Suella Braverman has said that the Conservatives “deserved” their historic election defeat, in an intervention that will be seen as laying the groundwork for her leadership bid.
Writing in The Telegraph, the former home secretary accuses Rishi Sunak of pursuing an “idiotic strategy” and suggests that some of her colleagues treated voters like “mugs”.
Looking at the Labour target list is also very revealing - 72 more seats available to them on swings of 5% or less, the vast bulk of which are held by the Conservatives.
All of the LD seats bar two are outside of Labour's top 120 targets. We all know how damaging Reform defections were to the Conservatives, but if anything demonstrates the full extent of the anti-Tory tactical switching between Lab and LD that occurred as well, that is surely it.
Indeed but given Labour are over 400 seats now it is hard to see them gaining many more seats. Indeed in the general election after their 1997 landslide in 2001 Labour only gained 2 seats, Dorset South from the Tories and Ynys Mon from Plaid although they held almost all the seats they had won in 1997
Well we don't know, do we? Politics is becoming a more complicated, multi-cornered fight, and it only takes a small swing from either of the two right-wing parties to Labour for more Conservative defences to start to fall over. There are 24 Conservative seats available to Labour on a direct Con-Lab swing of under 2%, and more Con defections to Reform, although only half as useful to Labour, would make the situation even worse for the Tories.
Of course, if Labour does badly and loses a lot of support then that could go in the other direction to the Conservatives - but it could just as easily go to other parties, which would halve its net benefit to Con.
The more viable parties there are competing under FPTP, the more complex and unpredictable the electoral outcomes get. More random candidates will win individual seats on small fractions of the vote, even if they are utterly repellent to two-thirds or more of the voters in the constituency, and more extreme and perverse national outcomes will also occur. Indeed, an extreme and perverse outcome is essentially what we've just had with this election: Labour, as the single strongest party against a split opposition, has won two thirds of the seats with a third of the popular vote. If, in future, we have one truly dominant party against a collection of smaller parties, as happened in Scotland in 2015, then we'll end up with a gigantic governing bloc and very little opposition - try Baxtering this GE result, but taking enough extra share from the second largest party to top Labour's vote up to 40%, and see what happens. Indeed, look at what's already happened to Reform and the Greens - 21% of the popular vote between them and a grand total of 9 seats to show for it.
Crap voting system plus multi-party dynamics = inequitable and extreme results. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, it's going to throw up a truly indefensible and damaging outcome. Not that the party which ends up controlling 80% of the Commons, and has no effective Parliamentary counter left, will do anything about it.
More Labour gains from the Tories is the least likely outcome next time, more LD or Reform gains from the Tories maybe but not Labour gains. Reform also has a lot of Labour seats in its target list as does the Greens
How do you know? Labour is starting from a surprisingly low share and the next election is probably at least four years away.
Labour is starting from 10% ahead of the Tories on voteshare, a lead over the Conservatives it has managed to match or exceed only twice in the last 100 years, 1945 and 1997. Labour is also now in government having to deal with the economy and the need to control immigration in a world where almost every incumbent government in the western world is behind or no more than level pegging in the polls
It is not impossible for well ordered Governments to maintain or increase their support in office, so we shall see.
Besides, the lesson of this week is that the national total of votes matters less than where you get those votes. Which has been staring us in the face during the rise and fall of the SNP, but we mostly ignored it because that was for viewers in Scotland.
If I were looking for further Conservative losses, I'd be looking for places where the tactical squeeze didn't fully work out this time. Take Huntingdon- Conservatives held it by 1500 over Labour, but there were still nearly 5000 Lib Dem votes.
Also Tatton. More tactical voting could have seen off Lady Esther.
Looking at the Labour target list is also very revealing - 72 more seats available to them on swings of 5% or less, the vast bulk of which are held by the Conservatives.
All of the LD seats bar two are outside of Labour's top 120 targets. We all know how damaging Reform defections were to the Conservatives, but if anything demonstrates the full extent of the anti-Tory tactical switching between Lab and LD that occurred as well, that is surely it.
Indeed but given Labour are over 400 seats now it is hard to see them gaining many more seats. Indeed in the general election after their 1997 landslide in 2001 Labour only gained 2 seats, Dorset South from the Tories and Ynys Mon from Plaid although they held almost all the seats they had won in 1997
Well we don't know, do we? Politics is becoming a more complicated, multi-cornered fight, and it only takes a small swing from either of the two right-wing parties to Labour for more Conservative defences to start to fall over. There are 24 Conservative seats available to Labour on a direct Con-Lab swing of under 2%, and more Con defections to Reform, although only half as useful to Labour, would make the situation even worse for the Tories.
Of course, if Labour does badly and loses a lot of support then that could go in the other direction to the Conservatives - but it could just as easily go to other parties, which would halve its net benefit to Con.
The more viable parties there are competing under FPTP, the more complex and unpredictable the electoral outcomes get. More random candidates will win individual seats on small fractions of the vote, even if they are utterly repellent to two-thirds or more of the voters in the constituency, and more extreme and perverse national outcomes will also occur. Indeed, an extreme and perverse outcome is essentially what we've just had with this election: Labour, as the single strongest party against a split opposition, has won two thirds of the seats with a third of the popular vote. If, in future, we have one truly dominant party against a collection of smaller parties, as happened in Scotland in 2015, then we'll end up with a gigantic governing bloc and very little opposition - try Baxtering this GE result, but taking enough extra share from the second largest party to top Labour's vote up to 40%, and see what happens. Indeed, look at what's already happened to Reform and the Greens - 21% of the popular vote between them and a grand total of 9 seats to show for it.
Crap voting system plus multi-party dynamics = inequitable and extreme results. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, it's going to throw up a truly indefensible and damaging outcome. Not that the party which ends up controlling 80% of the Commons, and has no effective Parliamentary counter left, will do anything about it.
More Labour gains from the Tories is the least likely outcome next time, more LD or Reform gains from the Tories maybe but not Labour gains. Reform also has a lot of Labour seats in its target list as does the Greens
How do you know? Labour is starting from a surprisingly low share and the next election is probably at least four years away.
Labour is starting from 10% ahead of the Tories on voteshare, a lead over the Conservatives it has managed to match or exceed only twice in the last 100 years, 1945 and 1997. Labour is also now in government having to deal with the economy and the need to control immigration in a world where almost every incumbent government in the western world is behind or no more than level pegging in the polls
It is not impossible for well ordered Governments to maintain or increase their support in office, so we shall see.
Only if they have a small majority or from a hung parliament, no government which entered power on a landslide has increased its majority even further the GE after
Prisoners should get the vote before 16 and 17 year olds.
Our treatment of prisoners is a disgrace. We neither deter nor reform. If MPs actually had to pay attention to what goes on inside prisons we might get better policies.
Pleased to see the appointment of James Timpson.
One of the most obvious means to deal with the myriad problems within our dilapidated and violent prisons is to reduce the number of prisoners. Unfortunately this is a difficult concept to explain to voters, many of whom want anybody convicted of anything more than parking on a double yellow line to be incarcerated for at least fifteen years.
The fact that, of the multiple crises bequeathed to Starmer by his predecessors, one of the most immediately pressing is the lack of capacity in the prison estate, speaks of the failure either to rehabilitate offenders or treat both drug addicts and the severely mentally ill in timely fashion.
According to recent statistics (from 2022) the incarceration rate in England and Wales is 132 people in every 100,000, compared with 67 in Germany and only 54 in the Netherlands. I doubt that the Germans and Dutch harbour especially permissive attitudes towards criminals, or have detection rates even lower than ours, so I can only conclude that they're doing something right that we aren't. Why do we lock so many people up - at, I might add, enormous expense, at a time when we're skint? It's a clear sign of failure.
Looking at the Labour target list is also very revealing - 72 more seats available to them on swings of 5% or less, the vast bulk of which are held by the Conservatives.
All of the LD seats bar two are outside of Labour's top 120 targets. We all know how damaging Reform defections were to the Conservatives, but if anything demonstrates the full extent of the anti-Tory tactical switching between Lab and LD that occurred as well, that is surely it.
Indeed but given Labour are over 400 seats now it is hard to see them gaining many more seats. Indeed in the general election after their 1997 landslide in 2001 Labour only gained 2 seats, Dorset South from the Tories and Ynys Mon from Plaid although they held almost all the seats they had won in 1997
Well we don't know, do we? Politics is becoming a more complicated, multi-cornered fight, and it only takes a small swing from either of the two right-wing parties to Labour for more Conservative defences to start to fall over. There are 24 Conservative seats available to Labour on a direct Con-Lab swing of under 2%, and more Con defections to Reform, although only half as useful to Labour, would make the situation even worse for the Tories.
Of course, if Labour does badly and loses a lot of support then that could go in the other direction to the Conservatives - but it could just as easily go to other parties, which would halve its net benefit to Con.
The more viable parties there are competing under FPTP, the more complex and unpredictable the electoral outcomes get. More random candidates will win individual seats on small fractions of the vote, even if they are utterly repellent to two-thirds or more of the voters in the constituency, and more extreme and perverse national outcomes will also occur. Indeed, an extreme and perverse outcome is essentially what we've just had with this election: Labour, as the single strongest party against a split opposition, has won two thirds of the seats with a third of the popular vote. If, in future, we have one truly dominant party against a collection of smaller parties, as happened in Scotland in 2015, then we'll end up with a gigantic governing bloc and very little opposition - try Baxtering this GE result, but taking enough extra share from the second largest party to top Labour's vote up to 40%, and see what happens. Indeed, look at what's already happened to Reform and the Greens - 21% of the popular vote between them and a grand total of 9 seats to show for it.
Crap voting system plus multi-party dynamics = inequitable and extreme results. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, it's going to throw up a truly indefensible and damaging outcome. Not that the party which ends up controlling 80% of the Commons, and has no effective Parliamentary counter left, will do anything about it.
More Labour gains from the Tories is the least likely outcome next time, more LD or Reform gains from the Tories maybe but not Labour gains. Reform also has a lot of Labour seats in its target list as does the Greens
How do you know? Labour is starting from a surprisingly low share and the next election is probably at least four years away.
Labour is starting from 10% ahead of the Tories on voteshare, a lead over the Conservatives it has managed to match or exceed only twice in the last 100 years, 1945 and 1997. Labour is also now in government having to deal with the economy and the need to control immigration in a world where almost every incumbent government in the western world is behind or no more than level pegging in the polls
It is not impossible for well ordered Governments to maintain or increase their support in office, so we shall see.
Only if they have a small majority or from a hung parliament, no government which entered power on a landslide has increased its majority even further the GE after
I've not gone back through centuries of electoral statistics, but I strongly suspect that no previous landslide was won with 34% of the vote.
Looking at the Labour target list is also very revealing - 72 more seats available to them on swings of 5% or less, the vast bulk of which are held by the Conservatives.
All of the LD seats bar two are outside of Labour's top 120 targets. We all know how damaging Reform defections were to the Conservatives, but if anything demonstrates the full extent of the anti-Tory tactical switching between Lab and LD that occurred as well, that is surely it.
Indeed but given Labour are over 400 seats now it is hard to see them gaining many more seats. Indeed in the general election after their 1997 landslide in 2001 Labour only gained 2 seats, Dorset South from the Tories and Ynys Mon from Plaid although they held almost all the seats they had won in 1997
Well we don't know, do we? Politics is becoming a more complicated, multi-cornered fight, and it only takes a small swing from either of the two right-wing parties to Labour for more Conservative defences to start to fall over. There are 24 Conservative seats available to Labour on a direct Con-Lab swing of under 2%, and more Con defections to Reform, although only half as useful to Labour, would make the situation even worse for the Tories.
Of course, if Labour does badly and loses a lot of support then that could go in the other direction to the Conservatives - but it could just as easily go to other parties, which would halve its net benefit to Con.
The more viable parties there are competing under FPTP, the more complex and unpredictable the electoral outcomes get. More random candidates will win individual seats on small fractions of the vote, even if they are utterly repellent to two-thirds or more of the voters in the constituency, and more extreme and perverse national outcomes will also occur. Indeed, an extreme and perverse outcome is essentially what we've just had with this election: Labour, as the single strongest party against a split opposition, has won two thirds of the seats with a third of the popular vote. If, in future, we have one truly dominant party against a collection of smaller parties, as happened in Scotland in 2015, then we'll end up with a gigantic governing bloc and very little opposition - try Baxtering this GE result, but taking enough extra share from the second largest party to top Labour's vote up to 40%, and see what happens. Indeed, look at what's already happened to Reform and the Greens - 21% of the popular vote between them and a grand total of 9 seats to show for it.
Crap voting system plus multi-party dynamics = inequitable and extreme results. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, it's going to throw up a truly indefensible and damaging outcome. Not that the party which ends up controlling 80% of the Commons, and has no effective Parliamentary counter left, will do anything about it.
More Labour gains from the Tories is the least likely outcome next time, more LD or Reform gains from the Tories maybe but not Labour gains. Reform also has a lot of Labour seats in its target list as does the Greens
How do you know? Labour is starting from a surprisingly low share and the next election is probably at least four years away.
Labour is starting from 10% ahead of the Tories on voteshare, a lead over the Conservatives it has managed to match or exceed only twice in the last 100 years, 1945 and 1997. Labour is also now in government having to deal with the economy and the need to control immigration in a world where almost every incumbent government in the western world is behind or no more than level pegging in the polls
It is not impossible for well ordered Governments to maintain or increase their support in office, so we shall see.
Besides, the lesson of this week is that the national total of votes matters less than where you get those votes. Which has been staring us in the face during the rise and fall of the SNP, but we mostly ignored it because that was for viewers in Scotland.
If I were looking for further Conservative losses, I'd be looking for places where the tactical squeeze didn't fully work out this time. Take Huntingdon- Conservatives held it by 1500 over Labour, but there were still nearly 5000 Lib Dem votes.
Also Tatton. More tactical voting could have seen off Lady Esther.
The Reform vote for Lady Esther to squeeze was bigger than the LD vote in Tatton though and almost as big as the combined LD and Green vote
Looking at the Labour target list is also very revealing - 72 more seats available to them on swings of 5% or less, the vast bulk of which are held by the Conservatives.
All of the LD seats bar two are outside of Labour's top 120 targets. We all know how damaging Reform defections were to the Conservatives, but if anything demonstrates the full extent of the anti-Tory tactical switching between Lab and LD that occurred as well, that is surely it.
Indeed but given Labour are over 400 seats now it is hard to see them gaining many more seats. Indeed in the general election after their 1997 landslide in 2001 Labour only gained 2 seats, Dorset South from the Tories and Ynys Mon from Plaid although they held almost all the seats they had won in 1997
Well we don't know, do we? Politics is becoming a more complicated, multi-cornered fight, and it only takes a small swing from either of the two right-wing parties to Labour for more Conservative defences to start to fall over. There are 24 Conservative seats available to Labour on a direct Con-Lab swing of under 2%, and more Con defections to Reform, although only half as useful to Labour, would make the situation even worse for the Tories.
Of course, if Labour does badly and loses a lot of support then that could go in the other direction to the Conservatives - but it could just as easily go to other parties, which would halve its net benefit to Con.
The more viable parties there are competing under FPTP, the more complex and unpredictable the electoral outcomes get. More random candidates will win individual seats on small fractions of the vote, even if they are utterly repellent to two-thirds or more of the voters in the constituency, and more extreme and perverse national outcomes will also occur. Indeed, an extreme and perverse outcome is essentially what we've just had with this election: Labour, as the single strongest party against a split opposition, has won two thirds of the seats with a third of the popular vote. If, in future, we have one truly dominant party against a collection of smaller parties, as happened in Scotland in 2015, then we'll end up with a gigantic governing bloc and very little opposition - try Baxtering this GE result, but taking enough extra share from the second largest party to top Labour's vote up to 40%, and see what happens. Indeed, look at what's already happened to Reform and the Greens - 21% of the popular vote between them and a grand total of 9 seats to show for it.
Crap voting system plus multi-party dynamics = inequitable and extreme results. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, it's going to throw up a truly indefensible and damaging outcome. Not that the party which ends up controlling 80% of the Commons, and has no effective Parliamentary counter left, will do anything about it.
More Labour gains from the Tories is the least likely outcome next time, more LD or Reform gains from the Tories maybe but not Labour gains. Reform also has a lot of Labour seats in its target list as does the Greens
How do you know? Labour is starting from a surprisingly low share and the next election is probably at least four years away.
Labour is starting from 10% ahead of the Tories on voteshare, a lead over the Conservatives it has managed to match or exceed only twice in the last 100 years, 1945 and 1997. Labour is also now in government having to deal with the economy and the need to control immigration in a world where almost every incumbent government in the western world is behind or no more than level pegging in the polls
It is not impossible for well ordered Governments to maintain or increase their support in office, so we shall see.
Only if they have a small majority or from a hung parliament, no government which entered power on a landslide has increased its majority even further the GE after
Looking at the Labour target list is also very revealing - 72 more seats available to them on swings of 5% or less, the vast bulk of which are held by the Conservatives.
All of the LD seats bar two are outside of Labour's top 120 targets. We all know how damaging Reform defections were to the Conservatives, but if anything demonstrates the full extent of the anti-Tory tactical switching between Lab and LD that occurred as well, that is surely it.
Indeed but given Labour are over 400 seats now it is hard to see them gaining many more seats. Indeed in the general election after their 1997 landslide in 2001 Labour only gained 2 seats, Dorset South from the Tories and Ynys Mon from Plaid although they held almost all the seats they had won in 1997
Well we don't know, do we? Politics is becoming a more complicated, multi-cornered fight, and it only takes a small swing from either of the two right-wing parties to Labour for more Conservative defences to start to fall over. There are 24 Conservative seats available to Labour on a direct Con-Lab swing of under 2%, and more Con defections to Reform, although only half as useful to Labour, would make the situation even worse for the Tories.
Of course, if Labour does badly and loses a lot of support then that could go in the other direction to the Conservatives - but it could just as easily go to other parties, which would halve its net benefit to Con.
The more viable parties there are competing under FPTP, the more complex and unpredictable the electoral outcomes get. More random candidates will win individual seats on small fractions of the vote, even if they are utterly repellent to two-thirds or more of the voters in the constituency, and more extreme and perverse national outcomes will also occur. Indeed, an extreme and perverse outcome is essentially what we've just had with this election: Labour, as the single strongest party against a split opposition, has won two thirds of the seats with a third of the popular vote. If, in future, we have one truly dominant party against a collection of smaller parties, as happened in Scotland in 2015, then we'll end up with a gigantic governing bloc and very little opposition - try Baxtering this GE result, but taking enough extra share from the second largest party to top Labour's vote up to 40%, and see what happens. Indeed, look at what's already happened to Reform and the Greens - 21% of the popular vote between them and a grand total of 9 seats to show for it.
Crap voting system plus multi-party dynamics = inequitable and extreme results. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, it's going to throw up a truly indefensible and damaging outcome. Not that the party which ends up controlling 80% of the Commons, and has no effective Parliamentary counter left, will do anything about it.
More Labour gains from the Tories is the least likely outcome next time, more LD or Reform gains from the Tories maybe but not Labour gains. Reform also has a lot of Labour seats in its target list as does the Greens
How do you know? Labour is starting from a surprisingly low share and the next election is probably at least four years away.
Labour is starting from 10% ahead of the Tories on voteshare, a lead over the Conservatives it has managed to match or exceed only twice in the last 100 years, 1945 and 1997. Labour is also now in government having to deal with the economy and the need to control immigration in a world where almost every incumbent government in the western world is behind or no more than level pegging in the polls
It is not impossible for well ordered Governments to maintain or increase their support in office, so we shall see.
Only if they have a small majority or from a hung parliament, no government which entered power on a landslide has increased its majority even further the GE after
I've not gone back through centuries of electoral statistics, but I strongly suspect that no previous landslide was won with 34% of the vote.
No previous landslide was won with the main Opposition Party to the winner as low as 23% either
If we had electronic voting these anomalies wouldn't happen, assuming they were spotted in the first place. You might have more actual visibility with bits of paper moving around but it doesn't make it any more accurate.
Not pushing one way or the other for online/electronic voting. It depends what people want to do. The issues aren't all way however.
If electronic voting were to go wrong it would go reallllly wrong. A few bits of paper go missing is less likely to be significant, and as was noted by someone else the sheer number of people and stages involved make it harder to game.
It depends what risk you want to control. With paper based voting system you accept a degree of inaccuracy to a couple of hundred of voted, possibly more if errors aren't detected and probably the occasional wrong result. Against that I am reasonably confident given I haven't done the analysis that an online system can be made as reliable as a paper based system, and more accurate. As I said upthread the problem addressed by a voting system is extremely simple compared. with systems we rely on every day.
It comes down to what we want. If we accept a a degree of inaccuracy with paper based systems and degree of abuse with postal voting, and don't want the convenience of online voting there is no point in implementing yet another voting method.
Looking at the Labour target list is also very revealing - 72 more seats available to them on swings of 5% or less, the vast bulk of which are held by the Conservatives.
All of the LD seats bar two are outside of Labour's top 120 targets. We all know how damaging Reform defections were to the Conservatives, but if anything demonstrates the full extent of the anti-Tory tactical switching between Lab and LD that occurred as well, that is surely it.
Indeed but given Labour are over 400 seats now it is hard to see them gaining many more seats. Indeed in the general election after their 1997 landslide in 2001 Labour only gained 2 seats, Dorset South from the Tories and Ynys Mon from Plaid although they held almost all the seats they had won in 1997
Well we don't know, do we? Politics is becoming a more complicated, multi-cornered fight, and it only takes a small swing from either of the two right-wing parties to Labour for more Conservative defences to start to fall over. There are 24 Conservative seats available to Labour on a direct Con-Lab swing of under 2%, and more Con defections to Reform, although only half as useful to Labour, would make the situation even worse for the Tories.
Of course, if Labour does badly and loses a lot of support then that could go in the other direction to the Conservatives - but it could just as easily go to other parties, which would halve its net benefit to Con.
The more viable parties there are competing under FPTP, the more complex and unpredictable the electoral outcomes get. More random candidates will win individual seats on small fractions of the vote, even if they are utterly repellent to two-thirds or more of the voters in the constituency, and more extreme and perverse national outcomes will also occur. Indeed, an extreme and perverse outcome is essentially what we've just had with this election: Labour, as the single strongest party against a split opposition, has won two thirds of the seats with a third of the popular vote. If, in future, we have one truly dominant party against a collection of smaller parties, as happened in Scotland in 2015, then we'll end up with a gigantic governing bloc and very little opposition - try Baxtering this GE result, but taking enough extra share from the second largest party to top Labour's vote up to 40%, and see what happens. Indeed, look at what's already happened to Reform and the Greens - 21% of the popular vote between them and a grand total of 9 seats to show for it.
Crap voting system plus multi-party dynamics = inequitable and extreme results. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, it's going to throw up a truly indefensible and damaging outcome. Not that the party which ends up controlling 80% of the Commons, and has no effective Parliamentary counter left, will do anything about it.
More Labour gains from the Tories is the least likely outcome next time, more LD or Reform gains from the Tories maybe but not Labour gains. Reform also has a lot of Labour seats in its target list as does the Greens
How do you know? Labour is starting from a surprisingly low share and the next election is probably at least four years away.
Labour is starting from 10% ahead of the Tories on voteshare, a lead over the Conservatives it has managed to match or exceed only twice in the last 100 years, 1945 and 1997. Labour is also now in government having to deal with the economy and the need to control immigration in a world where almost every incumbent government in the western world is behind or no more than level pegging in the polls
It is not impossible for well ordered Governments to maintain or increase their support in office, so we shall see.
Besides, the lesson of this week is that the national total of votes matters less than where you get those votes. Which has been staring us in the face during the rise and fall of the SNP, but we mostly ignored it because that was for viewers in Scotland.
If I were looking for further Conservative losses, I'd be looking for places where the tactical squeeze didn't fully work out this time. Take Huntingdon- Conservatives held it by 1500 over Labour, but there were still nearly 5000 Lib Dem votes.
It's a good point. Certainly where I live, the Labour candidate was helped enormously by the chunky vote for the third placed Reform candidate, but one suspects he still would've come up short without tactical voting from LD supporters. In round numbers, the Labour victor's vote share was 4% greater than that of the defeated Tory; the Lib Dem candidate lost 5% relative to 2019.
Labour are set to bring back Sir Tony Blair’s health secretary Alan Milburn to help reform the NHS, in a sign that the private sector and consumer choice will be at the heart of their plans.
It comes after the Prime Minister said in his first press conference that the NHS was “broken”.
Mr Milburn’s exact role is yet to be decided, and talks are still ongoing, but it is understood that he has already been advising the Health Secretary Wes Streeting and his team in recent weeks to ensure they can “hit the ground running” upon entering government.
Rumour has it as the new CEO. I am not a Milburn fan.
Prisoners should get the vote before 16 and 17 year olds.
Our treatment of prisoners is a disgrace. We neither deter nor reform. If MPs actually had to pay attention to what goes on inside prisons we might get better policies.
Pleased to see the appointment of James Timpson.
One of the most obvious means to deal with the myriad problems within our dilapidated and violent prisons is to reduce the number of prisoners. Unfortunately this is a difficult concept to explain to voters, many of whom want anybody convicted of anything more than parking on a double yellow line to be incarcerated for at least fifteen years.
The fact that, of the multiple crises bequeathed to Starmer by his predecessors, one of the most immediately pressing is the lack of capacity in the prison estate, speaks of the failure either to rehabilitate offenders or treat both drug addicts and the severely mentally ill in timely fashion.
According to recent statistics (from 2022) the incarceration rate in England and Wales is 132 people in every 100,000, compared with 67 in Germany and only 54 in the Netherlands. I doubt that the Germans and Dutch harbour especially permissive attitudes towards criminals, or have detection rates even lower than ours, so I can only conclude that they're doing something right that we aren't. Why do we lock so many people up - at, I might add, enormous expense, at a time when we're skint? It's a clear sign of failure.
Douglas Hurd famously said that prison was "an expensive way to make bad people worse".
Spending on rehab and drug treatment to reduce reoffending is not just good social policy , it makes financial sense.
It takes time to take effect but is just the sort of efficiency saving and productivity gain we need.
Looking at the Labour target list is also very revealing - 72 more seats available to them on swings of 5% or less, the vast bulk of which are held by the Conservatives.
All of the LD seats bar two are outside of Labour's top 120 targets. We all know how damaging Reform defections were to the Conservatives, but if anything demonstrates the full extent of the anti-Tory tactical switching between Lab and LD that occurred as well, that is surely it.
Indeed but given Labour are over 400 seats now it is hard to see them gaining many more seats. Indeed in the general election after their 1997 landslide in 2001 Labour only gained 2 seats, Dorset South from the Tories and Ynys Mon from Plaid although they held almost all the seats they had won in 1997
Well we don't know, do we? Politics is becoming a more complicated, multi-cornered fight, and it only takes a small swing from either of the two right-wing parties to Labour for more Conservative defences to start to fall over. There are 24 Conservative seats available to Labour on a direct Con-Lab swing of under 2%, and more Con defections to Reform, although only half as useful to Labour, would make the situation even worse for the Tories.
Of course, if Labour does badly and loses a lot of support then that could go in the other direction to the Conservatives - but it could just as easily go to other parties, which would halve its net benefit to Con.
The more viable parties there are competing under FPTP, the more complex and unpredictable the electoral outcomes get. More random candidates will win individual seats on small fractions of the vote, even if they are utterly repellent to two-thirds or more of the voters in the constituency, and more extreme and perverse national outcomes will also occur. Indeed, an extreme and perverse outcome is essentially what we've just had with this election: Labour, as the single strongest party against a split opposition, has won two thirds of the seats with a third of the popular vote. If, in future, we have one truly dominant party against a collection of smaller parties, as happened in Scotland in 2015, then we'll end up with a gigantic governing bloc and very little opposition - try Baxtering this GE result, but taking enough extra share from the second largest party to top Labour's vote up to 40%, and see what happens. Indeed, look at what's already happened to Reform and the Greens - 21% of the popular vote between them and a grand total of 9 seats to show for it.
Crap voting system plus multi-party dynamics = inequitable and extreme results. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, it's going to throw up a truly indefensible and damaging outcome. Not that the party which ends up controlling 80% of the Commons, and has no effective Parliamentary counter left, will do anything about it.
More Labour gains from the Tories is the least likely outcome next time, more LD or Reform gains from the Tories maybe but not Labour gains. Reform also has a lot of Labour seats in its target list as does the Greens
How do you know? Labour is starting from a surprisingly low share and the next election is probably at least four years away.
Labour is starting from 10% ahead of the Tories on voteshare, a lead over the Conservatives it has managed to match or exceed only twice in the last 100 years, 1945 and 1997. Labour is also now in government having to deal with the economy and the need to control immigration in a world where almost every incumbent government in the western world is behind or no more than level pegging in the polls
It is not impossible for well ordered Governments to maintain or increase their support in office, so we shall see.
Only if they have a small majority or from a hung parliament, no government which entered power on a landslide has increased its majority even further the GE after
I've not gone back through centuries of electoral statistics, but I strongly suspect that no previous landslide was won with 34% of the vote.
No previous landslide was won with the main Opposition Party to the winner as low as 23% either
Thus we are dealing with an unprecedented set of circumstances, so who knows what will happen next time?
Because the problem was NOT the votes counted for various candidates - including margin separating first (LD) and second (SNP) place - but rather reconciling ballots accepted with actually counted . . . or something like that.
Was an observer at a recount for state senator, which ended up with zero doubt as to which candidate won. HOWEVER, there was one vote recorded that could NOT be accounted for.
County auditor ordered (correctly in my opinion) that all ballots be double-checked until this discrepancy was resolved. Which it was . . . after about four hours looking by crew of two-dozen counters.
Suella Braverman has said that the Conservatives “deserved” their historic election defeat, in an intervention that will be seen as laying the groundwork for her leadership bid.
Writing in The Telegraph, the former home secretary accuses Rishi Sunak of pursuing an “idiotic strategy” and suggests that some of her colleagues treated voters like “mugs”.
Prisoners should get the vote before 16 and 17 year olds.
Our treatment of prisoners is a disgrace. We neither deter nor reform. If MPs actually had to pay attention to what goes on inside prisons we might get better policies.
Prisoners should get the vote before 16 and 17 year olds.
Our treatment of prisoners is a disgrace. We neither deter nor reform. If MPs actually had to pay attention to what goes on inside prisons we might get better policies.
Pleased to see the appointment of James Timpson.
One of the most obvious means to deal with the myriad problems within our dilapidated and violent prisons is to reduce the number of prisoners. Unfortunately this is a difficult concept to explain to voters, many of whom want anybody convicted of anything more than parking on a double yellow line to be incarcerated for at least fifteen years.
The fact that, of the multiple crises bequeathed to Starmer by his predecessors, one of the most immediately pressing is the lack of capacity in the prison estate, speaks of the failure either to rehabilitate offenders or treat both drug addicts and the severely mentally ill in timely fashion.
According to recent statistics (from 2022) the incarceration rate in England and Wales is 132 people in every 100,000, compared with 67 in Germany and only 54 in the Netherlands. I doubt that the Germans and Dutch harbour especially permissive attitudes towards criminals, or have detection rates even lower than ours, so I can only conclude that they're doing something right that we aren't. Why do we lock so many people up - at, I might add, enormous expense, at a time when we're skint? It's a clear sign of failure.
Douglas Hurd famously said that prison was "an expensive way to make bad people worse".
Spending on rehab and drug treatment to reduce reoffending is not just good social policy , it makes financial sense.
It takes time to take effect but is just the sort of efficiency saving and productivity gain we need.
The only benefit to more and longer sentences is it is easier. But of course parties often default to promising to be harsher and harsher because, well, it works (electorally I mean). See also promising 'new offences', often with very little need for a new law, because it sounds good. I don't remember which parties were doing that this time but several did.
Looking at the Labour target list is also very revealing - 72 more seats available to them on swings of 5% or less, the vast bulk of which are held by the Conservatives.
All of the LD seats bar two are outside of Labour's top 120 targets. We all know how damaging Reform defections were to the Conservatives, but if anything demonstrates the full extent of the anti-Tory tactical switching between Lab and LD that occurred as well, that is surely it.
Indeed but given Labour are over 400 seats now it is hard to see them gaining many more seats. Indeed in the general election after their 1997 landslide in 2001 Labour only gained 2 seats, Dorset South from the Tories and Ynys Mon from Plaid although they held almost all the seats they had won in 1997
Well we don't know, do we? Politics is becoming a more complicated, multi-cornered fight, and it only takes a small swing from either of the two right-wing parties to Labour for more Conservative defences to start to fall over. There are 24 Conservative seats available to Labour on a direct Con-Lab swing of under 2%, and more Con defections to Reform, although only half as useful to Labour, would make the situation even worse for the Tories.
Of course, if Labour does badly and loses a lot of support then that could go in the other direction to the Conservatives - but it could just as easily go to other parties, which would halve its net benefit to Con.
The more viable parties there are competing under FPTP, the more complex and unpredictable the electoral outcomes get. More random candidates will win individual seats on small fractions of the vote, even if they are utterly repellent to two-thirds or more of the voters in the constituency, and more extreme and perverse national outcomes will also occur. Indeed, an extreme and perverse outcome is essentially what we've just had with this election: Labour, as the single strongest party against a split opposition, has won two thirds of the seats with a third of the popular vote. If, in future, we have one truly dominant party against a collection of smaller parties, as happened in Scotland in 2015, then we'll end up with a gigantic governing bloc and very little opposition - try Baxtering this GE result, but taking enough extra share from the second largest party to top Labour's vote up to 40%, and see what happens. Indeed, look at what's already happened to Reform and the Greens - 21% of the popular vote between them and a grand total of 9 seats to show for it.
Crap voting system plus multi-party dynamics = inequitable and extreme results. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, it's going to throw up a truly indefensible and damaging outcome. Not that the party which ends up controlling 80% of the Commons, and has no effective Parliamentary counter left, will do anything about it.
More Labour gains from the Tories is the least likely outcome next time, more LD or Reform gains from the Tories maybe but not Labour gains. Reform also has a lot of Labour seats in its target list as does the Greens
How do you know? Labour is starting from a surprisingly low share and the next election is probably at least four years away.
Labour is starting from 10% ahead of the Tories on voteshare, a lead over the Conservatives it has managed to match or exceed only twice in the last 100 years, 1945 and 1997. Labour is also now in government having to deal with the economy and the need to control immigration in a world where almost every incumbent government in the western world is behind or no more than level pegging in the polls
It is not impossible for well ordered Governments to maintain or increase their support in office, so we shall see.
Besides, the lesson of this week is that the national total of votes matters less than where you get those votes. Which has been staring us in the face during the rise and fall of the SNP, but we mostly ignored it because that was for viewers in Scotland.
If I were looking for further Conservative losses, I'd be looking for places where the tactical squeeze didn't fully work out this time. Take Huntingdon- Conservatives held it by 1500 over Labour, but there were still nearly 5000 Lib Dem votes.
Also Tatton. More tactical voting could have seen off Lady Esther.
The Reform vote for Lady Esther to squeeze was bigger than the LD vote in Tatton though and almost as big as the combined LD and Green vote
If ReFukkers won't vote for a wing nut like Esther now, why should they next time?
Suella Braverman has said that the Conservatives “deserved” their historic election defeat, in an intervention that will be seen as laying the groundwork for her leadership bid.
Writing in The Telegraph, the former home secretary accuses Rishi Sunak of pursuing an “idiotic strategy” and suggests that some of her colleagues treated voters like “mugs”.
Yeah, she's at the bottom of my list for new Conservative leaders.
Does any PBer think that Braverman is any good ?
Quite a few of us I imagine - if nobody thought she was any good, she wouldn't get half the abuse.
Well I don't remember much praise for Braverman on PB.
Most of the Tory voters on PB are not of Braverman's wing.
Its not about which wing or which policy.
The problem with Braverman is that she's complete crap.
Incompetent in action and appalling in conduct.
That may well be true, but which wing does matter, because her intentions will have been supported more in certain wings even if she did badly, or they would even say any failures were not her fault but Rishis for not following through/removing her etc.
Suella Braverman has said that the Conservatives “deserved” their historic election defeat, in an intervention that will be seen as laying the groundwork for her leadership bid.
Writing in The Telegraph, the former home secretary accuses Rishi Sunak of pursuing an “idiotic strategy” and suggests that some of her colleagues treated voters like “mugs”.
Yeah, she's at the bottom of my list for new Conservative leaders.
Does any PBer think that Braverman is any good ?
Quite a few of us I imagine - if nobody thought she was any good, she wouldn't get half the abuse.
Well I don't remember much praise for Braverman on PB.
Most of the Tory voters on PB are not of Braverman's wing.
Its not about which wing or which policy.
The problem with Braverman is that she's complete crap.
Incompetent in action and appalling in conduct.
Neither incompetence not misconduct have been a barrier to ascending the Tory throne in the past. King Boris I exhibited both traits, but the faithful still loved him.
Labour are set to bring back Sir Tony Blair’s health secretary Alan Milburn to help reform the NHS, in a sign that the private sector and consumer choice will be at the heart of their plans.
It comes after the Prime Minister said in his first press conference that the NHS was “broken”.
Mr Milburn’s exact role is yet to be decided, and talks are still ongoing, but it is understood that he has already been advising the Health Secretary Wes Streeting and his team in recent weeks to ensure they can “hit the ground running” upon entering government.
Rumour has it as the new CEO. I am not a Milburn fan.
We don’t care.
Alan Milburn. Blimey - there's a name from the past.
I was once told by a very senior Labour activist that he was the next leader after Blair.
Labour are set to bring back Sir Tony Blair’s health secretary Alan Milburn to help reform the NHS, in a sign that the private sector and consumer choice will be at the heart of their plans.
It comes after the Prime Minister said in his first press conference that the NHS was “broken”.
Mr Milburn’s exact role is yet to be decided, and talks are still ongoing, but it is understood that he has already been advising the Health Secretary Wes Streeting and his team in recent weeks to ensure they can “hit the ground running” upon entering government.
Rumour has it as the new CEO. I am not a Milburn fan.
We don’t care.
Alan Milburn. Blimey - there's a name from the past.
I was once told by a very senior Labour activist that he was the next leader after Blair.
Because the problem was NOT the votes counted for various candidates - including margin separating first (LD) and second (SNP) place - but rather reconciling ballots accepted with actually counted . . . or something like that.
Was an observer at a recount for state senator, which ended up with zero doubt as to which candidate won. HOWEVER, there was one vote recorded that could NOT be accounted for.
County auditor ordered (correctly in my opinion) that all ballots be double-checked until this discrepancy was resolved. Which it was . . . after about four hours looking by crew of two-dozen counters.
I cannot conceive what took them that long, you can find an errant one or two votes pretty quickly, though sounds like you didn't have enough counters (at the ones i did there were 60+ per seat). Yet Inverness must have been enough out that they realised the knackered people would take too long to do it hence taking a day out.
Prisoners should get the vote before 16 and 17 year olds.
Our treatment of prisoners is a disgrace. We neither deter nor reform. If MPs actually had to pay attention to what goes on inside prisons we might get better policies.
Pleased to see the appointment of James Timpson.
One of the most obvious means to deal with the myriad problems within our dilapidated and violent prisons is to reduce the number of prisoners. Unfortunately this is a difficult concept to explain to voters, many of whom want anybody convicted of anything more than parking on a double yellow line to be incarcerated for at least fifteen years.
The fact that, of the multiple crises bequeathed to Starmer by his predecessors, one of the most immediately pressing is the lack of capacity in the prison estate, speaks of the failure either to rehabilitate offenders or treat both drug addicts and the severely mentally ill in timely fashion.
According to recent statistics (from 2022) the incarceration rate in England and Wales is 132 people in every 100,000, compared with 67 in Germany and only 54 in the Netherlands. I doubt that the Germans and Dutch harbour especially permissive attitudes towards criminals, or have detection rates even lower than ours, so I can only conclude that they're doing something right that we aren't. Why do we lock so many people up - at, I might add, enormous expense, at a time when we're skint? It's a clear sign of failure.
Douglas Hurd famously said that prison was "an expensive way to make bad people worse".
Spending on rehab and drug treatment to reduce reoffending is not just good social policy , it makes financial sense.
It takes time to take effect but is just the sort of efficiency saving and productivity gain we need.
Always a critical problem in policy. People want stuff to happen straight away. When the 8am bunfight for the GP, for example, doesn't end within the next three weeks, expect the grumbling to begin.
Looking at the Labour target list is also very revealing - 72 more seats available to them on swings of 5% or less, the vast bulk of which are held by the Conservatives.
All of the LD seats bar two are outside of Labour's top 120 targets. We all know how damaging Reform defections were to the Conservatives, but if anything demonstrates the full extent of the anti-Tory tactical switching between Lab and LD that occurred as well, that is surely it.
Indeed but given Labour are over 400 seats now it is hard to see them gaining many more seats. Indeed in the general election after their 1997 landslide in 2001 Labour only gained 2 seats, Dorset South from the Tories and Ynys Mon from Plaid although they held almost all the seats they had won in 1997
Well we don't know, do we? Politics is becoming a more complicated, multi-cornered fight, and it only takes a small swing from either of the two right-wing parties to Labour for more Conservative defences to start to fall over. There are 24 Conservative seats available to Labour on a direct Con-Lab swing of under 2%, and more Con defections to Reform, although only half as useful to Labour, would make the situation even worse for the Tories.
Of course, if Labour does badly and loses a lot of support then that could go in the other direction to the Conservatives - but it could just as easily go to other parties, which would halve its net benefit to Con.
The more viable parties there are competing under FPTP, the more complex and unpredictable the electoral outcomes get. More random candidates will win individual seats on small fractions of the vote, even if they are utterly repellent to two-thirds or more of the voters in the constituency, and more extreme and perverse national outcomes will also occur. Indeed, an extreme and perverse outcome is essentially what we've just had with this election: Labour, as the single strongest party against a split opposition, has won two thirds of the seats with a third of the popular vote. If, in future, we have one truly dominant party against a collection of smaller parties, as happened in Scotland in 2015, then we'll end up with a gigantic governing bloc and very little opposition - try Baxtering this GE result, but taking enough extra share from the second largest party to top Labour's vote up to 40%, and see what happens. Indeed, look at what's already happened to Reform and the Greens - 21% of the popular vote between them and a grand total of 9 seats to show for it.
Crap voting system plus multi-party dynamics = inequitable and extreme results. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, it's going to throw up a truly indefensible and damaging outcome. Not that the party which ends up controlling 80% of the Commons, and has no effective Parliamentary counter left, will do anything about it.
More Labour gains from the Tories is the least likely outcome next time, more LD or Reform gains from the Tories maybe but not Labour gains. Reform also has a lot of Labour seats in its target list as does the Greens
How do you know? Labour is starting from a surprisingly low share and the next election is probably at least four years away.
Labour is starting from 10% ahead of the Tories on voteshare, a lead over the Conservatives it has managed to match or exceed only twice in the last 100 years, 1945 and 1997. Labour is also now in government having to deal with the economy and the need to control immigration in a world where almost every incumbent government in the western world is behind or no more than level pegging in the polls
It is not impossible for well ordered Governments to maintain or increase their support in office, so we shall see.
Besides, the lesson of this week is that the national total of votes matters less than where you get those votes. Which has been staring us in the face during the rise and fall of the SNP, but we mostly ignored it because that was for viewers in Scotland.
If I were looking for further Conservative losses, I'd be looking for places where the tactical squeeze didn't fully work out this time. Take Huntingdon- Conservatives held it by 1500 over Labour, but there were still nearly 5000 Lib Dem votes.
Also Tatton. More tactical voting could have seen off Lady Esther.
But statements like that are made from the frame of yesterday’s politics; you’re not yet seeing how things have and will change.
It also highlight the strategic dilemma for the LibDems.
Maintaining, let alone growing, tactical voting is surely quite an ask, between a party of government and a party in opposition?
It might happen, of course, if Reform is rampant as Leon seems to expect. Vote to keep Reform out, similarly to what happens in France. But Reform is still a campaign group/business venture effectively set up for one election; we don’t know whether it will put down any roots and survive, let alone grow, the five years.
I know I said the Labour top team looked a bit bare, but Jacqui pissing Smith.....surely in that 400 MPs they have somebody better.
I was thinking that.
I guess there is a bunch of practical stuff in train in the DofE (the school repair programme? I don't know?) and they wanted someone who knows how to run the delivery function in that dept and keep the momentum going.
There is a very urgent need to complete the RAAC repairs, as there are still schools in temporary buildings. The general rebuilding programme needs to be restarted, so she will have a lot of experience in that, as there was huge renewal under 'Building Schools for The Future'.
Hopefully they will also revisit recruitment policies which worked e.g. Repayment of Teacher Loans, which are needed now more than ever.
Looking at the Labour target list is also very revealing - 72 more seats available to them on swings of 5% or less, the vast bulk of which are held by the Conservatives.
All of the LD seats bar two are outside of Labour's top 120 targets. We all know how damaging Reform defections were to the Conservatives, but if anything demonstrates the full extent of the anti-Tory tactical switching between Lab and LD that occurred as well, that is surely it.
Indeed but given Labour are over 400 seats now it is hard to see them gaining many more seats. Indeed in the general election after their 1997 landslide in 2001 Labour only gained 2 seats, Dorset South from the Tories and Ynys Mon from Plaid although they held almost all the seats they had won in 1997
Well we don't know, do we? Politics is becoming a more complicated, multi-cornered fight, and it only takes a small swing from either of the two right-wing parties to Labour for more Conservative defences to start to fall over. There are 24 Conservative seats available to Labour on a direct Con-Lab swing of under 2%, and more Con defections to Reform, although only half as useful to Labour, would make the situation even worse for the Tories.
Of course, if Labour does badly and loses a lot of support then that could go in the other direction to the Conservatives - but it could just as easily go to other parties, which would halve its net benefit to Con.
The more viable parties there are competing under FPTP, the more complex and unpredictable the electoral outcomes get. More random candidates will win individual seats on small fractions of the vote, even if they are utterly repellent to two-thirds or more of the voters in the constituency, and more extreme and perverse national outcomes will also occur. Indeed, an extreme and perverse outcome is essentially what we've just had with this election: Labour, as the single strongest party against a split opposition, has won two thirds of the seats with a third of the popular vote. If, in future, we have one truly dominant party against a collection of smaller parties, as happened in Scotland in 2015, then we'll end up with a gigantic governing bloc and very little opposition - try Baxtering this GE result, but taking enough extra share from the second largest party to top Labour's vote up to 40%, and see what happens. Indeed, look at what's already happened to Reform and the Greens - 21% of the popular vote between them and a grand total of 9 seats to show for it.
Crap voting system plus multi-party dynamics = inequitable and extreme results. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, it's going to throw up a truly indefensible and damaging outcome. Not that the party which ends up controlling 80% of the Commons, and has no effective Parliamentary counter left, will do anything about it.
More Labour gains from the Tories is the least likely outcome next time, more LD or Reform gains from the Tories maybe but not Labour gains. Reform also has a lot of Labour seats in its target list as does the Greens
How do you know? Labour is starting from a surprisingly low share and the next election is probably at least four years away.
Labour is starting from 10% ahead of the Tories on voteshare, a lead over the Conservatives it has managed to match or exceed only twice in the last 100 years, 1945 and 1997. Labour is also now in government having to deal with the economy and the need to control immigration in a world where almost every incumbent government in the western world is behind or no more than level pegging in the polls
It is not impossible for well ordered Governments to maintain or increase their support in office, so we shall see.
Only if they have a small majority or from a hung parliament, no government which entered power on a landslide has increased its majority even further the GE after
I've not gone back through centuries of electoral statistics, but I strongly suspect that no previous landslide was won with 34% of the vote.
It was a FPTP landslide, with more horses than in previous times of landslides. It was definitely not a PR landslide but the UK doesN't do PR.
Because the problem was NOT the votes counted for various candidates - including margin separating first (LD) and second (SNP) place - but rather reconciling ballots accepted with actually counted . . . or something like that.
Was an observer at a recount for state senator, which ended up with zero doubt as to which candidate won. HOWEVER, there was one vote recorded that could NOT be accounted for.
County auditor ordered (correctly in my opinion) that all ballots be double-checked until this discrepancy was resolved. Which it was . . . after about four hours looking by crew of two-dozen counters.
I cannot conceive what took them that long, you can find an errant one or two votes pretty quickly, though sounds like you didn't have enough counters (at the ones i did there were 60+ per seat). Yet Inverness must have been enough out that they realised the knackered people would take too long to do it hence taking a day out.
Reason the audit check I cited took as long as it did, was because the district including just part of the county in question, and ballots were NOT segregated by district or voting precinct in the original machine count. So for the hand recount, first step was digging all the ballots out of a slew of tabulation batches that were from the legislative district in question,
During that process, one ballot was overlooked so was still in its original batch - but which one? Going through just under 1k batches ballot-by-ballot to find the needle in the haystack - THAT's what took the time & effort.
ADDENDUM - In that election there were 160k ballots cast countywide; of these 42k were in the leg district in question. Thus the pool of ballots that had to be manual checked to find the mission one was 160k - 42k = 138k.
As I recall, the crew I observed had checked about half of those before finding the mission ballot; if they were unlucky, could have taken longer that 4 hours. Especially IF the worker who found it has missed it; obviously easy to do as that's what happened in the first place.
For god's sake Tony let ID cards go, you had your opportunity! Sir Tony Blair has urged Sir Keir Starmer to introduce digital identity cards and “avoid any vulnerability on wokeism”.
In an early intervention little more than 24 hours after the Prime Minister entered Downing Street, his predecessor has publicly offered advice on how to approach his time in office.
Really surprised that master of good morals and ethics, Starmar, has brought Jacqui Smith back.
While it was quite funny to see her attempting to get into the house owned by her sister, when she'd obviously never stepped foot in the place (not to mention claiming expenses for her husbands porn habit) the numbers involved in her case placed it on the more serious end of the allegations (£116,000) with Sir Alistair Graham saying her expenses claims were "near fraudulent"
Labour sleaze and cronyism from the off! Not a good start at all from the oh so pious Starmar.
For god's sake Tony let ID cards go, you had your opportunity! Sir Tony Blair has urged Sir Keir Starmer to introduce digital identity cards and “avoid any vulnerability on wokeism”.
In an early intervention little more than 24 hours after the Prime Minister entered Downing Street, his predecessor has publicly offered advice on how to approach his time in office.
The voting system used here in Washington state is mostly reasonable -- in my opinion.
Ballots are mailed out to registered voters, who mark them, at their leisure, and mail them -- postage free - to election offices in each county. Or deposit them in special metal boxes, which are collected on election night.
On election day, after the polls close, the election offices begin counting, using optical scanners. (If a ballot can not be read by a scanner, it is turned over to actual people, who try to decode it.)
Because they are optical ballots, they can be read just as easily, and almost as accurately, by people, as well as machines. So, I don't think of this as electronic voting, though others no doubt do..
Weaknesses: Mailed ballots need not be secret, and so make election fraud and intimidation easier. When fraud happens, as it sometimes does, it almost always happens with postal ballots. And usually in low turnout primary elections.
Ballots can be intercepted between the voter and the election office. (I have been worrying for years that this is especially a problem with those metal boxes, as they seem much too vulnerable to vandals.)
For god's sake Tony let ID cards go, you had your opportunity! Sir Tony Blair has urged Sir Keir Starmer to introduce digital identity cards and “avoid any vulnerability on wokeism”.
In an early intervention little more than 24 hours after the Prime Minister entered Downing Street, his predecessor has publicly offered advice on how to approach his time in office.
Blair should really have a bit of dignity and fade away.
I'm not against former PMs remaining involved in politics, far from it, but it has to be more than just 'Do the thing I never managed to finish please?'
And if you do want to remain relevant, you need to be do more than just come down from your ivory tower or cease swanning about with the super rich to every now and then grace us with some pronouncements.
For god's sake Tony let ID cards go, you had your opportunity! Sir Tony Blair has urged Sir Keir Starmer to introduce digital identity cards and “avoid any vulnerability on wokeism”.
In an early intervention little more than 24 hours after the Prime Minister entered Downing Street, his predecessor has publicly offered advice on how to approach his time in office.
For god's sake Tony let ID cards go, you had your opportunity! Sir Tony Blair has urged Sir Keir Starmer to introduce digital identity cards and “avoid any vulnerability on wokeism”.
In an early intervention little more than 24 hours after the Prime Minister entered Downing Street, his predecessor has publicly offered advice on how to approach his time in office.
Looking at the Labour target list is also very revealing - 72 more seats available to them on swings of 5% or less, the vast bulk of which are held by the Conservatives.
All of the LD seats bar two are outside of Labour's top 120 targets. We all know how damaging Reform defections were to the Conservatives, but if anything demonstrates the full extent of the anti-Tory tactical switching between Lab and LD that occurred as well, that is surely it.
Indeed but given Labour are over 400 seats now it is hard to see them gaining many more seats. Indeed in the general election after their 1997 landslide in 2001 Labour only gained 2 seats, Dorset South from the Tories and Ynys Mon from Plaid although they held almost all the seats they had won in 1997
Well we don't know, do we? Politics is becoming a more complicated, multi-cornered fight, and it only takes a small swing from either of the two right-wing parties to Labour for more Conservative defences to start to fall over. There are 24 Conservative seats available to Labour on a direct Con-Lab swing of under 2%, and more Con defections to Reform, although only half as useful to Labour, would make the situation even worse for the Tories.
Of course, if Labour does badly and loses a lot of support then that could go in the other direction to the Conservatives - but it could just as easily go to other parties, which would halve its net benefit to Con.
The more viable parties there are competing under FPTP, the more complex and unpredictable the electoral outcomes get. More random candidates will win individual seats on small fractions of the vote, even if they are utterly repellent to two-thirds or more of the voters in the constituency, and more extreme and perverse national outcomes will also occur. Indeed, an extreme and perverse outcome is essentially what we've just had with this election: Labour, as the single strongest party against a split opposition, has won two thirds of the seats with a third of the popular vote. If, in future, we have one truly dominant party against a collection of smaller parties, as happened in Scotland in 2015, then we'll end up with a gigantic governing bloc and very little opposition - try Baxtering this GE result, but taking enough extra share from the second largest party to top Labour's vote up to 40%, and see what happens. Indeed, look at what's already happened to Reform and the Greens - 21% of the popular vote between them and a grand total of 9 seats to show for it.
Crap voting system plus multi-party dynamics = inequitable and extreme results. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, it's going to throw up a truly indefensible and damaging outcome. Not that the party which ends up controlling 80% of the Commons, and has no effective Parliamentary counter left, will do anything about it.
More Labour gains from the Tories is the least likely outcome next time, more LD or Reform gains from the Tories maybe but not Labour gains. Reform also has a lot of Labour seats in its target list as does the Greens
How do you know? Labour is starting from a surprisingly low share and the next election is probably at least four years away.
Labour is starting from 10% ahead of the Tories on voteshare, a lead over the Conservatives it has managed to match or exceed only twice in the last 100 years, 1945 and 1997. Labour is also now in government having to deal with the economy and the need to control immigration in a world where almost every incumbent government in the western world is behind or no more than level pegging in the polls
It is not impossible for well ordered Governments to maintain or increase their support in office, so we shall see.
Besides, the lesson of this week is that the national total of votes matters less than where you get those votes. Which has been staring us in the face during the rise and fall of the SNP, but we mostly ignored it because that was for viewers in Scotland.
If I were looking for further Conservative losses, I'd be looking for places where the tactical squeeze didn't fully work out this time. Take Huntingdon- Conservatives held it by 1500 over Labour, but there were still nearly 5000 Lib Dem votes.
Also Tatton. More tactical voting could have seen off Lady Esther.
The Reform vote for Lady Esther to squeeze was bigger than the LD vote in Tatton though and almost as big as the combined LD and Green vote
If ReFukkers won't vote for a wing nut like Esther now, why should they next time?
As their protest vote will be against a Labour government they want to remove rather than a Sunak and Hunt led Tory government and Esther will not be from the governing party any more
Looking at the Labour target list is also very revealing - 72 more seats available to them on swings of 5% or less, the vast bulk of which are held by the Conservatives.
All of the LD seats bar two are outside of Labour's top 120 targets. We all know how damaging Reform defections were to the Conservatives, but if anything demonstrates the full extent of the anti-Tory tactical switching between Lab and LD that occurred as well, that is surely it.
Indeed but given Labour are over 400 seats now it is hard to see them gaining many more seats. Indeed in the general election after their 1997 landslide in 2001 Labour only gained 2 seats, Dorset South from the Tories and Ynys Mon from Plaid although they held almost all the seats they had won in 1997
Well we don't know, do we? Politics is becoming a more complicated, multi-cornered fight, and it only takes a small swing from either of the two right-wing parties to Labour for more Conservative defences to start to fall over. There are 24 Conservative seats available to Labour on a direct Con-Lab swing of under 2%, and more Con defections to Reform, although only half as useful to Labour, would make the situation even worse for the Tories.
Of course, if Labour does badly and loses a lot of support then that could go in the other direction to the Conservatives - but it could just as easily go to other parties, which would halve its net benefit to Con.
The more viable parties there are competing under FPTP, the more complex and unpredictable the electoral outcomes get. More random candidates will win individual seats on small fractions of the vote, even if they are utterly repellent to two-thirds or more of the voters in the constituency, and more extreme and perverse national outcomes will also occur. Indeed, an extreme and perverse outcome is essentially what we've just had with this election: Labour, as the single strongest party against a split opposition, has won two thirds of the seats with a third of the popular vote. If, in future, we have one truly dominant party against a collection of smaller parties, as happened in Scotland in 2015, then we'll end up with a gigantic governing bloc and very little opposition - try Baxtering this GE result, but taking enough extra share from the second largest party to top Labour's vote up to 40%, and see what happens. Indeed, look at what's already happened to Reform and the Greens - 21% of the popular vote between them and a grand total of 9 seats to show for it.
Crap voting system plus multi-party dynamics = inequitable and extreme results. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, it's going to throw up a truly indefensible and damaging outcome. Not that the party which ends up controlling 80% of the Commons, and has no effective Parliamentary counter left, will do anything about it.
More Labour gains from the Tories is the least likely outcome next time, more LD or Reform gains from the Tories maybe but not Labour gains. Reform also has a lot of Labour seats in its target list as does the Greens
How do you know? Labour is starting from a surprisingly low share and the next election is probably at least four years away.
Labour is starting from 10% ahead of the Tories on voteshare, a lead over the Conservatives it has managed to match or exceed only twice in the last 100 years, 1945 and 1997. Labour is also now in government having to deal with the economy and the need to control immigration in a world where almost every incumbent government in the western world is behind or no more than level pegging in the polls
It is not impossible for well ordered Governments to maintain or increase their support in office, so we shall see.
Only if they have a small majority or from a hung parliament, no government which entered power on a landslide has increased its majority even further the GE after
I've not gone back through centuries of electoral statistics, but I strongly suspect that no previous landslide was won with 34% of the vote.
No previous landslide was won with the main Opposition Party to the winner as low as 23% either
Thus we are dealing with an unprecedented set of circumstances, so who knows what will happen next time?
I agree that looking to precedent is probably not a good guide for predicting politics.
Nothing stays the same forever and we’re in the midst of a shift.
A question for me is how higher turnout might affect things next time. I suspect it could actually slightly suppress Reform, proportionally speaking. Though if the Tories lurch right and become diet-Reform, I expect most people they’re gunning for will prefer the full-fat version.
The voting system used here in Washington state is mostly reasonable -- in my opinion.
Ballots are mailed out to registered voters, who mark them, at their leisure, and mail them -- postage free - to election offices in each county. Or deposit them in special metal boxes, which are collected on election night.
On election day, after the polls close, the election offices begin counting, using optical scanners. (If a ballot can not be read by a scanner, it is turned over to actual people, who try to decode it.)
Because they are optical ballots, they can be read just as easily, and almost as accurately, by people, as well as machines. So, I don't think of this as electronic voting, though others no doubt do..
Weaknesses: Mailed ballots need not be secret, and so make election fraud and intimidation easier. When fraud happens, as it sometimes does, it almost always happens with postal ballots. And usually in low turnout primary elections.
Ballots can be intercepted between the voter and the election office. (I have been worrying for years that this is especially a problem with those metal boxes, as they seem much too vulnerable to vandals.)
CORRECTION - In WA State, NO county uses optical scan technology for ballot tabulation anymore.
Instead, they all gone to using digital scan, which essentially takes a pdf-type image of every ballot, which is more accurate in large measure because ballots can be easily analyzed and examined (by teams of two workers for each ballot) to ensure the votes on them are properly recorded as per the official state "What is a Vote" manual.
For god's sake Tony let ID cards go, you had your opportunity! Sir Tony Blair has urged Sir Keir Starmer to introduce digital identity cards and “avoid any vulnerability on wokeism”.
In an early intervention little more than 24 hours after the Prime Minister entered Downing Street, his predecessor has publicly offered advice on how to approach his time in office.
Blair should really have a bit of dignity and fade away.
That brought to mind the old advert jingle of "Keep recording, never fade away".
Which seems somewhat apt and horrifying.
He’s close to resembling the skeleton who sang it as well (I had that advert on the taped-off-the-telly Star Wars that I watched a million times as a kid).
Looking at the Labour target list is also very revealing - 72 more seats available to them on swings of 5% or less, the vast bulk of which are held by the Conservatives.
All of the LD seats bar two are outside of Labour's top 120 targets. We all know how damaging Reform defections were to the Conservatives, but if anything demonstrates the full extent of the anti-Tory tactical switching between Lab and LD that occurred as well, that is surely it.
Indeed but given Labour are over 400 seats now it is hard to see them gaining many more seats. Indeed in the general election after their 1997 landslide in 2001 Labour only gained 2 seats, Dorset South from the Tories and Ynys Mon from Plaid although they held almost all the seats they had won in 1997
Well we don't know, do we? Politics is becoming a more complicated, multi-cornered fight, and it only takes a small swing from either of the two right-wing parties to Labour for more Conservative defences to start to fall over. There are 24 Conservative seats available to Labour on a direct Con-Lab swing of under 2%, and more Con defections to Reform, although only half as useful to Labour, would make the situation even worse for the Tories.
Of course, if Labour does badly and loses a lot of support then that could go in the other direction to the Conservatives - but it could just as easily go to other parties, which would halve its net benefit to Con.
The more viable parties there are competing under FPTP, the more complex and unpredictable the electoral outcomes get. More random candidates will win individual seats on small fractions of the vote, even if they are utterly repellent to two-thirds or more of the voters in the constituency, and more extreme and perverse national outcomes will also occur. Indeed, an extreme and perverse outcome is essentially what we've just had with this election: Labour, as the single strongest party against a split opposition, has won two thirds of the seats with a third of the popular vote. If, in future, we have one truly dominant party against a collection of smaller parties, as happened in Scotland in 2015, then we'll end up with a gigantic governing bloc and very little opposition - try Baxtering this GE result, but taking enough extra share from the second largest party to top Labour's vote up to 40%, and see what happens. Indeed, look at what's already happened to Reform and the Greens - 21% of the popular vote between them and a grand total of 9 seats to show for it.
Crap voting system plus multi-party dynamics = inequitable and extreme results. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, it's going to throw up a truly indefensible and damaging outcome. Not that the party which ends up controlling 80% of the Commons, and has no effective Parliamentary counter left, will do anything about it.
More Labour gains from the Tories is the least likely outcome next time, more LD or Reform gains from the Tories maybe but not Labour gains. Reform also has a lot of Labour seats in its target list as does the Greens
If I had to predict right now, I’d imagine a few dozen or so Tory recoveries (a lot from Lib Dems but also a fair few Labour ones too), maybe another six or seven Reform wins - probably from Labour - and maybe another couple of Green seats.
The party I’m least sure about is the SNP who are so deep in crisis (more so even than the Tories) that it’s not impossible they become the fringe party they were in the past. However right now I’d guess they would recover a 5-10 seats next time round.
Labour to govern with a small majority
It's far too early to tell, but I would guess a small number of Lab and LD losses, but Lab still largest party and probable majority.
The Tories will find it much harder running their tax scares etc against an incumbent government.
Looking at those target lists, the 2 most surprising seats for me are that Llanelli is Reform target number 1 and that Brent West is Con target number 100.
In terms of Reform, the other surprise for me is that Barnsley N and Hartlepool are not in their top 150 target seats. The vast majority of their targets are Con 2019 seats (either where Con just hung on or where Lab narrowly won)
I've spent most of this campaign trying to tell folk this.
The voting system used here in Washington state is mostly reasonable -- in my opinion.
Ballots are mailed out to registered voters, who mark them, at their leisure, and mail them -- postage free - to election offices in each county. Or deposit them in special metal boxes, which are collected on election night.
On election day, after the polls close, the election offices begin counting, using optical scanners. (If a ballot can not be read by a scanner, it is turned over to actual people, who try to decode it.)
Because they are optical ballots, they can be read just as easily, and almost as accurately, by people, as well as machines. So, I don't think of this as electronic voting, though others no doubt do..
Weaknesses: Mailed ballots need not be secret, and so make election fraud and intimidation easier. When fraud happens, as it sometimes does, it almost always happens with postal ballots. And usually in low turnout primary elections.
Ballots can be intercepted between the voter and the election office. (I have been worrying for years that this is especially a problem with those metal boxes, as they seem much too vulnerable to vandals.)
CORRECTION - In WA State, NO county uses optical scan technology for ballot tabulation anymore.
Instead, they all gone to using digital scan, which essentially takes a pdf-type image of every ballot, which is more accurate in large measure because ballots can be easily analyzed and examined (by teams of two workers for each ballot) to ensure the votes on them are properly recorded as per the official state "What is a Vote" manual.
The big change I would make is saying ballots have to be in by election night, not 3 weeks later (or whatever it is), so that postal votes and normal votes are reported at the same time. The situation where votes come in over the following weeks couldn't be designed better to appeal to conspiracy theorists who, for instance, are able to watch as their favourite candidate is slowly overtaken by postal votes, having been ahead on election night itself.
Joe Biden’s doctor met with a leading Washington neurologist at the White House this year, it was reported on Saturday.
The report came after Biden on Friday ruled out taking an independent cognitive test and releasing its findings publicly, in an interview with ABC News arranged following his disastrous performance in last week’s presidential TV debate with Donald Trump.
According White House visitor logs reviewed by the New York Post, Dr Kevin Cannard, a Parkinson’s disease expert at Walter Reed medical center, met with Dr Kevin O’Connor, a doctor of osteopathic medicine who has treated the president for years.
Cannard has visited the White House house eight times since August 2023. On seven of those visits, most recently in late March, he met with Megan Nasworthy, a liaison between Walter Reed and the White House.
Labour are set to bring back Sir Tony Blair’s health secretary Alan Milburn to help reform the NHS, in a sign that the private sector and consumer choice will be at the heart of their plans.
It comes after the Prime Minister said in his first press conference that the NHS was “broken”.
Mr Milburn’s exact role is yet to be decided, and talks are still ongoing, but it is understood that he has already been advising the Health Secretary Wes Streeting and his team in recent weeks to ensure they can “hit the ground running” upon entering government.
Rumour has it as the new CEO. I am not a Milburn fan.
We don’t care.
Alan Milburn. Blimey - there's a name from the past.
I was once told by a very senior Labour activist that he was the next leader after Blair.
He lived down the road from me at my previous address. Pleasant enough fellow. Always walking dogs in wellies. Edit. Milburn had the wellies on!
Starmer: I will try and spend Friday evenings with my family.
right wing media: He will barely do a three day week.
Starmer: 11pm on Saturday night and appointments to ministry still being made.
The complaint was much ado about nothing in the first place, but I would in any case suspect his first few days to be a bit more frantic than average, outside of a crisis - he wants people in place for the start of the working week after all!
Joe Biden’s doctor met with a leading Washington neurologist at the White House this year, it was reported on Saturday.
The report came after Biden on Friday ruled out taking an independent cognitive test and releasing its findings publicly, in an interview with ABC News arranged following his disastrous performance in last week’s presidential TV debate with Donald Trump.
According White House visitor logs reviewed by the New York Post, Dr Kevin Cannard, a Parkinson’s disease expert at Walter Reed medical center, met with Dr Kevin O’Connor, a doctor of osteopathic medicine who has treated the president for years.
Cannard has visited the White House house eight times since August 2023. On seven of those visits, most recently in late March, he met with Megan Nasworthy, a liaison between Walter Reed and the White House.
Lord Ashcroft has more details now from his own exit poll of 16,000 people on Thursday and how they voted.
Starmer Labour won across the board, men and women, all age groups under 65 and every social class, doing best with upper middle class ABs and unskilled working class and unemployed DEs.
The Tories only won pensioners. Under Sunak the Tories did return to doing best amongst ABs though as they have at every general election except 2019 when under Boris the Conservatives did best with C2s. Reform did best with men and C2s and DEs and 45-64s. The LDs did best with women, 35-44s and ABs, the Greens best with women, 18-24s and C1s.
23% of 2019 Conservatives voted Reform, 12% Labour, 7% LD and 52% still voted Tory. 32% of 2019 LDs voted Labour, 11% of 2019 Labour voters voted Green. 13% of 2019 SNP voters voted Labour.
Joe Biden’s doctor met with a leading Washington neurologist at the White House this year, it was reported on Saturday.
The report came after Biden on Friday ruled out taking an independent cognitive test and releasing its findings publicly, in an interview with ABC News arranged following his disastrous performance in last week’s presidential TV debate with Donald Trump.
According White House visitor logs reviewed by the New York Post, Dr Kevin Cannard, a Parkinson’s disease expert at Walter Reed medical center, met with Dr Kevin O’Connor, a doctor of osteopathic medicine who has treated the president for years.
Cannard has visited the White House house eight times since August 2023. On seven of those visits, most recently in late March, he met with Megan Nasworthy, a liaison between Walter Reed and the White House.
And we are supposed to believe the media never knew or looked at this before?
Came EIGHT times!!!
This should be the final end of this.
Dems. Get a bloody grip or plunge the West into Trump 2.0
All those covering this up and gas-lighting everybody should hang their head in shame. They run the story last year, then they have a proper primary, pick a sensible candidate and you don't end up 5-6 points behind the Trumpster.
We are going to find out eventually he has been all over the shop for ages. If you are calling in a specialist Parkinson's doctor on a regular basis, it isn't he once forgot somebodies name.
One curiosity about Washington elections: In 1964, a Republican won the Secretary of State position, which is responsible for elections (among other things) - and Republicans, even as the state was trending Democratic, held that office until 2021, when Kim Wyman resigned.
Joe Biden’s doctor met with a leading Washington neurologist at the White House this year, it was reported on Saturday.
The report came after Biden on Friday ruled out taking an independent cognitive test and releasing its findings publicly, in an interview with ABC News arranged following his disastrous performance in last week’s presidential TV debate with Donald Trump.
According White House visitor logs reviewed by the New York Post, Dr Kevin Cannard, a Parkinson’s disease expert at Walter Reed medical center, met with Dr Kevin O’Connor, a doctor of osteopathic medicine who has treated the president for years.
Cannard has visited the White House house eight times since August 2023. On seven of those visits, most recently in late March, he met with Megan Nasworthy, a liaison between Walter Reed and the White House.
Urge you to go down to King County Elections in lead-up to or aftermath of August 6, 2024 primary.
They have a pretty amazing physical, technical AND managerial set-up. Light-years beyond what they had to work with twenty years ago, at time of the razor-thin Gregoire v Rossi gubernatorial race.\\
I just signed up to be election observer for King Co Democrats; there are also opportunities via King Co Republicans AND the local League of Women Voters (don't have to be female!) and also random members of the public.
Perhaps best opportunity in near-term is
Logic and Accuracy Test of ballot scanning and tabulation equipment July 11 at 1:00 p.m.
Lord Ashcroft has more details now from his own exit poll of 16,000 people on Thursday and how they voted.
Starmer Labour won across the board, men and women, all age groups under 65 and every social class, doing best with upper middle class ABs and unskilled working class and unemployed DEs.
The Tories only won pensioners. Under Sunak the Tories did return to doing best amongst ABs though as they have at every general election except 2019 when under Boris the Conservatives did best with C2s. Reform did best with men and C2s and DEs and 45-64s. The LDs did best with women, 35-44s and ABs, the Greens best with women, 18-24s and C1s.
23% of 2019 Conservatives voted Reform, 12% Labour, 7% LD and 52% still voted Tory. 32% of 2019 LDs voted Labour, 11% of 2019 Labour voters voted Green. 13% of 2019 SNP voters voted Labour.
Plus 'Six in ten 2019 Conservatives who voted Remain backed the Tories. Fewer than half (48%) of 2019 Conservatives who voted Leave stayed with the Conservatives, while just over 3 in 10 (31%) switched to Reform UK.'
Joe Biden’s doctor met with a leading Washington neurologist at the White House this year, it was reported on Saturday.
The report came after Biden on Friday ruled out taking an independent cognitive test and releasing its findings publicly, in an interview with ABC News arranged following his disastrous performance in last week’s presidential TV debate with Donald Trump.
According White House visitor logs reviewed by the New York Post, Dr Kevin Cannard, a Parkinson’s disease expert at Walter Reed medical center, met with Dr Kevin O’Connor, a doctor of osteopathic medicine who has treated the president for years.
Cannard has visited the White House house eight times since August 2023. On seven of those visits, most recently in late March, he met with Megan Nasworthy, a liaison between Walter Reed and the White House.
And we are supposed to believe the media never knew or looked at this before?
Came EIGHT times!!!
This should be the final end of this.
Dems. Get a bloody grip or plunge the West into Trump 2.0
All those covering this up and gas-lighting everybody should hang their head in shame. They run the story last year, then they have a proper primary, pick a sensible candidate and you don't end up 5-6 points behind the Trumpster.
We are going to find out eventually he has been all over the shop for ages. If you are calling in a specialist Parkinson's doctor on a regular basis, it isn't he once forgot somebodies name.
Yep. And the follow up question is whether the PD doctor recommended any further tests. We should be told.
Joe Biden’s doctor met with a leading Washington neurologist at the White House this year, it was reported on Saturday.
The report came after Biden on Friday ruled out taking an independent cognitive test and releasing its findings publicly, in an interview with ABC News arranged following his disastrous performance in last week’s presidential TV debate with Donald Trump.
According White House visitor logs reviewed by the New York Post, Dr Kevin Cannard, a Parkinson’s disease expert at Walter Reed medical center, met with Dr Kevin O’Connor, a doctor of osteopathic medicine who has treated the president for years.
Cannard has visited the White House house eight times since August 2023. On seven of those visits, most recently in late March, he met with Megan Nasworthy, a liaison between Walter Reed and the White House.
And we are supposed to believe the media never knew or looked at this before?
Came EIGHT times!!!
This should be the final end of this.
Dems. Get a bloody grip or plunge the West into Trump 2.0
All those covering this up and gas-lighting everybody should hang their head in shame. They run the story last year, then they have a proper primary, pick a sensible candidate and you don't end up 5-6 points behind the Trumpster.
We are going to find out eventually he has been all over the shop for ages. If you are calling in a specialist Parkinson's doctor on a regular basis, it isn't he once forgot somebodies name.
Yep. And the follow up question is whether the PD doctor recommended any further tests. We should be told.
I bet he is rammed full of more experimental drugs than Joe Rogan having COVID.
I've been at the pub for hours watching the football. I'm really fairly drunk now, but luckily my program has worked a treat and has spat out a result. I now know the winner of the
Also I really do feel we have to not treat RefUk as continuity-BXP for these. They stood half as many candidates, and did not stand them specifically in seats where brexiteer Tories were standing.
Also I really do feel we have to not treat RefUk as continuity-BXP for these. They stood half as many candidates, and did not stand them specifically in seats where brexiteer Tories were standing.
They got about 2% in 2019 so just add another 2% on to RefUK.
Joe Biden’s doctor met with a leading Washington neurologist at the White House this year, it was reported on Saturday.
The report came after Biden on Friday ruled out taking an independent cognitive test and releasing its findings publicly, in an interview with ABC News arranged following his disastrous performance in last week’s presidential TV debate with Donald Trump.
According White House visitor logs reviewed by the New York Post, Dr Kevin Cannard, a Parkinson’s disease expert at Walter Reed medical center, met with Dr Kevin O’Connor, a doctor of osteopathic medicine who has treated the president for years.
Cannard has visited the White House house eight times since August 2023. On seven of those visits, most recently in late March, he met with Megan Nasworthy, a liaison between Walter Reed and the White House.
The scores in ascending order were as follows: 83.67 106.09 122.11 127.20 138.11 146.87 156.76 - This one was me. Mid table obscurity. 165.70 171.67 179.09 200.70 215.20 226.76 228.87 231.20
One curiosity about Washington elections: In 1964, a Republican won the Secretary of State position, which is responsible for elections (among other things) - and Republicans, even as the state was trending Democratic, held that office until 2021, when Kim Wyman resigned.
Some of that. Of course, that was back in the days when Republicans originated "motor voter" registration (register to vote when applying for drivers license) and on-demand absentee voting.
In other words, bunch of Libtard RINOS according to MAGA-maniacs!
Other factor was desire of many otherwise Democratic voters to demonstrate their own political independence (most especially to themselves) by voting for at least ONE Republican IF they could find one they considered reasonably qualified and not a wacko. For years GOP SOS candidates and incumbents Ralph Munro, Sam Reed and Kim Wyman filled that role - the secret to their electoral successes.
The quite astonishing figure in those change in shares is the collapse in Tory share. A sitting government lost 45% of its share. That is utterly unprecedented.
Billy the Fysh used to be my MP. I will miss gobbing on his stupid fucking Subaru. The new LibDem looks like a complete non-entity but will be spared the expectoration for now.
Billy the Fysh used to be my MP. I will miss gobbing on his stupid fucking Subaru. The new LibDem looks like a complete non-entity but will be spared the expectoration for now.
Billy the Fysh used to be my MP. I will miss gobbing on his stupid fucking Subaru. The new LibDem looks like a complete non-entity but will be spared the expectoration for now.
Impreza?
4th gen Legacy. I would have voted for him if he had a 22B. Not a joke.
Joe Biden’s doctor met with a leading Washington neurologist at the White House this year, it was reported on Saturday.
The report came after Biden on Friday ruled out taking an independent cognitive test and releasing its findings publicly, in an interview with ABC News arranged following his disastrous performance in last week’s presidential TV debate with Donald Trump.
According White House visitor logs reviewed by the New York Post, Dr Kevin Cannard, a Parkinson’s disease expert at Walter Reed medical center, met with Dr Kevin O’Connor, a doctor of osteopathic medicine who has treated the president for years.
Cannard has visited the White House house eight times since August 2023. On seven of those visits, most recently in late March, he met with Megan Nasworthy, a liaison between Walter Reed and the White House.
And we are supposed to believe the media never knew or looked at this before?
Came EIGHT times!!!
This should be the final end of this.
Dems. Get a bloody grip or plunge the West into Trump 2.0
All those covering this up and gas-lighting everybody should hang their head in shame. They run the story last year, then they have a proper primary, pick a sensible candidate and you don't end up 5-6 points behind the Trumpster.
We are going to find out eventually he has been all over the shop for ages. If you are calling in a specialist Parkinson's doctor on a regular basis, it isn't he once forgot somebodies name.
Parkinson’s is not dementia though, more a motor issue than mental decline.
Billy the Fysh used to be my MP. I will miss gobbing on his stupid fucking Subaru. The new LibDem looks like a complete non-entity but will be spared the expectoration for now.
Impreza?
4th gen Legacy. I would have voted for him if he had a 22B. Not a joke.
You are a man of principle, that has to be respected.
OT Tokyo Governor election today. I'm strongly anti-NHK but I would have a hard time choosing.
Is that the State broadcaster? What have they done? Gone woke?
There's a TV license system a bit like the odious British one. They have collectors who come to your house and pester you and use various deceptive means to trick people into signing up for the license.
The party was founded by a former NHK accounting employee who resigned after leaking a corruption scandal to a weekly magazine. Although I think a lot of the appeal comes from the fact that NHK have to give them free broadcasts so they can sit in the NHK offices slagging off NHK live on NHK and telling everyone about the latest NHK corruption scandals.
The reason they have so many candidates this time is because each candidate gets a free poster display spot all over the city, and they've been selling these off to the highest bidder.
Billy the Fysh used to be my MP. I will miss gobbing on his stupid fucking Subaru. The new LibDem looks like a complete non-entity but will be spared the expectoration for now.
Impreza?
4th gen Legacy. I would have voted for him if he had a 22B. Not a joke.
The scores in ascending order were as follows: 83.67 106.09 122.11 127.20 138.11 146.87 156.76 - This one was me. Mid table obscurity. 165.70 171.67 179.09 200.70 215.20 226.76 228.87 231.20
Since there's a nice clear top 5, let's go through them in order.
In fifth place, just nudging past the 200 points mark it's @Benpointer on 200.7. He got the best results on both the Lib Dem seat total and the SNP seat total. Ben knows his yellows!
In fourth place with the best answers on the biggest majority size and the maximum losing percentage and a total of 215.20, it's @IanB2. Ian also got maximum points on two other questions. Well done!
In third place [hangs bronze medal around neck] with 226.76 points, it's @state_go_away They were very good at picking losers, with the best answers for the minimum winning vote margin, the minimum number of votes for a candidate, the number of times Ref beat Con and the number of times Ref lost their deposit (plus maximum points on two other questions!). [Applauds]
In second place [silver medal placed reverently over head] with 228.87 points, it's @James_M. James didn't hit very many best scores (although topped everyone on Labour seats and Labour 3rd-place-or-lower), but scored solidly across the board. Sometimes not putting a foot wrong can take you to the brink of glory -- a safe pair of hands!
And finally, in first place, trouncing the field with 231.2 points, the gold medal is awarded to
Pulpstar was the last person to enter the competition, sneaking in with the permission of the stewards just after the deadline due to Vanilla screwing up their attempt just before the deadline. A full investigation has taken place and after lengthy deliberation at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the entry has been decreed not only valid but also very fucking awesome. Pulpstar gave a top three answer in ELEVEN of the 25 questions. That was the breadth of knowledge and consistency needed to win, and it was a masterclass.
Joe Biden’s doctor met with a leading Washington neurologist at the White House this year, it was reported on Saturday.
The report came after Biden on Friday ruled out taking an independent cognitive test and releasing its findings publicly, in an interview with ABC News arranged following his disastrous performance in last week’s presidential TV debate with Donald Trump.
According White House visitor logs reviewed by the New York Post, Dr Kevin Cannard, a Parkinson’s disease expert at Walter Reed medical center, met with Dr Kevin O’Connor, a doctor of osteopathic medicine who has treated the president for years.
Cannard has visited the White House house eight times since August 2023. On seven of those visits, most recently in late March, he met with Megan Nasworthy, a liaison between Walter Reed and the White House.
And we are supposed to believe the media never knew or looked at this before?
Came EIGHT times!!!
This should be the final end of this.
Dems. Get a bloody grip or plunge the West into Trump 2.0
All those covering this up and gas-lighting everybody should hang their head in shame. They run the story last year, then they have a proper primary, pick a sensible candidate and you don't end up 5-6 points behind the Trumpster.
We are going to find out eventually he has been all over the shop for ages. If you are calling in a specialist Parkinson's doctor on a regular basis, it isn't he once forgot somebodies name.
Parkinson’s is not dementia though, more a motor issue than mental decline.
That is true, but if you look the guy up he treats people for dementia as well as Parkinsons. The fact he has visited 8 times in as many months is pretty clear something ain't right.
I watch NHK World from time to time (on PBS), and noted that it has no commercials - but from another point of view could be considered all commercials (for Japan, Inc.).
For any Depeche Mode fans out there, someone called Enhanced Music Videos has been uploading HQ versions of classic music videos. I think they've been using various AI programs to achieve the higher quality. This is Get The Balance Right for instance. (The quality might not seem that great by today's standards, but it's a big improvement on what was available before).
Suella Braverman has said that the Conservatives “deserved” their historic election defeat, in an intervention that will be seen as laying the groundwork for her leadership bid.
Writing in The Telegraph, the former home secretary accuses Rishi Sunak of pursuing an “idiotic strategy” and suggests that some of her colleagues treated voters like “mugs”.
Yeah, she's at the bottom of my list for new Conservative leaders.
I've stayed a member in the hope of voting for Kemi but also the certainty of voting against Suella and Priti (if god forbid it came down to a match between them I'd spoil ballot).
(Not necessarilly what my betting position will be; I got some friends to lay Farage earlier when he was 20something-30something but I've got a busy week ahead so unlikely to do anything, famous last words)
Comments
The fact that, of the multiple crises bequeathed to Starmer by his predecessors, one of the most immediately pressing is the lack of capacity in the prison estate, speaks of the failure either to rehabilitate offenders or treat both drug addicts and the severely mentally ill in timely fashion.
According to recent statistics (from 2022) the incarceration rate in England and Wales is 132 people in every 100,000, compared with 67 in Germany and only 54 in the Netherlands. I doubt that the Germans and Dutch harbour especially permissive attitudes towards criminals, or have detection rates even lower than ours, so I can only conclude that they're doing something right that we aren't. Why do we lock so many people up - at, I might add, enormous expense, at a time when we're skint? It's a clear sign of failure.
Not least because I wasn't born in 1966 and that the 1960s was a black and white world.
It comes down to what we want. If we accept a a degree of inaccuracy with paper based systems and degree of abuse with postal voting, and don't want the convenience of online voting there is no point in implementing yet another voting method.
Spending on rehab and drug treatment to reduce reoffending is not just good social policy , it makes financial sense.
It takes time to take effect but is just the sort of efficiency saving and productivity gain we need.
Was an observer at a recount for state senator, which ended up with zero doubt as to which candidate won. HOWEVER, there was one vote recorded that could NOT be accounted for.
County auditor ordered (correctly in my opinion) that all ballots be double-checked until this discrepancy was resolved. Which it was . . . after about four hours looking by crew of two-dozen counters.
The problem with Braverman is that she's complete crap.
Incompetent in action and appalling in conduct.
I was once told by a very senior Labour activist that he was the next leader after Blair.
Pippa Crerar
@PippaCrerar
·
1h
More appointments - both who served in last Labour govt👇🏼
Former home sec Jacqui Smith is given a peerage & becomes education minister.
Former development & transport sec Douglas Alexander becomes business & trade minister.
But statements like that are made from the frame of yesterday’s politics; you’re not yet seeing how things have and will change.
It also highlight the strategic dilemma for the LibDems.
Maintaining, let alone growing, tactical voting is surely quite an ask, between a party of government and a party in opposition?
It might happen, of course, if Reform is rampant as Leon seems to expect. Vote to keep Reform out, similarly to what happens in France. But Reform is still a campaign group/business venture effectively set up for one election; we don’t know whether it will put down any roots and survive, let alone grow, the five years.
Hopefully they will also revisit recruitment policies which worked e.g. Repayment of Teacher Loans, which are needed now more than ever.
How do I know....?
I'll start with my entry. Don't have a fucking clue.
During that process, one ballot was overlooked so was still in its original batch - but which one? Going through just under 1k batches ballot-by-ballot to find the needle in the haystack - THAT's what took the time & effort.
ADDENDUM - In that election there were 160k ballots cast countywide; of these 42k were in the leg district in question. Thus the pool of ballots that had to be manual checked to find the mission one was 160k - 42k = 138k.
As I recall, the crew I observed had checked about half of those before finding the mission ballot; if they were unlucky, could have taken longer that 4 hours. Especially IF the worker who found it has missed it; obviously easy to do as that's what happened in the first place.
Sir Tony Blair has urged Sir Keir Starmer to introduce digital identity cards and “avoid any vulnerability on wokeism”.
In an early intervention little more than 24 hours after the Prime Minister entered Downing Street, his predecessor has publicly offered advice on how to approach his time in office.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/tony-blair-prime-minister-id-cards-downing-street-new-labour-b2575367.html
While it was quite funny to see her attempting to get into the house owned by her sister, when she'd obviously never stepped foot in the place (not to mention claiming expenses for her husbands porn habit) the numbers involved in her case placed it on the more serious end of the allegations (£116,000) with Sir Alistair Graham saying her expenses claims were "near fraudulent"
Labour sleaze and cronyism from the off! Not a good start at all from the oh so pious Starmar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqui_Smith#Expenses_controversies_and_resignation
Ballots are mailed out to registered voters, who mark them, at their leisure, and mail them -- postage free - to election offices in each county. Or deposit them in special metal boxes, which are collected on election night.
On election day, after the polls close, the election offices begin counting, using optical scanners. (If a ballot can not be read by a scanner, it is turned over to actual people, who try to decode it.)
Because they are optical ballots, they can be read just as easily, and almost as accurately, by people, as well as machines. So, I don't think of this as electronic voting, though others no doubt do..
Weaknesses: Mailed ballots need not be secret, and so make election fraud and intimidation easier. When fraud happens, as it sometimes does, it almost always happens with postal ballots. And usually in low turnout primary elections.
Ballots can be intercepted between the voter and the election office. (I have been worrying for years that this is especially a problem with those metal boxes, as they seem much too vulnerable to vandals.)
And if you do want to remain relevant, you need to be do more than just come down from your ivory tower or cease swanning about with the super rich to every now and then grace us with some pronouncements.
Which seems somewhat apt and horrifying.
Nothing stays the same forever and we’re in the midst of a shift.
A question for me is how higher turnout might affect things next time. I suspect it could actually slightly suppress Reform, proportionally speaking. Though if the Tories lurch right and become diet-Reform, I expect most people they’re gunning for will prefer the full-fat version.
Instead, they all gone to using digital scan, which essentially takes a pdf-type image of every ballot, which is more accurate in large measure because ballots can be easily analyzed and examined (by teams of two workers for each ballot) to ensure the votes on them are properly recorded as per the official state "What is a Vote" manual.
https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/data-research/election-technology/voting-systems-county
The report came after Biden on Friday ruled out taking an independent cognitive test and releasing its findings publicly, in an interview with ABC News arranged following his disastrous performance in last week’s presidential TV debate with Donald Trump.
According White House visitor logs reviewed by the New York Post, Dr Kevin Cannard, a Parkinson’s disease expert at Walter Reed medical center, met with Dr Kevin O’Connor, a doctor of osteopathic medicine who has treated the president for years.
Cannard has visited the White House house eight times since August 2023. On seven of those visits, most recently in late March, he met with Megan Nasworthy, a liaison between Walter Reed and the White House.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/06/joe-biden-neurologist-doctor-meeting
And we are supposed to believe the media never knew or looked at this before?
Edit. Milburn had the wellies on!
right wing media: He will barely do a three day week.
Starmer: 11pm on Saturday night and appointments to ministry still being made.
This should be the final end of this.
Dems. Get a bloody grip or plunge the West into Trump 2.0
Starmer Labour won across the board, men and women, all age groups under 65 and every social class, doing best with upper middle class ABs and unskilled working class and unemployed DEs.
The Tories only won pensioners. Under Sunak the Tories did return to doing best amongst ABs though as they have at every general election except 2019 when under Boris the Conservatives did best with C2s. Reform did best with men and C2s and DEs and 45-64s.
The LDs did best with women, 35-44s and ABs, the Greens best with women, 18-24s and C1s.
23% of 2019 Conservatives voted Reform, 12% Labour, 7% LD and 52% still voted Tory. 32% of 2019 LDs voted Labour, 11% of 2019 Labour voters voted Green. 13% of 2019 SNP voters voted Labour.
https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2024/07/how-britain-voted-and-why-my-post-vote-poll/
We are going to find out eventually he has been all over the shop for ages. If you are calling in a specialist Parkinson's doctor on a regular basis, it isn't he once forgot somebodies name.
The blatant anti-Semitism of those attacks seem to have passed some anti Semite finders General by.
Dan Jarvis MP
@DanJarvisMBE
·
1h
Honoured to be asked by the Prime Minister to serve as Security Minister.
It's almost as if voters were weren't sure Democrats should be trusted to run elections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_of_State_of_Washington#List_of_Washington_secretaries_of_state
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Wyman
They have a pretty amazing physical, technical AND managerial set-up. Light-years beyond what they had to work with twenty years ago, at time of the razor-thin Gregoire v Rossi gubernatorial race.\\
I just signed up to be election observer for King Co Democrats; there are also opportunities via King Co Republicans AND the local League of Women Voters (don't have to be female!) and also random members of the public.
Perhaps best opportunity in near-term is
Logic and Accuracy Test of ballot scanning and tabulation equipment
July 11 at 1:00 p.m.
https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/elections/about-us/security-and-accountability/observing-elections-activities.asp
https://kingcounty.gov/en/legacy/depts/elections/education-and-outreach.aspx
Lab +0.4%
Con -21.3%
Ref +13.3% (compared to Brexit Party)
LD +0.8%
Grn +4.3%
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2024/uk/regions/E92000001
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_United_Kingdom_general_election_in_England
Also I really do feel we have to not treat RefUk as continuity-BXP for these. They stood half as many candidates, and did not stand them specifically in seats where brexiteer Tories were standing.
Lab -3.9%
Con -21.3%
Ref +11.5% (compared to Brexit Party)
PC +4.9%
LD +0.5%
Grn +3.7%
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2024/uk/regions/W92000004
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_United_Kingdom_general_election_in_Wales
https://www.whitehouse.gov/disclosures/visitor-logs/
In other words, bunch of Libtard RINOS according to MAGA-maniacs!
Other factor was desire of many otherwise Democratic voters to demonstrate their own political independence (most especially to themselves) by voting for at least ONE Republican IF they could find one they considered reasonably qualified and not a wacko. For years GOP SOS candidates and incumbents Ralph Munro, Sam Reed and Kim Wyman filled that role - the secret to their electoral successes.
A sitting government lost 45% of its share.
That is utterly unprecedented.
What have they done? Gone woke?
The party was founded by a former NHK accounting employee who resigned after leaking a corruption scandal to a weekly magazine. Although I think a lot of the appeal comes from the fact that NHK have to give them free broadcasts so they can sit in the NHK offices slagging off NHK live on NHK and telling everyone about the latest NHK corruption scandals.
The reason they have so many candidates this time is because each candidate gets a free poster display spot all over the city, and they've been selling these off to the highest bidder.
Lots more about them on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHK_Party
Was I last?
A good case that the Lib Dems just ran the most successful campaign (given the starting point) in British political history.
They won every seat they targeted bar Jeremy Hunt's, in every part of the country. Absolutely clinical.
https://nitter.poast.org/Samfr/status/1809290685507350720#m
Some things are more important than politics.
I’m pleased @DanJarvisMBE will be take over from me as Security Minister.
Your successes will be silent and your teams unseen. I know you will value them, as I always will.
Good luck, my friend.
https://nitter.poast.org/TomTugendhat/status/1809698778267451599#m
For any Depeche Mode fans out there, someone called Enhanced Music Videos has been uploading HQ versions of classic music videos. I think they've been using various AI programs to achieve the higher quality. This is Get The Balance Right for instance. (The quality might not seem that great by today's standards, but it's a big improvement on what was available before).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q2y8iFmDms
(Not necessarilly what my betting position will be; I got some friends to lay Farage earlier when he was 20something-30something but I've got a busy week ahead so unlikely to do anything, famous last words)