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By newspaper read the Tories only lead amongst Mail readers – politicalbetting.com
By newspaper read the Tories only lead amongst Mail readers – politicalbetting.com
I find the above table from Survation absolutely fascinating and highlights the massive challenge facing Sunak and his team at the coming general election.
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If this polling persists then I think The Sun comes out for SKS.
That’s precluded support for the Tories for quite some time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpZ8EkK3eWY
"Nevertheless, I am astonished, delighted and even slightly perplexed to report that the 80-year-old curmudgeon has genuinely pulled off something quite extraordinary."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/what-to-listen-to/roger-waters-dark-side-of-the-moon-review/
Wonder whatever happened to them? 😂
Maybe just say as little as possible about politics.
https://www.frontpages.com/the-sun/
Gaetz reportedly aspires to be the next governor of Florida.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/live/cricket/66854204
I must be getting old.
Doable when the situation is genuinely close. Trickier when it doesn't look close and your soulmate is the one who is losing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Cricket_World_Cup#Background
The FT rather surprisingly endorsed Labour in 1992, then through the Blair years, before going for Cameron and then May 2010-2017. It made no endorsement in 2019.
Broadly (although 1992 was a bit of a wildcard that raised eyebrows at the time) it's gone for perceived competence. I'd be surprised if it didn't endorse Labour next year.
In particular, its take on Sunak's recent tack is pretty scathing - the business view on such matters tends to be that markets like the stability of governments that are predictable, making and (crucially) sticking to policy decisions. In a sense the policy itself is less important than whether investors are confident it will be the same policy tomorrow, next week, and next year.
BREAKING
After just 24 hours, the government has dropped its commitment to reopen the Leamside Line. It was included yesterday in the initial Network North announcements, now it’s gone.
Roads minister Richard Holden tells me Govt is now just ‘committed to looking into it’.
Furious reaction already. @henrimurison says this announcement makes the entirety of Network North a ‘fairytale’.
https://twitter.com/danhollandnews/status/1709908649177461048
https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1709914868206223699
I am generally on the side of liberalisation of drug policy so as to better regulate it so this flies in the face of that. I also have an inbuilt aversion to the concept of banning things, though can be persuaded otherwise.
However as an undoubtedly unhealthy activity that is in what appears to be terminal decline I understand the rationale in trying to hurry it along.
I think on balance I’d question the need for a ban. Smoking is becoming less and less popular as time goes on anyway, and the market will eventually treat it as a niche product and that will be it. At that point you can just make it so prohibitively expensive through general taxation (and lack of demand) that it will just become the preserve of the odd eccentric here or there. By actually prohibiting sale I think there is the risk that it becomes more exciting to youngsters as forbidden fruit, so as to make the whole thing counterproductive.
Most pensioners seem to get off on denying younger people the freedoms they once enjoyed.
Turns out most “kindly” old people are just utterly selfish.
🇺🇲 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Among registered voters (n=868)
(R) Trump 51% (+3)
(D) Biden 48%
---
Among likely voters (n=690)
(D) Biden 51% (+2)
(R) Trump 49%
@MULawPoll
(A/B) | 9/18-25
https://law.marquette.edu/poll/
Not raining where I am, quite sunny in fact, and only a couple of hours from you on the plane…
Incoming ‘You know who else was on the cover of Time?’ in 5-4-3-2-1…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C8_VdMm7s0
They really are utterly useless.
Perhaps look at expanding the Metro as advocated by Nexus/NECA.
The whole tournament has been massive sh!t-show before it even started, as most of these things are - but this one doesn’t look likely to redeem itself, with the exception of the massive crowd expected for I vs P
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2023/10/05/cricket-world-cup-2023-empty-stadium-england-v-new-zealand/
TBF I am here mainly to dive so rain is less annoying (but still annoying). What amazes me is that there are paying guiests here. Paying, when you add it all up, £600-£1000 a night
WTF. Who wants to pay that to sit in a room (however luxe) and stare at drizzle? I'd rather be in Glasgow. I can only presume they either didn't do their research or they chose the cheapest time and endured a bad time just for the boasting rights ("Oh we went to the Maldives")
Truly truly weird
What Kinabalu wrote is exactly what I was thinking this morning. Finding it difficult to stop smoking is not “weakness” and there are many many different reasons why people find it hard to give up.
I guess you have absolutely no weaknesses yourself which luckily won’t kill you, damage those around you.
If it stops even a few kids from taking up smoking and dying unnecessarily then it’s good and not a liberal “freedom” hill worth dying on.
You have confirmed my suspicions; I need never go to the Maldives.
Bit sad to see what the Telegraph has become. It used to be very much Tory, but serious and authoritative with it.
BUT DON'T EVER COME FROM MAY-NOVEMBER
But I would also want to draw a distinction between those things which only harm you (cigarettes) and those things likely to harm others (drunk driving).
Perhaps seatbelts is a better comparison.
I was there in September last year, a belated honeymoon I couldn’t get out of, and we had a few days with rain but never washed out.
Our little villa in the sea was $900 a night, all inclusive, my car was cheaper than that holiday - but it was the best week of my wife’s life, and she still goes on about it more than a year later, which I guess made the price worth it!
Rishi Sunak used his speech on Wednesday to scrap the line north of Birmingham, but promised it would reach Euston in central London.
He said: “We will complete the line from Birmingham to Euston,” adding that construction of central London station would be taken away from HS2 Ltd, the government-run company tasked with delivering the project, and handed to a development company.
However, it emerged today that the whole scheme, not just the station, is contingent on a substantial proportion of the cost being met by private funds. This includes a 4.5-mile tunnel from Old Oak Common, west London. If the money cannot be raised, HS2 will permanently terminate at Old Oak Common.
Sunak said on Wednesday that the government’s new plan for Euston station will generate “£6.5 billion of savings”.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hs2-may-never-reach-euston-without-private-sector-funding-x3hjd9n36
Even the Mail is only by a squeak.
The 12% Sun lead for Labour would be a disaster for the tories at the election.
I don't think the numbers add up either. I believe that smoking is judged to cost the economy something like £17bn through illness. The Government takes £10bn in tax on cigarettes, and the smoking-related illnesses are probably offsetting other, potentially more protracted illnesses (like dementia) that could afflict non-smokers, not to mention longer pension withdrawals and social care costs, so that £17bn won't be 'saved' anyway.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2023/oct/05/nobel-prize-in-literature-2023-live
...In Norway, Fosse is so well-known that there is an International Fosse festival in Oslo, a biennial event that took place for the third time in summer 2023.
He also has an official residence in Oslo, courtesy of Norway’s royal family. “It’s part of the palace. To be absolutely honest, I didn’t really want it. But they convinced me” he told Andrew Dickson in 2014...
https://www.daily-lazy.com/2011/12/hitler-on-cover-of-time-magazine-1931.html
The end of life savings on medical care for smokers outweigh everything else.
OTOH, with a declining population, and the need to keep today's young working as long as they can...
And as I have been picking at for the last 24 hours, the rest of it is crayons as well. Unless @HYUFD can tell us exactly what the Manchester North West Quadrant scheme is which was greenlit yesterday?
Used to get them in my Xmas stocking.
Cool AF.
BUT I haven't laid out a penny for it, and I have done the two best scuba dives of my life, one night dive above the famous reef of Maaya Thali, one with James Bond super-scooter into a storm of sharks. Just amazing. And the free booze is endless
However, I do feel - seriously - for the poor saps that PAID
Smoking does harm others though, unborn children, children, people who might live with smokers who are inconsiderate but it also harms other people such as the families of smokers when the smokers are dying painfully from cancer and emphysema and they have to watch them go because they were hooked to a horrible addictive chemical. People are harmed by losing loved ones and friends.
If someone invented cigarettes today and said “these things will kill you, damage your health, stunt your baby’s growth. You will be addicted and spend a fortune on something really bad for you and society but they will act as a crutch when you are stressed ” they wouldn’t be allowed to sell them at all.
And to reconfirm I’m a smoker, not an evangelical ex smoker or someone who has never smoked so makes generalisations without the experience.
https://twitter.com/henrimurison/status/1709889650477633791
And you can't dual purpose the track and have both metro and ECML trains on the same track at the same time it would be a complete nightmare..
Really happy to see the government take these long term decisions. I wonder if anyone in the cabinet is seriously uncomfortable with the decision?
But I’m also an instinctive liberal who bridles at bans except where the risk falls beyond the individual (in which case, I fully support bans such as on the Bully XL breed).
I actually even wonder whether compulsory seatbelts is strictly desirable.
I think the case against cigarettes is very strong, but many people do enjoy them, and many make their livelihoods from them.
I really can't see many people using it...
Besides, vaping seems to be significantly reducing tobacco consumption amongst the young. Just let tobacco become an anachronism for the old and smelly with black powders muskets and classic cars. Let human nature do its thing.
Personally I am libertarian, and would prefer to live in a society in which all drugs were legal, but the corollary of that would be a society in which you take responsibility for the consequences of your actions, and the state would have no obligation to treat and help with addictions. In such a society banning smoking would be crazy.
But it isn't crazy in the society we have got - one in which we are addicted to control, and also allow everyone, however crazily they have acted, to be a massive expense to the state - health care and benefits etc. Here and now banning smoking makes perfect sense.
I wonder if Rishi has equally salted the long term popularity and reputation of the Tory party.
MNWQ is a road scheme linking the two separate sections of the M62, effectively bypassing the M60 between junctions 12 and 18, which includes the most congested stretch of motorway outside the M25 (i.e. the M60 between the M602 and M61).
It's a scheme which has been knocking around for some time - certainly not a civil servant's BOAFP job.
Certainly there's a case for it. There's also a case against it in terms of the land acquisition/demolitions/impact on environment (though one version of the scheme has the whole lot in a tunnel) - as well as carbon emissions. I don't think if I was the decision maker that's the transport scheme I'd have picked - I'd have gone for a public transport scheme such as, er, HS2 - but it's certainly a valid scheme.