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Rishi Sunak has taken my advice – politicalbetting.com
Rishi Sunak has taken my advice – politicalbetting.com
NEW — Rishi Sunak: "My working assumption is we'll have a general election in the second half of this year." https://t.co/PwIa4rQtu3
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It doesn’t work which is why November / December seems more plausible.
You eventually end up back in May because the other options are insane
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024 - 9%
2. Date of the next UK General Election - 14th November
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called - Sunak, Starmer, Davey, Yousaf, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%) - Labour win, 64 seat majority
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems - Trump & Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner - Biden
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024 - 3.75%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 4.2%) - 2.3%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn) - £89bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64) - 61
The election is absolutely going to be in October or November. All of this talk of May is nonsense. The government will want whatever tax cuts they are pushing through in March to land in people's pay for a significant amount of time, for interest rates to be falling with inflation to be at or below 2% and for petrol prices to have stabilised at 125p - 130p. All of those will happen after the summer, not before. In addition waiting until October or November will mean people will have had a year's worth of real terms pay rises, they will feel much better off in November than they will in May, especially with mortgage rates dropping below 4% already.
If the polls turn round by mid-March, a May election is still on. (They almost certainly won't, but that's another matter.)
"Why did you lie about the election date, Prime Minister?"
E.g. calling what's sold as a snapper ("coincidentally" on the same day as the London mayoral) to show the judges the extent to which the government is in tune with the will of the people as regards stopping boats coming in and sending full planes out in the other direction.
News items: Prime Minister Tells Judges to Stay Out of the Election, followed by Sadiq Khan Addresses Londoners in Urdu.
How will that play in the "Red Wall", to use a soon to be outdated term? ("Doughnut" might be the replacement term of art, with London as the hole.)
Brace for the nastiest election in living memory.
Who could possibly have foreseen this?
A source close to Keir Starmer told HuffPost before Christmas: “If Sunak doesn’t call an election for May then it just shows he’s weak and a bottler. We’ll just spend months hammering home that message.”
"Rishi Sunak wants to continue to squat in Downing Street".
Shadow paymaster general @JonAshworth says he thinks the British public consider the PM to be "weak and desperate".
https://trib.al/LlS4FAA
I suspect Spring 2024 may have turned out to be his best chance and he is being nicely manouvered out of the option.
And Rishi is bottling it (pun intended).
Certainly NOT Sherman-esque in classic sense.
Starmer had the chance to do something re housing but theres nothing to back it up.
In the end he'll wibble and do nothing.
1. The smallest Labour lead with a BPC registered pollster in Q1 2024. = 10%
2. Date of the next UK General Election. = 27 October 2024
3. Party leaders of Con, Lab, LD, SNP, and Reform when the GE is called = Sunak, Starmer, Davey, Yousaf, Tice
4. UK General Election outcome: winning party + majority (±10%). = Lab with a 50-seat majority
5. 2024 US Presidential Election: nominees for the GOP and Dems. = Trump and Biden
6. 2024 US Presidential Election: winner. = Biden
7. UK base rate on 31 December 2024. = 4.25%
8. UK CPI figure for November 2024 (Nov 2023 = 4.2% - correction 3.9%, 4.2% was CPIH). = 3.5%
9. UK borrowing in the financial year-to-November 2024 (Year to Nov 2023 = £116.4bn). = £120 bn
10. GB total medal haul at the 2024 Olympics ( 2020/21 = 64). = 40
"Make Britain Boring Again" is probably pretty popular with the voters. At least part of the appeal of "Get Brexit Done" was the (untrue) idea that we would be able to stop thinking about it.
See also this line from Starmer's speech today;
“I promise this- a politics which treads a little lighter on all our lives. That’s the thing about populism or nationalism…It needs your full attention, needs you constantly focussing on this week’s common enemy. And that’s exhausting.”
Has Ed Davey resigned yet?
Conversely the worse the government are doing in polling the bigger a problem the May locals will be, because they'll deliver yet another blow only a few months out from a GE. Whereas burying them together with a general takes this risk away.
He just needs some credible pretext like defeat on Rwanda or whatever in the Lords or courts to say, "My preference was to wait and take the Parliament to term... but the People's Priorities cannot wait and it's important I get a mandate now so I can overcome the unelected judges, woke bureaucrats, and metropolitan elite Barons, and get things done the Rishi way - without delay."
Some years ago, I learned that Alabama gave its sheriffs fixed amounts per day for each inmate in the county jails. If the sheriff was efficient in feeding the prisoners, he was allowed to keep any money he saved out of those amounts. Not surprisingly, some inmates lost signficant amounts of weight, even during short stays in the jails. (As I recall, as much as two stones, or more.)
It occurred to me that -- as desperate as some people are to lose weight -- an entrepreneur might be able to learn from this experience. and market Alabama Jailhouse diets.
(For the record: I believe they changed the system in Alabama, soon after the stories about the abuse came out.)
As for his claim of less politics I cant see a lawyer unburdening the nation by having fewer laws,
Also, he may hope for the gap to close a little. After all, as I said on the previous thread the Labour share at the 2010 GE was higher than their voteshare in the 2009 locals, as the Tory share at the 1997 GE was slightly higher than their voteshare at the 1996 locals even if Brown and Major still lost
In fact, the whole argument that holding UK GE24 at approx same time as US GE24 would be problematic, is gobbledygook.
Note that in Canada - USA's nearest & dearest neighbor - federal general elections have often been scheduled in proximity to POTUS elections south of the Great White North.
For example: 1972, 1988, 2000, 2008
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GzjM2Yg0ih4MLcoAKDHpfGF-YS5gMFQaWfFjM8bhOAU/edit?usp=sharing
So he has now gone into reverse, and more or less said that it will be in the autumn, so everybody slows down a bit, especially the opposition parties.
All Sunak has to do is change his mind once again, and he catches everybody out.
Would anybody put that scenario past him?
If he goes longer
Giveaway budget laughed apart or forces another market scare
Tories get an utter demolition in the locals
Banckbenchers go at him and each other all summer long
Endless NHS crisis
Big spike in small boats and deadlock on the Rwanda bill
Recession / at best flat economy + tax rises make people feel poor
King is away in October, threat of chaos in UK in November
I know that @MaxPB postulates he goes long so that economic benefits get into people's pockets. There are no economic benefits. The "tax cut" is a tax rise, and any giveaway budget in May threatens another market collapse.
Whilst I am sure he is frit, and no decision will be easier than a decision, the longer this goes on the worse the result. cf 1978 and 2007.
IIRC, he wasn't what you'd call keen to get stuck into the Germans in 1940, '41, '42 & '43.
And for good reason(s).
It’s a good start to 2024 for Labour as their lead increases to 17 points in our latest @wethinkpolling poll.
These are numbers no govt wants going into an election year. The 2 point increase for the Reform Party will also have the govt worried.
Although I appreciate that a clash would prevent UK politico journos rinsing expenses en masse with a month or two stateside following the circus of the US presidential (the premier league of elections).
However, polls like the WeThink today giving Labour a 17-point lead aren't exactly going to entice him.
A contested riotous US election threatens the stability of the west. Which is why (reportedly) the UK senior civil service have told Sunak he can't have November.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/how-new-labour-abandoned-workers/ar-AA1mrK4b?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=0cb461ae62494ea2b195789f3a0ac8fa&ei=9
The biggest problem the NHS has right now is staff retention. If you interview the staff that are leaving, it’s not really the pay (although that is a problem) - what’s pushing them out is the constant stress and general incompetence of NHS management. The IT infrastructure is terrible & wastes absurd amounts of staff time & the internal culture is /awful/ in many hospital trusts. Staff simply no longer trust management at all in many places.
But these are all fixable things, if we had a government actually cared about them & tried to do the work. Instead of grandstanding about targets and turning the screw on NHS management, who in turn feel compelled to do the same to NHS staff in an engine of misery, we need a government that decides that what really matters is things like fixing NHS IT systems & payroll. Boring competence matters here. Boring competence delivers an NHS where the staff don’t dread going into work every day. Boring competence gets results, but those results come slowly & without fanfare.
Rinse & repeat the above across every part of government. We need more boring competence in this country.
Which is what I'm reckoning on, almost as a default. The sizzle will have faded from the tax cuts, more people will be paying more for their mortgages and some part of the public sector will have fallen over. Oh, and there's a real risk that Rwanda will have had to be put into operation and shown to be a nasty farce.
But if there isn't a winning election date before then, it's when the Grim Reaper finally reaps, unless the Conservatives really have a death wish.
I'm not voting Labour (obviously) so I don't have any skin in that game. But when the current government are literally doing nothing, the only threat to "Starmer will do nothing" is that the wrong party are in power. So what?
If you want something radical, other parties are available. Though under our electoral system a vote for Reclaim or Reform or National Health Action or whomever is an utter waste of time. Vote LibDem and support a proportional voting system...
As one of the housebuilders put it he wont build a single extra house in the next Parliament.
https://www.thelawyer.com/how-justice-done-in-post-office-scandal/?trk=feed_main-feed-card_feed-article-content
We should be having tomorrow the first polls of 2024 - WeThink and Techne I would imagine.
https://www.asianews.it/news-en/Bishop-Shao-of-Wenzhou-arrested-again-59866.html
We know that PMs have political instincts. We also know that the civil service are very good at instructing them as to what has to happen when their instincts clash with the greater good. Brown wanted instructed that he was PM and must stay so until there was a clear or at the very least sizeable chance that Cameron could replace him.
So whether Sunak wants late October or mid November or not, if the civil service tell him he can't, that's a problem you can't just ignore...
However, it's also the same day that I predicted. My reasoning was that Sunak can use the Tory conference in early October to unveil manifesto pledges, polish his legacy and go to the polls off his last best chance of some positive publicity. An early Oct dissolution points to mid-Nov for polling, given 35 days campaigning and a bit of wash-up - so 14 Nov.
Anyway, a close US election will take weeks to sort out, by which time a UK one will be long done-and-dusted.
There is a reason why there has never been a September election - glancing at Wikipedia the earliest autumn ones seems to have been on October 8th and that was when 17 days was required not 25.