The story as it is written doesn't really make sense though. Braverman said that 'child grooming gangs' in the UK were nearly all comprised of British Pakistanis, but IPSO's correction criticises her for identifying them with 'a particular form of offending', meaning child grooming or perhaps child abuse as a general category (presumably not with a specific gang MO), where the majority ethnicity amongst offenders is white. These are two different things and it is specious to conflate the two.
[my emphasis]
The part I've put in bold is just sheer invention on your part.
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
I think 196 seats for the Tories would be a good result for them.
It is a really good poll for the Tories as Jacob Rees-Mogg loses his seat.
36 feels low for us. I can see a succession of blue wall seats falling like dominos on the night. Davey plans a "laser-like" targeting of seats and after the absurd chaos of the 2019 election I think he is right to do so.
But in a change election the tidal surge sweeps way past the targets...
36 would be very good for the Lib Dems. John Curtice thinks 30 is the maximum.
I'm predicting 40 with the following gains
Caithness? I don't reckon so. Mid Dunbartonshire could be close.
Caithness is an existing LibDem seat but becomes notionally SNP after boundary changes. Libs should win it though given decline of SNP. Mid Dunbarts is Jo Swinson's old seat but it has been dismembered. Outside chance of a LibDem win in one of the successor seats.
Understood, but are you ignoring the fact that the Lib Dems are also polling lower than their 2019 result? Last ten polls average put them on 7.2% compared with 9.5%. That's a quarter of their vote gone if reflected in an actual GE. Compare with SNP average of 35.9 (same ten polls) compared to 45% in the GE. That's 21% of their vote gone.
Be careful not to focus only on the SNP's troubles, it might lead you into making bad predictions.
There was a by election in Tain yesterday. Counting this morning. That may give a clue towards whether the Lib Dems or SNP will win Caithness etc.
That survey is a week old, and a week is a long time in politics.
It's also, within the margin of error, within or very close to within other polls. However, I expect they will tighten and there will be a less than 10 point Labour lead poll by Christmas.
While current polls indicate the Tories will not form the next government, I don't think there is any guidance much yet as to what the other aspects of the outcome will be.
For the Tories not to form the next government they need to lose (along with their only possible allies the DUP) about 53 seats. For Labour to have a majority (assume 8 for speaker + SF non participants, so 322) they need to net gain 120 seats. The range in the middle for a confusion of a result is gigantic.
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
I think 196 seats for the Tories would be a good result for them.
It is a really good poll for the Tories as Jacob Rees-Mogg loses his seat.
36 feels low for us. I can see a succession of blue wall seats falling like dominos on the night. Davey plans a "laser-like" targeting of seats and after the absurd chaos of the 2019 election I think he is right to do so.
But in a change election the tidal surge sweeps way past the targets...
36 would be very good for the Lib Dems. John Curtice thinks 30 is the maximum.
I'm predicting 40 with the following gains
Fairly sure you can add Wokingham (John Redwood) to that list.
That makes 41.
Might be worth considering one or more Oxfordshire seats, besides OxWAb (trouble is, there's a bit of an _embarras de richesse_ there, with three or arguably four looking winnable on recent local election results; targeting all of them would surely lead to disappointment). And as has also been mentioned, Cheadle and Hazel Grove look to be in play, with at least the MP for the latter, William Wragg, standing down, arguably prematurely, next time out, and some solid Lib Dem campaigning in both.
I note too that local journalists are much better at challenging our politicians than the supine national ones. Rishis round has been as bad as the infamous Truss local interviews.
This is because local radio doesn't cover politics as often as national radio/media. So the politicians almost have to beg for access, whereas the national radio/TV/newspapers are all competing with each other for access to the politicians, and so the politicians can threaten to cut off access if they're too challenging.
It's an interesting wrinkle in competition theory, where you have to be aware of who is holding the power to choose between competitors, and so who determines the effect of competition.
Can't believe there are still people who say that NATO provoked Putin.
This subtitled video, in which Russian TV explains to Russians what it’s all about, is quite instructive: it’s not about NATO, it’s not about foreign threats, it’s not about Russian-speakers. It’s just about Russia’s existential purpose to become the biggest empire on Earth. https://x.com/yarotrof/status/1707668985867796848?s=20
There is also this weird genre of Russian popular literature and film with timetravellers going back to change historic Russian defeats and subsequent history.
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
That does seem especially disastrous for the Conservatives, right now. A party can survive that level of defeat.
196 seats is little different to what Howard got in 2005 and 5 years later the Conservatives were in government
Yep, via a switch to centrist, socially liberal, green and detoxifying policies.
How likely do you think the next Tory leader is going to meet that formulation?
There are some signs of life on the centre-right bit of the right. Still at the level of mice scuttling around while the dinosaurs wonder what that big meteorite flying through the atmosphere is, but life nonetheless.
I liked Danny Finkelstein's piece in the times this week on why centre-right is not the same as centre-left, for example. It's been a while since there's been a point in saying any of that out loud.
But in the same way that the path from Major to Cameron went via IDS, I suspect the Conservatives will take the long way round.
Can nothing be done about feral youths? So far this week we have had a 17 and two 13 year olds charged with wilful fire raising at Ayr Station Hotel, a 16 year old arrested in connection with the cutting down of the Sycamore Gap tree and a 17 year old charged with the murder of a 15 year old.
Thanks to Covid, mental health issues for young people have gone through the roof.
Any stats on this? Seems to be a popular narrative but never seen anything other than assertions (and usually obviously politically motivated, sadly)
I'm aware I'm answering your specific request for stats with anecdata, but my understanding is that the big impacts are in those who were 1-5 during covid. My older kids' years are full of children who are a bit odd, but any more so than in a normal year? And can it be pinned directly to covid rather than any one of the other ways that growing up in the 2020s is different to growing up in, say, the 1980s? Dunno. But I've talked to teachers at a few infant/junior schools, and the number of SEN kids they are seeing in what is now years 1-4 are unlike anything they have seen before. At my kids' middle class school, you have to look a bit more closely to see it, though the evidence is there - essentially the kids were about 18 months behind where they should be both educationally and socially, though the gap is narrowing steadily. In less comfortable areas, however, they saw a massive increase in kids arriving in school who were non-verbal and sometime not toilet trained. The test of whether this is due to lockdowns will be whether this carries on or whether it is an unfortunate blip as post-lockdown kids start coming through the system better adjusted.
I don't, incidentally, blame lockdown for my youngest's ADHD - it was clearly there from the start. Though I do blame it for the fact she (along with most of her class) are still the best part of a year behind where her sisters were at that stage - essentially, although they attended school for some parts of this period, practically no education was done whatsoever between March 2020 and March 2021.
Not sure of the etiquette of this, but you don’t ask you don’t get, so…
Tomorrow I’m doing the Yorkshire Three Peaks Challenge. 24 miles and 5200ft worth of climbing over Yorkshire’s three highest peaks in under 12 hours. I, and around 20 other willing victims, are doing it memory of a friend of mine’s son, Isaac, who died in April at four months old after enduring four open heart surgeries.
We’re raising money for a charity called the Children’s Heart Surgery Fund, which supports the Leeds Congenital Heart Unit at Leeds General Infirmary.
I might be cheeky and drop this link in again later and tomorrow, so please bear with me. If you’re lucky and the phone signal holds up I might even post some pictures of trig points and heavy autumnal rainfall on bleak Yorkshire fells.
Point of order, the Whernside trig point is on a bleak Cumbria fell.
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
I think 196 seats for the Tories would be a good result for them.
It is a really good poll for the Tories as Jacob Rees-Mogg loses his seat.
36 feels low for us. I can see a succession of blue wall seats falling like dominos on the night. Davey plans a "laser-like" targeting of seats and after the absurd chaos of the 2019 election I think he is right to do so.
But in a change election the tidal surge sweeps way past the targets...
36 would be very good for the Lib Dems. John Curtice thinks 30 is the maximum.
I'm predicting 40 with the following gains
Cheadle and Hazel Grove are both more likely than some of those.
Agree on both. Key is Labour squeeze, or rather, preventing Labour resurgence splitting the anti Tory vote. This is prediction for Cheadle
I'm coming to the conclusion that my guess of 40 Lib Dem seats is on the low side.
I would be happy if you are right, but there will be a substantial number of near misses. I think the target seats approach is correct, but not every target will be hit.
Can nothing be done about feral youths? So far this week we have had a 17 and two 13 year olds charged with wilful fire raising at Ayr Station Hotel, a 16 year old arrested in connection with the cutting down of the Sycamore Gap tree and a 17 year old charged with the murder of a 15 year old.
The Ayr Station Hotel incident is interesting, especially when viewed in conjunction with the Crooked House mess. The hotel caught fire earlier in spring, and then mysteriously caught fire again this week as well, completing the job.
Brilliantly insightful comment written and deleted as the young rascal's been charged. But when the truth comes out, remember I told you so, or at least would have told you so if it weren't for those pesky sub judice laws.
Anecdote alert! I was out with my MP yesterday, door-knocking in an area that elects Labour councillors. It was even hostile in 2019, when he got 53% of the vote. Was expecting it to be rough.
However, he is given credit for getting a local banking hub and improving the bus service. Far better reception than I had thought, based on national polls.
Would just remind folk here that those MPs who have put in the effort for five years and have been visible in their constituency may get a significantly better result than national polling would suggest. I suspect that there will be a swathe of hard-working Tory MPs who hang on against the trend by just a few hundred or even a few dozen votes.
Anecdote alert! I was out with my MP yesterday, door-knocking in an area that elects Labour councillors. It was even hostile in 2019, when he got 53% of the vote. Was expecting it to be rough.
However, he is given credit for getting a local banking hub and improving the bus service. Far better reception than I had thought, based on national polls.
Would just remind folk here that those MPs who have put in the effort for five years and have been visible in their constituency may get a significantly better result than national polling would suggest. I suspect that there will be a swathe of hard-working Tory MPs who hang on against the trend by just a few hundred or even a few dozen votes.
Yeah, but balanced out by a negative incumbency bias for the idle and useless ones.
Overall being a hard working constituency MP gets swamped by national trends. See LDs in 2010 for an example.
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
That does seem especially disastrous for the Conservatives, right now. A party can survive that level of defeat.
196 seats is little different to what Howard got in 2005 and 5 years later the Conservatives were in government
The problem the Tory party has is the current Tory membership. UKIP lite and upset with Sunak.
They're like the Corbynites were in the Labour party. The Tories are destined to remain in opposition until enough proper Tories actually join or rejoin the party and restore decency and common sense.
The fate of the Tories is more likely to depend on how the likely next Labour government manage the economy than who their leader is.
Even if the Tories had selected Ken Clarke as leader in 1997 they would still have lost in 2001 as New Labour managed the economy relatively well.
In 1975 however Thatcher was seen by most commentators as an unelectable rightwinger but she beat the more centrist Callaghan in 1979 as the economy was in poor shape.
Can nothing be done about feral youths? So far this week we have had a 17 and two 13 year olds charged with wilful fire raising at Ayr Station Hotel, a 16 year old arrested in connection with the cutting down of the Sycamore Gap tree and a 17 year old charged with the murder of a 15 year old.
Thanks to Covid, mental health issues for young people have gone through the roof.
Any stats on this? Seems to be a popular narrative but never seen anything other than assertions (and usually obviously politically motivated, sadly)
I'm aware I'm answering your specific request for stats with anecdata, but my understanding is that the big impacts are in those who were 1-5 during covid. My older kids' years are full of children who are a bit odd, but any more so than in a normal year? And can it be pinned directly to covid rather than any one of the other ways that growing up in the 2020s is different to growing up in, say, the 1980s? Dunno. But I've talked to teachers at a few infant/junior schools, and the number of SEN kids they are seeing in what is now years 1-4 are unlike anything they have seen before. At my kids' middle class school, you have to look a bit more closely to see it, though the evidence is there - essentially the kids were about 18 months behind where they should be both educationally and socially, though the gap is narrowing steadily. In less comfortable areas, however, they saw a massive increase in kids arriving in school who were non-verbal and sometime not toilet trained. The test of whether this is due to lockdowns will be whether this carries on or whether it is an unfortunate blip as post-lockdown kids start coming through the system better adjusted.
I don't, incidentally, blame lockdown for my youngest's ADHD - it was clearly there from the start. Though I do blame it for the fact she (along with most of her class) are still the best part of a year behind where her sisters were at that stage - essentially, although they attended school for some parts of this period, practically no education was done whatsoever between March 2020 and March 2021.
We're paying through the nose for it as she's too young for any gov't funding but I think there's a real value in nursery for our 17 month old beyond simple childcare. Up to 25-30 words now I think and ahead on stuff like block stacking.
Apart from Lab on 39%, does anyone have the shares for the other parties from the Times MRP?
Con 26.3%
Lib Dems 10.8%
Taking Labour at 39% gives a 3 party tally of 76.1.
That's back to 2015 levels of Lib Lab Con. But where are the other votes going - Reform or whatever it's called now are nowhere near UKIP levels of 2015; the greens don't seem to be particularly surging and the SNP are going to be back closer to 3.x% rather than the 4.7% they got in 2015.
There's a tonne of extra votes which have to go somewhere here, and history suggests they'll go to one of the big three.
I was thinking that too. If you look at polling in early September 2019 so after things had settled post May's resignation but before election fever took hold, the Brexit Party was polling around 13% but eventually only actually polled 2%. Not standing in half the seats made a difference of course, but even if they hadn't pulled out it seems unlikely they would have polled more than 4-5%, and that was with Farage leading. They are only polling half that now, and don't have Farage. If they get more than 4% next time I will be very surprised. Last time that clearly all went Tory, will it again next time?
The Greens had a much wider polling spread in Sep 2019, between 3-7%, so they achieved the bottom end of their polling. So again for them, 4% feels about the top which would be a significant improvement on last time without being stellar.
Add on 6% for SNP/Plaid/Other that makes the non-3 party vote 15%, which would still be a higher % than any except 2015. So the MRP is about 9% off the 3-party vote compared to what will probably happen, and how that 9% splits could make a huge difference.
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
That does seem especially disastrous for the Conservatives, right now. A party can survive that level of defeat.
196 seats is little different to what Howard got in 2005 and 5 years later the Conservatives were in government
Yep, via a switch to centrist, socially liberal, green and detoxifying policies.
How likely do you think the next Tory leader is going to meet that formulation?
Brown was ahead of Cameron by even more than Blair was ahead of Howard when Brown became PM.
It was Osborne's IHT cut offer and the 2008 crash that really boosted the Tories in 2010, Cameron added a few points but not much more than that and of course in 2010 he still failed to get a majority
Anecdote alert! I was out with my MP yesterday, door-knocking in an area that elects Labour councillors. It was even hostile in 2019, when he got 53% of the vote. Was expecting it to be rough.
However, he is given credit for getting a local banking hub and improving the bus service. Far better reception than I had thought, based on national polls.
Would just remind folk here that those MPs who have put in the effort for five years and have been visible in their constituency may get a significantly better result than national polling would suggest. I suspect that there will be a swathe of hard-working Tory MPs who hang on against the trend by just a few hundred or even a few dozen votes.
Yeah, but balanced out by a negative incumbency bias for the idle and useless ones.
Overall being a hard working constituency MP gets swamped by national trends. See LDs in 2010 for an example.
That's true, but if the idle and useless ones disproportionately lose their jobs, and the hard working ones disproportionately keep them, that's a good thing.
Like in 2010 though there's a lot of MPs who see the writing on the wall and intend to step down rather than lose.
Aided by the fact that MPs who step down now get the payout losing MPs get anyway, so there is no longer an incentive to go down to an 'honourable' defeat.
I'm not an SKS fan, but Labour's largest poll lead under Corbyn was 10pp, when Labour were on 31% or 33% and Theresa May's ministry was in its extended death throes.
When SKS "wins" an election, but inexplicably remains as leader of the opposition, then your question will have some merit.
Record tax rises over the past four years will cost the equivalent of £3,500 per household, analysis has found.
Since 2019 the Conservatives have introduced more tax rises than any other government, with the £100 billion cost bigger than anything outside wartime, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said.
Britain is making “a decisive and permanent shift to a higher-tax economy”, the think tank said in a judgment that will intensify pressure on Rishi Sunak to reverse the trend....
...The rise of 4.2 percentage points in the tax burden is comfortably bigger than that during Tony Blair’s first term, from 1997-2001, when a series of stealth taxes led to a 2.9 point increase. Margaret Thatcher’s first term from 1979-83 and Harold Wilson’s two terms from 1964-70 and 1974-76 led to rises of more than two points
OT history fans. David Mitchell interview about his book on kings and queens. If he makes things this clear, no wonder @ydoethur has had to give up his interactive whiteboard and marker pen. I studied Richard II in both history and English yet no-one ever mentioned its wider significance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INabb1VL8qg
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
I think 196 seats for the Tories would be a good result for them.
It is a really good poll for the Tories as Jacob Rees-Mogg loses his seat.
36 feels low for us. I can see a succession of blue wall seats falling like dominos on the night. Davey plans a "laser-like" targeting of seats and after the absurd chaos of the 2019 election I think he is right to do so.
But in a change election the tidal surge sweeps way past the targets...
36 would be very good for the Lib Dems. John Curtice thinks 30 is the maximum.
I'm predicting 40 with the following gains
Agree with most of these gains except the following:
1. Tories to win back Chesham & Amersham, although only just. 2. Cornwall North. 3. Norfolk North (previous LD success was based on a particular candidate) 4. Melksham & Devizes (as mentioned earlier) 5. North Shropshire, (same situation as Chesham & Amersham) 6. Torbay (seems to be moving away from the LDs, perhaps due to being so strongly pro-Brexit). 7. Yeovil (this is close to 50/50)
LDs will probably win a couple of unexpected seats, so should end up with around 35.
Can nothing be done about feral youths? So far this week we have had a 17 and two 13 year olds charged with wilful fire raising at Ayr Station Hotel, a 16 year old arrested in connection with the cutting down of the Sycamore Gap tree and a 17 year old charged with the murder of a 15 year old.
The Ayr Station Hotel incident is interesting, especially when viewed in conjunction with the Crooked House mess. The hotel caught fire earlier in spring, and then mysteriously caught fire again this week as well, completing the job.
Anecdote alert! I was out with my MP yesterday, door-knocking in an area that elects Labour councillors. It was even hostile in 2019, when he got 53% of the vote. Was expecting it to be rough.
However, he is given credit for getting a local banking hub and improving the bus service. Far better reception than I had thought, based on national polls.
Would just remind folk here that those MPs who have put in the effort for five years and have been visible in their constituency may get a significantly better result than national polling would suggest. I suspect that there will be a swathe of hard-working Tory MPs who hang on against the trend by just a few hundred or even a few dozen votes.
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
That does seem especially disastrous for the Conservatives, right now. A party can survive that level of defeat.
196 seats is little different to what Howard got in 2005 and 5 years later the Conservatives were in government
Yep, via a switch to centrist, socially liberal, green and detoxifying policies.
How likely do you think the next Tory leader is going to meet that formulation?
Brown was ahead of Cameron by even more than Blair was ahead of Howard when Brown became PM.
It was Osborne's IHT cut offer and the 2008 crash that really boosted the Tories in 2010, Cameron added a few points but not much more than that and of course in 2010 he still failed to get a majority
No, it really wasn't.
For someone who talks about polls a lot, you really don't understand them.
Brown had a bounce, which unwound.
It was never just the IHT cut offer. That was only one of many things happening at the time.
Can nothing be done about feral youths? So far this week we have had a 17 and two 13 year olds charged with wilful fire raising at Ayr Station Hotel, a 16 year old arrested in connection with the cutting down of the Sycamore Gap tree and a 17 year old charged with the murder of a 15 year old.
Thanks to Covid, mental health issues for young people have gone through the roof.
Any stats on this? Seems to be a popular narrative but never seen anything other than assertions (and usually obviously politically motivated, sadly)
I'm aware I'm answering your specific request for stats with anecdata, but my understanding is that the big impacts are in those who were 1-5 during covid. My older kids' years are full of children who are a bit odd, but any more so than in a normal year? And can it be pinned directly to covid rather than any one of the other ways that growing up in the 2020s is different to growing up in, say, the 1980s? Dunno. But I've talked to teachers at a few infant/junior schools, and the number of SEN kids they are seeing in what is now years 1-4 are unlike anything they have seen before. At my kids' middle class school, you have to look a bit more closely to see it, though the evidence is there - essentially the kids were about 18 months behind where they should be both educationally and socially, though the gap is narrowing steadily. In less comfortable areas, however, they saw a massive increase in kids arriving in school who were non-verbal and sometime not toilet trained. The test of whether this is due to lockdowns will be whether this carries on or whether it is an unfortunate blip as post-lockdown kids start coming through the system better adjusted.
I don't, incidentally, blame lockdown for my youngest's ADHD - it was clearly there from the start. Though I do blame it for the fact she (along with most of her class) are still the best part of a year behind where her sisters were at that stage - essentially, although they attended school for some parts of this period, practically no education was done whatsoever between March 2020 and March 2021.
We're paying through the nose for it as she's too young for any gov't funding but I think there's a real value in nursery for our 17 month old beyond simple childcare. Up to 25-30 words now I think and ahead on stuff like block stacking.
A future engineer!
Ugh, I remember those days. (Actually, I barely do - I appear to have blanked most of the memories out.) I think of them often when we see our niece and nephew, who are around that age. Essentially 17 months is the nadir - your kids are constantly exhausting. Charming, but there is almost no overlap between things which are fun for them and things which are enjoyable for you. And the cost! We had two under three at nursery; any money I earned in a day at work was almost exactly balanced out by childcare costs for the day. But as you say, worth it: young kids need other kids their own age.
Record tax rises over the past four years will cost the equivalent of £3,500 per household, analysis has found.
Since 2019 the Conservatives have introduced more tax rises than any other government, with the £100 billion cost bigger than anything outside wartime, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said.
Britain is making “a decisive and permanent shift to a higher-tax economy”, the think tank said in a judgment that will intensify pressure on Rishi Sunak to reverse the trend....
...The rise of 4.2 percentage points in the tax burden is comfortably bigger than that during Tony Blair’s first term, from 1997-2001, when a series of stealth taxes led to a 2.9 point increase. Margaret Thatcher’s first term from 1979-83 and Harold Wilson’s two terms from 1964-70 and 1974-76 led to rises of more than two points
Truss and Kwarteng of course put forward big tax cuts in their budget last year but it crashed the markets.
Inflation and the deficit have to come down first before further tax cuts are possible
The irony is that obvious cuts will upset Conservative supporters, from the £100,000 a year child benefit recipients, through the high-flyers enjoying higher rate tax relief on their pensions and entrepreneurs relying on state infrastructure, to the old soldiers worried about what little remains of our armed forces.
For trains the question is how many hundreds of billions should be spent on new tracks to build capacity.
For motorists the idea of being pro is apparently to merely not be actively hostile, and to fix potholes?
That's just neutral, that's not pro. Want to be pro motorist, then let's talk about some long overdue investment in new roads etc rather than simply fixing potholes in roads in our network that last had significant upgrades fifty years ago when our population was considerably lower?
You make an interesting point. The difference, I think, is that not everyone has access to a car, so these policies are a "wedge". They benefit only one group.
On the other hand, investment in public transport is seen as something everyone, including those with access to a car.
Can nothing be done about feral youths? So far this week we have had a 17 and two 13 year olds charged with wilful fire raising at Ayr Station Hotel, a 16 year old arrested in connection with the cutting down of the Sycamore Gap tree and a 17 year old charged with the murder of a 15 year old.
Thanks to Covid, mental health issues for young people have gone through the roof.
Any stats on this? Seems to be a popular narrative but never seen anything other than assertions (and usually obviously politically motivated, sadly)
I'm aware I'm answering your specific request for stats with anecdata, but my understanding is that the big impacts are in those who were 1-5 during covid. My older kids' years are full of children who are a bit odd, but any more so than in a normal year? And can it be pinned directly to covid rather than any one of the other ways that growing up in the 2020s is different to growing up in, say, the 1980s? Dunno. But I've talked to teachers at a few infant/junior schools, and the number of SEN kids they are seeing in what is now years 1-4 are unlike anything they have seen before. At my kids' middle class school, you have to look a bit more closely to see it, though the evidence is there - essentially the kids were about 18 months behind where they should be both educationally and socially, though the gap is narrowing steadily. In less comfortable areas, however, they saw a massive increase in kids arriving in school who were non-verbal and sometime not toilet trained. The test of whether this is due to lockdowns will be whether this carries on or whether it is an unfortunate blip as post-lockdown kids start coming through the system better adjusted.
I don't, incidentally, blame lockdown for my youngest's ADHD - it was clearly there from the start. Though I do blame it for the fact she (along with most of her class) are still the best part of a year behind where her sisters were at that stage - essentially, although they attended school for some parts of this period, practically no education was done whatsoever between March 2020 and March 2021.
We're paying through the nose for it as she's too young for any gov't funding but I think there's a real value in nursery for our 17 month old beyond simple childcare. Up to 25-30 words now I think and ahead on stuff like block stacking.
A future engineer!
Ugh, I remember those days. (Actually, I barely do - I appear to have blanked most of the memories out.) I think of them often when we see our niece and nephew, who are around that age. Essentially 17 months is the nadir - your kids are constantly exhausting. Charming, but there is almost no overlap between things which are fun for them and things which are enjoyable for you. And the cost! We had two under three at nursery; any money I earned in a day at work was almost exactly balanced out by childcare costs for the day. But as you say, worth it: young kids need other kids their own age.
I'll probably encourage her into medicine if she doesn't have a strong sway herself tbh - job security for life with population demographics, decent enough basic pay (NHS) with opportunities to earn more for private work, ability to move to other careers if wanted.
Can nothing be done about feral youths? So far this week we have had a 17 and two 13 year olds charged with wilful fire raising at Ayr Station Hotel, a 16 year old arrested in connection with the cutting down of the Sycamore Gap tree and a 17 year old charged with the murder of a 15 year old.
Thanks to Covid, mental health issues for young people have gone through the roof.
Any stats on this? Seems to be a popular narrative but never seen anything other than assertions (and usually obviously politically motivated, sadly)
I'm aware I'm answering your specific request for stats with anecdata, but my understanding is that the big impacts are in those who were 1-5 during covid. My older kids' years are full of children who are a bit odd, but any more so than in a normal year? And can it be pinned directly to covid rather than any one of the other ways that growing up in the 2020s is different to growing up in, say, the 1980s? Dunno. But I've talked to teachers at a few infant/junior schools, and the number of SEN kids they are seeing in what is now years 1-4 are unlike anything they have seen before. At my kids' middle class school, you have to look a bit more closely to see it, though the evidence is there - essentially the kids were about 18 months behind where they should be both educationally and socially, though the gap is narrowing steadily. In less comfortable areas, however, they saw a massive increase in kids arriving in school who were non-verbal and sometime not toilet trained. The test of whether this is due to lockdowns will be whether this carries on or whether it is an unfortunate blip as post-lockdown kids start coming through the system better adjusted.
I don't, incidentally, blame lockdown for my youngest's ADHD - it was clearly there from the start. Though I do blame it for the fact she (along with most of her class) are still the best part of a year behind where her sisters were at that stage - essentially, although they attended school for some parts of this period, practically no education was done whatsoever between March 2020 and March 2021.
We're paying through the nose for it as she's too young for any gov't funding but I think there's a real value in nursery for our 17 month old beyond simple childcare. Up to 25-30 words now I think and ahead on stuff like block stacking.
A future engineer!
Ugh, I remember those days. (Actually, I barely do - I appear to have blanked most of the memories out.) I think of them often when we see our niece and nephew, who are around that age. Essentially 17 months is the nadir - your kids are constantly exhausting. Charming, but there is almost no overlap between things which are fun for them and things which are enjoyable for you. And the cost! We had two under three at nursery; any money I earned in a day at work was almost exactly balanced out by childcare costs for the day. But as you say, worth it: young kids need other kids their own age.
Been thinking of those days this morning; would have been our daughter’s 59th birthday, and she’d have been celebrating with her first grandchild, had she not died of MND nearly 10 years ago.
Final day of the cricket season. Derbyshire and Gloucestershire have failed to win any matches this year, and Northants and Glamorgan have won just one.
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
I think 196 seats for the Tories would be a good result for them.
It is a really good poll for the Tories as Jacob Rees-Mogg loses his seat.
36 feels low for us. I can see a succession of blue wall seats falling like dominos on the night. Davey plans a "laser-like" targeting of seats and after the absurd chaos of the 2019 election I think he is right to do so.
But in a change election the tidal surge sweeps way past the targets...
36 would be very good for the Lib Dems. John Curtice thinks 30 is the maximum.
I'm predicting 40 with the following gains
Cheadle and Hazel Grove are both more likely than some of those.
Agree on both. Key is Labour squeeze, or rather, preventing Labour resurgence splitting the anti Tory vote. This is prediction for Cheadle
I'm coming to the conclusion that my guess of 40 Lib Dem seats is on the low side.
I would be happy if you are right, but there will be a substantial number of near misses. I think the target seats approach is correct, but not every target will be hit.
Agreed but there will also be some unexpected wins. It's a surging anti-Tory tide which will wash up in unexpected places.
Final day of the cricket season. Derbyshire and Gloucestershire have failed to win any matches this year, and Northants and Glamorgan have won just one.
For trains the question is how many hundreds of billions should be spent on new tracks to build capacity.
For motorists the idea of being pro is apparently to merely not be actively hostile, and to fix potholes?
That's just neutral, that's not pro. Want to be pro motorist, then let's talk about some long overdue investment in new roads etc rather than simply fixing potholes in roads in our network that last had significant upgrades fifty years ago when our population was considerably lower?
You make an interesting point. The difference, I think, is that not everyone has access to a car, so these policies are a "wedge". They benefit only one group.
On the other hand, investment in public transport is seen as something everyone, including those with access to a car.
A lot of motorists never, or almost never, use public transport. There is a bit of a cultural divide between public and private transport users regrettably.
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
That does seem especially disastrous for the Conservatives, right now. A party can survive that level of defeat.
196 seats is little different to what Howard got in 2005 and 5 years later the Conservatives were in government
Yep, via a switch to centrist, socially liberal, green and detoxifying policies.
How likely do you think the next Tory leader is going to meet that formulation?
Brown was ahead of Cameron by even more than Blair was ahead of Howard when Brown became PM.
It was Osborne's IHT cut offer and the 2008 crash that really boosted the Tories in 2010, Cameron added a few points but not much more than that and of course in 2010 he still failed to get a majority
In hindsight, the 2010 general election was the first sign that David Cameron was a lousy campaigner, even before he almost lost Scotland and did lose Europe.
Anecdote alert! I was out with my MP yesterday, door-knocking in an area that elects Labour councillors. It was even hostile in 2019, when he got 53% of the vote. Was expecting it to be rough.
However, he is given credit for getting a local banking hub and improving the bus service. Far better reception than I had thought, based on national polls.
Would just remind folk here that those MPs who have put in the effort for five years and have been visible in their constituency may get a significantly better result than national polling would suggest. I suspect that there will be a swathe of hard-working Tory MPs who hang on against the trend by just a few hundred or even a few dozen votes.
I think that is right. Visibility and hard work is extremely important.
I suspect that there will be a lot of lazy invisible Tory MPs (including Rees Mogg who was being slated yesterday by a Tory in his constituency for his invisibility except on GB News) who unexpectedly lose large majorities.
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
That does seem especially disastrous for the Conservatives, right now. A party can survive that level of defeat.
196 seats is little different to what Howard got in 2005 and 5 years later the Conservatives were in government
Yep, via a switch to centrist, socially liberal, green and detoxifying policies.
How likely do you think the next Tory leader is going to meet that formulation?
Brown was ahead of Cameron by even more than Blair was ahead of Howard when Brown became PM.
It was Osborne's IHT cut offer and the 2008 crash that really boosted the Tories in 2010, Cameron added a few points but not much more than that and of course in 2010 he still failed to get a majority
No, it really wasn't.
For someone who talks about polls a lot, you really don't understand them.
Brown had a bounce, which unwound.
It was never just the IHT cut offer. That was only one of many things happening at the time.
If the IHT cut offer had an efffect it was psyching Gordon Brown out of calling a snap election which he would have won.
Final day of the cricket season. Derbyshire and Gloucestershire have failed to win any matches this year, and Northants and Glamorgan have won just one.
Dropped catches against Hampshire didn’t help. If we’d won the game we’ve just lost, we’d be top! Roll on next season, but will we still have Sir Alastair?
Can nothing be done about feral youths? So far this week we have had a 17 and two 13 year olds charged with wilful fire raising at Ayr Station Hotel, a 16 year old arrested in connection with the cutting down of the Sycamore Gap tree and a 17 year old charged with the murder of a 15 year old.
Thanks to Covid, mental health issues for young people have gone through the roof.
Any stats on this? Seems to be a popular narrative but never seen anything other than assertions (and usually obviously politically motivated, sadly)
I'm aware I'm answering your specific request for stats with anecdata, but my understanding is that the big impacts are in those who were 1-5 during covid. My older kids' years are full of children who are a bit odd, but any more so than in a normal year? And can it be pinned directly to covid rather than any one of the other ways that growing up in the 2020s is different to growing up in, say, the 1980s? Dunno. But I've talked to teachers at a few infant/junior schools, and the number of SEN kids they are seeing in what is now years 1-4 are unlike anything they have seen before. At my kids' middle class school, you have to look a bit more closely to see it, though the evidence is there - essentially the kids were about 18 months behind where they should be both educationally and socially, though the gap is narrowing steadily. In less comfortable areas, however, they saw a massive increase in kids arriving in school who were non-verbal and sometime not toilet trained. The test of whether this is due to lockdowns will be whether this carries on or whether it is an unfortunate blip as post-lockdown kids start coming through the system better adjusted.
I don't, incidentally, blame lockdown for my youngest's ADHD - it was clearly there from the start. Though I do blame it for the fact she (along with most of her class) are still the best part of a year behind where her sisters were at that stage - essentially, although they attended school for some parts of this period, practically no education was done whatsoever between March 2020 and March 2021.
We're paying through the nose for it as she's too young for any gov't funding but I think there's a real value in nursery for our 17 month old beyond simple childcare. Up to 25-30 words now I think and ahead on stuff like block stacking.
A future engineer!
Ugh, I remember those days. (Actually, I barely do - I appear to have blanked most of the memories out.) I think of them often when we see our niece and nephew, who are around that age. Essentially 17 months is the nadir - your kids are constantly exhausting. Charming, but there is almost no overlap between things which are fun for them and things which are enjoyable for you. And the cost! We had two under three at nursery; any money I earned in a day at work was almost exactly balanced out by childcare costs for the day. But as you say, worth it: young kids need other kids their own age.
Been thinking of those days this morning; would have been our daughter’s 59th birthday, and she’d have been celebrating with her first grandchild, had she not died of MND nearly 10 years ago.
Well that post brought forth a complex mix of emotions! Really sorry to hear you lost a daughter. For a parent to outlive a child is always a tragedy. But she lived long enough to start a family - she has grandchildren! So that's happy. But that means her child must have lost a parent quite young. And as well as all that, you have great grandchildren. OK, there are other people in the UK who have great grandchildren, but probably not that many still lucid enough to be posting about them on an internet chat forum. So you have both my sympathy and my congratulations. (One of my grandmother's last moments was when she met her second great-grandchild - the only one of my grandparents to live long enough to have great grandchildren. Her mind was almost always elsewhere by this stage, but, briefly, she came back to us. There is a photo which I treasure of four generations of Cookies.)
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
That does seem especially disastrous for the Conservatives, right now. A party can survive that level of defeat.
196 seats is little different to what Howard got in 2005 and 5 years later the Conservatives were in government
Yep, via a switch to centrist, socially liberal, green and detoxifying policies.
How likely do you think the next Tory leader is going to meet that formulation?
Brown was ahead of Cameron by even more than Blair was ahead of Howard when Brown became PM.
It was Osborne's IHT cut offer and the 2008 crash that really boosted the Tories in 2010, Cameron added a few points but not much more than that and of course in 2010 he still failed to get a majority
No, it really wasn't.
For someone who talks about polls a lot, you really don't understand them.
Brown had a bounce, which unwound.
It was never just the IHT cut offer. That was only one of many things happening at the time.
Yougov before the Tory conference in 2007 had Brown's Labour on 43% and Cameron's Tories on just 32%.
For trains the question is how many hundreds of billions should be spent on new tracks to build capacity.
For motorists the idea of being pro is apparently to merely not be actively hostile, and to fix potholes?
That's just neutral, that's not pro. Want to be pro motorist, then let's talk about some long overdue investment in new roads etc rather than simply fixing potholes in roads in our network that last had significant upgrades fifty years ago when our population was considerably lower?
You make an interesting point. The difference, I think, is that not everyone has access to a car, so these policies are a "wedge". They benefit only one group.
On the other hand, investment in public transport is seen as something everyone, including those with access to a car.
Which is self-serving bullshit, since 'public transport' is used by a tiny minority and only where roads aren't good, whereas roads are used by the overwhelming majority.
And those who use public transport still rely on others using roads, eg vans, buses, delivery drivers etc.
Stop looking for excuses for a failing government and just get going with investing in our critical infrastructure.
Record tax rises over the past four years will cost the equivalent of £3,500 per household, analysis has found.
Since 2019 the Conservatives have introduced more tax rises than any other government, with the £100 billion cost bigger than anything outside wartime, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said.
Britain is making “a decisive and permanent shift to a higher-tax economy”, the think tank said in a judgment that will intensify pressure on Rishi Sunak to reverse the trend....
...The rise of 4.2 percentage points in the tax burden is comfortably bigger than that during Tony Blair’s first term, from 1997-2001, when a series of stealth taxes led to a 2.9 point increase. Margaret Thatcher’s first term from 1979-83 and Harold Wilson’s two terms from 1964-70 and 1974-76 led to rises of more than two points
Truss and Kwarteng of course put forward big tax cuts in their budget last year but it crashed the markets.
Inflation and the deficit have to come down first before further tax cuts are possible
The irony is that obvious cuts will upset Conservative supporters, from the £100,000 a year child benefit recipients, through the high-flyers enjoying higher rate tax relief on their pensions and entrepreneurs relying on state infrastructure, to the old soldiers worried about what little remains of our armed forces.
You're talking about spending cuts. Tax cuts can be intended to be revenue neutral or even bring in additional revenues by encouraging taxable activity.
Anecdote alert! I was out with my MP yesterday, door-knocking in an area that elects Labour councillors. It was even hostile in 2019, when he got 53% of the vote. Was expecting it to be rough.
However, he is given credit for getting a local banking hub and improving the bus service. Far better reception than I had thought, based on national polls.
Would just remind folk here that those MPs who have put in the effort for five years and have been visible in their constituency may get a significantly better result than national polling would suggest. I suspect that there will be a swathe of hard-working Tory MPs who hang on against the trend by just a few hundred or even a few dozen votes.
I think that is right. Visibility and hard work is extremely important.
I suspect that there will be a lot of lazy invisible Tory MPs (including Rees Mogg who was being slated yesterday by a Tory in his constituency for his invisibility except on GB News) who unexpectedly lose large majorities.
Priti Patel is putting quite a lot In lately. Surely she isn’t worried about Witham.
Record tax rises over the past four years will cost the equivalent of £3,500 per household, analysis has found.
Since 2019 the Conservatives have introduced more tax rises than any other government, with the £100 billion cost bigger than anything outside wartime, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said.
Britain is making “a decisive and permanent shift to a higher-tax economy”, the think tank said in a judgment that will intensify pressure on Rishi Sunak to reverse the trend....
...The rise of 4.2 percentage points in the tax burden is comfortably bigger than that during Tony Blair’s first term, from 1997-2001, when a series of stealth taxes led to a 2.9 point increase. Margaret Thatcher’s first term from 1979-83 and Harold Wilson’s two terms from 1964-70 and 1974-76 led to rises of more than two points
Truss and Kwarteng of course put forward big tax cuts in their budget last year but it crashed the markets.
Inflation and the deficit have to come down first before further tax cuts are possible
The irony is that obvious cuts will upset Conservative supporters, from the £100,000 a year child benefit recipients, through the high-flyers enjoying higher rate tax relief on their pensions and entrepreneurs relying on state infrastructure, to the old soldiers worried about what little remains of our armed forces.
You're talking about spending cuts. Tax cuts can be intended to be revenue neutral or even bring in additional revenues by encouraging taxable activity.
If we cut those with obscenely high tax rates like 80%, yes, absolutely.
Sadly too much effort goes into cutting taxes for those with much lower marginal rates, while boosting the burden on those with higher rates.
Simpler, flatter taxes would be fairer. And help those on low and middle incomes the most.
Apart from Lab on 39%, does anyone have the shares for the other parties from the Times MRP?
Con 26.3%
Lib Dems 10.8%
Taking Labour at 39% gives a 3 party tally of 76.1.
That's back to 2015 levels of Lib Lab Con. But where are the other votes going - Reform or whatever it's called now are nowhere near UKIP levels of 2015; the greens don't seem to be particularly surging and the SNP are going to be back closer to 3.x% rather than the 4.7% they got in 2015.
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
That does seem especially disastrous for the Conservatives, right now. A party can survive that level of defeat.
196 seats is little different to what Howard got in 2005 and 5 years later the Conservatives were in government
Yep, via a switch to centrist, socially liberal, green and detoxifying policies.
How likely do you think the next Tory leader is going to meet that formulation?
Brown was ahead of Cameron by even more than Blair was ahead of Howard when Brown became PM.
It was Osborne's IHT cut offer and the 2008 crash that really boosted the Tories in 2010, Cameron added a few points but not much more than that and of course in 2010 he still failed to get a majority
No, it really wasn't.
For someone who talks about polls a lot, you really don't understand them.
Brown had a bounce, which unwound.
It was never just the IHT cut offer. That was only one of many things happening at the time.
Yougov before the Tory conference in 2007 had Brown's Labour on 43% and Cameron's Tories on just 32%.
1. More spoke at Tory Conference than just Osborne. 2. Some swing naturally occurs from publicity anyway. 3. Brown took a shotgun and aimed it at his own feet. 4. Cameron had an excellent speech himself.
I get that you are obsessed with IHT. Not everyone else is.
It looks to me like the Tory vote share had a meaningful jump after the motorist's friend stuff, not even necessarily because of the substance of the proposals but simply because it enabled the government to take control of the news agenda for a couple of days and put Labour on the back foot.
That jump was maybe 4-5%. Since then things have slipped back a bit as the story fades and some of the holes in it become clearer. To perhaps 2-3% (I suspect Yougov yesterday was a bit of an outlier). That brings us back to where the government were before their early September slump.
What has happened though in recent months is a slow decline in Labour vote share, largely benefiting Green, a tiny bit the LDs and probably some unwind of the swing away from SNP in Scotland. They are more often than not now in the low 40s rather the mid to high 40s.
Savanta looks to have much more credible figures for REF than most other pollsters.
"Why DEI Training Doesn’t Work—and How to Fix It There’s no question that bias exists. There’s also no question that the way organizations deal with it is more likely to hurt than help. By Mahzarin Banaji and Frank Dobbin"
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
That does seem especially disastrous for the Conservatives, right now. A party can survive that level of defeat.
196 seats is little different to what Howard got in 2005 and 5 years later the Conservatives were in government
Yep, via a switch to centrist, socially liberal, green and detoxifying policies.
How likely do you think the next Tory leader is going to meet that formulation?
Brown was ahead of Cameron by even more than Blair was ahead of Howard when Brown became PM.
It was Osborne's IHT cut offer and the 2008 crash that really boosted the Tories in 2010, Cameron added a few points but not much more than that and of course in 2010 he still failed to get a majority
No, it really wasn't.
For someone who talks about polls a lot, you really don't understand them.
Brown had a bounce, which unwound.
It was never just the IHT cut offer. That was only one of many things happening at the time.
If the IHT cut offer had an efffect it was psyching Gordon Brown out of calling a snap election which he would have won.
Anecdote alert! I was out with my MP yesterday, door-knocking in an area that elects Labour councillors. It was even hostile in 2019, when he got 53% of the vote. Was expecting it to be rough.
However, he is given credit for getting a local banking hub and improving the bus service. Far better reception than I had thought, based on national polls.
Would just remind folk here that those MPs who have put in the effort for five years and have been visible in their constituency may get a significantly better result than national polling would suggest. I suspect that there will be a swathe of hard-working Tory MPs who hang on against the trend by just a few hundred or even a few dozen votes.
I think that is right. Visibility and hard work is extremely important.
I suspect that there will be a lot of lazy invisible Tory MPs (including Rees Mogg who was being slated yesterday by a Tory in his constituency for his invisibility except on GB News) who unexpectedly lose large majorities.
Priti Patel is putting quite a lot In lately. Surely she isn’t worried about Witham.
I'm not sure Priti hasn't had a look at the polls and retirements and concluded she might have a shot at the leadership.
Anecdote alert! I was out with my MP yesterday, door-knocking in an area that elects Labour councillors. It was even hostile in 2019, when he got 53% of the vote. Was expecting it to be rough.
However, he is given credit for getting a local banking hub and improving the bus service. Far better reception than I had thought, based on national polls.
Would just remind folk here that those MPs who have put in the effort for five years and have been visible in their constituency may get a significantly better result than national polling would suggest. I suspect that there will be a swathe of hard-working Tory MPs who hang on against the trend by just a few hundred or even a few dozen votes.
I think that is right. Visibility and hard work is extremely important.
I suspect that there will be a lot of lazy invisible Tory MPs (including Rees Mogg who was being slated yesterday by a Tory in his constituency for his invisibility except on GB News) who unexpectedly lose large majorities.
Priti Patel is putting quite a lot In lately. Surely she isn’t worried about Witham.
She's sitting on a 24,000 majority but she might be worried.
Labour would have to hard squeeze Lib Dems. I don't think it'll be enough. Electoral Calculus has it as a 70% chance of a Tory hold.
Anecdote alert! I was out with my MP yesterday, door-knocking in an area that elects Labour councillors. It was even hostile in 2019, when he got 53% of the vote. Was expecting it to be rough.
However, he is given credit for getting a local banking hub and improving the bus service. Far better reception than I had thought, based on national polls.
Would just remind folk here that those MPs who have put in the effort for five years and have been visible in their constituency may get a significantly better result than national polling would suggest. I suspect that there will be a swathe of hard-working Tory MPs who hang on against the trend by just a few hundred or even a few dozen votes.
I think that is right. Visibility and hard work is extremely important.
I suspect that there will be a lot of lazy invisible Tory MPs (including Rees Mogg who was being slated yesterday by a Tory in his constituency for his invisibility except on GB News) who unexpectedly lose large majorities.
I also think though that at a GE people vote on national lines despite their local MPs' performance, rather than because of it. Lib Dems found that out in 2015: a lot of popular and visible local MPs defenestrated as the wider national tide swept them away.
Can nothing be done about feral youths? So far this week we have had a 17 and two 13 year olds charged with wilful fire raising at Ayr Station Hotel, a 16 year old arrested in connection with the cutting down of the Sycamore Gap tree and a 17 year old charged with the murder of a 15 year old.
Thanks to Covid, mental health issues for young people have gone through the roof.
Any stats on this? Seems to be a popular narrative but never seen anything other than assertions (and usually obviously politically motivated, sadly)
I'm aware I'm answering your specific request for stats with anecdata, but my understanding is that the big impacts are in those who were 1-5 during covid. My older kids' years are full of children who are a bit odd, but any more so than in a normal year? And can it be pinned directly to covid rather than any one of the other ways that growing up in the 2020s is different to growing up in, say, the 1980s? Dunno. But I've talked to teachers at a few infant/junior schools, and the number of SEN kids they are seeing in what is now years 1-4 are unlike anything they have seen before. At my kids' middle class school, you have to look a bit more closely to see it, though the evidence is there - essentially the kids were about 18 months behind where they should be both educationally and socially, though the gap is narrowing steadily. In less comfortable areas, however, they saw a massive increase in kids arriving in school who were non-verbal and sometime not toilet trained. The test of whether this is due to lockdowns will be whether this carries on or whether it is an unfortunate blip as post-lockdown kids start coming through the system better adjusted.
I don't, incidentally, blame lockdown for my youngest's ADHD - it was clearly there from the start. Though I do blame it for the fact she (along with most of her class) are still the best part of a year behind where her sisters were at that stage - essentially, although they attended school for some parts of this period, practically no education was done whatsoever between March 2020 and March 2021.
We're paying through the nose for it as she's too young for any gov't funding but I think there's a real value in nursery for our 17 month old beyond simple childcare. Up to 25-30 words now I think and ahead on stuff like block stacking.
A future engineer!
Ugh, I remember those days. (Actually, I barely do - I appear to have blanked most of the memories out.) I think of them often when we see our niece and nephew, who are around that age. Essentially 17 months is the nadir - your kids are constantly exhausting. Charming, but there is almost no overlap between things which are fun for them and things which are enjoyable for you. And the cost! We had two under three at nursery; any money I earned in a day at work was almost exactly balanced out by childcare costs for the day. But as you say, worth it: young kids need other kids their own age.
Been thinking of those days this morning; would have been our daughter’s 59th birthday, and she’d have been celebrating with her first grandchild, had she not died of MND nearly 10 years ago.
Well that post brought forth a complex mix of emotions! Really sorry to hear you lost a daughter. For a parent to outlive a child is always a tragedy. But she lived long enough to start a family - she has grandchildren! So that's happy. But that means her child must have lost a parent quite young. And as well as all that, you have great grandchildren. OK, there are other people in the UK who have great grandchildren, but probably not that many still lucid enough to be posting about them on an internet chat forum. So you have both my sympathy and my congratulations. (One of my grandmother's last moments was when she met her second great-grandchild - the only one of my grandparents to live long enough to have great grandchildren. Her mind was almost always elsewhere by this stage, but, briefly, she came back to us. There is a photo which I treasure of four generations of Cookies.)
Thank you; my daughter’s children were both in their early twenties when she died; she and her husband were looking forward to some ‘us’ time. I think there are quite a few more great-grandparents about nowadays; I never saw any of mine, and indeed only one set of grandparents, although my paternal grandmother lived long enough to see all seven of her eight great-grandchildren. And thanks again for the kind remarks.
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
That does seem especially disastrous for the Conservatives, right now. A party can survive that level of defeat.
196 seats is little different to what Howard got in 2005 and 5 years later the Conservatives were in government
Yep, via a switch to centrist, socially liberal, green and detoxifying policies.
How likely do you think the next Tory leader is going to meet that formulation?
Brown was ahead of Cameron by even more than Blair was ahead of Howard when Brown became PM.
It was Osborne's IHT cut offer and the 2008 crash that really boosted the Tories in 2010, Cameron added a few points but not much more than that and of course in 2010 he still failed to get a majority
In hindsight, the 2010 general election was the first sign that David Cameron was a lousy campaigner, even before he almost lost Scotland and did lose Europe.
Nick Clegg stalemated him.
But Cameron's problem was he was playing in the neoliberal/social liberal space and the market just wasn't there.
For trains the question is how many hundreds of billions should be spent on new tracks to build capacity.
For motorists the idea of being pro is apparently to merely not be actively hostile, and to fix potholes?
That's just neutral, that's not pro. Want to be pro motorist, then let's talk about some long overdue investment in new roads etc rather than simply fixing potholes in roads in our network that last had significant upgrades fifty years ago when our population was considerably lower?
You make an interesting point. The difference, I think, is that not everyone has access to a car, so these policies are a "wedge". They benefit only one group.
On the other hand, investment in public transport is seen as something everyone, including those with access to a car.
Which is self-serving bullshit, since 'public transport' is used by a tiny minority and only where roads aren't good, whereas roads are used by the overwhelming majority.
And those who use public transport still rely on others using roads, eg vans, buses, delivery drivers etc.
Stop looking for excuses for a failing government and just get going with investing in our critical infrastructure.
Only 66% of commuters drive to work. "Tiny" minority don't, apparently.
And that's with the shocking level of public transport provision in the north.
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
That does seem especially disastrous for the Conservatives, right now. A party can survive that level of defeat.
196 seats is little different to what Howard got in 2005 and 5 years later the Conservatives were in government
The problem the Tory party has is the current Tory membership. UKIP lite and upset with Sunak.
They're like the Corbynites were in the Labour party. The Tories are destined to remain in opposition until enough proper Tories actually join or rejoin the party and restore decency and common sense.
The fate of the Tories is more likely to depend on how the likely next Labour government manage the economy than who their leader is.
Even if the Tories had selected Ken Clarke as leader in 1997 they would still have lost in 2001 as New Labour managed the economy relatively well.
In 1975 however Thatcher was seen by most commentators as an unelectable rightwinger but she beat the more centrist Callaghan in 1979 as the economy was in poor shape.
Having Leicester Square looking like this probably didn't help either:
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
That does seem especially disastrous for the Conservatives, right now. A party can survive that level of defeat.
196 seats is little different to what Howard got in 2005 and 5 years later the Conservatives were in government
Yep, via a switch to centrist, socially liberal, green and detoxifying policies.
How likely do you think the next Tory leader is going to meet that formulation?
Brown was ahead of Cameron by even more than Blair was ahead of Howard when Brown became PM.
It was Osborne's IHT cut offer and the 2008 crash that really boosted the Tories in 2010, Cameron added a few points but not much more than that and of course in 2010 he still failed to get a majority
No, it really wasn't.
For someone who talks about polls a lot, you really don't understand them.
Brown had a bounce, which unwound.
It was never just the IHT cut offer. That was only one of many things happening at the time.
If the IHT cut offer had an efffect it was psyching Gordon Brown out of calling a snap election which he would have won.
From memory, Brown was probably more psyched out by the marginal constituency poll which came out showing the Tories doing better in marginal constituencies.
The Tories are like a holed ship with current repairs keeping them afloat . They have a very narrow path to get the ship back to port before it sinks .
Labour are ahead but could over confidence see them hit rocks just before the port .
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
The Tories are like a holed ship with current repairs keeping them afloat . They have a very narrow path to get the ship back to port before it sinks .
Labour are ahead but could over confidence see them hit rocks just before the port .
Whatever might cause Labour to hit the rocks - and it certainly could happen - over-confidence isn't it. They're terrified of their own shadow!
Anecdote alert! I was out with my MP yesterday, door-knocking in an area that elects Labour councillors. It was even hostile in 2019, when he got 53% of the vote. Was expecting it to be rough.
However, he is given credit for getting a local banking hub and improving the bus service. Far better reception than I had thought, based on national polls.
Would just remind folk here that those MPs who have put in the effort for five years and have been visible in their constituency may get a significantly better result than national polling would suggest. I suspect that there will be a swathe of hard-working Tory MPs who hang on against the trend by just a few hundred or even a few dozen votes.
I think that is right. Visibility and hard work is extremely important.
I suspect that there will be a lot of lazy invisible Tory MPs (including Rees Mogg who was being slated yesterday by a Tory in his constituency for his invisibility except on GB News) who unexpectedly lose large majorities.
I also think though that at a GE people vote on national lines despite their local MPs' performance, rather than because of it. Lib Dems found that out in 2015: a lot of popular and visible local MPs defenestrated as the wider national tide swept them away.
That's true too. A national tide is powerful and sweeps over everything. The dazed survivors are likely to be particularly popular and visible local MPs but it's no guarantee.
I can't wait until the individual constituency betting markets are available.
For trains the question is how many hundreds of billions should be spent on new tracks to build capacity.
For motorists the idea of being pro is apparently to merely not be actively hostile, and to fix potholes?
That's just neutral, that's not pro. Want to be pro motorist, then let's talk about some long overdue investment in new roads etc rather than simply fixing potholes in roads in our network that last had significant upgrades fifty years ago when our population was considerably lower?
You make an interesting point. The difference, I think, is that not everyone has access to a car, so these policies are a "wedge". They benefit only one group.
On the other hand, investment in public transport is seen as something everyone, including those with access to a car.
Which is self-serving bullshit, since 'public transport' is used by a tiny minority and only where roads aren't good, whereas roads are used by the overwhelming majority.
And those who use public transport still rely on others using roads, eg vans, buses, delivery drivers etc.
Stop looking for excuses for a failing government and just get going with investing in our critical infrastructure.
Only 66% of commuters drive to work. "Tiny" minority don't, apparently.
And that's with the shocking level of public transport provision in the north.
'Only' two in three. 😂😂😂😂
Last I checked two thirds is a pretty significant majority. And you want to deny investment to the two thirds of the population? Fanatic.
Of the other third, almost all stats normally show the primary alternative mode of commuting is walking. Yes, public transportation is tiny versus the overwhelming majority of 66%.
Anecdote alert! I was out with my MP yesterday, door-knocking in an area that elects Labour councillors. It was even hostile in 2019, when he got 53% of the vote. Was expecting it to be rough.
However, he is given credit for getting a local banking hub and improving the bus service. Far better reception than I had thought, based on national polls.
Would just remind folk here that those MPs who have put in the effort for five years and have been visible in their constituency may get a significantly better result than national polling would suggest. I suspect that there will be a swathe of hard-working Tory MPs who hang on against the trend by just a few hundred or even a few dozen votes.
I think that is right. Visibility and hard work is extremely important.
I suspect that there will be a lot of lazy invisible Tory MPs (including Rees Mogg who was being slated yesterday by a Tory in his constituency for his invisibility except on GB News) who unexpectedly lose large majorities.
Priti Patel is putting quite a lot In lately. Surely she isn’t worried about Witham.
She's sitting on a 24,000 majority but she might be worried.
Labour would have to hard squeeze Lib Dems. I don't think it'll be enough. Electoral Calculus has it as a 70% chance of a Tory hold.
Living here, I suspect (fear?) the LD might be fragile with the right Labour candidate. I also suspect the Green vote might be stronger than expected.
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
I think 196 seats for the Tories would be a good result for them.
It is a really good poll for the Tories as Jacob Rees-Mogg loses his seat.
36 feels low for us. I can see a succession of blue wall seats falling like dominos on the night. Davey plans a "laser-like" targeting of seats and after the absurd chaos of the 2019 election I think he is right to do so.
But in a change election the tidal surge sweeps way past the targets...
36 would be very good for the Lib Dems. John Curtice thinks 30 is the maximum.
I'm predicting 40 with the following gains
North Devon will stay Con. As will Newbury. Popular female MPs.
North Cornwall and Torbay very likely to stay Con too.
There are 15,000 majorities you are talking about overturning. The move nationally is to Labour. These seats are not going to return to the LibDems on their current level of polling.
For trains the question is how many hundreds of billions should be spent on new tracks to build capacity.
For motorists the idea of being pro is apparently to merely not be actively hostile, and to fix potholes?
That's just neutral, that's not pro. Want to be pro motorist, then let's talk about some long overdue investment in new roads etc rather than simply fixing potholes in roads in our network that last had significant upgrades fifty years ago when our population was considerably lower?
You make an interesting point. The difference, I think, is that not everyone has access to a car, so these policies are a "wedge". They benefit only one group.
On the other hand, investment in public transport is seen as something everyone, including those with access to a car.
A lot of motorists never, or almost never, use public transport. There is a bit of a cultural divide between public and private transport users regrettably.
Crudely, it depends on whether that subset of the population is smaller or larger the Tories current polling numbers.
The Tories are like a holed ship with current repairs keeping them afloat . They have a very narrow path to get the ship back to port before it sinks .
Labour are ahead but could over confidence see them hit rocks just before the port .
Whatever might cause Labour to hit the rocks - and it certainly could happen - over-confidence isn't it. They're terrified of their own shadow!
They could do something really stupid like ditch the triple lock . I tend to think Reeves has boxed Labour in with her no new wealth taxes. Trying to appeal to voters that would never vote for them anyway .
This strategy (pro motorist) on the part of the conservatives is one they always have in their back pocket when they run out of other ideas, or are just desperate. They also did it in our local Council. The labour party would produce a costed and detailed manifesto for what they want to do in the town. The tories would have no plan at all and just put out flyers saying that they would stop funding the arts and repair potholes instead, improve parking (the irony being that all this was largely a county matter). It is just at base appealing to everyday philistine laziness. It is sort of depressing and incompetent but fundamentally quite harmless.
For trains the question is how many hundreds of billions should be spent on new tracks to build capacity.
For motorists the idea of being pro is apparently to merely not be actively hostile, and to fix potholes?
That's just neutral, that's not pro. Want to be pro motorist, then let's talk about some long overdue investment in new roads etc rather than simply fixing potholes in roads in our network that last had significant upgrades fifty years ago when our population was considerably lower?
You make an interesting point. The difference, I think, is that not everyone has access to a car, so these policies are a "wedge". They benefit only one group.
On the other hand, investment in public transport is seen as something everyone, including those with access to a car.
Which is self-serving bullshit, since 'public transport' is used by a tiny minority and only where roads aren't good, whereas roads are used by the overwhelming majority.
And those who use public transport still rely on others using roads, eg vans, buses, delivery drivers etc.
Stop looking for excuses for a failing government and just get going with investing in our critical infrastructure.
Only 66% of commuters drive to work. "Tiny" minority don't, apparently.
And that's with the shocking level of public transport provision in the north.
'Only' two in three. 😂😂😂😂
Last I checked two thirds is a pretty significant majority. And you want to deny investment to the two thirds of the population? Fanatic.
Of the other third, almost all stats normally show the primary alternative mode of commuting is walking. Yes, public transportation is tiny versus the overwhelming majority of 66%.
The stats are not your friend.
Im sure the "Tiny Bully" is being bred as we speak.
You also claimed that "we northerners drive" like you are born wearing driving gloves and a flat cap.
Final day of the cricket season. Derbyshire and Gloucestershire have failed to win any matches this year, and Northants and Glamorgan have won just one.
In 1971 the First Class season ended on 14th September. To play the summer game for a whole month of meteorological autumn is possibly the triumph of hope over experience.
For trains the question is how many hundreds of billions should be spent on new tracks to build capacity.
For motorists the idea of being pro is apparently to merely not be actively hostile, and to fix potholes?
That's just neutral, that's not pro. Want to be pro motorist, then let's talk about some long overdue investment in new roads etc rather than simply fixing potholes in roads in our network that last had significant upgrades fifty years ago when our population was considerably lower?
You make an interesting point. The difference, I think, is that not everyone has access to a car, so these policies are a "wedge". They benefit only one group.
On the other hand, investment in public transport is seen as something everyone, including those with access to a car.
Which is self-serving bullshit, since 'public transport' is used by a tiny minority and only where roads aren't good, whereas roads are used by the overwhelming majority.
And those who use public transport still rely on others using roads, eg vans, buses, delivery drivers etc.
Stop looking for excuses for a failing government and just get going with investing in our critical infrastructure.
Only 66% of commuters drive to work. "Tiny" minority don't, apparently.
And that's with the shocking level of public transport provision in the north.
'Only' two in three. 😂😂😂😂
Last I checked two thirds is a pretty significant majority. And you want to deny investment to the two thirds of the population? Fanatic.
Of the other third, almost all stats normally show the primary alternative mode of commuting is walking. Yes, public transportation is tiny versus the overwhelming majority of 66%.
The stats are not your friend.
Given every public transport and active travel investment is explicitly designed to give drivers more choice and freedom, 100% of ground transport investment in the UK is pro-motorist.
For trains the question is how many hundreds of billions should be spent on new tracks to build capacity.
For motorists the idea of being pro is apparently to merely not be actively hostile, and to fix potholes?
That's just neutral, that's not pro. Want to be pro motorist, then let's talk about some long overdue investment in new roads etc rather than simply fixing potholes in roads in our network that last had significant upgrades fifty years ago when our population was considerably lower?
You make an interesting point. The difference, I think, is that not everyone has access to a car, so these policies are a "wedge". They benefit only one group.
On the other hand, investment in public transport is seen as something everyone, including those with access to a car.
Which is self-serving bullshit, since 'public transport' is used by a tiny minority and only where roads aren't good, whereas roads are used by the overwhelming majority.
And those who use public transport still rely on others using roads, eg vans, buses, delivery drivers etc.
Stop looking for excuses for a failing government and just get going with investing in our critical infrastructure.
Only 66% of commuters drive to work. "Tiny" minority don't, apparently.
And that's with the shocking level of public transport provision in the north.
'Only' two in three. 😂😂😂😂
Last I checked two thirds is a pretty significant majority. And you want to deny investment to the two thirds of the population? Fanatic.
Of the other third, almost all stats normally show the primary alternative mode of commuting is walking. Yes, public transportation is tiny versus the overwhelming majority of 66%.
The stats are not your friend.
Im sure the "Tiny Bully" is being bred as we speak.
You also claimed that "we northerners drive" like you are born wearing driving gloves and a flat cap.
We do drive. That is the primary mode of transportation in the North, as it is in almost the entire country. As it is for two thirds of commuters and 95% of land-based freight mileage from memory.
I've never worn 'driving gloves' or a flat cap.
Just because you're an anti-car fanatic that wants to deny investment to two thirds of commuters, doesn't make what I say ridiculous.
For trains the question is how many hundreds of billions should be spent on new tracks to build capacity.
For motorists the idea of being pro is apparently to merely not be actively hostile, and to fix potholes?
That's just neutral, that's not pro. Want to be pro motorist, then let's talk about some long overdue investment in new roads etc rather than simply fixing potholes in roads in our network that last had significant upgrades fifty years ago when our population was considerably lower?
You make an interesting point. The difference, I think, is that not everyone has access to a car, so these policies are a "wedge". They benefit only one group.
On the other hand, investment in public transport is seen as something everyone, including those with access to a car.
Which is self-serving bullshit, since 'public transport' is used by a tiny minority and only where roads aren't good, whereas roads are used by the overwhelming majority.
And those who use public transport still rely on others using roads, eg vans, buses, delivery drivers etc.
Stop looking for excuses for a failing government and just get going with investing in our critical infrastructure.
Only 66% of commuters drive to work. "Tiny" minority don't, apparently.
And that's with the shocking level of public transport provision in the north.
'Only' two in three. 😂😂😂😂
Last I checked two thirds is a pretty significant majority. And you want to deny investment to the two thirds of the population? Fanatic.
Of the other third, almost all stats normally show the primary alternative mode of commuting is walking. Yes, public transportation is tiny versus the overwhelming majority of 66%.
The stats are not your friend.
Im sure the "Tiny Bully" is being bred as we speak.
You also claimed that "we northerners drive" like you are born wearing driving gloves and a flat cap.
We do drive. That is the primary mode of transportation in the North, as it is in almost the entire country. As it is for two thirds of commuters and 95% of land-based freight mileage from memory.
I've never worn 'driving gloves' or a flat cap.
Just because you're an anti-car fanatic that wants to deny investment to two thirds of commuters, doesn't make what I say ridiculous.
The kind of fanatic that owns a car and has been driving since I was 17?
Anecdote alert! I was out with my MP yesterday, door-knocking in an area that elects Labour councillors. It was even hostile in 2019, when he got 53% of the vote. Was expecting it to be rough.
However, he is given credit for getting a local banking hub and improving the bus service. Far better reception than I had thought, based on national polls.
Would just remind folk here that those MPs who have put in the effort for five years and have been visible in their constituency may get a significantly better result than national polling would suggest. I suspect that there will be a swathe of hard-working Tory MPs who hang on against the trend by just a few hundred or even a few dozen votes.
I'm really interested in the current Torbay puzzle. Against the run of play the council flipped in May. Positive doorknocking sessions.
I'm assuming there must be some demographics at play? Are the oldies who used to retire to Bmth and Brighton all migrating to Torbay, now?
It is just so different to what is happening across the border in Dorset, where we also have (some) super keen MPs and activists, I feel like there must be something else at play....
For trains the question is how many hundreds of billions should be spent on new tracks to build capacity.
For motorists the idea of being pro is apparently to merely not be actively hostile, and to fix potholes?
That's just neutral, that's not pro. Want to be pro motorist, then let's talk about some long overdue investment in new roads etc rather than simply fixing potholes in roads in our network that last had significant upgrades fifty years ago when our population was considerably lower?
You make an interesting point. The difference, I think, is that not everyone has access to a car, so these policies are a "wedge". They benefit only one group.
On the other hand, investment in public transport is seen as something everyone, including those with access to a car.
Which is self-serving bullshit, since 'public transport' is used by a tiny minority and only where roads aren't good, whereas roads are used by the overwhelming majority.
And those who use public transport still rely on others using roads, eg vans, buses, delivery drivers etc.
Stop looking for excuses for a failing government and just get going with investing in our critical infrastructure.
Only 66% of commuters drive to work. "Tiny" minority don't, apparently.
And that's with the shocking level of public transport provision in the north.
'Only' two in three. 😂😂😂😂
Last I checked two thirds is a pretty significant majority. And you want to deny investment to the two thirds of the population? Fanatic.
Of the other third, almost all stats normally show the primary alternative mode of commuting is walking. Yes, public transportation is tiny versus the overwhelming majority of 66%.
The stats are not your friend.
Given every public transport and active travel investment is explicitly designed to give drivers more choice and freedom, 100% of ground transport investment in the UK is pro-motorist.
That's a lie. Failing to invest in roads is not pro-motorist, or pro-growth.
Failing to keep up road growth with population growth is not pro-motorist, or pro-growth.
Cannibalising existing roads taking away lanes to go to alternatives, without bothering to invest in new lanes and new roads is not pro-motorist, or pro-growth.
Your anti-investment hysteria is why we have low productivity in this country, because we've neglected our critical transport infrastructure for half a century while our population has massively expanded beyond investment.
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
I think 196 seats for the Tories would be a good result for them.
It is a really good poll for the Tories as Jacob Rees-Mogg loses his seat.
36 feels low for us. I can see a succession of blue wall seats falling like dominos on the night. Davey plans a "laser-like" targeting of seats and after the absurd chaos of the 2019 election I think he is right to do so.
But in a change election the tidal surge sweeps way past the targets...
36 would be very good for the Lib Dems. John Curtice thinks 30 is the maximum.
I'm predicting 40 with the following gains
North Devon will stay Con. As will Newbury. Popular female MPs.
North Cornwall and Torbay very likely to stay Con too.
There are 15,000 majorities you are talking about overturning. The move nationally is to Labour. These seats are not going to return to the LibDems on their current level of polling.
The national polls of the Lib Dems are grossly misleading. Not wrong but misleading.
The Lib Dem share is very lumpy by geography. Very low in most places but very high were Lib Dems are active and in local power.
If the Lib Dems were on 25% in every constituency they'd probably get zero seats with 25% national share.
If they were on 50% share in 50 seats and zero elsewhere, their national share would be 50x50/650 i.e. 4% but they would get 50 seats. Look at the SNP.
For trains the question is how many hundreds of billions should be spent on new tracks to build capacity.
For motorists the idea of being pro is apparently to merely not be actively hostile, and to fix potholes?
That's just neutral, that's not pro. Want to be pro motorist, then let's talk about some long overdue investment in new roads etc rather than simply fixing potholes in roads in our network that last had significant upgrades fifty years ago when our population was considerably lower?
You make an interesting point. The difference, I think, is that not everyone has access to a car, so these policies are a "wedge". They benefit only one group.
On the other hand, investment in public transport is seen as something everyone, including those with access to a car.
Which is self-serving bullshit, since 'public transport' is used by a tiny minority and only where roads aren't good, whereas roads are used by the overwhelming majority.
And those who use public transport still rely on others using roads, eg vans, buses, delivery drivers etc.
Stop looking for excuses for a failing government and just get going with investing in our critical infrastructure.
Only 66% of commuters drive to work. "Tiny" minority don't, apparently.
And that's with the shocking level of public transport provision in the north.
'Only' two in three. 😂😂😂😂
Last I checked two thirds is a pretty significant majority. And you want to deny investment to the two thirds of the population? Fanatic.
Of the other third, almost all stats normally show the primary alternative mode of commuting is walking. Yes, public transportation is tiny versus the overwhelming majority of 66%.
The stats are not your friend.
Im sure the "Tiny Bully" is being bred as we speak.
You also claimed that "we northerners drive" like you are born wearing driving gloves and a flat cap.
We do drive. That is the primary mode of transportation in the North, as it is in almost the entire country. As it is for two thirds of commuters and 95% of land-based freight mileage from memory.
I've never worn 'driving gloves' or a flat cap.
Just because you're an anti-car fanatic that wants to deny investment to two thirds of commuters, doesn't make what I say ridiculous.
The reason transport is such a silly topic for culture war is that very few people only use one mode. The idea the country is in some kind of incipient civil war between cavalier motorists and roundhead lycra-clad cyclists is nonsense. I live in London and would say I am pretty typical in that in an average week I use trains and light rail, the bus, both an ICE and EV car, and walk. I don't cycle as much as many but I have a bike too.
My family live in a more rural part of the midlands. They cycle, drive and take trains and buses too.
For trains the question is how many hundreds of billions should be spent on new tracks to build capacity.
For motorists the idea of being pro is apparently to merely not be actively hostile, and to fix potholes?
That's just neutral, that's not pro. Want to be pro motorist, then let's talk about some long overdue investment in new roads etc rather than simply fixing potholes in roads in our network that last had significant upgrades fifty years ago when our population was considerably lower?
You make an interesting point. The difference, I think, is that not everyone has access to a car, so these policies are a "wedge". They benefit only one group.
On the other hand, investment in public transport is seen as something everyone, including those with access to a car.
Which is self-serving bullshit, since 'public transport' is used by a tiny minority and only where roads aren't good, whereas roads are used by the overwhelming majority.
And those who use public transport still rely on others using roads, eg vans, buses, delivery drivers etc.
Stop looking for excuses for a failing government and just get going with investing in our critical infrastructure.
Only 66% of commuters drive to work. "Tiny" minority don't, apparently.
And that's with the shocking level of public transport provision in the north.
'Only' two in three. 😂😂😂😂
Last I checked two thirds is a pretty significant majority. And you want to deny investment to the two thirds of the population? Fanatic.
Of the other third, almost all stats normally show the primary alternative mode of commuting is walking. Yes, public transportation is tiny versus the overwhelming majority of 66%.
The stats are not your friend.
Given every public transport and active travel investment is explicitly designed to give drivers more choice and freedom, 100% of ground transport investment in the UK is pro-motorist.
That's a lie. Failing to invest in roads is not pro-motorist, or pro-growth.
Failing to keep up road growth with population growth is not pro-motorist, or pro-growth.
Cannibalising existing roads taking away lanes to go to alternatives, without bothering to invest in new lanes and new roads is not pro-motorist, or pro-growth.
Your anti-investment hysteria is why we have low productivity in this country, because we've neglected our critical transport infrastructure for half a century while our population has massively expanded beyond investment.
Anti-investment?
I want to purge all the NIMBY's opposing cycle lanes and put HS13 through to Inverness.
The Tories are like a holed ship with current repairs keeping them afloat . They have a very narrow path to get the ship back to port before it sinks .
Labour are ahead but could over confidence see them hit rocks just before the port .
Whatever might cause Labour to hit the rocks - and it certainly could happen - over-confidence isn't it. They're terrified of their own shadow!
They could do something really stupid like ditch the triple lock . I tend to think Reeves has boxed Labour in with her no new wealth taxes. Trying to appeal to voters that would never vote for them anyway .
Was there ever an election in the last 50-60 years where it is clear that an honest and principled campaign won it over a dishonest and populist one?
And has Labour in that time ever won from a leftwards position?
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
I think 196 seats for the Tories would be a good result for them.
It is a really good poll for the Tories as Jacob Rees-Mogg loses his seat.
36 feels low for us. I can see a succession of blue wall seats falling like dominos on the night. Davey plans a "laser-like" targeting of seats and after the absurd chaos of the 2019 election I think he is right to do so.
But in a change election the tidal surge sweeps way past the targets...
36 would be very good for the Lib Dems. John Curtice thinks 30 is the maximum.
I'm predicting 40 with the following gains
North Devon will stay Con. As will Newbury. Popular female MPs.
North Cornwall and Torbay very likely to stay Con too.
There are 15,000 majorities you are talking about overturning. The move nationally is to Labour. These seats are not going to return to the LibDems on their current level of polling.
For trains the question is how many hundreds of billions should be spent on new tracks to build capacity.
For motorists the idea of being pro is apparently to merely not be actively hostile, and to fix potholes?
That's just neutral, that's not pro. Want to be pro motorist, then let's talk about some long overdue investment in new roads etc rather than simply fixing potholes in roads in our network that last had significant upgrades fifty years ago when our population was considerably lower?
You make an interesting point. The difference, I think, is that not everyone has access to a car, so these policies are a "wedge". They benefit only one group.
On the other hand, investment in public transport is seen as something everyone, including those with access to a car.
Which is self-serving bullshit, since 'public transport' is used by a tiny minority and only where roads aren't good, whereas roads are used by the overwhelming majority.
And those who use public transport still rely on others using roads, eg vans, buses, delivery drivers etc.
Stop looking for excuses for a failing government and just get going with investing in our critical infrastructure.
Only 66% of commuters drive to work. "Tiny" minority don't, apparently.
And that's with the shocking level of public transport provision in the north.
'Only' two in three. 😂😂😂😂
Last I checked two thirds is a pretty significant majority. And you want to deny investment to the two thirds of the population? Fanatic.
Of the other third, almost all stats normally show the primary alternative mode of commuting is walking. Yes, public transportation is tiny versus the overwhelming majority of 66%.
The stats are not your friend.
Given every public transport and active travel investment is explicitly designed to give drivers more choice and freedom, 100% of ground transport investment in the UK is pro-motorist.
That's a lie. Failing to invest in roads is not pro-motorist, or pro-growth.
Failing to keep up road growth with population growth is not pro-motorist, or pro-growth.
Cannibalising existing roads taking away lanes to go to alternatives, without bothering to invest in new lanes and new roads is not pro-motorist, or pro-growth.
Your anti-investment hysteria is why we have low productivity in this country, because we've neglected our critical transport infrastructure for half a century while our population has massively expanded beyond investment.
Anti-investment?
I want to purge all the NIMBY's opposing cycle lanes and put HS13 through to Inverness.
“Takeaways from talks with Polish security and defence experts here in Poznan,🇵🇱. Warning: It’s what I heard. Not necessarily what you want to hear!
➡️ Poland will keep arming Ukraine. Silently before and once again openly after the election. “There is no other way.”
➡️ Ukraine’s biggest problem is manpower. “They need capable fighters more urgent than they need western arms. They are losing their best. NATO training so far is not sufficient enough.”
➡️ The Russian army is getting stronger, not weaker. “They learned from their mistakes. They are much more efficient now, than they have been a year ago.”
➡️ Russian drones improve by the month. “Their new Shaheeds make less noise, making it harder to hear and hence aim at them. Their Lancets have more range. Their FVP drones are getting more and more every month. Drones will possibly decide that war.”
➡️ Ukrainian strategic victory “still possible, but certainly not guaranteed”. Europe must “prepare for a long war”.
➡️ Tue country becomes a playground for Western defense industry. “They are floating in to test their newest weapons.” Ukraine and arms companies “learn and lot from each other. It’s a win-win.”
For trains the question is how many hundreds of billions should be spent on new tracks to build capacity.
For motorists the idea of being pro is apparently to merely not be actively hostile, and to fix potholes?
That's just neutral, that's not pro. Want to be pro motorist, then let's talk about some long overdue investment in new roads etc rather than simply fixing potholes in roads in our network that last had significant upgrades fifty years ago when our population was considerably lower?
You make an interesting point. The difference, I think, is that not everyone has access to a car, so these policies are a "wedge". They benefit only one group.
On the other hand, investment in public transport is seen as something everyone, including those with access to a car.
Which is self-serving bullshit, since 'public transport' is used by a tiny minority and only where roads aren't good, whereas roads are used by the overwhelming majority.
And those who use public transport still rely on others using roads, eg vans, buses, delivery drivers etc.
Stop looking for excuses for a failing government and just get going with investing in our critical infrastructure.
Only 66% of commuters drive to work. "Tiny" minority don't, apparently.
And that's with the shocking level of public transport provision in the north.
'Only' two in three. 😂😂😂😂
Last I checked two thirds is a pretty significant majority. And you want to deny investment to the two thirds of the population? Fanatic.
Of the other third, almost all stats normally show the primary alternative mode of commuting is walking. Yes, public transportation is tiny versus the overwhelming majority of 66%.
The stats are not your friend.
Im sure the "Tiny Bully" is being bred as we speak.
You also claimed that "we northerners drive" like you are born wearing driving gloves and a flat cap.
We do drive. That is the primary mode of transportation in the North, as it is in almost the entire country. As it is for two thirds of commuters and 95% of land-based freight mileage from memory.
I've never worn 'driving gloves' or a flat cap.
Just because you're an anti-car fanatic that wants to deny investment to two thirds of commuters, doesn't make what I say ridiculous.
The reason transport is such a silly topic for culture war is that very few people only use one mode. The idea the country is in some kind of incipient civil war between cavalier motorists and roundhead lycra-clad cyclists is nonsense. I live in London and would say I am pretty typical in that in an average week I use trains and light rail, the bus, both an ICE and EV car, and walk. I don't cycle as much as many but I have a bike too.
My family live in a more rural part of the midlands. They cycle, drive and take trains and buses too.
Yes, which is why I propose investing in roads (which help buses), cycle paths and trams.
Unfortunately some of our anti-car fanatics turn gammony red in the face at the suggestion of roads and switch off their thought processing at that word onwards.
For trains the question is how many hundreds of billions should be spent on new tracks to build capacity.
For motorists the idea of being pro is apparently to merely not be actively hostile, and to fix potholes?
That's just neutral, that's not pro. Want to be pro motorist, then let's talk about some long overdue investment in new roads etc rather than simply fixing potholes in roads in our network that last had significant upgrades fifty years ago when our population was considerably lower?
You make an interesting point. The difference, I think, is that not everyone has access to a car, so these policies are a "wedge". They benefit only one group.
On the other hand, investment in public transport is seen as something everyone, including those with access to a car.
Which is self-serving bullshit, since 'public transport' is used by a tiny minority and only where roads aren't good, whereas roads are used by the overwhelming majority.
And those who use public transport still rely on others using roads, eg vans, buses, delivery drivers etc.
Stop looking for excuses for a failing government and just get going with investing in our critical infrastructure.
Only 66% of commuters drive to work. "Tiny" minority don't, apparently.
And that's with the shocking level of public transport provision in the north.
'Only' two in three. 😂😂😂😂
Last I checked two thirds is a pretty significant majority. And you want to deny investment to the two thirds of the population? Fanatic.
Of the other third, almost all stats normally show the primary alternative mode of commuting is walking. Yes, public transportation is tiny versus the overwhelming majority of 66%.
The stats are not your friend.
Given every public transport and active travel investment is explicitly designed to give drivers more choice and freedom, 100% of ground transport investment in the UK is pro-motorist.
That's a lie. Failing to invest in roads is not pro-motorist, or pro-growth.
Failing to keep up road growth with population growth is not pro-motorist, or pro-growth.
Cannibalising existing roads taking away lanes to go to alternatives, without bothering to invest in new lanes and new roads is not pro-motorist, or pro-growth.
Your anti-investment hysteria is why we have low productivity in this country, because we've neglected our critical transport infrastructure for half a century while our population has massively expanded beyond investment.
Anti-investment?
I want to purge all the NIMBY's opposing cycle lanes and put HS13 through to Inverness.
And which new roads are you proposing? 🤔
"We northerners drive"
It's actually softy southerners. Real northerners button up their Barbour and stride across the moor. You'd be better off in leafy Buckinghamshire.
Six cabinet ministers are set to lose their seats at the next general election as support for the Conservatives in the suburbs of southern England crumbles, polling for The Times and Times Radio shows.
Seat-by-seat analysis of voting intention by the Stonehaven research and strategy consultancy suggested that the Labour Party would win a comfortable majority of 90 seats and 39 per cent of the votes if the next general election were held tomorrow. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was among the ministers who would be unseated by the Liberal Democrats.
The MRP poll used demographic and other data to build a constituency-by-constituency projection showed that support for the Conservatives would collapse to 26.3 per cent of the vote, from 43.6 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019.
Rishi Sunak’s projected 196-seat tally would be the worst recorded by any Conservative leader since William Hague’s 166 in 2001. Labour’s 372 seats would give Sir Keir Starmer a comfortable working majority of 90, the party’s biggest since 2001.
Highlighting the Tories’ vulnerabilities in their traditional southern heartlands, the Liberal Democrats would be returned with 36 seats and 10.8 per cent of the vote, a marked improvement on the 15 seats they hold at present.
I think 196 seats for the Tories would be a good result for them.
It is a really good poll for the Tories as Jacob Rees-Mogg loses his seat.
36 feels low for us. I can see a succession of blue wall seats falling like dominos on the night. Davey plans a "laser-like" targeting of seats and after the absurd chaos of the 2019 election I think he is right to do so.
But in a change election the tidal surge sweeps way past the targets...
36 would be very good for the Lib Dems. John Curtice thinks 30 is the maximum.
I'm predicting 40 with the following gains
North Devon will stay Con. As will Newbury. Popular female MPs.
North Cornwall and Torbay very likely to stay Con too.
There are 15,000 majorities you are talking about overturning. The move nationally is to Labour. These seats are not going to return to the LibDems on their current level of polling.
It looks a pretty sound prediction to me. In fact it's very close to what I would be betting on if the spreads were up now. Maybe I would have Tory seats a bit lower, and Labour a bit higher, but not by much. The LD forecast looks highly plausible. They will do well, but have some stonking majorities to overcome.
Now when is that nice Mr Sunak calling the Election?
Comments
The part I've put in bold is just sheer invention on your part.
While current polls indicate the Tories will not form the next government, I don't think there is any guidance much yet as to what the other aspects of the outcome will be.
For the Tories not to form the next government they need to lose (along with their only possible allies the DUP) about 53 seats. For Labour to have a majority (assume 8 for speaker + SF non participants, so 322) they need to net gain 120 seats. The range in the middle for a confusion of a result is gigantic.
It's an interesting wrinkle in competition theory, where you have to be aware of who is holding the power to choose between competitors, and so who determines the effect of competition.
I liked Danny Finkelstein's piece in the times this week on why centre-right is not the same as centre-left, for example. It's been a while since there's been a point in saying any of that out loud.
But in the same way that the path from Major to Cameron went via IDS, I suspect the Conservatives will take the long way round.
The test of whether this is due to lockdowns will be whether this carries on or whether it is an unfortunate blip as post-lockdown kids start coming through the system better adjusted.
I don't, incidentally, blame lockdown for my youngest's ADHD - it was clearly there from the start. Though I do blame it for the fact she (along with most of her class) are still the best part of a year behind where her sisters were at that stage - essentially, although they attended school for some parts of this period, practically no education was done whatsoever between March 2020 and March 2021.
If it wasn't for your other posts, I'd assume you'd switched it on in 2020 and then forgotten about it.
The trend is your friend.
My GE prediction is SKS Party gets less than Lab 2017 (41%) but is biggest Party as Con get between 34 and 37.
SKS NOM PM
A wave of killings has shaken Sweden over the past few weeks"
https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-gangs-attacks-ulf-kristersson-prime-minister-summons-army-crime-wave/
However, he is given credit for getting a local banking hub and improving the bus service. Far better reception than I had thought, based on national polls.
Would just remind folk here that those MPs who have put in the effort for five years and have been visible in their constituency may get a significantly better result than national polling would suggest. I suspect that there will be a swathe of hard-working Tory MPs who hang on against the trend by just a few hundred or even a few dozen votes.
Tax cuts in spring 24 will accelerate the snail pace trend till then.
I am on NOM at what I think is great value and almost certain to give a trading profit as lead narrows
Overall being a hard working constituency MP gets swamped by national trends. See LDs in 2010 for an example.
Even if the Tories had selected Ken Clarke as leader in 1997 they would still have lost in 2001 as New Labour managed the economy relatively well.
In 1975 however Thatcher was seen by most commentators as an unelectable rightwinger but she beat the more centrist Callaghan in 1979 as the economy was in poor shape.
The Greens had a much wider polling spread in Sep 2019, between 3-7%, so they achieved the bottom end of their polling. So again for them, 4% feels about the top which would be a significant improvement on last time without being stellar.
Add on 6% for SNP/Plaid/Other that makes the non-3 party vote 15%, which would still be a higher % than any except 2015. So the MRP is about 9% off the 3-party vote compared to what will probably happen, and how that 9% splits could make a huge difference.
It was Osborne's IHT cut offer and the 2008 crash that really boosted the Tories in 2010, Cameron added a few points but not much more than that and of course in 2010 he still failed to get a majority
Like in 2010 though there's a lot of MPs who see the writing on the wall and intend to step down rather than lose.
Aided by the fact that MPs who step down now get the payout losing MPs get anyway, so there is no longer an incentive to go down to an 'honourable' defeat.
When SKS "wins" an election, but inexplicably remains as leader of the opposition, then your question will have some merit.
Inflation and the deficit have to come down first before further tax cuts are possible
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INabb1VL8qg
1. Tories to win back Chesham & Amersham, although only just.
2. Cornwall North.
3. Norfolk North (previous LD success was based on a particular candidate)
4. Melksham & Devizes (as mentioned earlier)
5. North Shropshire, (same situation as Chesham & Amersham)
6. Torbay (seems to be moving away from the LDs, perhaps due to being so strongly pro-Brexit).
7. Yeovil (this is close to 50/50)
LDs will probably win a couple of unexpected seats, so should end up with around 35.
For someone who talks about polls a lot, you really don't understand them.
Brown had a bounce, which unwound.
It was never just the IHT cut offer. That was only one of many things happening at the time.
Ugh, I remember those days. (Actually, I barely do - I appear to have blanked most of the memories out.) I think of them often when we see our niece and nephew, who are around that age. Essentially 17 months is the nadir - your kids are constantly exhausting. Charming, but there is almost no overlap between things which are fun for them and things which are enjoyable for you. And the cost! We had two under three at nursery; any money I earned in a day at work was almost exactly balanced out by childcare costs for the day. But as you say, worth it: young kids need other kids their own age.
On the other hand, investment in public transport is seen as something everyone, including those with access to a car.
Final day of the cricket season. Derbyshire and Gloucestershire have failed to win any matches this year, and Northants and Glamorgan have won just one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_County_Championship#Standings
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/live/cricket/65020272
I suspect that there will be a lot of lazy invisible Tory MPs (including Rees Mogg who was being slated yesterday by a Tory in his constituency for his invisibility except on GB News) who unexpectedly lose large majorities.
Roll on next season, but will we still have Sir Alastair?
Really sorry to hear you lost a daughter. For a parent to outlive a child is always a tragedy. But she lived long enough to start a family - she has grandchildren! So that's happy. But that means her child must have lost a parent quite young. And as well as all that, you have great grandchildren. OK, there are other people in the UK who have great grandchildren, but probably not that many still lucid enough to be posting about them on an internet chat forum. So you have both my sympathy and my congratulations. (One of my grandmother's last moments was when she met her second great-grandchild - the only one of my grandparents to live long enough to have great grandchildren. Her mind was almost always elsewhere by this stage, but, briefly, she came back to us. There is a photo which I treasure of four generations of Cookies.)
Yougov after Osborne's IHT announcement had the Tories on 41% and Labour down to 38%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2010_United_Kingdom_general_election
And those who use public transport still rely on others using roads, eg vans, buses, delivery drivers etc.
Stop looking for excuses for a failing government and just get going with investing in our critical infrastructure.
Sadly too much effort goes into cutting taxes for those with much lower marginal rates, while boosting the burden on those with higher rates.
Simpler, flatter taxes would be fairer. And help those on low and middle incomes the most.
WNVs will probably drop out analysis entirely, I'd imagine.
1. More spoke at Tory Conference than just Osborne.
2. Some swing naturally occurs from publicity anyway.
3. Brown took a shotgun and aimed it at his own feet.
4. Cameron had an excellent speech himself.
I get that you are obsessed with IHT. Not everyone else is.
That jump was maybe 4-5%. Since then things have slipped back a bit as the story fades and some of the holes in it become clearer. To perhaps 2-3% (I suspect Yougov yesterday was a bit of an outlier). That brings us back to where the government were before their early September slump.
What has happened though in recent months is a slow decline in Labour vote share, largely benefiting Green, a tiny bit the LDs and probably some unwind of the swing away from SNP in Scotland. They are more often than not now in the low 40s rather the mid to high 40s.
Savanta looks to have much more credible figures for REF than most other pollsters.
So like stopped clocks this meme will eventually resonate.
There’s no question that bias exists. There’s also no question that the way organizations deal with it is more likely to hurt than help.
By Mahzarin Banaji and Frank Dobbin"
[DEI being diversity, equity, and inclusion].
https://www.wsj.com/business/c-suite/dei-training-hr-business-acd23e8b
Lost his majority.
Labour would have to hard squeeze Lib Dems. I don't think it'll be enough. Electoral Calculus has it as a 70% chance of a Tory hold.
I think there are quite a few more great-grandparents about nowadays; I never saw any of mine, and indeed only one set of grandparents, although my paternal grandmother lived long enough to see all seven of her eight great-grandchildren.
And thanks again for the kind remarks.
But Cameron's problem was he was playing in the neoliberal/social liberal space and the market just wasn't there.
And that's with the shocking level of public transport provision in the north.
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/4e0915a6f893f2b20ba31c15a0e6acd2d5715c08/0_0_2002_1201/master/2002.jpg?width=620&dpr=2&s=none
Thank God for Mrs Thatcher.
Labour are ahead but could over confidence see them hit rocks just before the port .
I can't wait until the individual constituency betting markets are available.
Last I checked two thirds is a pretty significant majority. And you want to deny investment to the two thirds of the population? Fanatic.
Of the other third, almost all stats normally show the primary alternative mode of commuting is walking. Yes, public transportation is tiny versus the overwhelming majority of 66%.
The stats are not your friend.
North Cornwall and Torbay very likely to stay Con too.
There are 15,000 majorities you are talking about overturning. The move nationally is to Labour. These seats are not going to return to the LibDems on their current level of polling.
You also claimed that "we northerners drive" like you are born wearing driving gloves and a flat cap.
I've never worn 'driving gloves' or a flat cap.
Just because you're an anti-car fanatic that wants to deny investment to two thirds of commuters, doesn't make what I say ridiculous.
I'm assuming there must be some demographics at play? Are the oldies who used to retire to Bmth and Brighton all migrating to Torbay, now?
It is just so different to what is happening across the border in Dorset, where we also have (some) super keen MPs and activists, I feel like there must be something else at play....
If there’s anything in there that frightens those likely to be more switchable in terms of Tory to Lib Dem in those southern seats .
Vote Lib Dem get Labour and that horrible policy .
Failing to keep up road growth with population growth is not pro-motorist, or pro-growth.
Cannibalising existing roads taking away lanes to go to alternatives, without bothering to invest in new lanes and new roads is not pro-motorist, or pro-growth.
Your anti-investment hysteria is why we have low productivity in this country, because we've neglected our critical transport infrastructure for half a century while our population has massively expanded beyond investment.
The Lib Dem share is very lumpy by geography. Very low in most places but very high were Lib Dems are active and in local power.
If the Lib Dems were on 25% in every constituency they'd probably get zero seats with 25% national share.
If they were on 50% share in 50 seats and zero elsewhere, their national share would be 50x50/650 i.e. 4% but they would get 50 seats. Look at the SNP.
My family live in a more rural part of the midlands. They cycle, drive and take trains and buses too.
I want to purge all the NIMBY's opposing cycle lanes and put HS13 through to Inverness.
And has Labour in that time ever won from a leftwards position?
Labour continue to learn the lesson of 1992.
They'll continue to sit back and let the Tories self destruct.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-66959715
The Lib Dems should take the seat here .
“Takeaways from talks with Polish security and defence experts here in Poznan,🇵🇱.
Warning: It’s what I heard. Not necessarily what you want to hear!
➡️ Poland will keep arming Ukraine. Silently before and once again openly after the election. “There is no other way.”
➡️ Ukraine’s biggest problem is manpower. “They need capable fighters more urgent than they need western arms. They are losing their best. NATO training so far is not sufficient enough.”
➡️ The Russian army is getting stronger, not weaker. “They learned from their mistakes. They are much more efficient now, than they have been a year ago.”
➡️ Russian drones improve by the month. “Their new Shaheeds make less noise, making it harder to hear and hence aim at them. Their Lancets have more range. Their FVP drones are getting more and more every month. Drones will possibly decide that war.”
➡️ Ukrainian strategic victory “still possible, but certainly not guaranteed”. Europe must “prepare for a long war”.
➡️ Tue country becomes a playground for Western defense industry. “They are floating in to test their newest weapons.” Ukraine and arms companies “learn and lot from each other. It’s a win-win.”
https://x.com/julianroepcke/status/1707521517741830629?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
"Poll-driven politics does nobody any favours
One-dimensional survey questions foster one-dimensional debate
John Burn-Murdoch"
https://www.ft.com/content/4ee301ce-e6ba-45ab-8fd5-0cbe3e5c5980
Debate about misogyny took a turn when discrepancy between two contributors' fees emerged
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/28/sky-news-misogyny-laurence-fox-guests/
Sky News!
Unfortunately some of our anti-car fanatics turn gammony red in the face at the suggestion of roads and switch off their thought processing at that word onwards.
It's actually softy southerners. Real northerners button up their Barbour and stride across the moor. You'd be better off in leafy Buckinghamshire.
Now when is that nice Mr Sunak calling the Election?