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Trump needs a clear victory in Iowa – politicalbetting.com
Trump needs a clear victory in Iowa – politicalbetting.com
Just 4 days to go before the first set piece of this year’s White House when the opening salvos and first actual voting are in Iowa with its caucuses. This time there will only be a Republican Party caucus while the Democrats contest will take place in about six weeks.
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Oh, and first?
Probably.
Why both Keir Starmer and Ed Davey face questions over Horizon
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/keir-starmer-post-office-cases-legal-lawyer-w83c3v0c5
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-67751605
"If you’re saying it’s “Morning in America” when 77 percent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track, you’re preaching to the wrong choir — and the wrong country.
Trump’s opponents say this is the most important election of our lifetime. Isn’t it time, then, to take our heads out of the sand?"
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/11/opinion/columnists/donald-trump-election.html
Then cold but not snow. -4 on Monday.
https://x.com/bundeskanzler/status/1745361824881500244
https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-scholz-lambasts-alleged-afd-remigration-plan/a-67950294
"We will not allow someone to determine who is 'We' in our country according to whether a person has a history of immigration or not. We protect everyone — regardless of origin, skin color or how uncomfortable someone is for fanatics with assimilation fantasies."
@GoodwinMJ
How the Tory vote imploded. A deep dive into the collapse of British conservatism."
https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1745344934951923713
And, at the same time, about 15% of 2019 Tories –who are mainly older, pro-Brexit, and disillusioned with how the Tories are managing immigration and the small boats—are defecting instead to the Reform party.
As the British Election Study team have shown, many of the defections —whether to Labour or Reform— are now being driven by a more diffuse sense out there in the country that the Tories are simply no longer a competent party. That on the most critical issues facing Britain today –the state of the economy, the cost-of-living crisis, the NHS, the small boats, the level of immigration—the Tories have done a ‘bad job’. Such is this ‘crisis of competence’ that Labour now lead the Conservatives even on issues such as Brexit and immigration.
The Bates v Royal Mail documentary has been the most important public service broadcast I can remember and the anger felt across the country is palpable which must have consequences for those responsible and jail time
I do not think Starmer will have a problem, but certainly Ed Davey seems to be in real danger not least as a post mistress intends standing against him as an Independent
Indeed I would suggest that as there are over 650 SPMs involved they should form an independent party and stand in every constituency at the next GE
Alan Bates will be in our new constituency and if he stood we would vote for him in a heart beat ( quite appropriate for me at present)
From the politicians to the lawyers, to the Royal Mail and others, we need a fundamental change and absolute accountability
Keir Starmer will be PM later this year and he has a daunting task in front of him because if he fails, the fear is the right will rise, as they are across Europe, with untold consequences added to in spades if Trump also becomes POTUS
I intend focusing on my health and family going forward, but truly hope someday things will get better for the vast majority of ordinary people including the SPMs so shamefully abused by the establishment
BBC has Des Moines as -20C as the highest temperature during the day on the 15th.
The AfD are actually far right. They are several orders of magnitude nastier than Marine Le Pen's RN (they are though more akin to her father's original FN) or Giorgia Meloni's Brother's of Italy, which is closer to our Tories than to the AfD.
The Tories are unlikely to be back in Downing Street until Farage is in his seventies.
Longer if they're stupid enough to let him into the Party.
If there isn't one, that's when one needs to get suspicious.
It's great that the whole thing has exploded, finally, but at the same time it feels a pretty ludicrous state of affairs. At least to me it does. This is surely not the way things should work in this mature liberal democracy of ours.
It's an unusual experiment in left populism, though most observers are sceptical that she has enough allies to form a full national party - the aging ex-Communists who are the backbone of the Left Party are generally sniffy about her, and the wilder fringes of anti-establishment types who like her style aren't easy to corral into a coherent movement.
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/sahra-wagenknecht-eigene-partei-linke-100.html
I tell you what, rather than going for individual politicians, because by god there are dozens in the frame, not just these two, how about trying to solve the endemic problem of these events being swept under the carpet. Enough lives have been destroyed.
I could list out a whole lot of Tories involved in the post office scandal and the scandal I'm helping to resolve. I don't because it is pointless, because I could also make a list of the good guys and frankly both lists consist of MPs from all parties. It is the system.
I rather like @noneoftheabove post from the previous thread in reply to one of my posts:
'My quarterly call on here for cabinet ministers to need to have served 3 years either as a junior minister (or shadow) or on a relevant select committee to be eligible to serve. Would give us more interested and knowledgeable ministers and slightly reduce the power of the parties/PMs patronage.'
I would also like to see outside specialist appointments. It has been done a few times.
... Julian Blake, counsel for the inquiry, highlights various documents showing that Bradshaw was asked for information but gave little or nothing in response. Bradshaw repeatedly says that he relied on the Post Office’s lawyers to decide what should be disclosed. “I’m a small cog in this,” he says.
Asked if he ever had concerns when he realised the lawyers were refusing to hand over more documentation about wider problems with the Horizon system, Bradshaw says he cannot remember what was said.
But he repeats the point about how he viewed this as an issue for the lawyers, even though he was the disclosure officer in the case...
I'd no idea what the duties of a disclosure officer are, so did a quick search.
This is from the CPS website.
https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/disclosure-manual-chapter-3-roles-and-responsibilities
...An officer in charge of an investigation (OIC), an investigator and a disclosure officer perform different functions. The three roles may be performed by different people or by one person. Where the three roles are undertaken by more than one person, close consultation between them will be essential to ensure compliance with the statutory duties imposed by the CPIA and the Code of Practice.
The Chief Officer of each police force is responsible for putting in place arrangements to ensure that in every investigation the identity of the officer in charge of an investigation and the disclosure officer is recorded. It is their duty to ensure that disclosure officers have sufficient skills and authority, commensurate with the complexity of the investigation, to discharge their functions effectively. The rulings from the Court of Appeal in DS and TS [2015] EWCA Crim 662 and Boardman [2015] EWCA Crim 175, reinforce the personal responsibility of the Chief Constable (or equivalent) as well as the Chief Crown Prosecutor, for ensuring that amongst other things, officers appointed to act as disclosure officers are trained and competent to fulfil this role and are appropriately supervised by the investigative authority...
While this was of course a private prosecution, Bradshaw was a trained investigator who claims to have followed professional standards (see for example, his frequent references to PACE interviews).
'Since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, the quantity and virulence of antisemitic content on China’s tightly controlled internet — especially on its social media — have skyrocketed. This unprecedented surge in antisemitism online in China could be possible only with the blessing of the Chinese government, which appears to be using anti-Jewish hate as a tool of its anti-U.S. and anti-Western diplomacy.'
source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/08/china-antisemitism-online-tool-west-gaza/
They will do almost anything to divide us. Those here who get excited about every story including Jews are helping them.
https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/disclosure-manual-chapter-2-general-duties-disclosure-outside-cpia-1996
..The investigator or disclosure officer must inform the prosecutor as early as possible whether any material weakens the case against the accused. An evidential report to a prosecutor for a charging decision must contain the key evidence upon which the prosecution will rely, together with any unused material which satisfies the disclosure test.
A revised Code for Crown Prosecutors was published on 26 October 2018. Disclosure considerations have now been incorporated into the evidential stage of the Full Code Test.
The Code clarifies the timing of a charging decision either after all reasonable lines of enquiry have been pursued or prior to the investigation being completed, if the prosecutor is satisfied that any further evidence/material is unlikely to affect the application of the Full Code Test. The Code also clarifies that a prosecutor must have regard to any failure to pursue an advised reasonable line of inquiry or to comply with a request for information when deciding whether it is appropriate to defer a charging decision or whether the test can be met at all.
The Code revises the Threshold Test and it must only be applied in limited circumstances after a rigorous examination of all the five conditions. Consideration must be given to material that points away from a suspect. Review must be carried out at an earlier date, as soon as the expected further material is received, or in any event before the formal service of the prosecution case...
Section 3 of the CPIA envisages the possibility that some disclosure may already have been made before the statutory duty to make initial disclosure arises. This early disclosure is known as "common law disclosure", on which detailed guidance is given in R v DPP ex parte Lee [1999] 2 All ER 737. In essence, a prosecutor should consider whether justice and fairness require any immediate disclosure in the particular circumstances of the case.
In all cases, irrespective of anticipated plea, the officer must comply with the common law disclosure obligations and certify that, to the best of the officer's knowledge and belief, no information has been withheld which would assist the accused in the preparation of the defence case..
BREAKING: A former SNP councillor has defected to Scottish Labour, according to reports.
It is understood that Beth Baudo, who quit the SNP last year, has now joined Anas Sarwar's party in North Lanarkshire.
I predict if/when AfD get a gangrenous finger on the levers of power, certain folk (richly represented on here) will be doing the whole 'they're not really hard right or the heirs of Hitler' mantra.
Ian McCartney
Alan Johnson
Douglas Alexander
Stephen Timms
Gerry Sutcliffe
Jim Fitzpatrick
Pat McFadden
Lord Young of Norwood Green
Ed Davey
Norman Lamb
Jo Swinson (twice, before and after Jenny Willott)
Jenny Willott
Anna Soubry
Margot James
Andrew Griffiths
Kelly Tolhurst
Paul Scully
Jane Hunt
Dean Russell
Kevin Hollinrake
“ a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised
industries.”
and the story of
“ (a woman old-age pensioner) lives there. This is her story. She lost her husband and both her sons in the war”
because they were people the reader would identify with and feel sympathetic towards. There’d been plenty of speeches about immigration before that didn’t have an impact at all. No one on here was talking about the post office scandal as much as they are since the tv programme, even though @cyclefree wrote about it a lot just for us. It’s because stories with real characters in are more relatable than the raw facts and legal details
Not to criticise Cyclefree’s work at all, she was ahead of the game. But I must admit I didn’t read any of it until just now. I never really read many of the headers on here
And it's the plebs that suffer every time. Perhaps - just perhaps = if some of the people who think they matter - the managers, the lawyers, the politicians etc - start suffering for decisions they made, then they might actually try to do better in future.
It's probably a vain hope; but by God, I hope the people who did this to those people, and those who contributed to ignoring it for so many years, get their comeuppance.
Then they might start trying to make this mature liberal democracy of ours work.
It is already evidenced that the paper that went to the Board recommended not shortlisting the ICL bid, because of weaknesses. Strangely at the meeting it was shortlisted, and eventually chosen
And that in spite of serious weaknesses in Biden's record. Two examples: First, the continuing death toll from opiod overdoses, which contributed to the decline in US life expectancy, beginning in the last years of the Obama presidency.
Second, the serious problems with the US military, for example, the US Navy: 'Yet the Navy enters 2024 in rough seas: Its struggle to build new ships, maintain existing ones — and recruit sailors — will take time and money to solve.
For too long, Washington has engaged in magical thinking about all of this. Concerned about China’s growing maritime presence, Congress has lately been authorizing the purchase of about 11 new warships every year, but the United States has the industrial capacity to build only a portion of those. Lawmakers, for example, typically order two submarines and three destroyers a year; but there are only enough skilled workers and materials to build and finish one of the former and two of the latter. On net, Congress isn’t increasing the Navy — the fleet, in fact, will shrink by a ship or two in 2028. It’s just padding the order books of a few big defense contractors.'
source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/04/navy-houthis-ships-shipyards-sailors/
These problems predate he Biden administration, of course. But it is fair to say that our last three presidents, Obama, Trump, and Biden, have done little or nothing to solve them, may even have made them worse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_7Y6xGNlr0
Who quotes Enoch Powell in their 2024 posts? What about a Peter Griffiths election slogan to discourage voting Labour for good measure?
Fox News asks whether Taylor Swift is a Pentagon psyop
Agreed.
As Theuniondivvie says, this is a particular category: erstwhile extremist movements that come in partially from the cold albeit with lingering suspicions about how far into the warmth they've really come. There aren't really any obvious examples in the UK but Sinn Fein is a left wing Irish example and various former rebel groups now in power in Latin America are others. Perhaps we call them centripetal parties.
Then there are the opposite: erstwhile centre-right or centre-left parties that turn populist or even extremist. Orban's Fidesz is one example, Poland's PiS another and Putin's united Russia in theory another. And with Trump looking set to be the GOP candidate I think the US Republicans already crossed that threshold too. Centrifugal parties.
Therefore France's RN is on the centripetal populist right, while the Republicans and our Tories have since 2016 been on the centrifugal centre right. Which leaves parties that start at one point of the spectrum and stay there, like our Greens or Germany's CDU, which we can perhaps call geostationary orbiting parties.
To end this post on a positive note I am going to say something positive about an MP regarding the campaign I am involved in. There are quite a few MPs I could give a positive shout for, but I am going to pick one in particular:
Oliver Letwin was brilliant. He understood the details of the complaint and fought hard on the campaign's behalf. Sadly no longer an MP.
Trump 1.52 / 1.56
Haley 2.84 / 3.25
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/politics/market/1.223236887
Good list.
I think Lamb gets a pass for showing some kind of interest. Swinson appears to have been particularly cloth- eared.
As a general rule of thumb I think you can say that the earlier incumbents bear less blame and the newer ones significanly more, simply because the Scandal became increasingly obvious over time.
Edit: Smithson jnr and I did not collude on that.
FFS!
Letwin is one of my faves too. Nick Palmer is also a fan, I believe.
True. Flying on little airplanes is one of the hazards for American politicians. Here's partial list of such deaths, up to 2010:
https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/20/us/american-politician-plane-fatalities-fast-facts/index.html
A North Dakota state senator died in a crash last October: https://apnews.com/article/utah-plane-crash-moab-killed-a7064a4f3a883be6f920fb647d10c6ca
(I would like to think that US small planes are safer now than they were, say, 20 years ago, but haven't looked for any numbers.
"Yousaf says Scotland will 'in essence replicate' England's ban on having XL bully dogs without licence"
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2024/jan/11/labour-keir-starmer-post-office-scandal-conservatives-rishi-sunak-uk-politics-live
They’ve rejected division and now supports unity.
The Conservative party is now seen as being as right wing as 2014-16 era UKIP
Average left/right wing score of party (higher scores mean more right wing)
UKIP 2014-2016: +60
Conservative party 2019-present: +58
https://x.com/YouGov/status/1745460031087427726?s=20
This also came up:
'The Scottish Tory leader, Douglas Ross, called for the lord advocate to make a statement to MSPs after the BBC revealed that the Crown Office was first informed of possible issues with Horizon in May 2013.
Humza Yousaf, the first minister, responded that he had been told the Crown Office at that point provided guidance to courts to treat cases on evidence that did not rely on Horizon, meaning that after that the Crown Office would not prosecute solely on Horizon evidence.'
Nothing to do with an election in the next year, of course.
I am more bothered by the precedent of Parliament deciding it can assume (even if temporarily), the functions of the criminal justice system.
Perhaps a shame he didn't possess slightly more political nous.
NB Viewcode wrote about this in an article a few days ago; this was very good, and, as they say, more research is needed.
Pre-Brexit we were going to write a book about the EU, setting out agreed facts and offering alternative views of them (he was a mild Brexiteer), but he got promoted and was no longer available for non-partisan publications.
And that's leaving aside the fact that the PO's management and legal team were so keen to win prosecutions, they would lie and manipulate in order to win. Again, that puts a massive dose of doubt over any prosecution.
Hence I wonder if anyone prosecuted using (even in a small way) data from the Horizon system can be retried. If I was on a jury now, and part of the prosecution evidence involved Horizon, I would not only ignore the Horizon evidence; I would probably view the entire prosecution with cynicism.
And I'm unsure how point I) on TSE's post "The guilty party genuinely was guilty" can be ascertained *before* a trial?
And BTW, be careful not to be so keen to get a dig in at the government, that you don't start smearing the postmasters.
I "stood" in our school mock Euro elections in 1994 as the Green party candidate (actually as the "Delboy" party - Democratic and Environmental Left for Oncoming Years). We won by a landslide of course because we bombarded the school with humorous posters full of double entendres.
In the run up we had a lunch at Hereford town hall with a few of the local actual candidates and I remember my fellow Green's talk very clearly. She argued that growth was the problem and we need to focus on shrinking GDP but making it greener and more equitable. Exactly the same language they use these days.
They too would have preferred to have been exonerated through the courts, and found the rationale for being required to sign an innocence statement somewhat insulting.
It is a complete mystery why Tony Blair was the most successful PM of modern history
"Prior to 1972 the Iowa caucuses were not the presidential testing ground they are today. The caucuses moved to the forefront as a result of legislation passed by the General Assembly which dictated the latest date caucuses could be held (the second Monday in May) but did not limit how early they could be held.
In addition to this legislation, the Democratic party of Iowa “added a clause to their party constitution requiring thirty days between party functions,” (Winebrenner 1987). This resulted in January 24 as the latest possible date for the democratic caucuses in 1972, moving Iowa ahead of the New Hampshire primaries.
https://www.dmpl.org/research/local-history-genealogy/iowa-caucuses
(additional details via wiki)
Note: Unlike with Iowa Democrats, Republican percentages below based on total statewide votes cast at precinct caucuses.
1980
Republican turnout 106,051
George Bush 32% > vice pres nominee > VP
Ronald Reagan 29.5% > nominee > POTUS
Howard Baker 15%
John Connally 9%
Phil Crane 7%
John Anderson 4% > independent
Bob Dole 1.5%
1984
Republican - Ronald Reagan unopposed
1988
Republican turnout 108,806
Bob Dole 37%
Pat Robertson 25%
George Bush 19% > nominee > POTUS
Jack Kemp 11%
Pete du Pont 7%
1992
Republican - George Bush unopposed
1996
Republican turnout 96,451)
Bob Dole 26% > nominee
Pat Buchanan 23%
Lamar Alexander 18%
Steve Forbes 10%
Phil Gramm 9%
Alan Keyes 7%
Dick Lugar 4%
2000
Republican turnout 86,440
George W Bush 41% > nominee > POTUS
Steve Forbes 30%
Alan Keyes 14%
Gary Bauer 9%
John McCain 5%
2004
Republican - George W Bush unopposed
2008
Republican turnout 118,411
Mike Huckabee 34.4%
Mitt Romney 25.2%
Fred Thompson 13.4%
John McCain 13.1% > nominee
Ron Paul 10%
Rudy Giuliani 3.5%
Hunter (Duncan) .4%
Hatch (Orrin) 1%\
2012
Republican turnout 122,255
Rick Santorum 24.56% = note Santorum won by +34 votes statewide
Mitt Romney 24.53%
Ron Paul 21.5%
New Gingrich 13.3%
Rick Perry 10.4%
Michele Bachmann 5%
Jon Huntsman 0.6%
2016
Republican turnout 186,932
Ted Cruz 27.65%
Donald Trump 24.31%
Marco Rubio 23.1%
2020
Republican turnout 32,345
Donald Trump 97.1%
William Weld 1.3%
Joe Walsh 1.1%
Hilarious.
And I make that 20 ministers in 26 years - an average of just under 16 months for each minister (and some were much shorter than that)
And the Post Office and its lawyers are very definitely not the legal system. More of a cancer on it.
Daytime high -2 degrees Fahrenheit (-19 degrees Celsius)
wind chill calculation -22 F (-20C)
Bit on chilly side EVEN for Iowa! Indeed, predicted to be the coldest caucus night ever.