You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Means poorer quality.
But not FURRIN so you will be only too happy with the decline of British universities.
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Universities - one of the last sectors where Britain still has world class institutions.
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Universities - one of the last sectors where Britain still has world class institutions.
Tory Party - hold my beer.
If you are a foreigner and a world class academic you will earn more than the £38k a year you need to stay in the UK on any definition
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Means poorer quality.
But not FURRIN so you will be only too happy with the decline of British universities.
It means more British postgrads can get research posts in British universities as there is less competition from immigrant academics
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Universities - one of the last sectors where Britain still has world class institutions.
Tory Party - hold my beer.
But they can't be that good, or academics would be paid more.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
The Yellow Wall!
No, That is Richmond Park, Kingston Upon Thames, Twickenham, Bath and West Oxford now
Two of which do actually have yellow walls as they’re build from oolitic limestone.
The political map of Macron support in France is an interesting analogue for areas of Lib Dem strength. Large swathes of rural Western France in areas that never industrialised. Plus the posher riverine suburbs of Paris and the limestone ridges of Eastern France (which tend to be the viticultural areas).
Vineyards are also an interesting divining rod for Lib Dem strength. The only areas they do well in councils in Kent for example are in the Eastern downs near Canterbury, and the high Weald around and South of Tunbridge Wells. Both clusters of vineyards. And in Essex they run Chelmsford which is the viticulture capital of the Crouch Valley.
There's a pattern in European countries of the north having the industry and the south having the vineyards and holiday homes.
I think we should offer up Leon's flat in Camden as the first place to be annexed by Putin.
Isn't the North Korean Embassy a little detached house somewhere in North London? In which case, a reduced Russia might want to use Leon's gaff for its embassy.
Although he'd have to fight Corbyn for the honour...
It's on the North Circular Road, not far from Chiswick.
Soon they can apply for asylum and upgrade to Rwanda.
I hear Gaza's nice this time of year...
Won't he be pissed this close to Christmas?
Did you hear about Paul Gascoigne's plan to do a charity run for the children of Israel and Palestine?
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
The Yellow Wall!
No, That is Richmond Park, Kingston Upon Thames, Twickenham, Bath and West Oxford now
Two of which do actually have yellow walls as they’re build from oolitic limestone.
The political map of Macron support in France is an interesting analogue for areas of Lib Dem strength. Large swathes of rural Western France in areas that never industrialised. Plus the posher riverine suburbs of Paris and the limestone ridges of Eastern France (which tend to be the viticultural areas).
Vineyards are also an interesting divining rod for Lib Dem strength. The only areas they do well in councils in Kent for example are in the Eastern downs near Canterbury, and the high Weald around and South of Tunbridge Wells. Both clusters of vineyards. And in Essex they run Chelmsford which is the viticulture capital of the Crouch Valley.
And Spa Towns from Bath to Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham to Harrogate
Which differs from Macron a little as the spa towns in France seem to vary politically. And Vichy of course has a somewhat in-liberal history.
I was in Aix les Bains last week and took in the hot baths, which was fun.
I think we should offer up Leon's flat in Camden as the first place to be annexed by Putin.
Isn't the North Korean Embassy a little detached house somewhere in North London? In which case, a reduced Russia might want to use Leon's gaff for its embassy.
Although he'd have to fight Corbyn for the honour...
It's on the North Circular Road, not far from Chiswick.
Well, it wouldn't be the SOUTH Circular, would it?
“ Pierrette Herzberger-Fofana, a German MEP representing the Greens-European Free Alliance, will present the draft resolution to the European parliament’s development committee on Thursday, and hopes to table the draft as an emergency resolution at the European parliament in the coming weeks.
She said a greater understanding of the roots of European racism would promote a “more nuanced understanding of migration issues” and added that textbooks across Europe needed to be revised to give schoolchildren a better understanding of the slave trade and colonialism
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
The Yellow Wall!
No, That is Richmond Park, Kingston Upon Thames, Twickenham, Bath and West Oxford now
Two of which do actually have yellow walls as they’re build from oolitic limestone.
The political map of Macron support in France is an interesting analogue for areas of Lib Dem strength. Large swathes of rural Western France in areas that never industrialised. Plus the posher riverine suburbs of Paris and the limestone ridges of Eastern France (which tend to be the viticultural areas).
Vineyards are also an interesting divining rod for Lib Dem strength. The only areas they do well in councils in Kent for example are in the Eastern downs near Canterbury, and the high Weald around and South of Tunbridge Wells. Both clusters of vineyards. And in Essex they run Chelmsford which is the viticulture capital of the Crouch Valley.
There's a pattern in European countries of the north having the industry and the south having the vineyards and holiday homes.
In France it’s more the East (including South East) with the industry and the West with the farms. Except of course Toulouse. But the East also has many of the vineyards.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
The Yellow Wall!
No, That is Richmond Park, Kingston Upon Thames, Twickenham, Bath and West Oxford now
Two of which do actually have yellow walls as they’re build from oolitic limestone.
The political map of Macron support in France is an interesting analogue for areas of Lib Dem strength. Large swathes of rural Western France in areas that never industrialised. Plus the posher riverine suburbs of Paris and the limestone ridges of Eastern France (which tend to be the viticultural areas).
Vineyards are also an interesting divining rod for Lib Dem strength. The only areas they do well in councils in Kent for example are in the Eastern downs near Canterbury, and the high Weald around and South of Tunbridge Wells. Both clusters of vineyards. And in Essex they run Chelmsford which is the viticulture capital of the Crouch Valley.
And Spa Towns from Bath to Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham to Harrogate
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
The Yellow Wall!
No, That is Richmond Park, Kingston Upon Thames, Twickenham, Bath and West Oxford now
Two of which do actually have yellow walls as they’re build from oolitic limestone.
The political map of Macron support in France is an interesting analogue for areas of Lib Dem strength. Large swathes of rural Western France in areas that never industrialised. Plus the posher riverine suburbs of Paris and the limestone ridges of Eastern France (which tend to be the viticultural areas).
Vineyards are also an interesting divining rod for Lib Dem strength. The only areas they do well in councils in Kent for example are in the Eastern downs near Canterbury, and the high Weald around and South of Tunbridge Wells. Both clusters of vineyards. And in Essex they run Chelmsford which is the viticulture capital of the Crouch Valley.
There's a pattern in European countries of the north having the industry and the south having the vineyards and holiday homes.
In France it’s more the East (including South East) with the industry and the West with the farms. Except of course Toulouse. But the East also has many of the vineyards.
There were lots of mines and factories up Lille way but not many vineyards and holiday homes.
"Prince Harry wants his children to "feel at home" in the UK" (BBC on High Court case.)
When you are a prince of the blood royal, and 5th in line to the throne there is a fairly obvious path to this ambition.
The idea Meghan is going to trade sunny California for the UK, especially in winter, is laughable.
She got what she wanted from marrying Harry, a move from C list to A list and income to match and he then had to follow her home
Well, B-list tbh. Harry is somewhere around Frank Stallone and Luke Wilson. If he was in the Expendables, he'd be below the MMA guy or the one for the Thai/Indonesian market that you can't remember. Balding, Ginger and annoying wife does not have four-quadrant appeal
I wonder how the people polled would define a 'strong economy'.
I suspect there would be many mutually exclusive answers plus plenty of 'the government giving more money to people like me'.
How would you define a "strong economy" ?
I would go for productivity growth of more than 2% (the 20th century average).
GDP doesn't work for obvious reasons. GDP per capita is better but is also influenced by our changing demographic profile and changes in working patterns. For example, if strong productivity growth led to people working less, that wouldn't show up as a "strong economy".
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
The Yellow Wall!
No, That is Richmond Park, Kingston Upon Thames, Twickenham, Bath and West Oxford now
Two of which do actually have yellow walls as they’re build from oolitic limestone.
The political map of Macron support in France is an interesting analogue for areas of Lib Dem strength. Large swathes of rural Western France in areas that never industrialised. Plus the posher riverine suburbs of Paris and the limestone ridges of Eastern France (which tend to be the viticultural areas).
Vineyards are also an interesting divining rod for Lib Dem strength. The only areas they do well in councils in Kent for example are in the Eastern downs near Canterbury, and the high Weald around and South of Tunbridge Wells. Both clusters of vineyards. And in Essex they run Chelmsford which is the viticulture capital of the Crouch Valley.
And Spa Towns from Bath to Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham to Harrogate
Is there something in the water?
Place generally still too posh to vote Labour but now too liberal for the post Brexit Conservatives
I wonder how the people polled would define a 'strong economy'.
I suspect there would be many mutually exclusive answers plus plenty of 'the government giving more money to people like me'.
How would you define a "strong economy" ?
Full/fullish employment Affordable housing Opportunities for individual development Appropriate investment for future in capital and human resources Living within means Adequate resources and financial reserves to deal with crises
Some points are more 'societal' than specifically economic.
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Universities - one of the last sectors where Britain still has world class institutions.
Tory Party - hold my beer.
If you are a foreigner and a world class academic you will earn more than the £38k a year you need to stay in the UK on any definition
I'm adding universities to the long list of things you have no clue about, then.
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Means poorer quality.
But not FURRIN so you will be only too happy with the decline of British universities.
It means more British postgrads can get research posts in British universities as there is less competition from immigrant academics
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Universities - one of the last sectors where Britain still has world class institutions.
Tory Party - hold my beer.
If you are a foreigner and a world class academic you will earn more than the £38k a year you need to stay in the UK on any definition
I'm adding universities to the long list of things you have no clue about, then.
May I suggest keeping a list of the things he has a clue about instead. It saves time.
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Universities - one of the last sectors where Britain still has world class institutions.
Tory Party - hold my beer.
If you are a foreigner and a world class academic you will earn more than the £38k a year you need to stay in the UK on any definition
I'm adding universities to the long list of things you have no clue about, then.
There is, of course, the small point about actually *starting* in academia. If I were a professor I'd be pretty pissed off at the way in which recruitment was so brutally being amputated at the starting levels. And being a good professor means having good people all the way down the scale.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
The Yellow Wall!
No, That is Richmond Park, Kingston Upon Thames, Twickenham, Bath and West Oxford now
Two of which do actually have yellow walls as they’re build from oolitic limestone.
The political map of Macron support in France is an interesting analogue for areas of Lib Dem strength. Large swathes of rural Western France in areas that never industrialised. Plus the posher riverine suburbs of Paris and the limestone ridges of Eastern France (which tend to be the viticultural areas).
Vineyards are also an interesting divining rod for Lib Dem strength. The only areas they do well in councils in Kent for example are in the Eastern downs near Canterbury, and the high Weald around and South of Tunbridge Wells. Both clusters of vineyards. And in Essex they run Chelmsford which is the viticulture capital of the Crouch Valley.
There's a pattern in European countries of the north having the industry and the south having the vineyards and holiday homes.
In France it’s more the East (including South East) with the industry and the West with the farms. Except of course Toulouse. But the East also has many of the vineyards.
There were lots of mines and factories up Lille way but not many vineyards and holiday homes.
Indeed. The (North) East. Strongly Le Pen too. Though vineyards not far from there in Champagne, montagne de Reims starts about an hour South.
Look at Macron along the Jurassic ridges of Eastern France where the vineyards are.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
The Yellow Wall!
No, That is Richmond Park, Kingston Upon Thames, Twickenham, Bath and West Oxford now
Two of which do actually have yellow walls as they’re build from oolitic limestone.
The political map of Macron support in France is an interesting analogue for areas of Lib Dem strength. Large swathes of rural Western France in areas that never industrialised. Plus the posher riverine suburbs of Paris and the limestone ridges of Eastern France (which tend to be the viticultural areas).
Vineyards are also an interesting divining rod for Lib Dem strength. The only areas they do well in councils in Kent for example are in the Eastern downs near Canterbury, and the high Weald around and South of Tunbridge Wells. Both clusters of vineyards. And in Essex they run Chelmsford which is the viticulture capital of the Crouch Valley.
And Spa Towns from Bath to Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham to Harrogate
Which differs from Macron a little as the spa towns in France seem to vary politically. And Vichy of course has a somewhat in-liberal history.
I was in Aix les Bains last week and took in the hot baths, which was fun.
I will miss tha LD association with religious nonconformism once it's last traces dissipate.
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Means poorer quality.
But not FURRIN so you will be only too happy with the decline of British universities.
It means more British postgrads can get research posts in British universities as there is less competition from immigrant academics
Of course, you don't give a shit about academic standards.
Perhaps a simpler way to achieve the same outcome without a threshold would be to broaden the scope of 'no recourse to public funds' so that it applies by default to all immigrants, and being stricter about enforcing it. That would avoid making people like that jump through hoops.
I wonder how the people polled would define a 'strong economy'.
I suspect there would be many mutually exclusive answers plus plenty of 'the government giving more money to people like me'.
How would you define a "strong economy" ?
I would go for productivity growth of more than 2% (the 20th century average).
GDP doesn't work for obvious reasons. GDP per capita is better but is also influenced by our changing demographic profile and changes in working patterns. For example, if strong productivity growth led to people working less, that wouldn't show up as a "strong economy".
There's more to life than GDP.
For most people maximising quality of life is likely to be mutually exclusive with maximising income or economic activity.
The Times often bewails this discovery:
But the latest happiness polling from Ipsos shows Britons no longer equate success with long hours of toil. They want to enjoy home ownership and financial security but are less interested in collecting physical possessions than they were before the pandemic. Increasingly few want to hustle. The UK is now a nation of “satisficers” rather than “maximisers”, with 51 per cent content with what they have and only 4 per cent equating success with working long hours; 47 per cent see achievement as “retiring early”.
"If you want all the foreigners to Fuck Off, vote Conservative. My name is Lee Anderson, Vice Chair of the Conservative party and I endorse this message. And if you don't like it, Fuck Off"
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Universities - one of the last sectors where Britain still has world class institutions.
Tory Party - hold my beer.
If you are a foreigner and a world class academic you will earn more than the £38k a year you need to stay in the UK on any definition
I'm adding universities to the long list of things you have no clue about, then.
There is, of course, the small point about actually *starting* in academia. If I were a professor I'd be pretty pissed off at the way in which recruitment was so brutally being amputated at the starting levels. And being a good professor means having good people all the way down the scale.
Indeed, appointing key lieutenants is an essential part of a successful professorial career.
I wonder how the people polled would define a 'strong economy'.
I suspect there would be many mutually exclusive answers plus plenty of 'the government giving more money to people like me'.
How would you define a "strong economy" ?
Full/fullish employment Affordable housing Opportunities for individual development Appropriate investment for future in capital and human resources Living within means Adequate resources and financial reserves to deal with crises
Some points are more 'societal' than specifically economic.
Interesting - there's not much you can disagree with though where would you prioritise? "Living within means" may not mean having "adequate resources to deal with crises". I assume "opportunities for individual development" isn't just about education (not just academic but technical such as skills) but investing in individuals and small businesses and that links to the next point about investing in capital and human resources which might crash into the whole "living within means" though if you can afford to borrow, you can borrow.
Affordable Housing can mean whatever you want it to mean - I'd be looking at an affordable mix of housing including a strong well-regulated rental sector as it's not all about home ownership.
What of public services especially those used by the poorest in society? What of maintaining and improving health and education infrastructure and provision? You could argue a strong economy promotes not just individual wealth but individual wellbeing through public health education promoting healthier lifestyle choices to take the pressure off health facilities?
I'd also add a strong exporting sector bringing in wealth and infrastructural spending to improve transport and other connections (such as digital rollout to all areas).
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
The Yellow Wall!
No, That is Richmond Park, Kingston Upon Thames, Twickenham, Bath and West Oxford now
Two of which do actually have yellow walls as they’re build from oolitic limestone.
The political map of Macron support in France is an interesting analogue for areas of Lib Dem strength. Large swathes of rural Western France in areas that never industrialised. Plus the posher riverine suburbs of Paris and the limestone ridges of Eastern France (which tend to be the viticultural areas).
Vineyards are also an interesting divining rod for Lib Dem strength. The only areas they do well in councils in Kent for example are in the Eastern downs near Canterbury, and the high Weald around and South of Tunbridge Wells. Both clusters of vineyards. And in Essex they run Chelmsford which is the viticulture capital of the Crouch Valley.
And Spa Towns from Bath to Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham to Harrogate
Which differs from Macron a little as the spa towns in France seem to vary politically. And Vichy of course has a somewhat in-liberal history.
I was in Aix les Bains last week and took in the hot baths, which was fun.
I will miss tha LD association with religious nonconformism once it's last traces dissipate.
It’ll possibly never fully dissipate. The maps that overlay voting patterns in various countries with odd socioeconomic-religious dividing lines from the middle ages are always fascinating.
Like the Danelaw and Brexit, and the Angevin lands and Macron support.
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Universities - one of the last sectors where Britain still has world class institutions.
I wonder how the people polled would define a 'strong economy'.
I suspect there would be many mutually exclusive answers plus plenty of 'the government giving more money to people like me'.
How would you define a "strong economy" ?
Full/fullish employment Affordable housing Opportunities for individual development Appropriate investment for future in capital and human resources Living within means Adequate resources and financial reserves to deal with crises
Some points are more 'societal' than specifically economic.
But let's take it as read we can't have any of those, do you have any other ideas?
"If you want all the foreigners to Fuck Off, vote Conservative. My name is Lee Anderson, Vice Chair of the Conservative party and I endorse this message. And if you don't like it, Fuck Off"
Given the Conservative party is the party of high legal migration, the highest level we have ever seen, this clearly is not the case.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
The Yellow Wall!
No, That is Richmond Park, Kingston Upon Thames, Twickenham, Bath and West Oxford now
Two of which do actually have yellow walls as they’re build from oolitic limestone.
The political map of Macron support in France is an interesting analogue for areas of Lib Dem strength. Large swathes of rural Western France in areas that never industrialised. Plus the posher riverine suburbs of Paris and the limestone ridges of Eastern France (which tend to be the viticultural areas).
Vineyards are also an interesting divining rod for Lib Dem strength. The only areas they do well in councils in Kent for example are in the Eastern downs near Canterbury, and the high Weald around and South of Tunbridge Wells. Both clusters of vineyards. And in Essex they run Chelmsford which is the viticulture capital of the Crouch Valley.
And Spa Towns from Bath to Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham to Harrogate
Which differs from Macron a little as the spa towns in France seem to vary politically. And Vichy of course has a somewhat in-liberal history.
I was in Aix les Bains last week and took in the hot baths, which was fun.
I will miss tha LD association with religious nonconformism once it's last traces dissipate.
It’ll possibly never fully dissipate. The maps that overlay voting patterns in various countries with odd socioeconomic-religious dividing lines from the middle ages are always fascinating.
Like the Danelaw and Brexit, and the Angevin lands and Macron support.
While the religious dimension to Nonconformism is fading fast, the underlying belief system with its suspicion of top down authority and desire for grass roots control is as strong as ever.
"If you want all the foreigners to Fuck Off, vote Conservative. My name is Lee Anderson, Vice Chair of the Conservative party and I endorse this message. And if you don't like it, Fuck Off"
Given the Conservative party is the party of high legal migration, the highest level we have ever seen, this clearly is not the case.
The Tory party is very much say one thing, do something completely different and hope people don't notice the bit they don't like...
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Universities - one of the last sectors where Britain still has world class institutions.
Tory Party - hold my beer.
If you are a foreigner and a world class academic you will earn more than the £38k a year you need to stay in the UK on any definition
I'm adding universities to the long list of things you have no clue about, then.
There is, of course, the small point about actually *starting* in academia. If I were a professor I'd be pretty pissed off at the way in which recruitment was so brutally being amputated at the starting levels. And being a good professor means having good people all the way down the scale.
Well yes: the first rungs on the academic ladder, while needing people with letters after their names, are often not very well paid at all.
"If you want all the foreigners to Fuck Off, vote Conservative. My name is Lee Anderson, Vice Chair of the Conservative party and I endorse this message. And if you don't like it, Fuck Off"
Given the Conservative party is the party of high legal migration, the highest level we have ever seen, this clearly is not the case.
And also the party of the highest absolute level of employment in British history. If people don't like the kind of society we're getting from all this job creation and immigration, they shouldn't just use the Tories as a scapegoat, but instead question their assumptions.
I wonder how the people polled would define a 'strong economy'.
I suspect there would be many mutually exclusive answers plus plenty of 'the government giving more money to people like me'.
How would you define a "strong economy" ?
I would go for productivity growth of more than 2% (the 20th century average).
GDP doesn't work for obvious reasons. GDP per capita is better but is also influenced by our changing demographic profile and changes in working patterns. For example, if strong productivity growth led to people working less, that wouldn't show up as a "strong economy".
There's more to life than GDP.
For most people maximising quality of life is likely to be mutually exclusive with maximising income or economic activity.
The Times often bewails this discovery:
But the latest happiness polling from Ipsos shows Britons no longer equate success with long hours of toil. They want to enjoy home ownership and financial security but are less interested in collecting physical possessions than they were before the pandemic. Increasingly few want to hustle. The UK is now a nation of “satisficers” rather than “maximisers”, with 51 per cent content with what they have and only 4 per cent equating success with working long hours; 47 per cent see achievement as “retiring early”.
Yep, that's why I went for productivity. The faster that grows, the more of us will be able to work 4 day weeks and retire early. I earn as much as the head of my team because she only works 3/4 days a week.
The problem is that sectors like education, health and social care cannot sustain the same productivity growth as elsewhere. That's why I see a larger proportion of the labour supply being directed to public services in the future.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
The Yellow Wall!
No, That is Richmond Park, Kingston Upon Thames, Twickenham, Bath and West Oxford now
Two of which do actually have yellow walls as they’re build from oolitic limestone.
The political map of Macron support in France is an interesting analogue for areas of Lib Dem strength. Large swathes of rural Western France in areas that never industrialised. Plus the posher riverine suburbs of Paris and the limestone ridges of Eastern France (which tend to be the viticultural areas).
Vineyards are also an interesting divining rod for Lib Dem strength. The only areas they do well in councils in Kent for example are in the Eastern downs near Canterbury, and the high Weald around and South of Tunbridge Wells. Both clusters of vineyards. And in Essex they run Chelmsford which is the viticulture capital of the Crouch Valley.
And Spa Towns from Bath to Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham to Harrogate
Which differs from Macron a little as the spa towns in France seem to vary politically. And Vichy of course has a somewhat in-liberal history.
I was in Aix les Bains last week and took in the hot baths, which was fun.
I will miss tha LD association with religious nonconformism once it's last traces dissipate.
It’ll possibly never fully dissipate. The maps that overlay voting patterns in various countries with odd socioeconomic-religious dividing lines from the middle ages are always fascinating.
Like the Danelaw and Brexit, and the Angevin lands and Macron support.
While the religious dimension to Nonconformism is fading fast, the underlying belief system with its suspicion of top down authority and desire for grass roots control is as strong as ever.
Indeed. The older I grow, the more respect I have for the likes of the Quakers and the Free Kirks and the more contempt for the servile, crawling Establishment churches.
It was a great treat to visit Scarborough Castle a few years ago and discover the ruined corner where George Fox the Quaker was imprisoned by the Stuarts. Memorable also for finding bee orchids in the grass there.
I wonder how the people polled would define a 'strong economy'.
I suspect there would be many mutually exclusive answers plus plenty of 'the government giving more money to people like me'.
How would you define a "strong economy" ?
Full/fullish employment Affordable housing Opportunities for individual development Appropriate investment for future in capital and human resources Living within means Adequate resources and financial reserves to deal with crises
Some points are more 'societal' than specifically economic.
But let's take it as read we can't have any of those, do you have any other ideas?
Isn’t it rather we don’t have any of these things, and where should we best start to improve matters ?
I wonder how the people polled would define a 'strong economy'.
I suspect there would be many mutually exclusive answers plus plenty of 'the government giving more money to people like me'.
How would you define a "strong economy" ?
I would go for productivity growth of more than 2% (the 20th century average).
GDP doesn't work for obvious reasons. GDP per capita is better but is also influenced by our changing demographic profile and changes in working patterns. For example, if strong productivity growth led to people working less, that wouldn't show up as a "strong economy".
There's more to life than GDP.
For most people maximising quality of life is likely to be mutually exclusive with maximising income or economic activity.
The Times often bewails this discovery:
But the latest happiness polling from Ipsos shows Britons no longer equate success with long hours of toil. They want to enjoy home ownership and financial security but are less interested in collecting physical possessions than they were before the pandemic. Increasingly few want to hustle. The UK is now a nation of “satisficers” rather than “maximisers”, with 51 per cent content with what they have and only 4 per cent equating success with working long hours; 47 per cent see achievement as “retiring early”.
Yep, that's why I went for productivity. The faster that grows, the more of us will be able to work 4 day weeks and retire early. I earn as much as the head of my team because she only works 3/4 days a week.
The problem is that sectors like education, health and social care cannot sustain the same productivity growth as elsewhere. That's why I see a larger proportion of the labour supply being directed to public services in the future.
The problem is, of course, that productivity statistics primarily measure the rate of labour force participation.
"If you want all the foreigners to Fuck Off, vote Conservative. My name is Lee Anderson, Vice Chair of the Conservative party and I endorse this message. And if you don't like it, Fuck Off"
Given the Conservative party is the party of high legal migration, the highest level we have ever seen, this clearly is not the case.
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Universities - one of the last sectors where Britain still has world class institutions.
Tory Party - hold my beer.
If you are a foreigner and a world class academic you will earn more than the £38k a year you need to stay in the UK on any definition
I'm adding universities to the long list of things you have no clue about, then.
There is, of course, the small point about actually *starting* in academia. If I were a professor I'd be pretty pissed off at the way in which recruitment was so brutally being amputated at the starting levels. And being a good professor means having good people all the way down the scale.
Indeed, appointing key lieutenants is an essential part of a successful professorial career.
I know precious little about medicine, thankfully, but as a faculty husband I've long since come to the conclusion that UK universities are a Ponzi scheme that would have imploded years ago if we hadn't been able to sell our initial investment to foreigners. I can't deny they are all very clever - in some cases cleverer than I - but I doubt if cooking up ever more ingenious social theories is a good use of their brains. The problem being that the doctrine of academic freedom means they can (and will) study anything and everything that interests them, regardless of utility.
"If you want all the foreigners to Fuck Off, vote Conservative. My name is Lee Anderson, Vice Chair of the Conservative party and I endorse this message. And if you don't like it, Fuck Off"
Given the Conservative party is the party of high legal migration, the highest level we have ever seen, this clearly is not the case.
The Tory party is very much say one thing, do something completely different and hope people don't notice the bit they don't like...
Indeed they are. They deserve the beating they are undoubtedly going to get.
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Universities - one of the last sectors where Britain still has world class institutions.
Tory Party - hold my beer.
If you are a foreigner and a world class academic you will earn more than the £38k a year you need to stay in the UK on any definition
I'm adding universities to the long list of things you have no clue about, then.
There is, of course, the small point about actually *starting* in academia. If I were a professor I'd be pretty pissed off at the way in which recruitment was so brutally being amputated at the starting levels. And being a good professor means having good people all the way down the scale.
Indeed, appointing key lieutenants is an essential part of a successful professorial career.
Quite. The Tories such as HYUFD seem to think that university professors work in splendid isolation, like Oxford scholars in a Trinity College quad before the 1855 (or whenever it was) reforms. And those lieutenants will very soon become captains and majors and colonels - with partners and families. Sure, they may still move, but the more chances that they have to stay, as opposed to being kicked out whenever their income drops when they have a child, oe want to marry their lovers ...
"If you want all the foreigners to Fuck Off, vote Conservative. My name is Lee Anderson, Vice Chair of the Conservative party and I endorse this message. And if you don't like it, Fuck Off"
Given the Conservative party is the party of high legal migration, the highest level we have ever seen, this clearly is not the case.
And also the party of the highest absolute level of employment in British history. If people don't like the kind of society we're getting from all this job creation and immigration, they shouldn't just use the Tories as a scapegoat, but instead question their assumptions.
High levels of employment are great but stagnant growth and living standards are not.
"If you want all the foreigners to Fuck Off, vote Conservative. My name is Lee Anderson, Vice Chair of the Conservative party and I endorse this message. And if you don't like it, Fuck Off"
Given the Conservative party is the party of high legal migration, the highest level we have ever seen, this clearly is not the case.
TBF, is that corrected for actual population?
I'd like to see someone try that argument for real:
"Yes, immigration may be a million a year, but as a percentage that's lower than it was when it was 990,000, so we're actually slowing the rate."
"If you want all the foreigners to Fuck Off, vote Conservative. My name is Lee Anderson, Vice Chair of the Conservative party and I endorse this message. And if you don't like it, Fuck Off"
Given the Conservative party is the party of high legal migration, the highest level we have ever seen, this clearly is not the case.
That really goes to the heart of the matter. The government are both incredibly two faced on migration and a mix of naive and incompetent, which helps neither those who want less migration, or those who want to see migrants feel welcome (of course those two are not incompatible at all but perhaps typically a different focus). Nor does it really help migrants, businesses and public services plan their future either.
"If you want all the foreigners to Fuck Off, vote Conservative. My name is Lee Anderson, Vice Chair of the Conservative party and I endorse this message. And if you don't like it, Fuck Off"
Given the Conservative party is the party of high legal migration, the highest level we have ever seen, this clearly is not the case.
TBF, is that corrected for actual population?
I'd like to see someone try that argument for real:
"Yes, immigration may be a million a year, but as a percentage that's lower than it was when it was 990,000, so we're actually slowing the rate."
Well, it clearly is relevant to a degree.
If you have a population of 10 million and have a million immigrants in a year; if you have a population of 200 million and a million immigrants a year is a lot smaller percentage.
I wonder how the people polled would define a 'strong economy'.
I suspect there would be many mutually exclusive answers plus plenty of 'the government giving more money to people like me'.
How would you define a "strong economy" ?
Full/fullish employment Affordable housing Opportunities for individual development Appropriate investment for future in capital and human resources Living within means Adequate resources and financial reserves to deal with crises
Some points are more 'societal' than specifically economic.
Interesting - there's not much you can disagree with though where would you prioritise? "Living within means" may not mean having "adequate resources to deal with crises". I assume "opportunities for individual development" isn't just about education (not just academic but technical such as skills) but investing in individuals and small businesses and that links to the next point about investing in capital and human resources which might crash into the whole "living within means" though if you can afford to borrow, you can borrow.
Affordable Housing can mean whatever you want it to mean - I'd be looking at an affordable mix of housing including a strong well-regulated rental sector as it's not all about home ownership.
What of public services especially those used by the poorest in society? What of maintaining and improving health and education infrastructure and provision? You could argue a strong economy promotes not just individual wealth but individual wellbeing through public health education promoting healthier lifestyle choices to take the pressure off health facilities?
I'd also add a strong exporting sector bringing in wealth and infrastructural spending to improve transport and other connections (such as digital rollout to all areas).
Good points.
I'd say we'd all have different priorities based on personal experiences and viewpoints.
But overall I think a bit of moderation, even in good things, is sensible.
So the odd year when unemployment is higher or housing less affordable or the country has to deal with a crisis is acceptable and even, cynical thought, might remind people not to be complacent about how fortunate they normally are.
For me the problems set in when a negative aspect becomes endemic and then accepted as 'normal' - for example unemployment from 1975 onwards or unaffordable housing in southern England or the trade deficit during this last generation.
Tory MP Rachel Maclean, one of several deputy chairs of the party, tells GB News the Rwanda vote *will* be a confidence issue. “Of course it's about confidence in the government and what it delivers."
"If you want all the foreigners to Fuck Off, vote Conservative. My name is Lee Anderson, Vice Chair of the Conservative party and I endorse this message. And if you don't like it, Fuck Off"
Given the Conservative party is the party of high legal migration, the highest level we have ever seen, this clearly is not the case.
The Tory party is very much say one thing, do something completely different and hope people don't notice the bit they don't like...
"If you want all the foreigners to Fuck Off, vote Conservative. My name is Lee Anderson, Vice Chair of the Conservative party and I endorse this message. And if you don't like it, Fuck Off"
Given the Conservative party is the party of high legal migration, the highest level we have ever seen, this clearly is not the case.
TBF, is that corrected for actual population?
I'd like to see someone try that argument for real:
"Yes, immigration may be a million a year, but as a percentage that's lower than it was when it was 990,000, so we're actually slowing the rate."
This is very much how government wants to present debt (inasmuch as it wishes to remind us at all). "This year we owe Z quadrillion pounds, which is X% of GDP; next year it is Z+Y quadrillion, which is X-W% of GDP, so it isn't rising, it's falling by getting bigger, so by borrowing more we are paying it off".
"If you want all the foreigners to Fuck Off, vote Conservative. My name is Lee Anderson, Vice Chair of the Conservative party and I endorse this message. And if you don't like it, Fuck Off"
Given the Conservative party is the party of high legal migration, the highest level we have ever seen, this clearly is not the case.
TBF, is that corrected for actual population?
I'd like to see someone try that argument for real:
"Yes, immigration may be a million a year, but as a percentage that's lower than it was when it was 990,000, so we're actually slowing the rate."
Well, it clearly is relevant to a degree.
If you have a population of 10 million and have a million immigrants in a year; if you have a population of 200 million and a million immigrants a year is a lot smaller percentage.
It would be nice to have a General Election in which simple arithmetic took the place of rhetoric.
"If you want all the foreigners to Fuck Off, vote Conservative. My name is Lee Anderson, Vice Chair of the Conservative party and I endorse this message. And if you don't like it, Fuck Off"
Given the Conservative party is the party of high legal migration, the highest level we have ever seen, this clearly is not the case.
TBF, is that corrected for actual population?
I'd like to see someone try that argument for real:
"Yes, immigration may be a million a year, but as a percentage that's lower than it was when it was 990,000, so we're actually slowing the rate."
Wouldn't that result in about 50m immigrants over the next century ?
@LeeAndersonMP_ For too long these namby pamby, hand-wringing, pearl clutching, Britain bashing, EU fanatics, and illegal migrants encouraged by lefty lawyers with no moral compass haved used our courts to frustrate democracy. Parliament is sovereign and we must stop the boats. We must deliver on behalf of the Great British public.
Tory MP Rachel Maclean, one of several deputy chairs of the party, tells GB News the Rwanda vote *will* be a confidence issue. “Of course it's about confidence in the government and what it delivers."
@LeeAndersonMP_ For too long these namby pamby, hand-wringing, pearl clutching, Britain bashing, EU fanatics, and illegal migrants encouraged by lefty lawyers with no moral compass haved used our courts to frustrate democracy. Parliament is sovereign and we must stop the boats. We must deliver on behalf of the Great British public.
"If you want all the foreigners to Fuck Off, vote Conservative. My name is Lee Anderson, Vice Chair of the Conservative party and I endorse this message. And if you don't like it, Fuck Off"
Given the Conservative party is the party of high legal migration, the highest level we have ever seen, this clearly is not the case.
TBF, is that corrected for actual population?
I'd like to see someone try that argument for real:
"Yes, immigration may be a million a year, but as a percentage that's lower than it was when it was 990,000, so we're actually slowing the rate."
Wouldn't that result in about 50m immigrants over the next century ?
Yes.
Indeed, it's remarkable how much higher immigration is now than in 2018 and 2019 (which are both pre-pandemic) and when net-migration averaged 265k/year range.
Now some of this, I suspect, is because of a bounceback in student numbers post pandemic. In 2020, there was a big negative student number as people went back to their home countries when the pandemic hit, so the total number of students in the UK declined sharply. Even account for this, it is still quite astonishing how many more people are coming to the UK, especially in the context of net EU migration being negligible.
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Universities - one of the last sectors where Britain still has world class institutions.
Tory Party - hold my beer.
If you are a foreigner and a world class academic you will earn more than the £38k a year you need to stay in the UK on any definition
I'm adding universities to the long list of things you have no clue about, then.
There is, of course, the small point about actually *starting* in academia. If I were a professor I'd be pretty pissed off at the way in which recruitment was so brutally being amputated at the starting levels. And being a good professor means having good people all the way down the scale.
No, just excessive foreign researchers are being restricted.
Whereas you want to prevent lots of British phd students from being able to get research posts in academia after qualification by giving half those posts to foreign immigrants!
@LeeAndersonMP_ For too long these namby pamby, hand-wringing, pearl clutching, Britain bashing, EU fanatics, and illegal migrants encouraged by lefty lawyers with no moral compass haved used our courts to frustrate democracy. Parliament is sovereign and we must stop the boats. We must deliver on behalf of the Great British public.
I concur, it really is time to see the end of lefty liberal hand wringing Labour home secretaries such as May, Patel and Braverman. We need a General Election sharpish to see the end of 13 years of Labour government and it is surely only fair we give the Conservatives a fair chance to sort out this lefty mess.
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Universities - one of the last sectors where Britain still has world class institutions.
Tory Party - hold my beer.
If you are a foreigner and a world class academic you will earn more than the £38k a year you need to stay in the UK on any definition
I'm adding universities to the long list of things you have no clue about, then.
Nobody can be a 'world class academic' on any definition if they earn less than £38k a year, indeed to be a 'world class academic' most would be able to command 6 figure salaries at any university or college they wished to go to
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Universities - one of the last sectors where Britain still has world class institutions.
Tory Party - hold my beer.
If you are a foreigner and a world class academic you will earn more than the £38k a year you need to stay in the UK on any definition
I'm adding universities to the long list of things you have no clue about, then.
There is, of course, the small point about actually *starting* in academia. If I were a professor I'd be pretty pissed off at the way in which recruitment was so brutally being amputated at the starting levels. And being a good professor means having good people all the way down the scale.
No, just excessive foreign researchers are being restricted.
Whereas you want to prevent lots of British phd students from being able to get research posts in academia after qualification by giving half those posts to foreign immigrants!
That is one of the most stupid things you have ever posted on here. And it had some stiff competition.
At least we are all clear - its a scorched earth strategy. Wreck as many things as possible in the months that remain.
@LeeAndersonMP_ For too long these namby pamby, hand-wringing, pearl clutching, Britain bashing, EU fanatics, and illegal migrants encouraged by lefty lawyers with no moral compass haved used our courts to frustrate democracy. Parliament is sovereign and we must stop the boats. We must deliver on behalf of the Great British public.
I concur, it really is time to see the end of lefty liberal hand wringing Labour home secretaries such as May, Patel and Braverman. We need a General Election sharpish to see the end of 13 years of Labour government and it is surely only fair we give the Conservatives a fair chance to sort out this lefty mess.
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Universities - one of the last sectors where Britain still has world class institutions.
Tory Party - hold my beer.
If you are a foreigner and a world class academic you will earn more than the £38k a year you need to stay in the UK on any definition
I'm adding universities to the long list of things you have no clue about, then.
There is, of course, the small point about actually *starting* in academia. If I were a professor I'd be pretty pissed off at the way in which recruitment was so brutally being amputated at the starting levels. And being a good professor means having good people all the way down the scale.
Indeed, appointing key lieutenants is an essential part of a successful professorial career.
I know precious little about medicine, thankfully, but as a faculty husband I've long since come to the conclusion that UK universities are a Ponzi scheme that would have imploded years ago if we hadn't been able to sell our initial investment to foreigners. I can't deny they are all very clever - in some cases cleverer than I - but I doubt if cooking up ever more ingenious social theories is a good use of their brains. The problem being that the doctrine of academic freedom means they can (and will) study anything and everything that interests them, regardless of utility.
I think there is a fundamental clash of ideas of what university is for.
Is it the utilitarian idea of preparing people for a life time of work?
Is it to push the boundaries of knowledge and ideas?
Is it to innovate and research?
Is it a social finishing school for those who wish to join the British middle classes?
Is it a product to sell to overseas students as an income earner for the country?
We really haven't decided, and these objectives do have quite fundamental clashes.
@LeeAndersonMP_ For too long these namby pamby, hand-wringing, pearl clutching, Britain bashing, EU fanatics, and illegal migrants encouraged by lefty lawyers with no moral compass haved used our courts to frustrate democracy. Parliament is sovereign and we must stop the boats. We must deliver on behalf of the Great British public.
Do you ever wonder how others would conduct themselves if born in a different time or country? i.e. Netanyahu grew up on the other side of the wall or Putin's now the son of a Home Counties head teacher etc etc.
Is it only circumstance that means Lee isn't pushing people out of helicopters or helping to disappear protestors?
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
The Yellow Wall!
No, That is Richmond Park, Kingston Upon Thames, Twickenham, Bath and West Oxford now
Two of which do actually have yellow walls as they’re build from oolitic limestone.
The political map of Macron support in France is an interesting analogue for areas of Lib Dem strength. Large swathes of rural Western France in areas that never industrialised. Plus the posher riverine suburbs of Paris and the limestone ridges of Eastern France (which tend to be the viticultural areas).
Vineyards are also an interesting divining rod for Lib Dem strength. The only areas they do well in councils in Kent for example are in the Eastern downs near Canterbury, and the high Weald around and South of Tunbridge Wells. Both clusters of vineyards. And in Essex they run Chelmsford which is the viticulture capital of the Crouch Valley.
And Spa Towns from Bath to Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham to Harrogate
Which differs from Macron a little as the spa towns in France seem to vary politically. And Vichy of course has a somewhat in-liberal history.
I was in Aix les Bains last week and took in the hot baths, which was fun.
I will miss tha LD association with religious nonconformism once it's last traces dissipate.
It’ll possibly never fully dissipate. The maps that overlay voting patterns in various countries with odd socioeconomic-religious dividing lines from the middle ages are always fascinating.
Like the Danelaw and Brexit, and the Angevin lands and Macron support.
While the religious dimension to Nonconformism is fading fast, the underlying belief system with its suspicion of top down authority and desire for grass roots control is as strong as ever.
Indeed. The older I grow, the more respect I have for the likes of the Quakers and the Free Kirks and the more contempt for the servile, crawling Establishment churches.
It was a great treat to visit Scarborough Castle a few years ago and discover the ruined corner where George Fox the Quaker was imprisoned by the Stuarts. Memorable also for finding bee orchids in the grass there.
And no doubt therefore also respect for the anti gay marriage views of Kate Forbes and her fellow Free Kirkers
@LeeAndersonMP_ For too long these namby pamby, hand-wringing, pearl clutching, Britain bashing, EU fanatics, and illegal migrants encouraged by lefty lawyers with no moral compass haved used our courts to frustrate democracy. Parliament is sovereign and we must stop the boats. We must deliver on behalf of the Great British public.
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Universities - one of the last sectors where Britain still has world class institutions.
Tory Party - hold my beer.
If you are a foreigner and a world class academic you will earn more than the £38k a year you need to stay in the UK on any definition
I'm adding universities to the long list of things you have no clue about, then.
Nobody can be a 'world class academic' on any definition if they earn less than £38k a year, indeed to be a 'world class academic' most would be able to command 6 figure salaries at any university or college they wished to go to
But every "world class academic" did their time as a lowly paid post doc, where they made their name and reputation.
"If you want all the foreigners to Fuck Off, vote Conservative. My name is Lee Anderson, Vice Chair of the Conservative party and I endorse this message. And if you don't like it, Fuck Off"
Given the Conservative party is the party of high legal migration, the highest level we have ever seen, this clearly is not the case.
TBF, is that corrected for actual population?
I'd like to see someone try that argument for real:
"Yes, immigration may be a million a year, but as a percentage that's lower than it was when it was 990,000, so we're actually slowing the rate."
Wouldn't that result in about 50m immigrants over the next century ?
Yes.
Indeed, it's remarkable how much higher immigration is now than in 2018 and 2019 (which are both pre-pandemic) and when net-migration averaged 265k/year range.
Now some of this, I suspect, is because of a bounceback in student numbers post pandemic. In 2020, there was a big negative student number as people went back to their home countries when the pandemic hit, so the total number of students in the UK declined sharply. Even account for this, it is still quite astonishing how many more people are coming to the UK, especially in the context of net EU migration being negligible.
It is of course a very big number, but not sure why anyone is astonished.
We set a target to get 600,000 students, which we met. We gave 3m Hong Kong British Overseas Nationals the right to live here, a small percentage of which have decided to. We gave refuge to Ukrainian refugees in significant numbers.
That alone gives numbers that are higher than average before you consider the massive backlogs in health and care sectors where are unwilling/unable to pay the salaries to keep staff let alone recruit new ones without importing people.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
The Yellow Wall!
No, That is Richmond Park, Kingston Upon Thames, Twickenham, Bath and West Oxford now
Two of which do actually have yellow walls as they’re build from oolitic limestone.
The political map of Macron support in France is an interesting analogue for areas of Lib Dem strength. Large swathes of rural Western France in areas that never industrialised. Plus the posher riverine suburbs of Paris and the limestone ridges of Eastern France (which tend to be the viticultural areas).
Vineyards are also an interesting divining rod for Lib Dem strength. The only areas they do well in councils in Kent for example are in the Eastern downs near Canterbury, and the high Weald around and South of Tunbridge Wells. Both clusters of vineyards. And in Essex they run Chelmsford which is the viticulture capital of the Crouch Valley.
And Spa Towns from Bath to Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham to Harrogate
Which differs from Macron a little as the spa towns in France seem to vary politically. And Vichy of course has a somewhat in-liberal history.
I was in Aix les Bains last week and took in the hot baths, which was fun.
I will miss tha LD association with religious nonconformism once it's last traces dissipate.
It’ll possibly never fully dissipate. The maps that overlay voting patterns in various countries with odd socioeconomic-religious dividing lines from the middle ages are always fascinating.
Like the Danelaw and Brexit, and the Angevin lands and Macron support.
While the religious dimension to Nonconformism is fading fast, the underlying belief system with its suspicion of top down authority and desire for grass roots control is as strong as ever.
Indeed. The older I grow, the more respect I have for the likes of the Quakers and the Free Kirks and the more contempt for the servile, crawling Establishment churches.
It was a great treat to visit Scarborough Castle a few years ago and discover the ruined corner where George Fox the Quaker was imprisoned by the Stuarts. Memorable also for finding bee orchids in the grass there.
And no doubt therefore also respect for the anti gay marriage views of Kate Forbes and her fellow Free Kirkers
Not necessarily. Quakers have done gay marriages for decades. NonConformism covers quite a broad range of opinion.
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Universities - one of the last sectors where Britain still has world class institutions.
Tory Party - hold my beer.
If you are a foreigner and a world class academic you will earn more than the £38k a year you need to stay in the UK on any definition
I'm adding universities to the long list of things you have no clue about, then.
There is, of course, the small point about actually *starting* in academia. If I were a professor I'd be pretty pissed off at the way in which recruitment was so brutally being amputated at the starting levels. And being a good professor means having good people all the way down the scale.
No, just excessive foreign researchers are being restricted.
Whereas you want to prevent lots of British phd students from being able to get research posts in academia after qualification by giving half those posts to foreign immigrants!
That is one of the most stupid things you have ever posted on here. And it had some stiff competition.
At least we are all clear - its a scorched earth strategy. Wreck as many things as possible in the months that remain.
I’m sure HYUFD is familiar with the Catholic doctrine on invincible ignorance.
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
The Yellow Wall!
No, That is Richmond Park, Kingston Upon Thames, Twickenham, Bath and West Oxford now
Two of which do actually have yellow walls as they’re build from oolitic limestone.
The political map of Macron support in France is an interesting analogue for areas of Lib Dem strength. Large swathes of rural Western France in areas that never industrialised. Plus the posher riverine suburbs of Paris and the limestone ridges of Eastern France (which tend to be the viticultural areas).
Vineyards are also an interesting divining rod for Lib Dem strength. The only areas they do well in councils in Kent for example are in the Eastern downs near Canterbury, and the high Weald around and South of Tunbridge Wells. Both clusters of vineyards. And in Essex they run Chelmsford which is the viticulture capital of the Crouch Valley.
And Spa Towns from Bath to Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham to Harrogate
Which differs from Macron a little as the spa towns in France seem to vary politically. And Vichy of course has a somewhat in-liberal history.
I was in Aix les Bains last week and took in the hot baths, which was fun.
I will miss tha LD association with religious nonconformism once it's last traces dissipate.
It’ll possibly never fully dissipate. The maps that overlay voting patterns in various countries with odd socioeconomic-religious dividing lines from the middle ages are always fascinating.
Like the Danelaw and Brexit, and the Angevin lands and Macron support.
While the religious dimension to Nonconformism is fading fast, the underlying belief system with its suspicion of top down authority and desire for grass roots control is as strong as ever.
Indeed. The older I grow, the more respect I have for the likes of the Quakers and the Free Kirks and the more contempt for the servile, crawling Establishment churches.
It was a great treat to visit Scarborough Castle a few years ago and discover the ruined corner where George Fox the Quaker was imprisoned by the Stuarts. Memorable also for finding bee orchids in the grass there.
And no doubt therefore also respect for the anti gay marriage views of Kate Forbes and her fellow Free Kirkers
You do have an obsession with that aspect of being in the Free Kirk. You might want to study some actual Scottish history and what it meant to oppose the Establishment.
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Universities - one of the last sectors where Britain still has world class institutions.
Tory Party - hold my beer.
If you are a foreigner and a world class academic you will earn more than the £38k a year you need to stay in the UK on any definition
I'm adding universities to the long list of things you have no clue about, then.
There is, of course, the small point about actually *starting* in academia. If I were a professor I'd be pretty pissed off at the way in which recruitment was so brutally being amputated at the starting levels. And being a good professor means having good people all the way down the scale.
No, just excessive foreign researchers are being restricted.
Whereas you want to prevent lots of British phd students from being able to get research posts in academia after qualification by giving half those posts to foreign immigrants!
Try getting your ceiling plastered in December!
I don't count the number of PhD students - British or foreign - as an unequivocal index of economic wellbeing.
NEW: The cost of the govt’s Rwanda scheme has *doubled* before a single migrant has been sent there. Home Office admits tonight it has handed over another £100m this year, on top of the original £140m cost - with a further £50m to follow next year
@LeeAndersonMP_ For too long these namby pamby, hand-wringing, pearl clutching, Britain bashing, EU fanatics, and illegal migrants encouraged by lefty lawyers with no moral compass haved used our courts to frustrate democracy. Parliament is sovereign and we must stop the boats. We must deliver on behalf of the Great British public.
That's a great parody. It really catches his predictable blustering: could almost be him!
"Parliament is sovereign"
I assume he wont have a problem then when the House of Lords blocks this?
Indeed.
I do believe Parliament is sovereign. I think it can do a lot of things it probably should not and I would rather it not, including superceding other very reasonable laws if it wants to and actually covers it off properly in legislation (which it often does not, hence losing cases in court).
But politicians at least often mean 'the government' when they say 'Parliament', and are wrong to do so.
Though one pet peeve of mine is when a government loses a vote and people talk about Parliament demonstrating its authority etc, when the exact same statement would be true if the government won the vote, since Parliament demonstrates its authority by agreeing to the government's requests all the time.
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Universities - one of the last sectors where Britain still has world class institutions.
Tory Party - hold my beer.
If you are a foreigner and a world class academic you will earn more than the £38k a year you need to stay in the UK on any definition
I'm adding universities to the long list of things you have no clue about, then.
Nobody can be a 'world class academic' on any definition if they earn less than £38k a year, indeed to be a 'world class academic' most would be able to command 6 figure salaries at any university or college they wished to go to
Depends how you look at it.
Firstly, what is an academic?
If this class includes basic post-docs then the world class might apply as the recruitment net is world-wide (subject to visa etc).
I worked for years in universities and the PhD/Post-doc/ junior research fellow segment was often non-UK.
NEW: The cost of the govt’s Rwanda scheme has *doubled* before a single migrant has been sent there. Home Office admits tonight it has handed over another £100m this year, on top of the original £140m cost - with a further £50m to follow next year
Not really if a bunch of hate-filled imbecilic thugs just showed exactly why he's been in the right to ignore them and they've made themselves look like the idiotic intellectual pygmies they are. Starmer's greatest asset is how lucky he is in the quality of his opponents on left and right. They always contrive to be so awful they make him look much more appealing by comparison.
@LeeAndersonMP_ For too long these namby pamby, hand-wringing, pearl clutching, Britain bashing, EU fanatics, and illegal migrants encouraged by lefty lawyers with no moral compass haved used our courts to frustrate democracy. Parliament is sovereign and we must stop the boats. We must deliver on behalf of the Great British public.
Do you ever wonder how others would conduct themselves if born in a different time or country? i.e. Netanyahu grew up on the other side of the wall or Putin's now the son of a Home Counties head teacher etc etc.
Is it only circumstance that means Lee isn't pushing people out of helicopters or helping to disappear protestors?
Possibly, though my more charitable impression is that he's just a bit try hard. Perhaps due to being a latecomer to the Tories he often comes across like he has a desperate need to prove his credentials in as loud and stereotypical a way as possible.
I'm sure he still believes what he says, but he has one eye on his brand, for sure.
NEW: The cost of the govt’s Rwanda scheme has *doubled* before a single migrant has been sent there. Home Office admits tonight it has handed over another £100m this year, on top of the original £140m cost - with a further £50m to follow next year
@LeeAndersonMP_ For too long these namby pamby, hand-wringing, pearl clutching, Britain bashing, EU fanatics, and illegal migrants encouraged by lefty lawyers with no moral compass haved used our courts to frustrate democracy. Parliament is sovereign and we must stop the boats. We must deliver on behalf of the Great British public.
That's a great parody. It really catches his predictable blustering: could almost be him!
"Parliament is sovereign"
I assume he wont have a problem then when the House of Lords blocks this?
Indeed.
I do believe Parliament is sovereign. I think it can do a lot of things it probably should not and I would rather it not, including superceding other very reasonable laws if it wants to and actually covers it off properly in legislation (which it often does not, hence losing cases in court).
But politicians at least often mean 'the government' when they say 'Parliament', and are wrong to do so.
Though one pet peeve of mine is when a government loses a vote and people talk about Parliament demonstrating its authority etc, when the exact same statement would be true if the government won the vote, since Parliament demonstrates its authority by agreeing to the government's requests all the time.
I suspect they really mean the Daily Mail editor should be sovereign rather than the government.....
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
The Yellow Wall!
No, That is Richmond Park, Kingston Upon Thames, Twickenham, Bath and West Oxford now
Two of which do actually have yellow walls as they’re build from oolitic limestone.
The political map of Macron support in France is an interesting analogue for areas of Lib Dem strength. Large swathes of rural Western France in areas that never industrialised. Plus the posher riverine suburbs of Paris and the limestone ridges of Eastern France (which tend to be the viticultural areas).
Vineyards are also an interesting divining rod for Lib Dem strength. The only areas they do well in councils in Kent for example are in the Eastern downs near Canterbury, and the high Weald around and South of Tunbridge Wells. Both clusters of vineyards. And in Essex they run Chelmsford which is the viticulture capital of the Crouch Valley.
And Spa Towns from Bath to Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham to Harrogate
Which differs from Macron a little as the spa towns in France seem to vary politically. And Vichy of course has a somewhat in-liberal history.
I was in Aix les Bains last week and took in the hot baths, which was fun.
I will miss tha LD association with religious nonconformism once it's last traces dissipate.
It’ll possibly never fully dissipate. The maps that overlay voting patterns in various countries with odd socioeconomic-religious dividing lines from the middle ages are always fascinating.
Like the Danelaw and Brexit, and the Angevin lands and Macron support.
While the religious dimension to Nonconformism is fading fast, the underlying belief system with its suspicion of top down authority and desire for grass roots control is as strong as ever.
Indeed. The older I grow, the more respect I have for the likes of the Quakers and the Free Kirks and the more contempt for the servile, crawling Establishment churches.
It was a great treat to visit Scarborough Castle a few years ago and discover the ruined corner where George Fox the Quaker was imprisoned by the Stuarts. Memorable also for finding bee orchids in the grass there.
And no doubt therefore also respect for the anti gay marriage views of Kate Forbes and her fellow Free Kirkers
You might want to study some actual Scottish history
He only needs to know how well it would stand up to a tank invasion.
I hadn’t quite appreciated the numbers involved in the Ukraine drone war.
https://euromaidanpress.com/2023/12/07/inside-ukraines-campaign-to-crush-russia-with-combat-drones/?sw345d … Ukraine buys 60% of the total production volume of Chinese Mavic drones, excluding other UAV purchases, Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal stated during the Kyiv International Economic Forum. The minister most likely referred to both state and volunteer-purchased drones, according to the data of the customs service.
“This year, we have allocated an additional UAH 40 billion to purchase drones. These are drones of Ukrainian and foreign production. Ukraine buys 60% of the entire world production of Mavic,” Shmyhal said…
The west needs to take a good look at how much China dominates world production. Soon.
I hadn’t quite appreciated the numbers involved in the Ukraine drone war.
https://euromaidanpress.com/2023/12/07/inside-ukraines-campaign-to-crush-russia-with-combat-drones/?sw345d … Ukraine buys 60% of the total production volume of Chinese Mavic drones, excluding other UAV purchases, Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal stated during the Kyiv International Economic Forum. The minister most likely referred to both state and volunteer-purchased drones, according to the data of the customs service.
“This year, we have allocated an additional UAH 40 billion to purchase drones. These are drones of Ukrainian and foreign production. Ukraine buys 60% of the entire world production of Mavic,” Shmyhal said…
The west needs to take a good look at how much China dominates world production. Soon.
I was reading a sci-fi novel this week which postulated a near future with the two dominant powers being China and...Japan, with the USA coming up in a distant third.
I assumed it must have been published a long time ago, but no, 2011, making it seem a little less plausible.
You do know that Research Fellows are not the same as Professors, don't you?
Yes, they are less senior researchers than Professors.
Top academics, foreign or not will still be able to stay here.
Middle income and low income migrants who don't meet the salary threshold however will not be able to come here now unless in a shortage area like social care. Which is exactly what middle income and low income Brexit voters voted for when they won the referendum to reduce pressure on their wages and housing.
Plenty of room for more British Research Fellows now too to get those posts without the competition of Fellows imported from abroad
Universities - one of the last sectors where Britain still has world class institutions.
Tory Party - hold my beer.
If you are a foreigner and a world class academic you will earn more than the £38k a year you need to stay in the UK on any definition
I'm adding universities to the long list of things you have no clue about, then.
Nobody can be a 'world class academic' on any definition if they earn less than £38k a year, indeed to be a 'world class academic' most would be able to command 6 figure salaries at any university or college they wished to go to
Depends how you look at it.
Firstly, what is an academic?
If this class includes basic post-docs then the world class might apply as the recruitment net is world-wide (subject to visa etc).
I worked for years in universities and the PhD/Post-doc/ junior research fellow segment was often non-UK.
Also, much of research is now effectively teamwork (some always was, vide Cuvier and his school in Paris in the early C19 for instance). HYUFD is insane if he thinks not allowing the top grade without allowing the lower grades is going to work. Of course, it would be the courteous thing to assume he is sane and deliberately wants to run British universities into the ground just because.
I hadn’t quite appreciated the numbers involved in the Ukraine drone war.
https://euromaidanpress.com/2023/12/07/inside-ukraines-campaign-to-crush-russia-with-combat-drones/?sw345d … Ukraine buys 60% of the total production volume of Chinese Mavic drones, excluding other UAV purchases, Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal stated during the Kyiv International Economic Forum. The minister most likely referred to both state and volunteer-purchased drones, according to the data of the customs service.
“This year, we have allocated an additional UAH 40 billion to purchase drones. These are drones of Ukrainian and foreign production. Ukraine buys 60% of the entire world production of Mavic,” Shmyhal said…
The west needs to take a good look at how much China dominates world production. Soon.
I was reading a sci-fi novel this week which postulated a near future with the two dominant powers being China and...Japan, with the USA coming up in a distant third.
I assumed it must have been published a long time ago, but no, 2011, making it seem a little less plausible.
@LeeAndersonMP_ For too long these namby pamby, hand-wringing, pearl clutching, Britain bashing, EU fanatics, and illegal migrants encouraged by lefty lawyers with no moral compass haved used our courts to frustrate democracy. Parliament is sovereign and we must stop the boats. We must deliver on behalf of the Great British public.
I concur, it really is time to see the end of lefty liberal hand wringing Labour home secretaries such as May, Patel and Braverman. We need a General Election sharpish to see the end of 13 years of Labour government and it is surely only fair we give the Conservatives a fair chance to sort out this lefty mess.
Your on a winner 2 horses to ride next time for the Tories
Seattle Times ($) - ‘Escape liberal hell’: Republicans really are fleeing WA
Danny Westneat - At first, the ads seemed like a pandemic-era curiosity, a niche political pitch playing on the red state, blue state divide.
“Escape liberal hell,” counseled one sales video from a Boise, Idaho, real estate agent. “Here are seven reasons conservatives flock to Idaho.” . . .
The idea that people would pick up and move solely for politics has seemed like a stretch. Moving for a job, schools, space, a rural lifestyle, yes. People relocate for all sorts of reasons — nearly 250,000 moved here from another U.S. state last year, with 258,000 going the other way, the Census Bureau says.
But now, there’s solid evidence that some people really are migrating over partisanship.
This past week, Idaho released a database of voters who have moved into that state, along with where they came from and what political party they signed up for when they got there. . . .
The political makeup of who has moved to Idaho is eye-opening. It is, as the Idaho Capital Sun news site called it, a “Republican fever dream.”
Of about 119,000 voters who relocated to Idaho in recent years, 65% signed up as Republican. That’s significantly higher than the partisan makeup of the state already, which is 58% GOP.
Only 12% of the newcomers registered as Democrats. About 21% picked “unaffiliated” and 2% chose a third party such as Libertarian.
The data explodes the myth that liberals, untethered due to remote work, might be moving to Idaho or other red states from San Francisco and Seattle and potentially turning the interior more purple. The exact opposite is happening — people are segregating into like-minded, polarized, geographical camps.
Sixty-two percent of Washingtonians who moved to Idaho registered as Republicans, the data shows. Only 12% were Democrats. Ours is a 60-40 blue state, roughly, so this means Republicans are preferentially sorting themselves out of Washington state at high rates. . . .
From Seattle, the data shows 34% who relocated to Idaho were GOPers. (Seattle tends to vote only about 10% Republican.) . . . .
It is a fever dream for Idaho Republicans to turn that state into a fortress against liberalism — an American redoubt, some of them call it.
But red migration like this to the interior is a nightmare for the Washington state GOP. Its own customers are fleeing.
You can now even choose your real estate agent by their politics. The company GOP Agent “is here to help you connect with a Real Estate Agent who shares your Republican ideals and values,” their website says.
“One of our realtors held an info session in Seattle (about moving to a red State), and had over 150 attendees,” according to the Conservative Move Facebook page. “The interest in moving to red states is not slowing down.”
I hope they warned them that Idaho has a state income tax. [Washington State does NOT.] Could be a sticker shock upon arrival.
There was an excellent Vox video a couple of years ago about how - in America - people are increasingly ghettoized. Democrats only know Democrats. Republicans only know Republicans.
And this is incredibly unhealthy. And, candidly, toxic for democracy. We need to know and understand why people have different views to us.
Even here inner cities are increasingly left liberal and rural areas conservative.
Suburbs and commuter towns do still have more of a mix of political views and thus determine elections too
The “rural areas conservative” rule which by and large applies in most of the country will be tested in the next election in a few areas, notably the Lib Dem targets in the SW.
Even there there are fewer LD rural target seats than in the 1990s.
Of the top 50 LD target seats most are in the Home counties or southern Remain seats.
This reflects Lib Dem blue wall thinking, which I think is potentially misplaced - overestimating their chances in the stockbroker belt and underestimating their chances in deep rural parts of the West. Certainly local election results (and a couple of by-elections) seem to bear this out.
Even in the local elections in May the Tories held councils in pro Brexit SW areas like Torbay the LDs won in 1997 while the LDs took control of lots of councils in Remain stockbroker belt Surrey and Oxfordshire where the Tories held seats in 1997.
And of course even in the by elections the LDs won a bigger majority in stockbroker belt Chesham and Amersham than say rural SW Tiverton and Honiton
I don’t expect them to return to 1997 levels but the point is this is a region the Tories have pretty much taken as read for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows about the trends in the blue wall but they’ve largely forgotten the blue hedgerow. Any gains there would have much greater shock factor than gains in Surrey.
Tiverton and Honiton and North Shropshire saw huge swings - 34 and 29%. I think the West will be an interesting region to watch,
In by elections on protest vote, in the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey.
On national swing indeed only 2 of the top 50 LD target seats are in Devon compared to 6 of the top 50 in Surrey. And no, Tory losses in Surrey would be far more of a shock than in Devon which has elected Liberal MPs on a regular basis as far back as Thorpe and beyond. True Blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent in the Australian elections last year
You’re arguing against yourself there. “In the local elections the LDs won no more councils in Devon than they did in Surrey”: put another way, the LDs won as many councils in forgotten, recently written off Devon as in blue wall heartland where Tory MPs are quaking in their boots Surrey.
“True blue Surrey would be demographically similar to the wealthy Teal seats traditionally Liberal which went Teal Independent”: exactly, everyone has their eyes pinned on the blue wall. They saw what happened in Australia, and in the period after Brexit vote. They expect - rightly or wrongly - big LD advances there. They are ignoring the old Liberal heartland, and wider Wessex and Marches.
I expect a larger than national swing in the West, partly because it swung so far against the Lib Dems in 2015 and 2017.
The Yellow Wall!
No, That is Richmond Park, Kingston Upon Thames, Twickenham, Bath and West Oxford now
Two of which do actually have yellow walls as they’re build from oolitic limestone.
The political map of Macron support in France is an interesting analogue for areas of Lib Dem strength. Large swathes of rural Western France in areas that never industrialised. Plus the posher riverine suburbs of Paris and the limestone ridges of Eastern France (which tend to be the viticultural areas).
Vineyards are also an interesting divining rod for Lib Dem strength. The only areas they do well in councils in Kent for example are in the Eastern downs near Canterbury, and the high Weald around and South of Tunbridge Wells. Both clusters of vineyards. And in Essex they run Chelmsford which is the viticulture capital of the Crouch Valley.
And Spa Towns from Bath to Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham to Harrogate
Which differs from Macron a little as the spa towns in France seem to vary politically. And Vichy of course has a somewhat in-liberal history.
I was in Aix les Bains last week and took in the hot baths, which was fun.
I will miss tha LD association with religious nonconformism once it's last traces dissipate.
It’ll possibly never fully dissipate. The maps that overlay voting patterns in various countries with odd socioeconomic-religious dividing lines from the middle ages are always fascinating.
Like the Danelaw and Brexit, and the Angevin lands and Macron support.
While the religious dimension to Nonconformism is fading fast, the underlying belief system with its suspicion of top down authority and desire for grass roots control is as strong as ever.
Indeed. The older I grow, the more respect I have for the likes of the Quakers and the Free Kirks and the more contempt for the servile, crawling Establishment churches.
It was a great treat to visit Scarborough Castle a few years ago and discover the ruined corner where George Fox the Quaker was imprisoned by the Stuarts. Memorable also for finding bee orchids in the grass there.
And no doubt therefore also respect for the anti gay marriage views of Kate Forbes and her fellow Free Kirkers
You might want to study some actual Scottish history
He only needs to know how well it would stand up to a tank invasion.
Well, here's some reading to keep him oujt of mischief.
NEW: The cost of the govt’s Rwanda scheme has *doubled* before a single migrant has been sent there. Home Office admits tonight it has handed over another £100m this year, on top of the original £140m cost - with a further £50m to follow next year
I hadn’t quite appreciated the numbers involved in the Ukraine drone war.
https://euromaidanpress.com/2023/12/07/inside-ukraines-campaign-to-crush-russia-with-combat-drones/?sw345d … Ukraine buys 60% of the total production volume of Chinese Mavic drones, excluding other UAV purchases, Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal stated during the Kyiv International Economic Forum. The minister most likely referred to both state and volunteer-purchased drones, according to the data of the customs service.
“This year, we have allocated an additional UAH 40 billion to purchase drones. These are drones of Ukrainian and foreign production. Ukraine buys 60% of the entire world production of Mavic,” Shmyhal said…
The west needs to take a good look at how much China dominates world production. Soon.
I was reading a sci-fi novel this week which postulated a near future with the two dominant powers being China and...Japan, with the USA coming up in a distant third.
I assumed it must have been published a long time ago, but no, 2011, making it seem a little less plausible.
Oh, which one was that, please?
Through Struggle, the Stars, by John Lumpkin. Pretty decent, definitely more of a character and political focused story as a cold war turns hot in space, than more fantastical fare.
Comments
But not FURRIN so you will be only too happy with the decline of British universities.
Tory Party - hold my beer.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-67647379
That's how it works now, it seems.
He'll be wearing his Gazza Strip.
I was in Aix les Bains last week and took in the hot baths, which was fun.
Europe must face up to colonial legacy and support reparations say MEPs.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/06/eu-must-face-legacy-of-colonialism-and-support-reparations-say-meps
“ Pierrette Herzberger-Fofana, a German MEP representing the Greens-European Free Alliance, will present the draft resolution to the European parliament’s development committee on Thursday, and hopes to table the draft as an emergency resolution at the European parliament in the coming weeks.
She said a greater understanding of the roots of European racism would promote a “more nuanced understanding of migration issues” and added that textbooks across Europe needed to be revised to give schoolchildren a better understanding of the slave trade and colonialism
I wonder how the people polled would define a 'strong economy'.
I suspect there would be many mutually exclusive answers plus plenty of 'the government giving more money to people like me'.
GDP doesn't work for obvious reasons. GDP per capita is better but is also influenced by our changing demographic profile and changes in working patterns. For example, if strong productivity growth led to people working less, that wouldn't show up as a "strong economy".
Affordable housing
Opportunities for individual development
Appropriate investment for future in capital and human resources
Living within means
Adequate resources and financial reserves to deal with crises
Some points are more 'societal' than specifically economic.
Look at what that is doing to universities.
Of course, you don't give a shit about academic standards.
Look at Macron along the Jurassic ridges of Eastern France where the vineyards are.
For most people maximising quality of life is likely to be mutually exclusive with maximising income or economic activity.
The Times often bewails this discovery:
But the latest happiness polling from Ipsos shows Britons no longer equate success with long hours of toil. They want to enjoy home ownership and financial security but are less interested in collecting physical possessions than they were before the pandemic. Increasingly few want to hustle. The UK is now a nation of “satisficers” rather than “maximisers”, with 51 per cent content with what they have and only 4 per cent equating success with working long hours; 47 per cent see achievement as “retiring early”.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/furlough-robbed-our-workforce-of-its-mojo-ww5fm77rw
Affordable Housing can mean whatever you want it to mean - I'd be looking at an affordable mix of housing including a strong well-regulated rental sector as it's not all about home ownership.
What of public services especially those used by the poorest in society? What of maintaining and improving health and education infrastructure and provision? You could argue a strong economy promotes not just individual wealth but individual wellbeing through public health education promoting healthier lifestyle choices to take the pressure off health facilities?
I'd also add a strong exporting sector bringing in wealth and infrastructural spending to improve transport and other connections (such as digital rollout to all areas).
Like the Danelaw and Brexit, and the Angevin lands and Macron support.
The problem is that sectors like education, health and social care cannot sustain the same productivity growth as elsewhere. That's why I see a larger proportion of the labour supply being directed to public services in the future.
It was a great treat to visit Scarborough Castle a few years ago and discover the ruined corner where George Fox the Quaker was imprisoned by the Stuarts. Memorable also for finding bee orchids in the grass there.
(See France for example.)
"Yes, immigration may be a million a year, but as a percentage that's lower than it was when it was 990,000, so we're actually slowing the rate."
If you have a population of 10 million and have a million immigrants in a year; if you have a population of 200 million and a million immigrants a year is a lot smaller percentage.
I'd say we'd all have different priorities based on personal experiences and viewpoints.
But overall I think a bit of moderation, even in good things, is sensible.
So the odd year when unemployment is higher or housing less affordable or the country has to deal with a crisis is acceptable and even, cynical thought, might remind people not to be complacent about how fortunate they normally are.
For me the problems set in when a negative aspect becomes endemic and then accepted as 'normal' - for example unemployment from 1975 onwards or unaffordable housing in southern England or the trade deficit during this last generation.
Tory MP Rachel Maclean, one of several deputy chairs of the party, tells GB News the Rwanda vote *will* be a confidence issue. “Of course it's about confidence in the government and what it delivers."
@LeeAndersonMP_
For too long these namby pamby, hand-wringing, pearl clutching, Britain bashing, EU fanatics, and illegal migrants encouraged by lefty lawyers with no moral compass haved used our courts to frustrate democracy. Parliament is sovereign and we must stop the boats. We must deliver on behalf of the Great British public.
🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧⬆️"
https://twitter.com/LeeAndersonMP_/status/1732829545256890828
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/12/07/tory-chairman-warns-ousting-rishi-sunak-insanity-rwanda/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-67647472
Germany's Scholz lights first candle as Hanukkah celebrated around the world
Indeed, it's remarkable how much higher immigration is now than in 2018 and 2019 (which are both pre-pandemic) and when net-migration averaged 265k/year range.
Now some of this, I suspect, is because of a bounceback in student numbers post pandemic. In 2020, there was a big negative student number as people went back to their home countries when the pandemic hit, so the total number of students in the UK declined sharply. Even account for this, it is still quite astonishing how many more people are coming to the UK, especially in the context of net EU migration being negligible.
Whereas you want to prevent lots of British phd students from being able to get research posts in academia after qualification by giving half those posts to foreign immigrants!
At least we are all clear - its a scorched earth strategy. Wreck as many things as possible in the months that remain.
Is it the utilitarian idea of preparing people for a life time of work?
Is it to push the boundaries of knowledge and ideas?
Is it to innovate and research?
Is it a social finishing school for those who wish to join the British middle classes?
Is it a product to sell to overseas students as an income earner for the country?
We really haven't decided, and these objectives do have quite fundamental clashes.
Is it only circumstance that means Lee isn't pushing people out of helicopters or helping to disappear protestors?
I assume he wont have a problem then when the House of Lords blocks this?
https://twitter.com/broseph_stalin/status/1732873318674337998
We set a target to get 600,000 students, which we met.
We gave 3m Hong Kong British Overseas Nationals the right to live here, a small percentage of which have decided to.
We gave refuge to Ukrainian refugees in significant numbers.
That alone gives numbers that are higher than average before you consider the massive backlogs in health and care sectors where are unwilling/unable to pay the salaries to keep staff let alone recruit new ones without importing people.
I don't count the number of PhD students - British or foreign - as an unequivocal index of economic wellbeing.
Even ChatGPT can't plaster my ceiling.
NEW: The cost of the govt’s Rwanda scheme has *doubled* before a single migrant has been sent there. Home Office admits tonight it has handed over another £100m this year, on top of the original £140m cost - with a further £50m to follow next year
@PaulBrandITV
Cost of the Rwanda scheme has rocketed from £140m to £290m according to
@JasonGroves1
I do believe Parliament is sovereign. I think it can do a lot of things it probably should not and I would rather it not, including superceding other very reasonable laws if it wants to and actually covers it off properly in legislation (which it often does not, hence losing cases in court).
But politicians at least often mean 'the government' when they say 'Parliament', and are wrong to do so.
Though one pet peeve of mine is when a government loses a vote and people talk about Parliament demonstrating its authority etc, when the exact same statement would be true if the government won the vote, since Parliament demonstrates its authority by agreeing to the government's requests all the time.
Firstly, what is an academic?
If this class includes basic post-docs then the world class might apply as the recruitment net is world-wide (subject to visa etc).
I worked for years in universities and the PhD/Post-doc/ junior research fellow segment was often non-UK.
I'm sure he still believes what he says, but he has one eye on his brand, for sure.
Tories pandering to lowest common denominator
https://euromaidanpress.com/2023/12/07/inside-ukraines-campaign-to-crush-russia-with-combat-drones/?sw345d
… Ukraine buys 60% of the total production volume of Chinese Mavic drones, excluding other UAV purchases, Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal stated during the Kyiv International Economic Forum. The minister most likely referred to both state and volunteer-purchased drones, according to the data of the customs service.
“This year, we have allocated an additional UAH 40 billion to purchase drones. These are drones of Ukrainian and foreign production. Ukraine buys 60% of the entire world production of Mavic,” Shmyhal said…
The west needs to take a good look at how much China dominates world production. Soon.
I assumed it must have been published a long time ago, but no, 2011, making it seem a little less plausible.
http://journals.socantscot.org/index.php/psas/article/view/9670
You have to admire their entrepreneurship and chutzpah.