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With just 18 months to go before the Scottish referendum there’s a new poll from Panelbase in the Sunday Times. Overall the split is 36% YES to 46^% NO. The balance of those sampled have not made up their minds.
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FPT: The latest Opinium poll of what people will vote themselves (rather than what they think others will vote - much the same as YouGov:
The poll puts Labour on 38% (down 1% on a fortnight ago), the Conservatives on 28% (up 1%), Ukip on 16% (-1%) and the Liberal Democrats on 9% (up 1%).
All three party leaders have seen their personal ratings improve since the last poll, with Miliband now having a net score of -14%, Cameron -23% and Nick Clegg -45%.
Also an older YouGov survey that I missed from March 3:
http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/995b3nt4q9/Prospect results 130304.pdf
- think one has to treat the last question with caution, as after 10 questions on tax avoidance and benefit fraud people may be reluctant to admit they've participated. But the fact that people are more concerned about tax avoidance than benefit fraud may help explain why the latter hasn't really taken off as a popular issue in the way the Tories hoped (polls on the various past and prospective crackdowns have produced mixed results).
Is this mirrored in any polling on leaving the EU? That would be the nearest similar polling exercise, and should tell us whether this is an isolated thing or that "testosterone" is a general factor.
What about pre-independence polls in Czech/Slovakia? What about in Catalonia, Mr Observer? For betting purposes we'd need to see a pattern before we see much significance here.
That's the reason why the women's vote is more important - it's up for grabs in a way the men's vote isn't. I don't have any problem with Mike's threadheader, clearly the Yes campaign have some work to do in engaging with women (and they're fully aware of that), but we mustn't lose sight of the headline points of this poll -
1) The lowest No lead of this year so far - just 10%.
2) All pollsters who have reported this year have now shown a swing to Yes in their most recent poll.
Salmond may be less popular with women than men, but he still has ratings with women that both Cameron and Miliband can only dream of.
And by the way, Tim, Nicola Sturgeon is Alistair Darling's direct counterpart in the Yes campaign.
That wasn't decided by referendum, though.
Quite ironic that the only lasting legacy of what looks like a Cameron one term government might be the break up of the union.
"The visceral hatred for Tory governments at Westminster is something not too well understood in England but it really exists and it's not even class based.
Quite ironic that the only lasting legacy of what looks like a Cameron one term government might be the break up of the union. "
Those two sentences are a non sequitor. The first is certainly true, but the near-certainty that RedEd will be PM in May 2015 means there's absolutely no point in ending a 300 yr Union to spite a Party that many Scots loathe but a PM who has done absolutely nothing that's anti-Scots or clearly against Scotland, or Scotland's primary interests.
So Cameron (and what name could be more Scottish?) as Coalition PM is a positive feature, not a negative one for 'No!'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/mar/24/bluebell-railway-joins-rail-network
Risk aversion in this referendum means voting Yes to ensure the Tories can never rule Scotland again. Once that point is driven home, women will start moving towards Yes.
Incidentally, another point that needs to be made about this poll is that it shows an utterly enormous lead for the SNP on Scottish Parliament voting intentions. I haven't seen the breakdowns, but I think we can safely assume that the SNP under Salmond remain the party of choice for women as well as men.
It's not about "spiting" anyone - it's about taking control of our own destiny, and ensuring that we get the government we actually vote for from now on. It's laughable to suggest Labour are "near-certainties" to win, but regardless of the result of the next GE, Scotland has to face up to the fact that if we vote No we will continue to be ruled by Westminster Tories two-thirds of the time.
His facile 'testosterone' explanation aside, it's long been known that when the campaign begins proper Nicola Sturgeon will be front and centre to answer the 'too wee, too poor and too stupid' scaremongering rerun of Iain Gray's 2011 campaign.
Nothing that has transpired so far from No campaign has been surprising lest you count their eagerness to embrace the same tactics of 2011.
So when it does get down to the crunch point of the real campaign it's going to boil down to a question of trust as is always the case. Some have yet to be persuaded and some are clearly harder to persuade at the outset (as is the case here) but when the choice for the scottish public is business as usual at westminster or independence, then it's going to take quite a bit more than scaremongering from Clegg, little Ed and Cameron's parties to win that trust.
Anyone who has any experience of the initial preliminary ground campaigning will tell you that right now the scottish public just aren't focusing on it, which is hardly unexpected. Yet there is little sign of rabid hostility to independence, as some might have you believe, the public just don't care too much right now.
That will change in the final months of the campaign and if No are content to drive down turnout with a relentlessly negative campaign then they should have a good hard look at the logistics of which side can least afford that and which side has the better motivated and greatest amount of activists necessary for a ground campaign that will need a highly focused GOTV operation. The Yes campaign knows perfectly well they will have to win this the hard way and certainly isn't taking anything for granted. However, if little Ed, Clegg and Cameron have to bus in activists to try and make up the numbers on the ground then that will hardly bode well for them. Nor is such 'cooperation' and allocating of precious campaign resources likely to go particularly smoothly for the various unionist No parties since the GE will be looming large at that time and be more than just theoretical as will the referendum itself.
Let's not forget he also got 2012 wrong - on the local election results programme he called it for Labour, but of course in the end the SNP won in terms of both votes and seats, and also enjoyed a bigger increase in votes and seats than Labour.
I agree. But the gender gap will not remain as it is.
"Now I am going back to sleep.
I do not expect anything to have changed when I wake up."
Again, I agree - assuming you only plan to sleep for a few hours. But the referendum is a year-and-a-half away.
It is not to spite a party but because it reminds them that their destiny is never in their hands and now they have a one off chance to remedy the situation. My guess is that with a Labour government at Westminster the referendum wouldn't even be close.
I said 'Cameron's legacy' I should more accurately have said Thatcher's
Incompetence is killing the tories.
I know it, you know it even the PB tories know it, though try getting many of them to admit it.
Here's the proof.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/GB_Polling_May_2010_to_Jan_2013.jpg
However, what is abundantly clear from that is that little Ed didn't 'win' his poll lead, he was gifted it by Osbrowne. So little Ed had better have a better plan for the No campaign than he did in 2011 because the toxic liability Osbrowne is on HIS side. Something that will hardly go unnoticed at the referendum.
I understand it, if you have no taxable income but a yacht and a Ferrari, you're deemed to have a high income anyway - how does this work in practice?
http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/48oioeiy95/YG-Archive-Pol-Sunday-Times-results-240313.pdf
If absolutely nothing changes in two years you're right. Cammie may well put chum before party and keep Osbrowne where he is and reap the 'reward'. The public might not care too much about labour's policies or leader.
Yet it's worth pointing out that Brown was leading just before the election that wasn't. How did that turn out for him? It's also worth highlighting that Cammie was at one point leading by some 26 points in the polling. Again, was a tory majority a near certainty despite that massive lead?
It's entirely possible for a party to win during austerity. Obama and the Dems did it after all.
Cammie is certainly no Obama but little Ed is hardly a political heavyweight either.
So the tories either win the next election off the back of little Ed and Balls apparent weakness and labour's past economic performance, or they can start looking for banking advisory jobs like Blair.
Dog whistling just isn't going to cut it next time around. Nor will PR stupidity and policy wonk idiocy like "The Big Society, Aspiration One Nation, Alarm Clock Britain, Predistribution" or even "we're all in this together" do anything other than make the public even more cynical.
More young men die each day as a result of suicide than road accidents, HIV and assaults combined, according to a charity.
Suicide is now the biggest killer of young men across the UK, a charity has warned.
The latest figures show that the suicide rate rose significantly in 2011 with a total of 6,045 people taking their own life - 4,552 of them were men.
The highest rate was in the male age bracket 30-44 and the recession is thought to be playing a part in many of the deaths."
http://news.sky.com/story/1068998/huge-problem-of-male-suicide-rate-in-uk
http://news.sky.com/story/1068991/berezovsky-death-chemical-experts-called-in
I concur with much of what you say but your suggestion Wales/NI/England Confederation would do even whereabouts for Labour in England.
On the Cyprus tax on deposits over €100000 I do resent the assumption that all such people are the possessions of laundered money and wicked tax avoiders. I've never earned more than £65000 a year and amassed my savings over years of thrift in deposits and IS As. I've never avoided tax in my life nor claimed anything from the state I've not paid contributions on. Here in Spain, I pay all my taxes and have private health cover so again I'm not scrounging. If I was in Cyprus I'd feel pretty sick right now.
I agree with all of your post. My own view is that Cameron & Osborne will be dumped asap after May 2015 (unless a big majority is won) with a UKIP-friendly, worked-their-way-up group of hard-nosed individuals as the leadership team.
That's Gove/May/Hammond - and I can see any and all of those making absolute mincemeat of their Labour oppos in PMQs (etc) each week, leading to their election in the following GE - which may very well be long before 2020, as the post WW2 economic façade comes crashing down and there is a consequential breakdown in law and order as the money runs out and 'Bankrupt Britain' has to cut Welfare down to a bare minimum.
It's not 'if' but 'when' and 'how quickly' and no current Party leader has the courage to articulate (publicly at least) the extent of the economic mess we're in. The idea that 'growth' will generate £150 billion pa of State income/drop in outgoings is so laughable as to be beyond bonkers - yet unless and until we do that, we're merely servicing our current debts (just) and not repaying them: what happens when Bond rates rise from ~2% to ~10%?
QE money has to be repaid too - which means inflation nearer 10% than 5% (and possibly much more) - and there is no way that wages can do anything but lag behind until our wages broadly match the rate paid globally for equivalent work: the BRICS' wages rising too, as ours fall (in Bitcoin/Gold terms: the £/hr rate may rise, but a devalued currency means the global rate falls).
It seems certain that our children and grandchildren (ie 2025+ and 2060+) will be little if any, better off than we THOUGHT we were in 2007/8: two generations of little additional prosperity beckons - which is not dissimilar to most of history, in fact, the last 150-200 years or so being the exception, not the rule.
EDIT: A technological development which provided cheap energy would change all that, as might Sci-Fi style robots or Web-based services making our working practices virtually unrecognisable from those of today.
Race start is in about 9 minutes. The track's reportedly part dry, part wet.
I hope the independence result is clear-cut, either way. Recounts and potential independence (or not) being determined by a tiny handful of votes (ie within a margin of error) would not be good.
A possible answer is the one that we recoiled from in horror when California tried to introduce it - tax on global personal income. To work, that would require a global agrement to share banking data, which is clearly a long way off - but probably where the world will get to eventually when enough countries get fed up with their tax base draining away offshore.
The bricks they are all worried about is the economic Armageddon that will be let loose post 2015 , after all the bull of the GE is out of the way.
If I was living in Scotland , I would vote yes, and have some control over the decisions of where the axe will fall,rather than have Westminster impose the tax and cuts regime which suits the south east of England.
" If I was in Cyprus I'd feel pretty sick right now. "
So would I Scamp.
However I would also have appreciated that over the years I had been the beneficiary of exceptionally high interest rates. I would have guessed, if I didn't know for sure, that those rates were somehow tied up with dirty money, mainly from Russia. Even if I hadn't guessed, I would have known that exceptionally high interest income is generally associated with high risk.
Just how high would nevertheless have been a surprise to me.
Sales of tea and sushi in Surrey will be taking quite a hit.
Also have there been detailed discussions about how much of the debt Scotland will take on. Obviously Scotland will have to take on a relevant proportion of the UK's national debt. I think £1 trillion would be a fair amount.
I think women are less tribal in nature, but also more sensible. It is hard to be firm about voting for something that remains a blank sheet of paper.
What price would you put your money on Cameron winning ?
Even with Scotland gone .
Test
Thanks RCS.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2298146/I-refuse-surrender-Marxist-teachers-hell-bent-destroying-schools-Education-Secretary-berates-new-enemies-promise-opposing-plans.html
References to The Blob are particularly apposite - and extend far wider than just the Education world.
Whitehall mandarins and senior State white-collar employees: meet the next Conservative PM.
Liking the quote button!
This quote thing is fine but it makes long posts into epics!
I could bang on about Gove/Ofsted/Wilshaw/etc all day, but I keep that sort of discussion to edu sites. The knowledge/skills/etc debate is a hot topic at the moment - as is the contradiction between what Wilshaw wants and what Ofsted seems to want. Gove probably has more support on the ground re some issues than he thinks; if he was a good politician he'd recognise/capitalise on that. And cut the playground language. In fairness, the headline in the Mail doesn't reflect what he's saying in the article.
Edit - I tried to quote that but it put my comment in as well, which could make threads very very long!
What we don't know yet is what Vanilla will charge after the trial month
EDIT: oh, the other quote doesn't show once you post. Great.
As a general rule with banking, if someone is offering you too much interest, beware. There is no 'free lunch', if someone is offering you 5% (whether Icesave or Bank of Cyprus), you should be suspicious.
Savers in Cyprus would have been aware that they were benefiting from exceptionally high interest rates and if they were unaware that such rates imply high risk, they were being a bit naive.
In view of the strong Russian presence and influence on the Island, I should think general awareness of the risks was fairly high. But aware of not, the savers still got the benefit of the rates - and even after the EU's heist, they would still be ahead of most EU savers depositing in clean and safe old banks.
As for whether the EU has been smart or not, that's a different question and I doubt we'll know the answer for quite a while. My own impression is that it has fired a very large and loud warning shot across Russian bows, and scared the sh*ts out of the Cypriot government, but this has got a fair way to run yet.
I see RCS has made a similar point to me, but without the geo-political angle, which I actually think is the bigger and more important aspect.
:just-sayin':
A woman but not Teresa May. But she lives in New York now !
:not-rocket-science:
* Key Publishing, Defencetalk, Military Photos, etc.
Edit - I tried to quote that but it put my comment in as well, which could make threads very very long!
Sadly, it suits Gove's political purposes to insinuate teachers are part of the problem because that justifies his attempts to micro-manage the curriculum.
Ofsted is a major drag - too often inspections are done by form fillers and retirees who got out of the classroom because they could not hack it. Telling teachers how their classrooms should be organised, insisting they teach their subjects (or literacy and maths at primary level) in certain ways, and so on is just ridiculous. What is good is what works. A teacher who gets sensational reading and writing results, but does not use phonics, should be encouraged, not told he can't do it because the method is not Ofsted-friendly.
You're absolutely right, of course. We've been working with a great programme of storytelling to encourage children's imagination and engagement with art - seeing some fantastic results, but this is definitely outside the 'approved' structure
Does that make them conservative or just plain mean?
Ofsted is a joke. Gove will find many a 'blob' in the Ofsted ranks. And in some respects Gove is flailing around like an idiot (as time will tell). Wilshaw I have a lot of time for. Some of his comments got teachers' backs up at the start but they were taken out of context. In my experience and from what I read teachers are warming to him. Anyway. It's Sunday. Enough already.
Many Cypriots liked the Russian's coming and bailing them out idea but clearly the Russians did not. It isn't clear yet why the Russians didn't buy in unless they are simply waiting buy up some of the mess by indirect means.
You cannot have embedded blockquotes; the quote will be ended on the first occurance of the closing tag </blockquote>. Replace inner-tags with an alternate such as the <i></i> pairing.
Something I mentioned to St Ant. of Wells, before I found this kindergarten, was the introduction of an etiquette thread. This would explain to the puntahs how to post in a manner which was conducive to getting a point across to the wider audience. Has he implemented one yet...?
@Charles
http://politicalbetting.vanillaforums.com/discussion/comment/1970/#Comment_1970
Politics in this country needs a radical overhaul, none of our parties are fit for purpose. A Yes vote would change everything, and I think it's time to roll the dice.
I have no idea if Yes would be good or bad, have no knowledge of the financial or social implications, but can it be any worse than where we are now?
Sure, Mike.
I'm neither defending nor condemning these institutions, just pointing out the risk/reward relationship.
On a betting Site, you'd think that relationship would be fairly well understood.
Less easily on an iPad, but I take your point
My guess is that they can easily do their business through other havens (Lebanon, Singapore?) and that Cyprus just isn't that important to them.
If I am right, then we might conclude the Cypriot Government overplayed its hand badly and the EU has played it to a nicety, but it's early days yet.
Free the "Plato One" from the tyrany of second class vanila membership !!