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How viable are Green targets in 2024? Part One – politicalbetting.com
How viable are Green targets in 2024? Part One – politicalbetting.com
It rarely makes headlines outside of The New Statesman, but the Greens have had (by far) their best period ever since 2019. Since that election the Greens have set new records in:
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Bristol Central might be winnable in an election with a fairly unpopular Labour Government seeking re-election, but there is absolutely no chance next year. In the others, they are miles away and the idea hoovering up some protest votes at a low turnout district council election presages coming from nowhere to win at a general election is just fantasy.
That's not to say they aren't going in the right direction as a party - they've built up a good local government base. But the electoral system is what it is, and they don't have a range of attractive targets in practice.
Betting PostGood morning, everyone.
F1: will mention this when I finish the pre-sprint ramble but already made my bet for today and it's 10.5 on Norris each way to win the sprint.
He underperformed yesterday and could've ended up on pole. The car has the pace for it.
Yuk.
Nadine Dorries, a close ally of the former prime minister, claims in a new book that Johnson was ousted by a “cabal” that has been controlling the Tory leadership for two decades.
She says in the book, The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson, that the cabinet minister Michael Gove, Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former senior adviser, and Dougie Smith, also a Tory adviser, brought down Johnson.
She says the group, called “the movement”, was also key in bringing down Iain Duncan Smith as party leader, and undermined Theresa May.
A source close to Gove said: “Nadine is a very talented bestselling fiction author.” Friends of Gove insisted that he “played no part” in the recruitment of Cummings and said claims he had helped to bring down a succession of Tory leaders were “a conspiracy theory worthy of Corbyn”.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/nadine-dorries-rishi-sunak-boris-johnson-betrayed-plot-prime-minister-pbh30tjc0
I hope they win nothing.
They may continue to do well in local elections. They are the ultimate NIMBYs and you’re right about them being very much anti growth.
A general election breakthrough won’t happen under FPTP.
Privately some ministers are beginning to wonder if they “overcorrected” by moving to Sunak after Johnson and Liz Truss.
“Ministers are more restive than I’ve seen them for a long time. It’s not like there is going to be a leadership challenge or anything, but everyone is getting frustrated by the micromanagement of Downing Street,” a senior conservative said.
“We’ve overcorrected from a No 10 [under Johnson] which was big on vision and bad on detail to one which is obsessed by detail and has no vision.
“It is not a good way to run a government if you want PhD levels of information on every subject before you’re prepared to make a decision.” While those close to Sunak accept the polls are “stuck”, many still express confidence that disaffected Tory voters will return.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rishi-sunak-still-hasnt-escaped-the-boris-johnson-psychodrama-3fg5jtbpz
And as i have said for donkeys years, whoever was left holding the bag when interest rates return to historic norms will get pounded like a dockside hooker. When your mortgage has gone up £100s of a month, you aren't going to get benefit of the doubt on anything.
Watermelons in England & Wales and the vegan branch of nationalism in Scotland.
If they were truly pro Green then they would back nuclear power.
1997-2007 - Chancellor of the Exchequer
1992 - 1997 - Shadow Chancellor
1989 - 1992 - Shadow Trade & Industry Secretary
1987 - 1992 - Shadow Chief Secretary
He just wasn't used to dealing non economic policies when he became PM.
Mad to think we had four Chancellors between 1993 and 2016 and we had five Chancellors this parliament and potentially a sixth if the ERG get their way.
But they don't, because some trees might be cut down.
The one time he screwed up badly was with the NHS reforms under Lansley and that was down to trusting his ex boss so much.
https://www.nationalforest.org/
I didn't expect them to win either time, and they didn't come close, but both were safe seats. The point was to get the main parties to be aware of green issues and priorities.
Interesting that neither Isle of Wight constituency features in their list. Greens have been strong there for a decade, getting 17% in 2017 and 15% in 2019. Both seats are Lab gains on current polling.
5 Chancellors during the 18 year Tory rule between 1979 - 1997.
5 Chancellors and counting during this fecking parliament.
Four Chancellors from July-October 2022.
No, me neither.
Just to make sure I don't suffer this trauma alone, I will now tell you all that I had brief mental image of Nadine and Michael Gove having a wild sex party...
If it had been anyone else, I’d have suggested they should have stuck with Liz Truss because, for better or worse, it is only right to give a new leader time. The problem was that it was Liz Truss - and I think it was becoming obvious she couldn’t handle the job - and in some ways had to go just because she wasn’t cut out to handle the pressures of the role (particularly given the fires she’d started).
They were absolutely right to axe Boris Johnson. However the following leadership election where candidates moved completely away from the 2019 manifesto and just made up their own weird True Blue pitches that didn’t chime with public priorities, was also very damaging IMHO.
https://twitter.com/SulaimanHakemy/status/1719998819189019134?t=WkJPtCHh8mNk5mJWBYU15A&s=19
Our main problem as a political movement is that, because we're always right about everything eventually, many Green political positions end up being absorbed into the mainstream. Climate change, fox hunting, marriage equality, the list goes on...
So we continually have to fight for clear green water and exist mainly as a pressure group to the left of Labour.
Such a war would complicate matters as Armenia is actually allied to Iran.
https://time.com/6327596/turkey-armenia-azerbaijan-invade-united-states/
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/what-is-pallywood-palestinians-falsely-accused-faking-devastation-1234869765/
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-israel-hamas-gaza-false-crisis-actors-068772255064
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/injured-teenager-who-lost-his-leg-misidentified-social-media-2023-10-27/
And good morning to everyone else.
https://everyglasgowstreet.com/
It's all very well telling someone to forget the analysis and trust their instincts, but that doesn't help if their instincts are no good.
"He would watch the Terminator series and root for Skynet..."
https://x.com/MarinaHyde/status/1720698313039548596?s=20
Running the country and emptying the bins really are different subjects and require different talents. (And no-one actually believes the Greens could run a country for 5 minutes, even though the live issue is whether anyone can).
Secondly, the local vote is often personal and people are much more voting for the individual.
Thirdly, it is selfishly rational, regardless of whether it works: many people support building N zillion houses, but not in their ward/small town/allotment patch. It is possible to believe that voting Tory/Lab nationally but Independent/LD/Loony/Green locally works towards that end.
It would take some doing to exceed the numbers of Rohingya forced out of Myanmar, or some of the forced movements in Eastern Congo and Rwanda too.
Apart from ALL THE OTHERS !!!
Labour and Tories both want FPTP so as to restrict us to their dismal offerings.
I think it's partly the difficulty of getting journalists to the Congo, Sudan and Burma, partly that Ukraine has been going on for a long time so isn't really news, partly that our Jewish and Muslim populations are larger and more vocal than our Burmese and Congolese, and partly America's (unreciprocated) fixation on protecting Israel.
But then I don't understand why the death of an actor has been huge news for the last week either.
Whereas this time, the opportunities are probably in Conservative seats that Labour and Lib Dem don't bother with. The pickings there are probably as slim as the average Green party member, though.
Some animals are more equal than others.
Tony Blair used to seethe at the way the left wing of his Party was blind to the evil of Robert Mugabe.
Blair managed it, but he was a once-in-a-century political genius and had lots of other people's money to buy them off with. Starmer isn't and won't have.
We could all play that game. Indeed, you could probably find a couple of OMRLP policies that were adopted by the mainstream, too, if you wanted to.
Climate change was absorbed into the political mainstream because it became a mainstream issue, and it's being tackled far from how the Greens would like to tackle it. And, you haven't listed out the far longer list of totally barking and barmy policies that were rejected by parties on all sides.
The Green Party membership reflects its niche as a cadre of priviledged radical left-wing activists who have the privilege of indulging an ideology that they secretly know will never be enacted so they have to take responsibility for all the policies they advocate. And, where they do get a taste of office, some of their nutty policies have totally backfired in the last year as in Brighton and Scotland.
Sure, many may have been educated to tertiary level but that doesn't reflect superior intelligence - simply that they are not a mass democratic movement and their small numbers (of those who have the time and resources to indulge in dogma) skew the average.
He still seems baffled as to why he hasn't landed as he thought it would.
Greens are a diverse bunch, and prize local action over the cult of the leader. Certainly there are some far left ex-Corbynites, but there are also elderly hippies, crusties, but also respectable middle class folk appalled at how we are trashing our country and planet.
The Party has to reform and rebuild. I'm not sure how they do that and I'm glad it's not my problem.
That sort of ability at change management is a rare skill. It could transform our institutions too. It would be nice to have some idea of what those changes will be!
As Sir Humphrey commented when telling the Prime Minister to support the Arabs in any Israel-Palestinian dispute, 'you should worry about the Oily Places not the Holy Places.'
(Although the fact the Foreign Office of the day were a bunch of supercilious racists, the heirs of Gerald Henry Fitzmaurice, probably had something to do with it.)
I also suspect the country does as well as I think PR would result in more long term thinking rather than just the next X months.
One would hope that "detail" would include getting some of it right.
Canning the Manchester Branch of HS2 as headlines for a Party Conference in Manchester? Fighting ULEZ, when the detail is that it is to meet pollution targets created and imposed by his own party, and he now has only 4.8% of vehicles driving in London affected by it, 4.8% amongst the lowest area of vehicle ownership in the country.
Real attention to detail, that !
I'm afraid I see nothing except Hail Mary Passes, Faceplants, and the desperate burning down of what achievements have been made.
Fortunately, that's often the slow bit. As Starmer and Cameron both showed, the right leader can sort out a party fairly quickly, especially if bits are starting to fall off the other lot.
The danger for the Conservatives is how extreme their age profile has become. This is new- in the early 2000s, people like Cameron, Gove and Johnson were clearly coming up the pipeline. If you leave it for a decade, will there actually be much Conservative party left to salvage, let alone use as a base for rebuilding?
Which meant everyone was able to sell Brexit in different ways to attract different sets of voters.
He also forgot that X% of voters in a referendum will be for f*** what you want.
Literally the one thing the Referendum did was tell the rest of Europe don't hold stupid referendums...
These are the people who selected first Boris, then Truss.
Voting for Leave was, in practice, a vote for Vote Leave to deliver it.
Then the fun would really begin...
UKIP would have been the right's SDP. A stack of MPs defect and then lose their seats at the next GE.
Maduro has just reneged on a deal to allow free elections by claiming without evidence that an opposition primary was fraudulent and ordering the Supreme Court to ban the winner from standing.
The primary was held in exchange for America lifting its sanctions, which were a secondary cause of Venezuela's economic implosion.
So now Biden and Blinken have a tough choice:
1) Not reimpose sanctions and allow a fifth-rate fascist dictatorship to keep on its ruinous path, but possibly ease both oil shortages and the Venezuelan refugee crisis;
2) Reimpose sanctions and have both get markedly worse, probably while making no difference to Maduro.
Don't envy them that choice, frankly.