The polls still look gloomy for Rishi – politicalbetting.com
The polls still look gloomy for Rishi – politicalbetting.com
I always think it is important to look at the polls as a block rather than just highlighting single surveys. The above from Wikipedia shows the general election voting polls so far this month.
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His problem (well, one of them), is that he was both too late and too early.
Too late because he came into his political prime (they do so earlier thesedays) at the tailend of a long period of government, which would always have been a challenge even with a very hefty majority to defend. There's so much baggage from the time in government, and so much exhaustion within the party after that time, that's its not easy to renew or achieve things.
Too early in that he lacks experience due to his rapid rise through the ranks and aytpical period for a major part of it, and so hasn't really developed any ideas on what to do.
Let's see the lie of the land in a month or two.
OK 5th then!
The closer to the next GE, the greater the resources available to voters who which to vote tactically - resources that will be independent, or leastways NOT directly dependent, on competing party propaganda.
Also, opposition parties will have to do much more fishing or cutting bait in GE environment, than they have to do for by-elections. Indeed, by-election competition and it's results, will help establish the parameters for party GE tactical voting strategy (including ways and means of possible cooperation).
Maybe he really does just want to give back to the country. Maybe he thinks he is an amazing dude and the country would be lucky to be run by him. Maybe he likes public attention, even if as with most politicians a lot of it is just hate. I doubt he'll be sad for long when he's out of office, but he will miss some of what it gave him.
I mean, you have literal billionaires who get kicks trolling people on twitter, clearly people find satisfaction in very odd ways.
On Ulez today he confirmed Harper's lie and embellished it by suggesting Starmer promoted Ulez expansion, whilst the Conservatives never supported it.
On lifting surface water restrictions Gove told some absolute whoppas today, and Rishi unflinchingly repeated them.
More interestingly the Conservatives had their LBC phone-in shills linking Starmer to Savile.
Sunak plays dirty doesn't he? He's as bad as Johnson.
For example, I'm assuming that most tikes in UK know what an Eccles cake is all about/
Whereas US brats wouldn't have a clue. AND they wouldn't know, at least for starters, if the leading non-cake character was what Perfidious Albionians call (with their usual charming cluelessness) a "biscuit", OR instead the cook who baking the cake?
But our Cookie would still get the glory!
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/10/22/what-do-britons-make-greens
So don't let your prejudices get too strong.
The saving grace, of a sort, is that Sunak isn't as good at it. Sunak doesn't have the style to lie smoothly, unlike the master, and it shows.
The 25-30% the Conservatives are now polling is rather better than the 20-25% they were polling before Truss resigned
@DeadlineDayLive
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8h
🚨 Nadiem Amiri REJECTED a £5m move to Leeds after he flew in by private jet to look around the city with his family.
After he saw the city and the training ground, he called Leverkusen and said he didn’t want to join.
Aaron Bastani
@AaronBastani
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6h
This is the price you pay when you're Europe's largest city without a tram
But seriously, compared to France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland....basically everywhere - Britain's large towns and non-London cities are falling way behind. Getting embarrasing.
And in episode 377 of polishing the Brexit turd the DE is proclaiming the wonderful benefits as the UK can now ditch an EU environmental rule and pump more sewage into rivers !
"All around us, the social and physical infrastructure that once held this country together is crumbling. You name it: our roads are rubbish, our rivers are polluted, our streets are overrun by lunatics wielding machetes — it's impossible to get anywhere or do anything without it turning into a three-act drama."
If only she knew someone who has been in government as a senior and highly active minister for...erm... the last decade or more who could have done something to stop this decline into the abyss.
https://x.com/osinttechnical/status/1696636257286205723
My parents used to do one of similar length in Scotland but happily had the train as an option.
BRACE
I'm currently doing exactly that distance to my work. Very rare it takes as much as 30 minutes, 65-70mpg from my old diesel car means it only costs about £5 a day even at current bonkers fuel prices.
It's amazing how great the UK is as soon as you get away from the bits in the south with too many people in them.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/traveltoworkenglandandwales/census2021#distance-travelled-to-work
The majority of people who travelled to work travelled less than 10 kilometres
More generally, tired of those pandering takes on "X" that the UK can be cost-free wealthier while working less. Large French towns and non-Paris cities were literally on fire for much of the summer. As for Italy surging ahead - Bastani, don't make me laugh
That’s entirely because, once I’ve finished my Violet Club 1-in-1 scale replica, I am going to demand a large chunk of Europe for my new living room. I expect all the realists here to support me.
I'd rather do a 28 minutes, 23 mile commute in the comfort of my own car, listening to my own music as I drive down the motorway, than a 10km, 1 hour commute in public transport being stuffed into tin cans full of sweaty individuals that I have no business being in their personal space of. Thanks but no thanks.
Hell, ignore the debate of cars and everything else for one second and just think about how people here react to their own transportation. @CorrectHorseBat doesn't like cars but is always moaning about the state of public transportation that he uses.
I don't grumble if I have issues with my car, I fix them and move on.
The majority of people may have smaller than 10km commutes, I don't dispute that figure. I also don't recognise its relevance. A 9km commute can be done in a car in the fraction of the time, and much more comfort, and all-round more efficiently in direct point-to-point private transportation than using public transportation. Many people's sub-10km commute distance will take longer than my 23 mile one, not to forget of course not everyone is in the "majority" - approximately half of people are in the minority.
I've done cycling, its fun. I've done public transport, not so much. And I've done cars, they're simply the most efficient of all. Nothing wrong with that - but if others want to use less efficient transportation, they should absolutely feel free to.
PS according to the TUC the average commute time is 59 minutes per day. So my 56 minutes per day puts me at better than average, for a top 5% commute distance apparently. So what does that tell you?
Long story short, yes its absolutely fantastic that the UK can drop an absurd, ridiculous rule that prevents house building and does not reduce pollution whatsoever.
Overcrowded housing creates the same amount of water pollution as the same people managing to have their own homes. Forcing people to live in overcrowded HMOs whose shit still needs processing should never have been considered an appropriate alternative to building more houses, it is a disgusting and disgraceful policy that you should be embarrassed to be associated with.
It is a lovely still and moonlit night here in Herefordshire. Sleep surprisingly elusive and not even a read through this thread is going to send me back to the land of nod so I have been pondering.
To get a handle on the scale of the Tory defeat at the next GE we need to form a view as to where their disgruntled former voters are going to put their cross, if they do.
I would guess that a lot of them are decent folk who are so disgusted with the present iteration of the natural party of government - a combination of meanness incompetence and bonkers - that they will not vote for it.
Will they really go the whole hog and vote against the party that has, in general, served them so well for the last forty years?
Somehow I doubt it.
I would factor in mass abstention leading to a low turnout and a not quite fifth mass extinction event. 147 seats max.
But what do I know?
Night night.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/
The chances of Estonia launching an attack on Russia are pretty well zero.
That they have supplied drones to Ukraine is well known.
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2023/06/tallinns-tally-estonias-weapons.html?m=1
No attack drones of that range, I think ?
'Dying by the dozens every day' - Ukraine losses climb
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66581217
Is North Korea preparing crown princess Kim Ju-ae as successor?
https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=358090
North Korea again directed the media spotlight on Kim Ju-ae, the daughter of leader Kim Jong-un, running a video footage of its navy commander saluting the presumed 10-year-old, rekindling a debate over whether the North is preparing to make her the rightful heir to the regime.
The North's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported on Aug. 29 that Kim made a congratulatory visit to the Naval Command of the North Korean People's Army (KPA) with his daughter on Aug. 27. The television network also released a video image of KPA Navy Commander Adm. Kim Myong-sik saluting Ju-ae, further fueling speculation about her elevated status.
"When the respected Comrade Kim Jong-un arrived at the Navy Command together with his beloved daughter, the officers and men of the Navy there broke into enthusiastic cheers, full of the emotion and joy of coming to high glory and privilege on its significant foundation day," the KCNA wrote. ..
Which other modern dictatorships have managed to establish rule by hereditary principle ?
Monarchy is deeply ingrained in Korean national identity.
Your truck pulls up away from major population areas, and the drones fly off and perform their mission.
If you feel safe waiting for their return, great. If not, you simply disappear and the authorities have nothing to go on.
Putin is a classic bully. He only picks on the weak, which NATO isn't.
Just giving Russia Donbass does fuck-all to guarantee peace in the medium or long term. You are essentially Chamberlain waving a piece of paper in the air.
It also puts Russia and Ukraine on the same moral footing. I'd argue that we've seen that as being *very* wrong.
*) Ukraine have actually got very long-range drones that Russia did not detect as they took a detour around their territory.
*) There are squad(s) of Ukrainian special forces launching these from within Russia.
I quite like the latter option, especially as it will cause Russian security services issues. But then the question becomes how the Ukrainians are getting the drones (which are not small, even in flatpack) across the border and into Russia. But as we saw earlier in the year, the Russian border can be more poroous than anyone expected.
We used to see polling like this under Charles Kennedy with maps of how yellow the UK would look like if everyone did it.
The Greens are LDs to the max: they are anti-development NIMBYs and conservationists favouring lower taxes on small businesses in rural areas, and radical left-wing activists in urban areas.
You only work 5 days a week, 46 weeks a year? Pah!
Dictatorships often like to keep it in the family, if they can.
I think unlikely to hold even a single seat in the next parliament, but like UKIP in the past the Greens may well have a lot of influence on how our politics works.
People don't want shit in all our rivers and beaches. That appeals to all classes and ages, except of course those running the Tory Party.
Events can and will change things, maybe for the better, maybe not. For the moment I'm sticking with my very broad prediction of somewhere 100 and 250, so Gonatas's guess of 147 strikes me as being as good as any.
I agree with his sleepless analysis though. Massive Tory abstentions much more likely than going the whole hog and voting for a Party with which they have nothing in common.
If I was in charge of security, anywhere in the world, looking after a fixed target, these stories would be giving me nightmares. It is surely just a matter of time before these cheap, hard to detect, easy to operate drones become the weapon of choice of every terrorist group on the planet.
The modern era low of 59.4% was achieved in 2001: could that be "beaten" next time around?
* Except for BJO, obviously
(As a complete aside I had dinner last night with some Georgian politicians… oh man Trump’s in trouble…)
I absolutely hope that Ukraine make a decisive breakthrough this time, but if they fail to do so that doesn't mean there can't be a decisive breakthrough next year, or even the year after. Wars, even total wars, can often last years before the decisive breakthrough.
I will repeat a comment I made about 18 months ago - long, heavy wars are won on logistics, not battles. If Ukraine can repair or replace its losses better than Russia can over the winter, then even if weakened by their current attacks they could be in a much healthier relative position than Russia is come next spring.
Ukraine is consistently gaining new NATO-level equipment. They haven't even got their F16s in the field yet.
Russia is continually reaching further and further back in their Cold War stockpile.
NATO has better logistics than Russia. In the claim by Russian pundits that they're fighting NATO, that element is actually reasonable to consider.
They're not happy about that - but support for fighting the invasion does not seem to have waned.
I don't think you have any more idea than I do if what will happen, but I'd note those looking on have consistently underestimated Ukrainian will to fight.
It also seems that the very high casualty rates from the start of the counteroffensive have dropped significantly as they've learned from their mistakes.
The best hope is that someone gets rid of Putin and the new ruler decides that they have bigger fish to fry at home rebuilding a shattered economy.
Given the many versions of the Conservatives over the past decade I'm tempted to say not in the same way.
That said, largely, and for a number of reasons some exogenous and others endogenous, things are pretty shit right now so I expect the current government to get booted out at the next election but not with the same kind of Blair fervour.
One of the biggest difference I think between the efficiency of cars and t he lower efficiency of public transport, is that cars can go direct whereas many people's commute requires not 1 but 2 buses or trains. If you need to change buses or trains then you need to wait at the platform twice to get picked up and that is extra dead time in your commute.
That's I guess part of the reason why my commute, although longer than average, is more importantly to me faster than average. Distance isn't as big a problem if you have speed.
That may be skewing the stats a bit.
Johnson's 2019 win wasn't because he was particularly well regarded, it's just that Corbyn was seen as far worse. A resigned shrug "can't have him, so he'll have to do" win can still be a landslide when converted into Commons seats.
Mine is a bit of a puzzle. It's 24 miles, door to door by the shortest route. In the real world, it's about 35 because the shortest route is through rush-hour Wolverhampton.
Which category should I go into?
A good article here on how the summers battles are evolving. Particularly well evidenced on the rate of loss of Russian artillery over the last couple of months. The Ukranians seem to have become really quite effective at counterbattery fire. As more than half of battle casualties are from artillery, that bit of attrition seems to be going Ukraines way.
https://euromaidanpress.com/2023/08/30/ukrainian-counteroffensive-genocide-of-russian-artillery/
Russia’s kamikaze drones raining down on Ukraine's east
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66621724
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66579436
Our benefits system's characteristic mix of cruelty and incompetence strikes again.