How the papers are covering Sunak’s dangerous Monday – politicalbetting.com
How the papers are covering Sunak’s dangerous Monday – politicalbetting.com
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How the papers are covering Sunak’s dangerous Monday – politicalbetting.com
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Got final bill through from sols for the best part of a grand but at least we know our I'll fated purchase of our old horse is at an end,
Better half received email she's getting the 10k pay rise she wanted - so by July she'll outearn me xD
All in all after the death of our rabbit at the weekend a better Tuesday than most.
"Can I get a Re-Wanda?"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/dec/13/uk-at-high-risk-of-catastrophic-ransomware-attack-report-says
The UK government is at high risk of a “catastrophic ransomware attack” that could “bring the country to a standstill” because of poor planning and a lack of investment, a parliamentary committee has warned.
In a damning report, the joint committee on the national security strategy warned that the UK could face a crippling cyber-attack on its critical national infrastructure (CNI) at any moment. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) describes the CNI as national assets that are essential for the functioning of society, including energy supply, water supply, transportation, health and telecommunications...
...The report said the government was failing to invest sufficiently to prevent large-scale cyber-attacks and criticised the Home Office, who claim the lead on ransomware as a policy issue, and former home secretary Suella Braverman, for failing to make the issue a priority.
The committee said Braverman “showed no interest in [ransomware]. Clear political priority is given instead to other issues, such as illegal migration and small boats.”..
...
'Four is too thin and six too woolly and five worked for Blair..... '
A quick glance at the polls gave his team the first four but the fifth without repetition was proving stubborn.....Then as the midnight oil burnt and the coca cola flowed someone was heard saying .......
"Shall we ask Suella?"
In the month of October, GDP fell 0.3%.
➡️ ons.gov.uk/economy/grossd…
https://twitter.com/ONS/status/1734830520742060079?t=ecKRICiN7RpNRpMV5elhWQ&s=19
Ukraine’s HUR disrupts Russian Tax Service, erases entire database, full recovery impossible
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/ukraine-hur-disrupts-russian-tax-155000773.html
But most importantly, an obsessive focus on the very short term detracts from focusing on our main economic problem: that, long term, we have all but stopped growing. And often measures to raise growth in the long term have adverse effects in the short term, as Mrs Thatcher discovered in the early 80s. So if I had my way, I'd stop the production of very short-term numbers - it's an American practice, partly reflecting and partly causing the very short-term focus of US financial markets, and, like so many American habits we've imported, it is hurting not helping us.
Nonetheless it is fine to publish such figures, just not over interpret them.
At that point you have to ask if you are actually generating misinformation.
That applies of course when the figures are showing growth too. It's a bit like polling and SKSFPE. You need to look at the average over the long term.
(I agree about the unreliability of short term statistics, but that's a very poor reason not to publish them.)
In any case, slowing down the economy through higher interest rates was the plan to stop inflation, so why the complaints?
I do have to ask the remaining PB Tories what the appeal of their party is supposed to be to ordinary voters. We now have the "Five Families" of Tory MPs - which sounds like the mafia until you remember how shit they are. The country is beaten and broken and crumbling, with people's lived experience an increasingly bewildered mess wondering how things got this bad. And you're all off knifing each other in the front doing performative stupidity.
I know there have been a few attempts on here to deflect onto Starmer - the man who forced Tory MPs to implode their own majority in 2015. But normals think you are crazy, not he...
That’s the basic theory behind modern government.
Perish the thought, and I know there are people who don’t understand them, but it’s always helpful in the circumstances to draw a graph and look at the overall trend!
You may recall 2010-2015, when thanks to Lord Ashcroft there were daily YouGovs. We ended up looking at the daily tree and ignoring/wilfully misinterpreting the die-back in the LibDem forest
Ukraine's largest mobile operator Kyivstar downed by 'powerful' cyberattack
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ukraines-largest-mobile-operator-kyivstar-170003054.html
1) We should judge governments on whether we are in a recession or not
2) We need different courses of future action depending on whether we are in a recession or not
Neither is helpful. I would suggest whether we are in a technical recession or not should have less than 1% influence on both points 1 and 2.
https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=365020
The Daily YouGovs were nothing to do with Lord Ashcroft.
In late 2009 and until the 2015 GE we had daily* YouGovs which were commissioned by News International for The Sun and The Sunday Times.
*5 days a week.
The YouGovs were in part the reason how I became deputy editor of PB.
Big shoutout to Chris Huhne too.
The former New Jersey governor is banking his entire campaign on New Hampshire.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/12/sununus-haley-endorsement-is-a-huge-blow-to-chris-christie-00131396
The difference between either of those numbers and the sort of growth we probably need to make the country function is clear and it's been that way for quite a while now.
If Thames Water has to be nationalised, so be it. Ofwat should not be bullied
https://www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2023/dec/12/thames-water-nationalised-ofwat-mps-customers
It's a safe prediction that Ofwat is likely to fold to the shareholders' pressure, at the expense of customers.
If the working population increased by 1% (due to immigration) and domestic GDP increases by 0.1% that’s a hell of a drop in GDP per capita because 100.1/101 is really a 0.8% decrease in GDP per capita.
Add inflation at x% and you can see why a lot of people feel worse off - because things are never distributed equally.
Leicester heading up for sure and should finish top, Ipswich doing really well and could get back to back promotions.
Reality is I would be asking Thames Water what assets have been used to secure any loans to emphasis that any who has lent them money is about see at the very minimum a serious haircut
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-67700088
We'll know within the year.
In the North East we were rinsed for 15% on our latest bills.
When push came to shove they have had some excellent by-election results.
an excessive focus on GDP encourages problematic and excessive state interventions. Sir John Cowperthwaite, a governor of Hong Kong, famously refused to compile statistics on the gross output of Hong Kong on the basis that it would just lead to the temptation to unnecessarily 'manage' the economy
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/106566/html/
He was smart enough to step to one side and let it develop.
'Graduates used to vote Conservative by a majority of 20%. In 2019 it reversed..' etc
So aggregating to a single figure….
There is indeed a revolving door between the regulator and the industry, as in most regulators, but I know of only one instance where that clearly influenced regulatory decision making, and that wasn't in the water sector (somebody was about to join a regulated company which was under investigation for some violation or other, and, surely after he left, it was discovered that the papers relating to the investigation were missing, so the investigation had to be dropped. It was the days before electronic filing and obsessive backups of everything). I'm not usually one for given civil servants the benefit of the doubt, but most of the Ofwat staff I dealt with do their best to act in customers' interests. Their over-cautious decisions are due to their legal duties and the nature of the industry, not because they hope to get jobs in the regulated companies.
If the hypothesis is correct and the public want to give a punishment beating to the Tories, there are a stack of seats where the LDs are the weapon of choice...
Polling from YouGov, carried out before last night’s crunch vote on the Rwanda bill, found 70% of people said they had an unfavourable opinion of Sunak, compared with 21% who had a favourable opinion.
It means the prime minister has been given his lowest ever net favourability score of minus 49, a drop of 10 points from late November.
Sunak also faced a new low among 2019 Tory voters, whom he is keen to hold on to ahead of the next election. With that group 56% had a negative view of the prime minister, compared with 40% who had a positive view.
The new figures, seen by The Times, mean Sunak’s overall net favourability score is comparable with Johnson’s during his final months in office, which was minus 46 immediately after he resigned and dropped to minus 53 a month later.
However, it is not as low as Liz Truss’s, which dropped to minus 70.
Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, also saw his score fall nine points to minus 22, with 32% of Britons holding a positive opinion of him compared with 54% who had a negative one.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rishi-sunak-popularity-approval-poll-rating-prime-minister-csr79qbnc
I have no enthusiasm whatsoever for the current lot, but my view is that everything they are wrong about, for me, Labour are wronger. Obvious example being lockdown.
Though I'm afraid we sold the pass on "problematic and excessive state interventions" decades ago.
Pi is 3
There is a huge hole opening up in British politics on the soft centre-right. Somewhere roundabout where liberalism ought to sit. If the Lib Dems want a future as a major party, they need to target it ruthlessly and push the Tories into the fringes where they can merge with Reform. That could comfortably sit within their vote coalition but be beyond Labour's.
However, no doubt they'll go back to comfort-zone politics and play with their bar charts.
Just thought some might appreciate it!
(or 11, almost 12 if we work in years)
Agree LD polling is awful. Agree with @OldKingCole being 4th and not 3rd in the HofC really doesn't help, especially with the media. Agree that a good campaign for the Tories would be to convince the voters that Labour are an empty vessel and stem their losses. Similarly to hold off the LDs in the South. But realistically a good result at this stage is not being massacred.
If the LDs can get into the 30 - 50 seat range and ahead of the SNP I think they will be back in the game in the next parliament so the Tories really don't want that to happen.
@MarqueeMark was rather good on his predictions for the LDs in his part of the world (the bastard) so I will be looking out for your predictions this time around Mark.
If Ofwat's "main priority' was to finance a huge program of capex, why did Ofwat allow the extraction of so much capital from companies like Thames by successive owners and bondholders ?
The return to early owners like Macquarie was way beyond what a well functioning market might have demanded - and Thames in particular (and much of the industry in general) has been financially crippled ever since.
Add to that the decisions of managements to finance long term capex with short term borrowings which now need refinancing at higher rates, and the entire exercise has been a disaster.
"The nature of the industry" is meaningless.
And the nature of "legal duties" is defined by government.
You're effectively arguing that Ofwat is a passive bystander - in which case any serious regulator who took the public interest seriously would have said publicly that their job was impossible, and resigned.
Government can borrow more cheaply than private companies. If private management is as incompetent as government when it comes to running a business, then what is the point of privatisation ?
There's no competition to improve things; these are monopolies. Get rid.
This is why I have been a life-long advocate of a fairer voting system People should be free to vote for what they want, not be forced to vote against what they don't want.
Cowperthwaite used to be put forward as an exemplar quite a lot: it's nice to see him still cited in the 2020s. But the tenor of the times is towards greater govt interference, not less: the Rwanda Bill, where the Govt says what is a safe country, is a ginormous govt overreach.
1. There will almost certainly be deportations to Rwanda this side of a general election.
2. That, along with tax cuts in early 2024, will drive something of a Tory comeback. Labour minority or small majority looks like a much better bet than Labour landslide.
3. The post-fascist Tory far-right is nowhere near as powerful as they and the media have led us to believe. There is a very low likelihood of the Braverman/Jenrick branch of the PCP providing the party's next leader. If 1 and 2 do happen, Cleverley is surely likeliest to succeed Sunak.
Will Hayward
@WillHayCardiff
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36m
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Rumours Mark Drakeford may announce he is stepping down today.
Nothing confirmed but heard from multiple sources.
New leader election in January potentially.