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Punters remain overwhelming convinced about Starmer winning a majority – politicalbetting.com
Punters remain overwhelming convinced about Starmer winning a majority – politicalbetting.com
As we can see from the chart above showing the Betfair overall majority market over the last ten days last week’s elections have reinforced the expectation abour Starmer winning a majority.
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In other news, sounds like Nadhim Zahawi is stepping down at the GE. Not sure if that’s good or bad news for the LibDems’ chances of taking Stratford on Avon.
https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1788394155137278430
Founding father of modern chemistry - and biochemistry.
Its a bit like Snowden... all vigorous denials of Russian collaboration and then he turns up in Moscow and such denials look rather... fake.
Your opponents aren't going to stop trying just because you don't.
They've spent so long playing on easy mode (if you have a big majority, who cares about the odd bit of disloyalty?) that they've been careless for quite a while.
Labour lead at *30 points* in this week's YouGov poll for The Times
That's the biggest Labour lead since Truss
CON 18 (=)
LAB 48 (+4)
LIB DEM 9 (-1)
REF UK 13 (-2)
GRN 7 (-1)
Fieldwork 7 - 8 May
If someone's going to defect, they will. It's not as though whips will have any further influence over them... short of blackmail.
48 18
Yeah yeah
“ His wife, Carol Conway, 79, said: “We don’t want Labour to run the country. It’s gone to the dogs. I’m shocked that she’s done that.”
So there is hope for the Tories that there are voters who think the country is screwed so don’t want Labour to screw it.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/may/09/i-understand-why-she-moved-dover-voters-on-natalie-elphicke-switching-parties
The night Liz Truss’s government collapsed
"Half an hour before the vote, the No 10 machine decided they were going to interfere."
Outgoing Conservative MP and former whip Craig Whittaker reveals what really happened on the night a fracking vote became a confidence motion in Liz Truss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoachaALMdI
After all, ex Tory MPs are going to be a greatly devalued commodity fairly soon.
Whereas someone who can claim some sort of input into (eg) the housing policy of the next government might be of more value.
No one doubts that Labour are well ahead but I simply don't believe this is compatible with the millions of votes counted in the last week.
👏👏👏
The art is to head off the issues before they get that bad. What was Natalie Elphicke really unhappy about? (It's hardly ever policy as such.) Who were her friends who could help keep her on the straight and narrow? Would more face time with a cabinet minister have helped?
Man management 101, in other words. And whilst Rishi has clearly flunked that course, he needs people who are good at it.
But there are all sorts of steps that can be taken. Defection is a big move that can be emotionally torturous and can affect your reputation both professionally and personally.
As Yes Minister showed, if you want the right answer, you have to ask the right question in the right way.
A 30-point Labour lead would be a 21.5% swing from last time - Blackpool South was 26%, I suspect there were bigger swings in some of the local contests.
The dynamics of an election campaign will be very different - there's a general perception the Conservatives will close the gap and everyone runs to 2017 for justification. Other General Elections tell a different story - 2019 didn't show much change (and oddly, YouGov were pretty accurate then but apparently they are "comedy" now), 2010 didn't.
In 2015, the swing to Cameron occurred in the last week of polling carving out a 6-point lead polls which were essentially tied.
The Scottish Greens have been accused of prioritising ideology over protecting children after the party again refused to endorse an expert report into gender healthcare.
Patrick Harvie, who until last month was a Scottish government minister, claimed that a Holyrood motion welcoming the Cass Review and recognising it as a “valid scientific document” was not “supportable” by his party....
All other parties, including the SNP, endorsed Hilary Cass’s report at Holyrood. However, all seven Green MSPs voted against the motion, with Mr Harvie claiming that transgender people were having their “very existence refuted”....
Brian Whittle, a Tory MSP, asked Mr Harvie whether he would now seek to listen to “alternative experts” on climate change after he refused to accept the findings of Dr Cass, a widely respected consultant paediatrician.
“You don’t get to choose your experts just to fit your ideology,” Mr Whittle said. “Especially when it’s the health of children at stake.
https://archive.ph/lDQmx
That poll has the Tories as 4th party behind the SNP.
once the Tories get below 25% of votes the safe seats start rapidly dropping away...
She will either have been promised to be Dame Elphicke of housing and Blackshorts or will be on loose women with a highly paid newspaper column slagging off whoever is in charge of immigration and defending abusive men because they’re hot.
1) Tories recovery polling lead, but not enough to stop a modest Labour majority, particularly given there will be Scottish gains too
2) Votes reflect current pollsters that are more optimistic for the Tories at say 15pts. Landslide in traditional sense but majority under 100.
3) Local elections gave false hope to how badly voters will punish the Tories on the national stage. Tories wiped out to closer to 100 seats or less. As implied by this poll.
All plausible. The no Labour majority requires a much more optimistic variation of scenario 1. A 10% probability sounds about fair.
ERCOT hit a new record for battery dispatch tonight at 3.2 GW.
This smashed the previous record set less than a year ago by over 1 GW (+47%).
https://twitter.com/grid_status/status/1788387086162145320
I can see the Tories losing 180 seats, that's roughly half of their seats, just like they lost roughly half their councillors who were standing last week. I don't believe for a moment that they will lose more than 300.
Not expecting to be around on here much until the GE campaign as I’m very busy at the moment and UK politics is dull to me. Most everyone knows Labour are going to win so we’re all strumming our fingers.
I don’t think the defection was Starmer’s finest moment but it was tricky for him politically because if he didn’t accept her he could have been wide open to attacks about migrants. This has undermined one of the few remaining attack dog areas left for Sunak.
All rather ‘meh’ anyway because she’s standing down at the GE.
What it does show is that Labour are in the business of winning back power. Unlike the Conservatives.
I did!
xx
One evidence point in a group of series.
30% lead does seem outlandish, but tbh it follows the trend line. 6 months ago 26% might have seemed outlandish, not so much now.
(Good morning everyone.)
* Hmmm. I suppose that GB News or Sky Australia might not touch her now.
When will the older generation realise that this country is moving on and this issue, like so many of the culture wars, are irrelevant to our needs?
Well you’ll have a long time in the political wilderness to answer that one.
Have a nice day everyone.
xx
She is an expert on child healthcare as a practitioner.
See my post upthread. This is the fag end not just of a government, but likely any prospects of being in Parliament for a large number of Tory MPs.
Appropriately enough for the party of market forces, and enlightened self interest, they are looking at their future earning prospects.
Leave it much longer and it will be too late to derive much benefit from jumping ship.
The MP from the constituency most impacted by small boat immigrants have joined the Labour Party saying they will do a better job. That's a whole set of Tory attack angles removed / countered in 1 section.
So yep she's probably not the ideal Labour candidate but she has made the next election somewhat harder for the Tory party by removing one of the planned attack lines...
Temporarily.
This does seem to imply a pleasing level of discrimination against bikewankers elsewhere
According to Electoral Calculus, this would give Labour a 452-seat majority and leave the Tories on 13 seats.
#hungparliament
One thing Labour could really do with is the sort of vote share Yougov implies. They are routinely higher for Labour than the others, including the ones that also show low Tory support.
Much easier to feel confident about a 20+ point gap if you’re in the high 40s than if the gap is all down to your opponents scoring very low.
Our latest research for our general election partners @Telegraph suggests that just 16% of the public believes Rishi Sunak's claim that the country is likely heading towards a hung parliament.
Delta showed a small dip in the Lsabour lead, YG shows an increase, so I wouldn't conclude that anything special has happened. But the much-awaited swingback is proving elusive for Starmer - will Opinium adjust their polling to reflect that, as they build in a swingback assumption?
Those who write about artificial intelligence or the existence of aliens challenge that as well - to imagine that which seems unimaginable isn't easy.
I'll be honest - I didn't think in 2015 the LDs would be reduced to just 8 seats - I thought 15-20 at worst - but the evidence was in front of me, I chose not to see it. Ask anyone in an LD constituency at that time and they'll tell you Conservative activity ramped up sharply from 2012 onwards - the destruction of the LDs was a plan long in the making and the execution but it was the route to the next Conservative majority Government.
To be mischievous, when I was an activist in the Alliance days, the "dream" was to re-align British politics by replacing Labour as the main opposition and then going after the Conservatives - perhaps all we did was get it the wrong way round, replace the Conservatives and then go after Labour.
Mr. Stodge, I recently watched an interesting video mapping out the rise of the Franks. The Visigoths at the time had most of Gaul and the Iberian peninsula. Very easily could've led to a permanent nation covering today's Portugal, Spain, and France (and Andorra/Monaco), and that either being conquered by or totally resisting the Moors.
Things can change very rapidly. An even better example is that Majorian might've reunited the Empire and saved the West, if Ricimer weren't around.
It is still a lot of MPs about to have no job, few prospects and an awkward length of time until retirement. But if the Conservatives don't have enough tame think tanks, charities and businesses who can offer sinecures to see enough people all right, what exactly is the point of them?
(Remarkably they had no metal tools and did not use the wheel, yet built 1000s of stone buildings some over 70m high.)
Coming soon: the Rule of the Franks. The Cabinet to be replaced by Spencer, Sinatra Jr, and the Ghosts of Zapra and Lloyd Wright **.
Could we tell the difference?
** To ensure continuity by creating things that collapse in short order.
It could well be true that YouGov’s methodology is becoming inaccurate for predicting general elections, but the time for addressing that can really only be after the next election. Otherwise they risk both distorting movements in voting intention and still getting it wrong.
I like your nuggets of wisdom and your anecdotes. Who else is going to exercise the last remaining PB Tories so early in the mornings?
Lab 41
Con 26
Ref 13
LD 11
Green 5
SNP 3
Sorry, I've seen your later post, Tories up, Labour down. Thanks.