Just noticed that Waveney Valley is forecast to be a Green / Reform marginal.
Grn 33% Ref 29% Con 23% Lab 10% LD 4%
No, it's not Reform territory in any way, shape or form. DYOR Edit - if that's being modelled off of UKIP 2015, most of their vote (15%) in Waveney was in Lowestoft, now hived off in its own constituency
Just noticed that Waveney Valley is forecast to be a Green / Reform marginal.
Grn 33% Ref 29% Con 23% Lab 10% LD 4%
No, it's not Reform territory in any way, shape or form. DYOR Edit - if that's being modelled off of UKIP 2015, most of their vote (15%) in Waveney was in Lowestoft, now hived off in its own constituency
These figures are from the MRP study that's just been published.
Yeah I'm not sure how they are getting 29% Reform in Waveney Valley, its so not Reform territory! Oh well.
Clearly the demographics of the people who live there suggests otherwise.
Do these surveys take into account any local factors eg incumbency effect, tactical voting, personality candidates etc? Or are they just a glorified version of UNS?
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
4) Not being very nuanced, he's a knobhead - in several senses, with no principles.
(I see that the MRPs are homing in on my suggestion of 100 Conservative seats +/- 100 .)
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Live longer, work longer, and save more.
Simple as that.
Not that simple. Telling future retirees like our generation they'll need to retire later decades from now doesn't save a penny today and doesn't save a penny on the costs of the many millions of boomers who've already retired.
Unless you are suggesting forcing the already retired back into work we need a serious solution.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
My seat of Angus and the Perthshire Glens shows that the SNP are likely winners with a substantial increase in the Labour vote (from a very low base) meaning that the fall in the Tory vote will offset any fall in the SNP vote giving them the seat. So, basically the SNP hang on because the Unionist vote gets less efficient. For good measure there is a Reform candidate but no Green to split the Independence vote (assuming the Greens are still pro independence).
All very frustrating really but I fear this will be all too common in Tory SNP battles with Unionist Labour supporters no longer willing to hold their nose and vote for the most likely Unionist. Bah.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
We were once part of Denmark's empire. Svein Forkbeard is the guy., followed by Canute. Went pear shaped after that.
Denmark had multiple colonies in the Caribbean and India. It is currently the biggest colonial country with all of Greenland as its possession. Norwegians will probably say that they were a colonial subject until 1817. Then there was Iceland and the Faroe isles. Furthermore, the Danish merchant marine made vast sums in the triangle trade of slaves.
The MRPs shouldn’t in my view include seat by seat predictions. They should stick to totals, unless they are able to take into account personal votes (eg Corbyn)
I think MRPs should show their workings with seat results but people should realise the MRP aims to be an aggregation of individual seat results and not a prediction of individual seats. MRPs are susceptible to slight changes of probabilities and assumptions so it's useful to have those workings.
John Caudwell endorses Labour, live on BBC News. Are they allowed to do that?
6 months ago he said he wouldn't support the Tories at the GE, because of Sunak's continued obsession with the "green madness". Has he read Labour's manifesto?
TSE raises an interesting point. When first mentioning the newly published IPSOS poll this afternoon several Pbers appear to make out that the findings are disastrous for the Tories and surely sound the party's death knell. It's certainly the case that this poll in any normal circumstances would be very dispiriting for the Blues. But what is only too evident is that compared with GE seat predictions as shown in Electoral Calculus's most recent forecast, the Tories' total UK seat tally is shown to have increased, some would say quite markedly from EC's 80 to IPSOS' 115, ie. +35 seats. Looking at the other 3 significant UK parties ALL are shown to have lost seats over this period as follows: Labour DOWN 8 by seats from 461 to 453. LibDems DOWN (alarmingly) by 25 seats from 63 to 38 seats. SNP DOWN by 5 seats from 20 to 15 seats.
John Caudwell endorses Labour, live on BBC News. Are they allowed to do that?
6 months ago he said he wouldn't support the Tories at the GE, because of Sunak's continued obsession with the "green madness". Has he read Labour's manifesto?
Sorry, but who gives a flying, well you get the idea. He has one vote. End of.
John Caudwell endorses Labour, live on BBC News. Are they allowed to do that?
6 months ago he said he wouldn't support the Tories at the GE, because of Sunak's continued obsession with the "green madness". Has he read Labour's manifesto?
I don’t know much about him, other than he was a big Tory donor. But he’s endorsed Labour, fair enough, people are entitled to change their minds. But why should that be on national news? @Boulay makes a very fair point
Do these surveys take into account any local factors eg incumbency effect, tactical voting, personality candidates etc? Or are they just a glorified version of UNS?
No, and no. They apply a national projection based on multi-variate demographic analysis to each seat. So they don’t really account for local political (as against demographic) factors - except in as much as there’s a small sample of actual voters polled in each seat - but neither is the swing necessarily uniform. Indeed assuming that it all comes down to demographics pretty much guarantees a non-uniform model.
John Caudwell endorses Labour, live on BBC News. Are they allowed to do that?
6 months ago he said he wouldn't support the Tories at the GE, because of Sunak's continued obsession with the "green madness". Has he read Labour's manifesto?
I don’t know much about him, other than he was a big Tory donor. But he’s endorsed Labour, fair enough, people are entitled to change their minds. But why should that be on national news? @Boulay makes a very fair point
Rightly or wrongly big money donors changing parties has always been considered news, so I don't think Ofcom would care or any rules are broken.
Whether that should be the case is another matter.
Why does the Guardian article bother to say the model predicts Corbyn will lose? The model is entirely incapable of saying anything sensible on the situation in Islington North. It’s pointless looking at what it says on Islington N.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
Denmark *did* have an Empire in the 18C. Not on the scale of say the UK or France, but it was a small country.
They ruled Norway until 1814, when iirc it was all rather disturbed by Nelson.
That's the best football match I've seen since Argentina v France at the last World Cup Final
Sensational! Sat in my garden with it on the laptop with the lovely evening sun blazing down. Perfick!
Best goal yet, best save yet, best match yet, best everything. Scintillating
When football is THAT good....
As much as I love my cricket and rugby, sometimes football is very hard to beat
Bad cricket and rugby is worse than bad football. But good cricket and rugby is better than good football.
Not sure about that. Will ponder
it's a REALLY good question, one I've considered myself
Fuck, I dunno
How do you rate the last Ashes series or the 2005 Ashes, against France V Argentina? And how does that match the insane madness of the best rugby, say England v the All Blacks, the Boks v Ireland, with both teams on fire?
International rugby at the top level produces more reliable compelling entertainment through the whole match
But the very best football beats that but it is rarer
And the very best Test series beats even that but it is even RARER
Make of that what you will. He's definitely not dumb and he speaks to senior people in US media every day
Trump is, and should be, favorite. But in a two horse race where both the horses are decrepit, nobody should be a 98% chance.
I'd make it Trump 45%, Biden 40%, health issue that takes out one of the front runners 15%.
Yeah, I'm not saying he is right, I was just relaying his opinion - partly because I was so shocked by his despondent pessimism. He's a moderate Democrat and he despises Biden for not standing down
John Caudwell endorses Labour, live on BBC News. Are they allowed to do that?
6 months ago he said he wouldn't support the Tories at the GE, because of Sunak's continued obsession with the "green madness". Has he read Labour's manifesto?
I don’t know much about him, other than he was a big Tory donor. But he’s endorsed Labour, fair enough, people are entitled to change their minds. But why should that be on national news? @Boulay makes a very fair point
Rightly or wrongly big money donors changing parties has always been considered news, so I don't think Ofcom would care or any rules are broken.
Whether that should be the case is another matter.
I can understand it being news at any other time in a political cycle but to have it second in the headlines on the evening bbc news during an election is odd.
At any time it would struggle to make the tv news, more a newspaper/website story for politics nerds.
To give it major prominence gives it a sense of importance that is way overstated but ends up making it seem that it is actually important and that if this man, who lots of people haven’t heard of, is switching to Labour and it’s so important it’s second on the news then that is something we need to consider too.
It really isn’t something the beeb should be running with so prominently during an election in my humble opinion.
My seat of Angus and the Perthshire Glens shows that the SNP are likely winners with a substantial increase in the Labour vote (from a very low base) meaning that the fall in the Tory vote will offset any fall in the SNP vote giving them the seat. So, basically the SNP hang on because the Unionist vote gets less efficient. For good measure there is a Reform candidate but no Green to split the Independence vote (assuming the Greens are still pro independence).
All very frustrating really but I fear this will be all too common in Tory SNP battles with Unionist Labour supporters no longer willing to hold their nose and vote for the most likely Unionist. Bah.
I will REFORM really get 8% in Scotland? I doubt it
Do these surveys take into account any local factors eg incumbency effect, tactical voting, personality candidates etc? Or are they just a glorified version of UNS?
It's nothing to do with sub-samples, it's an MRP forecast.
My seat of Angus and the Perthshire Glens shows that the SNP are likely winners with a substantial increase in the Labour vote (from a very low base) meaning that the fall in the Tory vote will offset any fall in the SNP vote giving them the seat. So, basically the SNP hang on because the Unionist vote gets less efficient. For good measure there is a Reform candidate but no Green to split the Independence vote (assuming the Greens are still pro independence).
All very frustrating really but I fear this will be all too common in Tory SNP battles with Unionist Labour supporters no longer willing to hold their nose and vote for the most likely Unionist. Bah.
I will REFORM really get 8% in Scotland? I doubt it
I would be astonished. They are not even a paper candidate because so far there has been no paper, not a single piece of correspondence from them. But any votes at all are wasted Unionist votes. I can't help feeling that the overall trend of the analysis is right. The Tory vote is likely to fall even faster than the SNP vote unlike what I was hoping for a few months ago.
It is going to take a miraculous debate performance from Biden for this to change. My guess is that Trump will duck out of them.
Is it terrible of me that I find myself hoping Biden either dies or has some debilitating illness that prevents him from running? I don't actually wish it on the man but it looks increasingly likely to be the only thing that will save us from Trump II.
John Caudwell endorses Labour, live on BBC News. Are they allowed to do that?
6 months ago he said he wouldn't support the Tories at the GE, because of Sunak's continued obsession with the "green madness". Has he read Labour's manifesto?
I don’t know much about him, other than he was a big Tory donor. But he’s endorsed Labour, fair enough, people are entitled to change their minds. But why should that be on national news? @Boulay makes a very fair point
He isn't a very popular person in Stoke. Phones4U where he made all his money was not a good place to work. The sort of conditions I can't imagine Starmer would approve of.
The Coates family, who are Labour supporters, are more popular.
It is going to take a miraculous debate performance from Biden for this to change. My guess is that Trump will duck out of them.
Is it terrible of me that I find myself hoping Biden either dies or has some debilitating illness that prevents him from running? I don't actually wish it on the man but it looks increasingly likely to be the only thing that will save us from Trump II.
The Democrats made a very serious mistake by not saying thanks and goodbye to Biden 9 months ago. Probably too late now.
Damn you new thread... Long time listener, first time caller etc etc. As a public service announcement I can reveal that my postal ballot arrived today in Southampton Itchen so the election is now on.
Two postal votes reported so far on this site, plus one bloke at work had done one today. So we can all bet on turnout over three. Not three percent: three votes. In addition, I expect to vote so make it 3.99 (actuarily adjusted).
That's the best football match I've seen since Argentina v France at the last World Cup Final
Sensational! Sat in my garden with it on the laptop with the lovely evening sun blazing down. Perfick!
Best goal yet, best save yet, best match yet, best everything. Scintillating
When football is THAT good....
As much as I love my cricket and rugby, sometimes football is very hard to beat
Bad cricket and rugby is worse than bad football. But good cricket and rugby is better than good football.
Not sure about that. Will ponder
it's a REALLY good question, one I've considered myself
Fuck, I dunno
How do you rate the last Ashes series or the 2005 Ashes, against France V Argentina? And how does that match the insane madness of the best rugby, say England v the All Blacks, the Boks v Ireland, with both teams on fire?
International rugby at the top level produces more reliable compelling entertainment through the whole match
But the very best football beats that but it is rarer
And the very best Test series beats even that but it is even RARER
That's the best I can do
And all American sports are shite
Good rugby beats anything for pure spectacle - though good cricket is more exciting if you care who wins. Both beat football, for me. Football can be quite entertaining but for me ranks below rugby (both codes) or cricket (of any format) - faced with a screen showing England playing football in the world cup final and another showing a rugby or cricket match - even one I didn't particularly care about - my attention would be drawn to the latter. Though obviously if it's between a football match my daughter is playing in and any other sport, football wins!
I'd also rank the other footballs - Gaelic, American, Australian rules - above association football. Football's a uniquely good game to play, because you need so little for a game. But for me, other team sports are more enjoyable watches.
Matt Singh @MattSingh_ This is an MRP where is the *polling* data (n~20k) is from a probability sample, which is a big deal. I believe this is the first time one has been published in the UK...
It is going to take a miraculous debate performance from Biden for this to change. My guess is that Trump will duck out of them.
Is it terrible of me that I find myself hoping Biden either dies or has some debilitating illness that prevents him from running? I don't actually wish it on the man but it looks increasingly likely to be the only thing that will save us from Trump II.
Yet the polls are looking better for Biden, particularly in swing states. My late father always told me to follow the money rather than the polls as punters followed their head not their heart. Brexit told me he was wrong.
That's the best football match I've seen since Argentina v France at the last World Cup Final
Sensational! Sat in my garden with it on the laptop with the lovely evening sun blazing down. Perfick!
Best goal yet, best save yet, best match yet, best everything. Scintillating
When football is THAT good....
As much as I love my cricket and rugby, sometimes football is very hard to beat
Bad cricket and rugby is worse than bad football. But good cricket and rugby is better than good football.
Not sure about that. Will ponder
it's a REALLY good question, one I've considered myself
Fuck, I dunno
How do you rate the last Ashes series or the 2005 Ashes, against France V Argentina? And how does that match the insane madness of the best rugby, say England v the All Blacks, the Boks v Ireland, with both teams on fire?
International rugby at the top level produces more reliable compelling entertainment through the whole match
But the very best football beats that but it is rarer
And the very best Test series beats even that but it is even RARER
That's the best I can do
And all American sports are shite
Good rugby beats anything for pure spectacle - though good cricket is more exciting if you care who wins. Both beat football, for me. Football can be quite entertaining but for me ranks below rugby (both codes) or cricket (of any format) - faced with a screen showing England playing football in the world cup final and another showing a rugby or cricket match - even one I didn't particularly care about - my attention would be drawn to the latter. Though obviously if it's between a football match my daughter is playing in and any other sport, football wins!
I'd also rank the other footballs - Gaelic, American, Australian rules - above association football. Football's a uniquely good game to play, because you need so little for a game. But for me, other team sports are more enjoyable watches.
I will always go with Test cricket because the climax comes after up to five days of ups and downs. It’s tantric sport.
A load of conservatives on the thread suddenly deciding - after a decade and a half of cheerleading their party in government - that it’s beyond the state to do anything.
If that’s the best you can do you don’t deserve to win again, and your party might as well become extinct.
When it comes to ground war, my seat is amusing as my ward at local elections is a Tory/LD battleground and since we moved in any time we get local elections we get flooded with materials from both parties. Been canvassed by both parties since we moved in as well.
However boundary changes mean we've moved from what was a safe Tory seat (but is probably now a marginal) into a safe Labour seat (which is probably now . . . no change).
Every local election is non-stop leafletting, but the General Election? Crickets. Not had a single leaflet from any party at all yet. Apart from the polling cards coming through the door, there's been nothing at all through the post to say that there's an election on.
Matt Singh @MattSingh_ This is an MRP where is the *polling* data (n~20k) is from a probability sample, which is a big deal. I believe this is the first time one has been published in the UK...
The hundred Tory seats on a knife edge seems relevant. Can they swing 5% in a week? They need to attack Reform I think. And they need Boris and the like to do it.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
Some of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. But agriculture actually extends surprisingly far north - further north in Finland than anywhere else on earth. There is agriculture inside the Arctic Circle. Winters are unproductive, obviously, but Northern Finland in summer is surprisimgly fertile.
Matt Singh @MattSingh_ This is an MRP where is the *polling* data (n~20k) is from a probability sample, which is a big deal. I believe this is the first time one has been published in the UK...
Yes it's the method Verian (ex Kantar) are using for their standard VI polls too, it should make panel 'gamers' much less possible as you have to be invited at random to partake
Where? These have been the highlight of the campaign. Granted, they have added the cubic root of fuck all to my or anyone else’s political understanding. But Angela and Penny performatively shouting at each other before hugging and going out for several glasses of wine has its appeal.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
You're overstating the "revenue of empire" here, as costs matched benefits from the 1870s onwards even if you look at it from a pure revenue perspective.
On a wider economic basis it produced a clear loss, especially when you factor in the downsides of it fucking our trade and monetary policy over and over and over again until we finally began to cut our losses in 1957.
It is going to take a miraculous debate performance from Biden for this to change. My guess is that Trump will duck out of them.
I backed Biden a copule of days ago. £200 at 3.15. I've just cashed out. -£5.70. I'm worried Trump will dodge the debates too. Why would he risk them as the front runner? All very depressing.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
Some of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. But agriculture actually extends surprisingly far north - further north in Finland than anywhere else on earth. There is agriculture inside the Arctic Circle. Winters are unproductive, obviously, but Northern Finland in summer is surprisimgly fertile.
Roughly 2% of forests in Finland are undisturbed habitat and they are in the far north.
The remaining 98% should be classed as agricultural land (albeit with a crop that takes 50 years to grow).
I've just spoken to a friend in the USA. He's a Fortune 500 CEO and a direct descendent of Odin. He once climbed Everest by dragging himself up using only his arms, for the challenge. He didn't start at base camp, he started from a beach on the Arabian Sea. He is an accomplished chef and once made pancakes for His Holiness Pope Paul VI despite being just 6 months old at the time.
Anyway, he tells me he's 99.4% sure that Cristiano Ronaldo will score a left-footed flick from the edge of the penalty area in the 52nd minute, and will get booked for his celebrations.
That's the best football match I've seen since Argentina v France at the last World Cup Final
Sensational! Sat in my garden with it on the laptop with the lovely evening sun blazing down. Perfick!
Best goal yet, best save yet, best match yet, best everything. Scintillating
When football is THAT good....
As much as I love my cricket and rugby, sometimes football is very hard to beat
Bad cricket and rugby is worse than bad football. But good cricket and rugby is better than good football.
Not sure about that. Will ponder
it's a REALLY good question, one I've considered myself
Fuck, I dunno
How do you rate the last Ashes series or the 2005 Ashes, against France V Argentina? And how does that match the insane madness of the best rugby, say England v the All Blacks, the Boks v Ireland, with both teams on fire?
International rugby at the top level produces more reliable compelling entertainment through the whole match
But the very best football beats that but it is rarer
And the very best Test series beats even that but it is even RARER
That's the best I can do
And all American sports are shite
Good rugby beats anything for pure spectacle - though good cricket is more exciting if you care who wins. Both beat football, for me. Football can be quite entertaining but for me ranks below rugby (both codes) or cricket (of any format) - faced with a screen showing England playing football in the world cup final and another showing a rugby or cricket match - even one I didn't particularly care about - my attention would be drawn to the latter. Though obviously if it's between a football match my daughter is playing in and any other sport, football wins!
I'd also rank the other footballs - Gaelic, American, Australian rules - above association football. Football's a uniquely good game to play, because you need so little for a game. But for me, other team sports are more enjoyable watches.
I will always go with Test cricket because the climax comes after up to five days of ups and downs. It’s tantric sport.
The wonderful thing about test cricket is the way it can swing from Team A being 70% likely to win to Team B being 70% likely to win and back again - and so often does.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
Some of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. But agriculture actually extends surprisingly far north - further north in Finland than anywhere else on earth. There is agriculture inside the Arctic Circle. Winters are unproductive, obviously, but Northern Finland in summer is surprisimgly fertile.
Their food security tops even Republic of Ireland apparently.
TSE raises an interesting point. When first mentioning the newly published IPSOS poll this afternoon several Pbers appear to make out that the findings are disastrous for the Tories and surely sound the party's death knell. It's certainly the case that this poll in any normal circumstances would be very dispiriting for the Blues. But what is only too evident is that compared with GE seat predictions as shown in Electoral Calculus's most recent forecast, the Tories' total UK seat tally is shown to have increased, some would say quite markedly from EC's 80 to IPSOS' 115, ie. +35 seats. Looking at the other 3 significant UK parties ALL are shown to have lost seats over this period as follows: Labour DOWN 8 by seats from 461 to 453. LibDems DOWN (alarmingly) by 25 seats from 63 to 38 seats. SNP DOWN by 5 seats from 20 to 15 seats.
PfP. How many seats do Electoral Calculus predict Refform will get?
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
Some of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. But agriculture actually extends surprisingly far north - further north in Finland than anywhere else on earth. There is agriculture inside the Arctic Circle. Winters are unproductive, obviously, but Northern Finland in summer is surprisimgly fertile.
Their food security tops even Republic of Ireland apparently.
TSE raises an interesting point. When first mentioning the newly published IPSOS poll this afternoon several Pbers appear to make out that the findings are disastrous for the Tories and surely sound the party's death knell. It's certainly the case that this poll in any normal circumstances would be very dispiriting for the Blues. But what is only too evident is that compared with GE seat predictions as shown in Electoral Calculus's most recent forecast, the Tories' total UK seat tally is shown to have increased, some would say quite markedly from EC's 80 to IPSOS' 115, ie. +35 seats. Looking at the other 3 significant UK parties ALL are shown to have lost seats over this period as follows: Labour DOWN 8 by seats from 461 to 453. LibDems DOWN (alarmingly) by 25 seats from 63 to 38 seats. SNP DOWN by 5 seats from 20 to 15 seats.
PfP. How many seats do Electoral Calculus predict Refform will get?
EC current Reform prediction is one seat. Range is 0-7. (How much use this all is is another matter. Their Tory seat prediction is 80 with a High to Low range of 236-42.)
Matt Singh @MattSingh_ This is an MRP where is the *polling* data (n~20k) is from a probability sample, which is a big deal. I believe this is the first time one has been published in the UK...
The hundred Tory seats on a knife edge seems relevant. Can they swing 5% in a week? They need to attack Reform I think. And they need Boris and the like to do it.
I think we're at the period where we will find out whether the Reform rise is exciting Tories or spooking them - so if there is no reaction (or even a Reform increase) then I don't see it changing for the election.
I've just spoken to a friend in the USA. He's a Fortune 500 CEO and a direct descendent of Odin. He once climbed Everest by dragging himself up using only his arms, for the challenge. He didn't start at base camp, he started from a beach on the Arabian Sea. He is an accomplished chef and once made pancakes for His Holiness Pope Paul VI despite being just 6 months old at the time.
Anyway, he tells me he's 99.4% sure that Cristiano Ronaldo will score a left-footed flick from the edge of the penalty area in the 52nd minute, and will get booked for his celebrations.
Not bad at all. And parodies are not as easy as they look
Keep it up and you might end up being paid for your writing
I've just spoken to a friend in the USA. He's a Fortune 500 CEO and a direct descendent of Odin. He once climbed Everest by dragging himself up using only his arms, for the challenge. He didn't start at base camp, he started from a beach on the Arabian Sea. He is an accomplished chef and once made pancakes for His Holiness Pope Paul VI despite being just 6 months old at the time.
Anyway, he tells me he's 99.4% sure that Cristiano Ronaldo will score a left-footed flick from the edge of the penalty area in the 52nd minute, and will get booked for his celebrations.
Not bad at all. And parodies are not as easy as they look
Keep it up and you might end up being paid for your writing
On topic - I wonder if the Cons would take that Ipsos result if they were offered it? Still seems crazy to talk in such terms but they just might
Meanwhile, sell the Lib Dems and Reform.
I’m heavy on Lib Dem and Reform positions and don’t think this is the right time to sell.
As @Heathener points out the fieldwork for this is older now.
Also, as I posted earlier, we’re still awaiting the next YouGov Poll (and hopefully another MRP from them). They’ve been much more bullish on Reform.
I think the ideal time to sell might be after the YouGov comes out, as it moved the odds quite a bit last time and would likely do so again if its results are anything like the previous one.
If YouGov also adjusts REFUK / LDs down then I will consider selling.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
Some of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. But agriculture actually extends surprisingly far north - further north in Finland than anywhere else on earth. There is agriculture inside the Arctic Circle. Winters are unproductive, obviously, but Northern Finland in summer is surprisimgly fertile.
Their food security tops even Republic of Ireland apparently.
UK agri sector is about 1% of the economy. Oddly this doesn't matter if you are wanting to eat and there is no food around. One of the epic fails of just looking at GDP and suchlike is that not all economic activity is properly measurable by its price, but only by its value. Diamonds are expensive, potatoes and bread are cheap. Potatoes and bread have far greater value.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
You're overstating the "revenue of empire" here, as costs matched benefits from the 1870s onwards even if you look at it from a pure revenue perspective.
On a wider economic basis it produced a clear loss, especially when you factor in the downsides of it fucking our trade and monetary policy over and over and over again until we finally began to cut our losses in 1957.
Direct revenue is one thing. Indirect (a captive market for UK manufacturers) is another, this has lingered on to a certain extent even now (e.g MK will have good sales in Singapore, Ireland, Cyprus, Hong Kong and half the middle East and Africa as a legacy of empire is that they use BS1363 plugs and sockets.
Plenty more such trade was kicked in the nuts in 1973 when joined customs union with rival industrial countries and put trade barriers up with such countries as a result.
The root cause of empire is need, a country not having enough land and resources to support it's population sustainably. See Rome, Japan and us (not to mention Russia invading Ukraine, both now and in aftermath of the Russian Revolution)
It dosen't help that we are making it worse by unsustainable population increase and shunning the Oil, Gas and Coal resources (the latter of which is still abundant) so are therefore making our industry uncompetitive compared with those that do exploit such resources unreserved.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
You're overstating the "revenue of empire" here, as costs matched benefits from the 1870s onwards even if you look at it from a pure revenue perspective.
On a wider economic basis it produced a clear loss, especially when you factor in the downsides of it fucking our trade and monetary policy over and over and over again until we finally began to cut our losses in 1957.
Direct revenue is one thing. Indirect (a captive market for UK manufacturers) is another, this has lingered on to a certain extent even now (e.g MK will have good sales in Singapore, Ireland, Cyprus, Hong Kong and half the middle East and Africa as a legacy of empire is that they use BS1363 plugs and sockets.
Plenty more such trade was kicked in the nuts in 1973 when joined customs union with rival industrial countries and put trade barriers up with such countries as a result.
The root cause of empire is need, a country not having enough land and resources to support it's population sustainably. See Rome, Japan and us (not to mention Russia invading Ukraine, both now and in aftermath of the Russian Revolution)
It dosen't help that we are making it worse by unsustainable population increase and shunning the Oil, Gas and Coal resources (the latter of which is still abundant) so are therefore making our industry uncompetitive compared with those that do exploit such resources unreserved.
Who is going to allow coal-based imports into their market without compensatory tariffs? China?
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
You're overstating the "revenue of empire" here, as costs matched benefits from the 1870s onwards even if you look at it from a pure revenue perspective.
On a wider economic basis it produced a clear loss, especially when you factor in the downsides of it fucking our trade and monetary policy over and over and over again until we finally began to cut our losses in 1957.
Direct revenue is one thing. Indirect (a captive market for UK manufacturers) is another, this has lingered on to a certain extent even now (e.g MK will have good sales in Singapore, Ireland, Cyprus, Hong Kong and half the middle East and Africa as a legacy of empire is that they use BS1363 plugs and sockets.
Plenty more such trade was kicked in the nuts in 1973 when joined customs union with rival industrial countries and put trade barriers up with such countries as a result.
The root cause of empire is need, a country not having enough land and resources to support it's population sustainably. See Rome, Japan and us (not to mention Russia invading Ukraine, both now and in aftermath of the Russian Revolution)
It dosen't help that we are making it worse by unsustainable population increase and shunning the Oil, Gas and Coal resources (the latter of which is still abundant) so are therefore making our industry uncompetitive compared with those that do exploit such resources unreserved.
Wait.
You think Russia is invading Ukraine because it needs more land for its population?
Isn't it rather the opposite: that it needs more population for its land, given the Russian population has dropped from 148m to 143m, and their population pyramid is incredibly deeply (and perhaps irretrievably) fucked up.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
Some of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. But agriculture actually extends surprisingly far north - further north in Finland than anywhere else on earth. There is agriculture inside the Arctic Circle. Winters are unproductive, obviously, but Northern Finland in summer is surprisimgly fertile.
Their food security tops even Republic of Ireland apparently.
GDP is a poor measure of wellbeing anyway (especially when not measured per head). Big slews of it are made up of things like imputed rent (the amount of money that would be raised if every owner occupied house is rented out).
Apologies if this has been done - Jeremy Vine's statement.
It seems that Barton also doxxed JV's home address *after* the 5 tweets to which this settlement relates (says JV). More to come, perhaps.
Jeremy Vine @theJeremyVine STATEMENT REGARDING JOEY BARTON:
The news of Joey Barton’s apology and commitment to pay damages and costs is not the final outcome of this case.
After five defamatory tweets, my lawyer offered Barton a chance to settle: pay £75k, plus my costs, and make an apology.
He ignored that offer and posted more disgusting tweets about me, even publishing my home address to his followers.
When I then took my case to the High Court, a judge ruled that TEN of the tweets I complained of were defamatory. Having lost, Barton has returned to the offer we made after tweet 5.
There has therefore been a parallel action on tweets 6-10 and Barton will pay further damages for these. A number of other steps — including statements made in Court by way of apology — are still to be taken, and Barton has agreed to pay my legal costs of all of the claims.
I've just spoken to a friend in the USA. He's a Fortune 500 CEO and a direct descendent of Odin. He once climbed Everest by dragging himself up using only his arms, for the challenge. He didn't start at base camp, he started from a beach on the Arabian Sea. He is an accomplished chef and once made pancakes for His Holiness Pope Paul VI despite being just 6 months old at the time.
Anyway, he tells me he's 99.4% sure that Cristiano Ronaldo will score a left-footed flick from the edge of the penalty area in the 52nd minute, and will get booked for his celebrations.
Not bad at all. And parodies are not as easy as they look
Keep it up and you might end up being paid for your writing
It is going to take a miraculous debate performance from Biden for this to change. My guess is that Trump will duck out of them.
I backed Biden a copule of days ago. £200 at 3.15. I've just cashed out. -£5.70. I'm worried Trump will dodge the debates too. Why would he risk them as the front runner? All very depressing.
Agree. Trump will win. America is in the grip of a mass delusion, and the UK branch of this, Reform, is but a pale shadow of the real thing.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
Some of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. But agriculture actually extends surprisingly far north - further north in Finland than anywhere else on earth. There is agriculture inside the Arctic Circle. Winters are unproductive, obviously, but Northern Finland in summer is surprisimgly fertile.
Their food security tops even Republic of Ireland apparently.
GDP is a poor measure of wellbeing anyway (especially when not measured per head). Big slews of it are made up of things like imputed rent (the amount of money that would be raised if every owner occupied house is rented out).
Something we do agree on!
Imputed rent is a slightly ridiculous concept which means that GDP grows when house prices go up because it means we'd all need to be paying more rent to live in our homes.
(Interestingly, in Switzerland, imputed rent is taxable income. They say that all assets should be treated equally. If you own a company, and it pays you a dividend, you pay tax on it. If you own a house and get a benefit in kind - i.e. living there - from that asset, then you should treat it as income. I.e. you shouldn't be tax disadvantaged by buying shares in a company and using that dividend income to pay rent.)
That's the best football match I've seen since Argentina v France at the last World Cup Final
Sensational! Sat in my garden with it on the laptop with the lovely evening sun blazing down. Perfick!
Best goal yet, best save yet, best match yet, best everything. Scintillating
When football is THAT good....
As much as I love my cricket and rugby, sometimes football is very hard to beat
Bad cricket and rugby is worse than bad football. But good cricket and rugby is better than good football.
Not sure about that. Will ponder
it's a REALLY good question, one I've considered myself
Fuck, I dunno
How do you rate the last Ashes series or the 2005 Ashes, against France V Argentina? And how does that match the insane madness of the best rugby, say England v the All Blacks, the Boks v Ireland, with both teams on fire?
International rugby at the top level produces more reliable compelling entertainment through the whole match
But the very best football beats that but it is rarer
And the very best Test series beats even that but it is even RARER
That's the best I can do
And all American sports are shite
Good rugby beats anything for pure spectacle - though good cricket is more exciting if you care who wins. Both beat football, for me. Football can be quite entertaining but for me ranks below rugby (both codes) or cricket (of any format) - faced with a screen showing England playing football in the world cup final and another showing a rugby or cricket match - even one I didn't particularly care about - my attention would be drawn to the latter. Though obviously if it's between a football match my daughter is playing in and any other sport, football wins!
I'd also rank the other footballs - Gaelic, American, Australian rules - above association football. Football's a uniquely good game to play, because you need so little for a game. But for me, other team sports are more enjoyable watches.
I will always go with Test cricket because the climax comes after up to five days of ups and downs. It’s tantric sport.
The wonderful thing about test cricket is the way it can swing from Team A being 70% likely to win to Team B being 70% likely to win and back again - and so often does.
And over a series. A whole summer
Did I mention I was at Lord's last summer, and saw the Great Stokes hit more sixes than any man in the universe?
I've just spoken to a friend in the USA. He's a Fortune 500 CEO and a direct descendent of Odin. He once climbed Everest by dragging himself up using only his arms, for the challenge. He didn't start at base camp, he started from a beach on the Arabian Sea. He is an accomplished chef and once made pancakes for His Holiness Pope Paul VI despite being just 6 months old at the time.
Anyway, he tells me he's 99.4% sure that Cristiano Ronaldo will score a left-footed flick from the edge of the penalty area in the 52nd minute, and will get booked for his celebrations.
That's good because I have the bet the farm on that very contingency.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Damn you new thread... Long time listener, first time caller etc etc. As a public service announcement I can reveal that my postal ballot arrived today in Southampton Itchen so the election is now on.
Comments
Do these surveys take into account any local factors eg incumbency effect, tactical voting, personality candidates etc? Or are they just a glorified version of UNS?
(I see that the MRPs are homing in on my suggestion of 100 Conservative seats +/- 100
Unless you are suggesting forcing the already retired back into work we need a serious solution.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
All very frustrating really but I fear this will be all too common in Tory SNP battles with Unionist Labour supporters no longer willing to hold their nose and vote for the most likely Unionist. Bah.
It's certainly the case that this poll in any normal circumstances would be very dispiriting for the Blues.
But what is only too evident is that compared with GE seat predictions as shown in Electoral Calculus's most recent forecast, the Tories' total UK seat tally is shown to have increased, some would say quite
markedly from EC's 80 to IPSOS' 115, ie. +35 seats.
Looking at the other 3 significant UK parties ALL are shown to have lost seats over this period as follows:
Labour DOWN 8 by seats from 461 to 453.
LibDems DOWN (alarmingly) by 25 seats from 63 to 38 seats.
SNP DOWN by 5 seats from 20 to 15 seats.
No, it';s not @rcs1000 I said VERY smart
only joking, Robert!
ANYWAY he said he is 98% sure Trump will win
Make of that what you will. He's definitely not dumb and he speaks to senior people in US media every day
📈19pt Labour lead
🗳️First full ballot prompt
🌹Lab 40 (-6)
🌳Con 21 (=)
➡️Reform 14 (+1)
🔶LD 11 (=)
🌍Green 4 (-1)
🎗️SNP 3 (+1)
⬜️Other 5 (+2)
2,046 UK adults, 14-16 June
(chg from 12-14 June)
https://x.com/Savanta_UK/status/1803133075276148842?s=19
Whether that should be the case is another matter.
Survation are running a constituency poll as we speak, so we should get the results of that at the end of the week: https://www.gofundme.com/f/IslingtonPoll?modal=updates
I'd make it Trump 45%, Biden 40%, health issue that takes out one of the front runners 15%.
They ruled Norway until 1814, when iirc it was all rather disturbed by Nelson.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_overseas_colonies#/media/File:Danish_Colonial_Empire.png
Fuck, I dunno
How do you rate the last Ashes series or the 2005 Ashes, against France V Argentina? And how does that match the insane madness of the best rugby, say England v the All Blacks, the Boks v Ireland, with both teams on fire?
International rugby at the top level produces more reliable compelling entertainment through the whole match
But the very best football beats that but it is rarer
And the very best Test series beats even that but it is even RARER
That's the best I can do
And all American sports are shite
At any time it would struggle to make the tv news, more a newspaper/website story for politics nerds.
To give it major prominence gives it a sense of importance that is way overstated but ends up making it seem that it is actually important and that if this man, who lots of people haven’t heard of, is switching to Labour and it’s so important it’s second on the news then that is something we need to consider too.
It really isn’t something the beeb should be running with so prominently during an election in my humble opinion.
https://www.realclearpolling.com/betting-odds/2024/president
It is going to take a miraculous debate performance from Biden for this to change. My guess is that Trump will duck out of them.
AIs are out to 7s or 8s, and Tories to 30s.
It's still light, so I'll pop out for a placard review and a bit of exercise.
The Coates family, who are Labour supporters, are more popular.
Focus group from MiC in Rishis seat. Sounds comfortable holdish to me, you may take a different view
Though obviously if it's between a football match my daughter is playing in and any other sport, football wins!
I'd also rank the other footballs - Gaelic, American, Australian rules - above association football.
Football's a uniquely good game to play, because you need so little for a game. But for me, other team sports are more enjoyable watches.
@MattSingh_
This is an MRP where is the *polling* data (n~20k) is from a probability sample, which is a big deal. I believe this is the first time one has been published in the UK...
https://x.com/MattSingh_/status/1803102269988081996
If that’s the best you can do you don’t deserve to win again, and your party might as well become extinct.
However boundary changes mean we've moved from what was a safe Tory seat (but is probably now a marginal) into a safe Labour seat (which is probably now . . . no change).
Every local election is non-stop leafletting, but the General Election? Crickets. Not had a single leaflet from any party at all yet. Apart from the polling cards coming through the door, there's been nothing at all through the post to say that there's an election on.
We will have a better idea after that perhaps.
On a wider economic basis it produced a clear loss, especially when you factor in the downsides of it fucking our trade and monetary policy over and over and over again until we finally began to cut our losses in 1957.
And I almost forgot the commies are also standing here
The remaining 98% should be classed as agricultural land (albeit with a crop that takes 50 years to grow).
Anyway, he tells me he's 99.4% sure that Cristiano Ronaldo will score a left-footed flick from the edge of the penalty area in the 52nd minute, and will get booked for his celebrations.
https://foodmatterslive.com/article/global-food-security-index-economist-impact-finland-uk/
Meanwhile, sell the Lib Dems and Reform.
(How much use this all is is another matter. Their Tory seat prediction is 80 with a High to Low range of 236-42.)
Keep it up and you might end up being paid for your writing
As @Heathener points out the fieldwork for this is older now.
Also, as I posted earlier, we’re still awaiting the next YouGov Poll (and hopefully another MRP from them). They’ve been much more bullish on Reform.
I think the ideal time to sell might be after the YouGov comes out, as it moved the odds quite a bit last time and would likely do so again if its results are anything like the previous one.
If YouGov also adjusts REFUK / LDs down then I will consider selling.
Plenty more such trade was kicked in the nuts in 1973 when joined customs union with rival industrial countries and put trade barriers up with such countries as a result.
The root cause of empire is need, a country not having enough land and resources to support it's population sustainably. See Rome, Japan and us (not to mention Russia invading Ukraine, both now and in aftermath of the Russian Revolution)
It dosen't help that we are making it worse by unsustainable population increase and shunning the Oil, Gas and Coal resources (the latter of which is still abundant) so are therefore making our industry uncompetitive compared with those that do exploit such resources unreserved.
Phew. Always worry about doing those when it's busy.
https://x.com/_AlexBogdan/status/1803124702094717006
If a week is a long time in politics...
You think Russia is invading Ukraine because it needs more land for its population?
Isn't it rather the opposite: that it needs more population for its land, given the Russian population has dropped from 148m to 143m, and their population pyramid is incredibly deeply (and perhaps irretrievably) fucked up.
Also, WTAF was that Tory PEB before the football started? It is one way to flag up that the money and ideas have all run out, I suppose.
It seems that Barton also doxxed JV's home address *after* the 5 tweets to which this settlement relates (says JV). More to come, perhaps.
Jeremy Vine
@theJeremyVine
STATEMENT REGARDING JOEY BARTON:
The news of Joey Barton’s apology and commitment to pay damages and costs is not the final outcome of this case.
After five defamatory tweets, my lawyer offered Barton a chance to settle: pay £75k, plus my costs, and make an apology.
He ignored that offer and posted more disgusting tweets about me, even publishing my home address to his followers.
When I then took my case to the High Court, a judge ruled that TEN of the tweets I complained of were defamatory. Having lost, Barton has returned to the offer we made after tweet 5.
There has therefore been a parallel action on tweets 6-10 and Barton will pay further damages for these. A number of other steps — including statements made in Court by way of apology — are still to be taken, and Barton has agreed to pay my legal costs of all of the claims.
Jeremy Vine
https://x.com/theJeremyVine/status/1803100048403665035
Your bitterness OOZES, like sap in April
Imputed rent is a slightly ridiculous concept which means that GDP grows when house prices go up because it means we'd all need to be paying more rent to live in our homes.
(Interestingly, in Switzerland, imputed rent is taxable income. They say that all assets should be treated equally. If you own a company, and it pays you a dividend, you pay tax on it. If you own a house and get a benefit in kind - i.e. living there - from that asset, then you should treat it as income. I.e. you shouldn't be tax disadvantaged by buying shares in a company and using that dividend income to pay rent.)
Did I mention I was at Lord's last summer, and saw the Great Stokes hit more sixes than any man in the universe?