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Carthago Delenda Est – politicalbetting.com
Carthago Delenda Est – politicalbetting.com
A General Election is supposed to answer the question of who runs the country, but we already have the answer for July 4th 2024: it will be Labour running the country. From their side, the only outstanding answer required is whether they have a big majority, or a very big majority. Or even a VERY very big majority.From the other side, there are other and more interesting questions: what kind of a result will the Conservatives get? And what will happen to the Conservative party in the aftermath of the election?
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Everything about it is correct and excellent except the conclusion. Why should the Conservative Party need to be destroyed? That makes no sense to me.
"All" it needs to do is to return to the centre, which eventually it will do. Why should they give up on that place that they once owned?
I've been around the block enough to have heard all this before in the 1980's with Labour and the late 1990's with the Conservatives.
History repeats itself. Has to. No-one listens.
I am happy to educate you on this whole Carthago delenda est part of history as I know you really struggle with this particular part of history.
Don't be afraid to reach out.
Nothing too dramatic or radical, but enough to leave them squabbling and in opposition for 10 yrs +
Mr. Eagles, how could you be a teacher of history when you aren't even a student?
As an aside, it's ironic Carthage recovered and, as an Exarchate of the Eastern Roman Empire rescued it from Flavius Phocas and Chosroes.
Yes.
I’ll use my daily picture to show you something encouraging from this morning’s GFS weather model run.
Meteorologico improva est (trans. things can only get better)
Neatly ignoring the fact that in 2011 the British people were offered, and decisively rejected, a reform of our electoral system: more decisively indeed than either Brexit or Indyref (68%-32%).
I am going to Algeria in October to look at roman ruins, will investigate popping over the border. Still lots to see of Carthage.
Whilst not impossible, I severely doubt any of the hyped outcomes.
Farage is not leader of the opposition and will continue to struggle to win a seat.
There will be a Lib Dem recovery in parts of the south and west.
Labour will vastly impose on 2019 and will have achieved an amazing result to get a majority of one. Today it looks like they will get a majority, but it will be far smaller than the polls suggest.
Never underestimate the Tories, their vote will turn out and even if they do badly their seat count will be nearer 200 than 100.
If they ape I Can't Believe It's Not UKIP they'll get a merger at best, and will perhaps end up being devoured.
Those giddy about the potential demise of the Conservatives should remember this isn't the USSR. There are plenty of people who want a party on the right. The Conservatives, in the past and perhaps the future, combined this with an ability to appeal to centrist voters. Reform or what follows it is unlikely to do so.
Labour and Conservative support now falling to the benefit of Reform UK and the Lib Dems.
LAB: 41.7% (-3.0 / +8.7)
CON: 21.2% (-2.3 / -23.5)
RFM: 14.9% (+2.9 / +12.8)
LDM: 10.7% (+1.4 / -1.1)
GRN: 6.1% (±0.0 / +3.3)
Changes since (Start of campaign / GE2019).
electionmaps.uk/polling
Dying Relative Fallacy. "Great Uncle John is on the point of death." "Oh don't worry about that, the doctors are always saying that but he always pulls through."
If we want to move forward the system needs to be broken and that requires the destruction of one, and then probably both, of the old parties. That should enable a more open, honest and representative democracy.
My thoughts on kicking out elderly peers. Will @UKLabour go for the monarchy next?
Why King Charles should fear Starmer’s ageist plan for the House of Lords
The Labour leader’s plan to force peers to retire at 80 is a worrying sign of his attitude towards the elderly
https://x.com/danielmgmoylan/status/1801868634936996093
This was when A-Levels were difficult.
So expect a low (ish) turnout and hideous Tory results…
Any excuse to get the man in front of the cameras and they’ll leap at it. They have the same excitement-bias that several posters here (including me sometimes) share.
I would suggest that a more important factor than the Tory brand survival is the question of who leads the British Right?
In a lot of countries that have seen right-wing political success, that has involved a generational change where younger female leadership has replaced older male leadership. Meloni, Le Pen, but you could also add Mary Lou for SF, if you consider extremist parties with large negatives. A similar thing with the far-right in Netherlands, which I believe is a bit more modern and dropped bashing the gays, for example.
Farage has very high negatives, and likely acts as a blocker to the right-beyond-the-traditional-mainstream-right (aka the far-right) achieving enough success to lead a government. If there were to be a younger, possibly female leader, who didn't have all of Farage's baggage, then I think that could take the British far-right a long way, even without the help of the Tory brand.
Just like ICI.
I get the idea of James' header - we don't want a Faragist party to be able to use the Conservative brand to gain more support from the politically unengaged. Make them stick with their existing branding, a new centre-right outfit become established with a new name (suggestions on a postcard), and the Conservative name disappear into history.
Same has been said of Foot’s Labour in 1983, Labour in 2010 during the Cleggasm, even the Tories in 2019 after the Euros.
Part of the problem is that "far-right" is grossly overused and used as a smear against anyone who disagrees with the current "mainstream" political consensus.
For example, a party proposing the return of the death penalty for murderers of children within the rule of law and judicial process with all it's safeguards is *not* far right, A party proposing the death penalty of its opponents using bills of attainder or applying it to trivial offences like "walking on the cracks of the pavement while wearing a loud shirt" is far right.
By smearing right wing views (views that were mainstream in democratic 1950s Britain) as far right, you smear those with those views.
Demonise enough people as far right and you risk someone actually far right getting power as you make the far right taboo (and voting for it) meaningless.
So be careful what you wish for.
He had refused an honour last year because Vennells still had her CBE, but now that has been stripped from her he’s accepting a Knighthood on behalf of all the other sub-postmasters affected by the scandal.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/14/alan-bates-knight-paula-vennells-post-office-boss-horizon/
Good man, congratulations.
Yes, the Conservatives are likely to move to the right after losing, just as Labour tend to move to the left when they leave government. Both parties eventually move back towards the centre as, despite the beliefs of their more extreme supporters, that is where elections are won and lost. Destruction of the Conservative party opens the way for Reform to take over as the party of the right. Far better for the Conservatives to remain the party of the right. If they don't, in my view we could see a situation similar to the USA with centre-right voters holding their noses and voting for Farage because they don't want the alternative.
A political party is not a sentient being.
So the ‘Dying Relative Fallacy’ is a nonsensical example to use.
Indeed even the LDs don't seem to be interested in offering that. The LD manifesto after all was closer to Charles Kennedy social democracy than Nick Clegg Orange Book of the Coalition era when the LDs and Cameron Tories were the moderate centre right in the UK.
1 are the Conservatives really going to u-turn on this?
2 voting share in first past the post elections isn't necessarily indicative of wishes. The Lib Dems for example don't want national vote share, they want concentrated support in a few seats. Also compare the voting in London between the supplementary vote previously and this year's first past the post.
He (she?) is correct. We were offered a chance to change it and we said ‘nope’.
This is the system and all the new converts suddenly wanting to change it are only doing so because they don’t like the way results are heading.
It goes beyond polling - parties also have canvass returns to guide them. In your scenario the Tories are doing MUCH better than the headlines suggest. And yet when we look at what the Tories are doing, it demonstrates that if anything the polls aren't showing enough of a rout.
If Tory last time voters were Tory this time, we would know. Tory activists are knocking doors and making calls. That data gets fed into their model alongside their own polling. And sets the direction for the campaign.
Sunak is being sent in to defend True Blue seats with 20k majorities. Ministers are pushing lines to not give Labour a super majority. Are saying its OK to put Farage on Tory leaflets. Are desperately pitching to their core vote.
They would not be doing any of those things if your scenario was in play. There could be an abrupt plot twist - at the last a few million decide to vote Tory after all. But that is hopium. It isn't rooted in reality.
So it could happen. It just very certainly won't.
He could have used parliamentary privilege to name and shame so many.
I’m Labour leaning but I will vote LibDem. So a pollster would chalk me up as one of those drops in Labour support. It’s not that. It’s because I know that primary aim of booting out the sitting tory MP means I need to vote LibDem.
I don't think it is inevitable that the Tory party be destroyed or disappear - but I think that when it is performing this poorly, and the idea of a merger is being pushed by many (not all) on the right, we need to actively seek its destruction so that it is not a weapon that is useable by the far right to enter the mainstream
There were lots of views that were mainstream in democratic 1930s Germany that are also not welcome today
Assigning a label to people who hold such views is not a smear
However that might mean King William sooner than expected if he doesn't want over 80s still working. Not sure how he tells President Biden or Trump?
They will be just as concerned about Farage as CCHQ.
Unfortunately their first tweet attacking Farage yesterday, saying he would end the NHS as we know it (he favours a French style insurance system) rather blew up in their face. People don't want a US type system but recognise that pouring money into an institution resembling a soviet tractor corporation top heavy, hidebound with bureaucracy and archaic practices, cannot go on.
Even if Labour polled as low as 35%, they did that in 2005. This is the system and it works.
There will be no ‘unstoppable’ pressure for anything of the sort. A stonking Labour majority will have many other things to address. And the excitable chatter of a few political nerds on a minor betting forum will have no relevance.
Silly me, I was construing it rather more broadly.
But, the blocs of voters remain.
Literally everything says the Tories are having a far worse campaign than even I was expecting them to have when the election was called.
Actually, that's the name for the new party: One Nation.
FPTP allows an extremist takeover of one side, or both, trapping centrist voters into voting for the extreme. See Trump, Johnson/Corbyn, Foot, etc.
Having spent the last few decades, I’ve learned that Tory voters turn out on election day and should not be underestimated.
I would be delighted if that were not the case. The Tories will do badly, but I would be surprised if the result lives up to the hype.
This election - like every election - is about what *the voters* want. If they vote for Farage they should get Farage. The job of other parties is to politically defeat Faragism, not to rig the system so that Faragism bubbles away below the surface.
If your party gets smashed in a few weeks time its because the voters are so utterly appalled by you. The only people to blame will be yourselves.
The current policy of allowing the far right to drag the Tories to the right does not seem to have worked out well for the country. So why not allow the far right to stand on its own, and if it does well the electorate will need to accept the consequences. It’s called democracy.
That's pretty much what the Romans did to Jerusalem, particularly the Temple area in 70CE. Seemed to do the trick. I wonder how that project is getting on these days?
I'm not sure what's different this time that is going to make a party with a 200 seat majority wish to lose it next time round.
But at least we will have multiple AV threads to look forward to...
What is delivering the projected large majority is the collapse in the Tory vote. Just because one major party’s support hasn’t collapsed like that before, doesn’t mean that it cannot happen.
Indeed, arguably it has happened before, in 1983 for Labour, its just that Labour wasn’t in government at the time.
For balance I disagree with the hope of the destruction of the conservative party not least because there is a place for a centre right party in our politics
I broke the story of Sunak debacle over DDay and am very angry to this day and I said I would vote Lib Dem in protest
With the postal votes about to arrive I told my wife, who said that nothing could bring her to vote for that 'Clown' Ed Davey after watching him foolng around on water and the role he played in the Post Office disgrace not least because she knows Alan Bates and was a customer at his post office here in Llandudno
She is not generally political, but we spoke about our votes and both agreed Sunak has failed and the conservatives are in a desperate state but far more worrying is the rise of Farage which horrifies us
To us it is important that the conservatives out poll Reform, and we have agreed that we will vote for the conservative candidate though it will have no effect on labour regaining the seat
I know Ed Davey and his antics are popular on here but certainly not reflected by my wife's opinion
You say "this is the system". Yes. As "the system" was apartheid. The Stazi. The fourth republic. Systems fall when they no longer appear to be fit for purpose. Most people will be delighted if the Tories get destroyed. But then not be happy with the result that is generated because it is so inherently unfair.
Private Schools? End Assisted Places; impose VAT
Hunting? Ban Fox Hunting; Ban Trail Hunting
Lords? End Hereditaries; End Over 80s
He's following a very careful playbook. For now, at least.
He too is a narcisstic charlatan with a history of liking a drink and falling out with colleagues. He is not the answer to Tory woes.
A takeover by Reform would be history repeating itself as farce.
The Conservative Party can survive, and even regain power in a decade but there are no quick fixes or magic remedies for their ills. They need to be a party of sound finance again, and pro-business, and advocate for social freedoms as well as economic freedom.
Labour will eventually fail, not because its support is shallow or Starmer wooden, but because it is too centralised and statist in its solutions.
, and undermining Scipio Africanus along the way? Is Starmer Aemelianus, destroying the city but weeping over it at the same time? SOo much to ponder. Isn't history fun!
….One people, one leader?
Which is where Reform has problem because to win seats you need to get 30% or 40% (depending on how the votes get split) in an actual constituency and that's very difficult if you vote is broad and shallow rather than regional and deep..
Basically polls show trends they don't show actual results unless you have real in depth knowledge...
There is literally nothing Sunak can do to lose some Tories vote.
Essentially, it boils down to 'Green candidates hate Tories.' Which isn't exactly news.
Perhaps he could have taken that position and considered what might be the implications for 2029?
That’s the second election where you have spent weeks and weeks expressing your discontent with the Tories, claiming you won’t be voting for them, only when it comes to it, you vote for them anyway. Why do you insult us all with your nonsense?
CEO of the Post Office.
I would suggest to him that the Prosecution Department has a new target…
The other factor in play which hasn't been much remarked on is the protest vote; the 'who do I vote for to show my disgust with the state of affairs ?'
Until now that's worked almost wholly in favour of Labour; the disillusioned right of centre were as likely to not vote as any other option. RefUK achieving some sort of significance in the polls perhaps gives a stronger incentive for a positive protest in the election ?
It's why I am not exiting my betting position (in the green on Con above 24% and 150+ seats)
But the heart of his argument - too much money being spent in the wrong places. And that is true, not a million miles away from what Daisy Cooper was saying on the same stage.
The secret of the Nigel's success is that he takes complex issues (like the NHS) and cuts straight to the core issue which he clips, simplifies and packages into a form people who don't really know how it works can digest.
I vehemently dislike his politics. But you have to respect the craft. He is a significant political operator. The way to defeat Faragism isn't to cling on to a voting system which is about to effectively disenfranchise 6m people. Its to engage the argument and actually provide solutions. The endless decline of our communities and the sense of powerlessness is why he is a thing. Lets go and fix that.
After D day, I am sure some would have been delighted to have opportunity to put the boot in, but as BigG so superbly demonstrates will vote Tory on the day.
I take polls with a pinch of salt and Baxter is just a bit of fun.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz99yr6dq41o
In 1998, a Japanese man was stripped naked and left alone in an almost-empty apartment as part of a challenge for a reality TV show.
Tomoaki Hamatsu, known as Nasubi, was left with only a pen, some blank postcards, a telephone and rack full of magazines.
But he was not there to read. The concept of the show was to see if a human being could survive on competition prizes alone.
In order to win the challenge, the value of the prizes he won had to reach a certain financial threshold - 1m yen, around £6,000 at the time.
He would not emerge for 15 months, following a gradual descent into depression and mania, driven by hunger and isolation. Nearly three decades later, Nasubi's ordeal is being revisited as part of a new film that has just screened at the Sheffield Documentary Festival...
Yes the media are trying to build up Farage, in the same way as they built up Trump, and it’s free advertising for the shameless self-publicists.