions of Labour winning everything everywhere. Supposedly that Channel 4 Poll last night had Labour taking Richmond off Sunak.
The electorate have shown they are well up for tactical voting. There is no mass desire for Sunak in the way there was for Blair. But there is a mass demand to get shut of this government. And people showing that they are motivated and well informed about how to vote to bring that about.
If there truly was a Tory collapse, surely there would be scores more LibDems elected rather than Labour winning Richmond. Some Greens too. But in what gets simplified as a two party choice the pollsters interpret national polls nationally instead of looking at reality.
Compare and contrast the LD vote in a seat we're the ABC choice in vs a seat where its Labour. In one seat we pick up a 5 figure majority, In the other seat we lose our deposit. That is what we can expect in the GE - Labour and LD candidates winning outrageous seats whilst their colleagues elsewhere lose their deposit.
Forget UNS.
All sounds entirely sensible, until you remember how poorly the LDs have performed at national elections since 2010.
Which is where Dave'n'George were smarter than the current team.
If Lib and Lab take potshots at each other (2015 due to coalition fallout, 2019 due to the awfulness of Jez 2.0), Conservatives can do well without too much difficulty.
By being so awful, the 2019-now government has made it clear to the red and yellow teams where they should be aiming their fire. And that's good for the Lib Dems in the 50(?) seats they can put on a decent show in, and good for Labour everywhere else in England.
Damned with faint praise there, much?
Electorally the current Tory team are simply not up to it. Activists locally getting restless. Suspect another bad set of locals would be Rishi's last.
Blimey, that would make six Tory PMs since 2016... Hardly screams strong and stable. You want to give the people who chose Truss another pop at selecting the leader of a UN P5 and G7 economy? Remind me of the definition of insanity, again.
So its better to have the person who lost to Truss?
It's not about strong and stable; it's about scraping the barnacles off the boat preparing the party for an election.
For the 2019 voting Tory brand AND most of the recent activist base, the biggest barnacles are in No 10 and No 11.
But what are you suggesting instead ?
Nobody is going to believe promises of unfunded tax cuts.
And few Conservatives seem to want to boast about full employment and NHS employment increasing by 300k since 2019.
"Every police officer in Northern Ireland has data compromised in 'monumental' breach due to human error
The PSNI Assistant Chief Constable admitted the breach was made in "human error" and apologised to colleagues whose data was made public for two and a half to three hours."
Amazingly, some dangerous idiots still want the government to have yet more of our intimate personal data, even though it's obvious they can't keep it safe. Last year Labour were advocating ID cards to control illegal immigration.
... I would regard id cards as a sensible and proportionate measure...
UK 2020s politics is a long stream of illiberal measures designed to burden law-abiding citizens with whatever the fashionable nostrums of the day are. ID cards is a thing that keeps popping up, and it gets knocked down every time.
Not very effectively knocked down then. It's about 1% as scary to me as the surveillance by facial/numberplate recognition/cell phone which goes on 24/7 so if it has any practical value let's do it.
Again, coercing the individual. The question is not whether it is a good idea, but whether it is moral to fine/jail somebody for refusing to carry one. That would be state overkill.
When I lived in Switzerland i was legally obliged to carry my ID card/foreigner permit (carte des etrangers) at all times and if it was requested by the police or an official and I didn’t have it then I was liable to a fine. There was not one second where I felt that it was oppression by the state or an intrusion into my civil liberties.
In fact it was actually great to have one as with it so many activities were quicker - opening a bank account, collecting a parcel, registering with a gov department re tax or similar - because it was an official compulsory ID card that no functionary would refuse to accept as ID.
The problem with last attempt at implementation that most objected to was not actually the card itself in my view.
It was purely all the data they wanted to link to the id card on the backing database and the several thousand organisations which would have access to that data
The Conservatives and Labour will always be the two main parties... until they are not.
Time was when: ...every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal Or else a little Conservative!
Neither party has a divine right to compete for power; it's not inconceivable that the LDs replace the Tories permanently (until the next change).
The oddness of the current polling is that we keep getting mad predictions of Labour winning everything everywhere. Supposedly that Channel 4 Poll last night had Labour taking Richmond off Sunak.
The electorate have shown they are well up for tactical voting. There is no mass desire for Sunak in the way there was for Blair. But there is a mass demand to get shut of this government. And people showing that they are motivated and well informed about how to vote to bring that about.
If there truly was a Tory collapse, surely there would be scores more LibDems elected rather than Labour winning Richmond. Some Greens too. But in what gets simplified as a two party choice the pollsters interpret national polls nationally instead of looking at reality.
Compare and contrast the LD vote in a seat we're the ABC choice in vs a seat where its Labour. In one seat we pick up a 5 figure majority, In the other seat we lose our deposit. That is what we can expect in the GE - Labour and LD candidates winning outrageous seats whilst their colleagues elsewhere lose their deposit.
Forget UNS.
All sounds entirely sensible, until you remember how poorly the LDs have performed at national elections since 2010.
Which is where Dave'n'George were smarter than the current team.
If Lib and Lab take potshots at each other (2015 due to coalition fallout, 2019 due to the awfulness of Jez 2.0), Conservatives can do well without too much difficulty.
By being so awful, the 2019-now government has made it clear to the red and yellow teams where they should be aiming their fire. And that's good for the Lib Dems in the 50(?) seats they can put on a decent show in, and good for Labour everywhere else in England.
Damned with faint praise there, much?
Electorally the current Tory team are simply not up to it. Activists locally getting restless. Suspect another bad set of locals would be Rishi's last.
May 24 is much too far into the endgame for a putsch.
If May 2024 shows Tory MPs down to the 91st safest (as per recent polling) losing their seats, 24 hours would be time enough.
It takes 24 seconds for a PM to call a General Election.
Hard to find anything to argue with in OGH's summary. At least for yours truly!
Morning all.
@MikeSmithson keeps taking GE2019 as the benchmark. Whilst this looks right on paper, it's an illusion and for punters it's an error. GE2019 was a one-off 'Get Brexit Done' election to unblock the jam created during the Remainer Parliament. Boris Johnson galvanised the voters against the unelectable trotskyite anti-semitic Jeremy Corbyn with the sole aim of Getting Brexit Done. Hence the December election. In many ways GE2019 was NOT a General Election.
The last proper General Election in the UK was June 2017, which resulted in a hung parliament. That's your benchmark.
Bet accordingly.
p.s. I'm personally very glad that Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair.
I think I understand the point you are making - whilst the 2019 election is the status quo, its artificial. Ordinarily the Labour task would be considered politically unlikely - as we all said in the aftermath.
But if we consider the 2019 result to be the aberration, then a revision to the norm can be expected to happen as the start of any new electoral move. There are swathes of red wall seats which endless polls have shows will not just revert to Labour but will deliver them 5 figure majorities.
If we bake that 2017 reversion in, the task facing Starmer is much smaller, and much more attainable. Then we look at the two other political low tides from 2015 likely to come back in:
The absence of unionist MPs in Scotland feels like a situation that can't be sustained - so expect 20-30 seats to switch from the motorhome party. The absence of yellow MPs in rural England is already a tide rushing back in. The focus is always on Labour, but as is clear it is the LibDems who will mop up disaffected sane voters in places where "Sink the Boats" makes people feel sick.
So, we reset the Red Wall. We drain out the SNP flood. We remove the dam from the LibDems. And suddenly a thumping Tory defeat is not just possible, it feels likely. To stay in power they need to preserve all three of these artificial positions. Which politically means they need to be Janus, a task they are spectacularly failing to pull off.
Yes, I think the Tories have snookered themselves. It is hard to see any of those 3 fronts being contained next GE. While Scotland is unique, the other 2 fronts play out across most E and W constituencies. They are sociological rather than geographical waves.
Tory unpopularity with the working age population is astonishing. I doubt there’s been anything like it in the history of two-party politics in this country.
Yes, it is deeply concerning.
The only people they seem to look after (and protect from policy) is the retired and they've dug a hole so deep there I struggle to see how they get out now.
Opposition will do a lot of the work.
Labour, in government, will be unlikely to resist the temptation to try to buy pensioner votes. I think some of the bias of the old to the Tories is in fact a bias of the old to the incumbent government.
Things could change quite rapidly, at least in terms of rhetoric and polling. But would a new Tory government, after a Starmer interregnum, be able to resist the temptation to buy pensioner votes? I have my doubts. (Well, okay, not many doubts, I'm fairly confident that governments of both sides will follow the path of least resistance and genuflect to the pensioner vote.)
OTOH, many pensioners will still vote Tory regardless, so why should SKS bother going all out Tory? Or (as remarked to me yesterday) so cowardly in his approach to Brexit etc. that he might as well be Tory. And ditto with baby starving, Scottish referendum, and so on and so forth.
The Tories have gone so far (as already remarked in the thread) it's probably impossible to rebalance things and make a fairer balance with the people actually doing the work without upsetting the pensioner vote irreparably (for instance, by imposing NI on all, or merging it with income tax, or cutting IHT allowances or converting them to CGT).
My argument is mainly grounded on what happened under the previous Labour government, rather than on hypotheticals about the future.
Under the Labour government of 1997-2010* we saw several moves that increased spending on pensioners. We had the first pension lock, to ensure there wasn't a repeat of low inflation leading to a tiny increase in the state pension. We had various freebies given to pensioners - TV licenses, bus passes, fuel allowances.
The consequence of this was seen in election results. In the 2010 GE the bias of the old to vote Tories was at its lowest since 1992.
Expect to see the same again. I'd be gobsmacked if pensioners were not reassured by Labour budgets, and I'd expect votes to change as they did before.
The attraction of buying the votes of pensioners is that it is really simple. The government only has to keep the money flowing. Sorting out the problems for younger voters, such as the housing crisis, might sound simple - just build more houses! - but runs into all sorts of other issues - Who will build them? Will there be enough building materials at a low enough price? Where? - which make them practically more difficult, and even in a best case scenario will take years to deliver tangible results.
* Actually, probably more correctly in the period 2001-2010. I'd have to dig out the details of when the various reforms were made. But the very small pension increase happened in the first Parliament, 1997-2001, and Labour consequently fell further behind with the pensioner vote at the 2001 GE. They learnt their lesson then and I don't think they will be looking for a refresher.
Comments
There are precious few benefits, significant ongoing costs, and a large majority of the electorate wish it had never happened.
And after years of blaming the EU for all our ills, Leavers can hardly expect those of us who deeply regret Brexit not to blame it for adding to our present woes.
Gas prices would be higher even without Brexit, and if people weren't having pay rises then real wages would be even lower.
We know the Red Wall reversion is happening - unless every poll up there is massively wrong. We know the southern moderates reversion is happening. We can see signs of the Scottish reversion and Rutherglen will give us a measure of how fierce that will be.
That gets us back to a political mean. Then we apply the effects of this government to the newly levelled voter pool. As you say, many Tories will stay home - and we saw what that did to so many seats in 1997. And the tides will not just neatly slosh back to where they were - signs that the movement will overtop the 2015 position ands sweep away Tory seats in all kind of interesting places.
1) Actively demonise trans people (the GOP approach)
2) Try to associate Labour with the trans activists whose views they have rejected (the Tory approach to Extinction Rebellion / Labour)
I expect they mostly go down route 2, but the trouble is no one believes Starmer is a radical. It will fall flat.
The Tories really have run out of ideas.
‘The war changed everything’: Hungarians in Ukraine turn against Orbán
https://www.ft.com/content/88d6ffab-5cab-4db1-bf43-d44a7eac00c8
...After Russia annexed Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine from 2014, Kyiv sought to boost national identity and in 2017 passed a law curtailing minority rights, including in education. That angered the Hungarian community and drove them to support Orbán.
But since last year’s full-scale invasion, most Hungarians in Zakarpattia have changed their minds.
“I used to identify as a Hungarian with Ukrainian citizenship,” said György Buleca, the director of a company that imports goods from Hungary. “That changed when Orbán said this was not his war and that we should agree to a ceasefire.”..
I'm not convinced cutting taxes will work. The Tories have largely brought this onto themselves - beholden to retirees and people who own their homes outright.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/09/guardian-essential-poll-new-zealand-national-holds-clear-lead-over-labour-as-election-nears
The only people they seem to look after (and protect fr Excellent post.
*assuming quite a lot of erstwhile SNP supporters sit on their hands.
It's far more likely that there's deal after deal that aligns us ever more closely with the EU than Rejoin, IMHO.
The fact that the older generation are doing well is in part legacy from the actions that the Tories took 40 years ago to help ensure that people could own their own home.
The Government over the past 13 years has no such legacy. Under Cameron and Osborne they made some decent moves, arrested the decline in home ownership that started under Blair and Brown, saw it start to rebound but there simply hasn't been enough construction to cope. And any good ideas they've had for housing post-Osborne haven't made it past their MPs since.
If you think that if you had free access to a super-government database that you wouldn't be looking at your neighbour's income then you are kidding yourself. The best that can be hoped for is that you would have the good sense not to tell anyone that you had done so and keep the information to yourself.
The question that "pay rise for Britain" types never answered was where the money for the pay rises was coming from. Businesses didn't have a Scrooge McDuck Swimming Pool Full Of Money to dip into, so of course prices were going to go up. Higher pay to pay higher prices doesn't really help us overall, and tends to screw the poor most of all.
So productivity, investment. The only things that have ever supported rising living standards. And 2016 was at best irrelevant to that, at worst harmful.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/02/08/britain-g7-economy-europe-falling-real-wages-warns-oecd/
Indeed, tax increases by Labour on second homes, landlords etc might be more popular.
If the opposite wasn't happening, it might have worked.
But if the Government keeps whacking up taxes on working people, then gives a fraction of that back, then it doesn't deserve and won't get any gratitude.
Time was when:
...every boy and every gal
That’s born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative!
Neither party has a divine right to compete for power; it's not inconceivable that the LDs replace the Tories permanently (until the next change).
It may be that Generation Alpha (who will succeed Zoomers/Millennials) will find some of their views and obsessions quaint.
Both my children will be in that cohort.
The benefits in terms of efficiency are truly staggering, especially in health care, but the ability to verify your identity in a secure online environment saves a fortune in things like tax collection and financial transactions too.
Eventually Britain will need to adopt at least some part of these systems (and in the DVLA and the Passport Office it did use advice from Estonia)., the problem is that it involves understanding the issues involved and the UK political system is missing leaders with that kind of understanding.
Over to you @NickPalmer
Almost all of the optics of the party are now geared towards the ageing. Last week Rishi Sunak posed in Thatcher’s old Rover. No one under the age of 55 at the next election could have ever voted for a party led by her. Her first election was as far from us today as Baldwin was from hers. The tortured nostalgia for the half-remembered matriarch can be aimed only at voters collecting their pensions.
I'd say the biggest costs of Brexit are societal division and a decline in the calibre of politicians and political debate.
Not much in it.
[to which the answer is no, he isn't. He is an authoritarian tho - witness the online safety bill - and considers the state as something that does things to people for their own good, instead of doing things for people]
The problem in this country is a lack of investment, as you say, and in particular that has been driven by an effectively-infinite pool of minimum wage workers.
When employers complain that they can't find enough workers, then the answer is to pay people more - and any businesses that can't afford to do so, are the least productive and go out of business.
If the least productive businesses go out of business, then that frees up their labour, capital, land, customers etc to be acquired and used my more productive businesses instead. Which can help boost their productivity even further, and fund further pay rises.
Full employment seeing market-led wage growth isn't a problem, market driven wage-price spirals aren't a problem, they're a success.
The problem is when wages and employment get out of sync. When wages are spiralling even when there's mass unemployment, because the market forces aren't working.
Make training and further education tax deductible for workers
Affordable housing
And start talking about full employment - if something good has happened claim credit for it.
Of course, many Conservatives regard full employment as a bad thing.
The electorate have shown they are well up for tactical voting. There is no mass desire for Sunak in the way there was for Blair. But there is a mass demand to get shut of this government. And people showing that they are motivated and well informed about how to vote to bring that about.
If there truly was a Tory collapse, surely there would be scores more LibDems elected rather than Labour winning Richmond. Some Greens too. But in what gets simplified as a two party choice the pollsters interpret national polls nationally instead of looking at reality.
Compare and contrast the LD vote in a seat we're the ABC choice in vs a seat where its Labour. In one seat we pick up a 5 figure majority, In the other seat we lose our deposit. That is what we can expect in the GE - Labour and LD candidates winning outrageous seats whilst their colleagues elsewhere lose their deposit.
Forget UNS.
(Ok, death maybe)
Let’s not get started on that Waitrose loyalty card.
If the fear is of being required to produce the ID card then fine, I have some sympathy. I would note that there is no requirement to have your driving licence on you when you drive, so why would you need an ID card to breath?
So what is the real issue? Fear of a British Gestapo saying “papers please?”
The Government is now spending more money on welfare, than it is on public sector wages.
Yet despite that, it is increasing welfare by double digits via the Triple Lock, while it is suppressing wages.
That is a choice. Not Brexit, not the market, not inevitable. It is a political choice, and the Government should be held to account for it.
If the Government want to suppress wages and tax workers in order to fund welfare then they can do so, and they can campaign on that basis at the next General Election, but if they do, it will be without my vote.
The Tories are the old people’s party and so package their messaging for the old. But even there, they seem to believe the UK is populated by radicalised over-60s who read the Daily Mail and watch GBNews. Has any government known less about the country it governs than this one?
The introduction of ID cards is meant to improve efficiency by linking all that stuff together. That improvement of efficiency is repellent, dangerous and not something anyone should be trusted with.
Compare and contrast with Clegg (an early AI experiment to create a deep fake of Tony Blair), Farron (happy clappy scary), Cable (a race to see who will fall asleep faster, us or him), Swinson (Icarus ascending).
Davey is the right guy at the right time. And we can see the results. A LibDem vote which is hyper concentrated in target seats, and is seen as finally safe again for Labour voters to support in their attempt to oust the Tory.
But a demographic which thought it would always win discovered in 2016 that it too could be on the losing side.
Which was a good thing - fairness in society requires every group having a chance to win but also every group having the risk of losing.
I'd say it was time for affluent oldies to lose out a little.
And especially the executive oligarchy.
"I'm just a block boy sittin' in a Rover
I got my friends and my fam on my shoulder
I been cold but my money got me colder..."
If Lib and Lab take potshots at each other (2015 due to coalition fallout, 2019 due to the awfulness of Jez 2.0), Conservatives can do well without too much difficulty.
By being so awful, the 2019-now government has made it clear to the red and yellow teams where they should be aiming their fire. And that's good for the Lib Dems in the 50(?) seats they can put on a decent show in, and good for Labour everywhere else in England.
They're going to get squeezed in Lab/LD marginals, and seem unable to run national campaigns. For that reason, I'd be surprised to see them over 25 seats.
Electorally the current Tory team are simply not up to it. Activists locally getting restless. Suspect another bad set of locals would be Rishi's last.
Labour, in government, will be unlikely to resist the temptation to try to buy pensioner votes. I think some of the bias of the old to the Tories is in fact a bias of the old to the incumbent government.
Things could change quite rapidly, at least in terms of rhetoric and polling. But would a new Tory government, after a Starmer interregnum, be able to resist the temptation to buy pensioner votes? I have my doubts. (Well, okay, not many doubts, I'm fairly confident that governments of both sides will follow the path of least resistance and genuflect to the pensioner vote.)
There was a Ukraine summit in Jeddah last weekend, attended by China and India - the destinations for Russia’s black market oil - as well as Zelensky.
They agreed to keep talking, and that the Ukranian terms - the 1991 border - should form the basis of any agreement.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/06/china-backs-further-ukraine-peace-talks-saudi-arabia-summit
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4499457/#Comment_4499457
The contrary view, put forward by American commentator Saagar Enjeti https://youtube.com/watch?v=ns_1EJkalx8
His view is that Russia and OPEC are still on the same page.
The Tories have gone so far (as already remarked in the thread) it's probably impossible to rebalance things and make a fairer balance with the people actually doing the work without upsetting the pensioner vote irreparably (for instance, by imposing NI on all, or merging it with income tax, or cutting IHT allowances or converting them to CGT).
I think this is a misread of the situation, made possible by overstating the so-called culture wars the Tories are stoking.
@DavidL ’s post is much more on the money imo - we used to be two nations but the borders between us have been weakened or smashed and we are now a loose federation of states that ally based on convenience. And as @RochdalePioneers suggests those alliances are currently almost all against the Tories.
I will equip my children to think for themselves and to thrive in the modern world, such as it is then.
The problem is that they are hard wired to believe in the Big Central Database. Access controls are seen as Impeding Good Government.
So all the briefing papers reflect this.
You would need to fire the top five ranks of the Home Office, en masse.
The Tories are supported more by homeowners and the old are disproportionately homeowners.
The elderly have always been more likely to be homeowners, and thus more likely to be Tory, but that has become more true than ever before because of both 1 good and 1 bad Tory government.
Good - The Tory government of the 80s worked very hard to get people onto the property ladder. Working people able to get onto the property ladder in the 1980s are now increasingly the pensioners of today.
Bad - This government rather than doing the same work to get people onto the property ladder has instead rested on the laurels of relying on the votes won by the actions of the past.
There are very few working people who will support the Tories on the basis of "hey, if my parents peg it then I'll get an inheritance". About HYUFD and that's it.
It's not about strong and stable; it's about scraping the barnacles off the boat preparing the party for an election.
For the 2019 voting Tory brand AND most of the recent activist base, the biggest barnacles are in No 10 and No 11.
Do you think that the hardcore gender activists will move towards the Greens and LDs, but perhaps vote Lab tactically at the election?
There is no such rule in the LibDems...
"the 2019 voting Tory brand" - you have lost almost all of the ex Labour red wall voters and repulsed large numbers of conservatives.
"the most recent activist base" is the reason for repelling so many voters from your 2019 vote. The remaining activists are *mental*
It is a shame that the statist centrism of Sunak has alienated such a broad coalition.
Nobody is going to believe promises of unfunded tax cuts.
And few Conservatives seem to want to boast about full employment and NHS employment increasing by 300k since 2019.
It was purely all the data they wanted to link to the id card on the backing database and the several thousand organisations which would have access to that data
Under the Labour government of 1997-2010* we saw several moves that increased spending on pensioners. We had the first pension lock, to ensure there wasn't a repeat of low inflation leading to a tiny increase in the state pension. We had various freebies given to pensioners - TV licenses, bus passes, fuel allowances.
The consequence of this was seen in election results. In the 2010 GE the bias of the old to vote Tories was at its lowest since 1992.
Expect to see the same again. I'd be gobsmacked if pensioners were not reassured by Labour budgets, and I'd expect votes to change as they did before.
The attraction of buying the votes of pensioners is that it is really simple. The government only has to keep the money flowing. Sorting out the problems for younger voters, such as the housing crisis, might sound simple - just build more houses! - but runs into all sorts of other issues - Who will build them? Will there be enough building materials at a low enough price? Where? - which make them practically more difficult, and even in a best case scenario will take years to deliver tangible results.
* Actually, probably more correctly in the period 2001-2010. I'd have to dig out the details of when the various reforms were made. But the very small pension increase happened in the first Parliament, 1997-2001, and Labour consequently fell further behind with the pensioner vote at the 2001 GE. They learnt their lesson then and I don't think they will be looking for a refresher.