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This explains so much – politicalbetting.com
This explains so much – politicalbetting.com
2. Extract from Levido memo to Sunak, 3 weeks before he decided to call the election: “It is strategically most beneficial to have an autumn election in October or November. We need as much time as possible for economic metrics to improve and for voters to feel better off.”…
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I really cannot see a delay as having improved things for the Tories - their problems were far more structural than just people feeling better off or not. The changes there would have been tiny, and would have been dwarfed by the fact that people simply wanted change.
So if he had delayed, we would see a threader with other stories about the contrary advice: that going earlier would have been better,
The Tories were doomed.
edit: and first with an on-topic post!
Liz Truss psychologically unfit to be PM, say aides
Pleas to slow down went unheeded. Aides leaked stories to The Times in an effort to avoid disaster in the mini-budget. It didn’t work
alfway through the Tory leadership contest in 2022, Liz Truss knew she was going to win. She gathered her team at Chevening, the Palladian house in Kent which is the grace-and-favour home of the foreign secretary, on August 13. Details of what would become the mini-budget were thrashed out in meetings at Chevening between Truss and a quad of economic ministers, which included the future chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, Chris Philp, who was to be chief secretary to the Treasury, and Simon Clarke, the current chief secretary. Economists, ministers and civil servants all advised her to tread cautiously. She ignored them all.
Economists Gerard Lyons and Julian Jessop presented a paper on ways of boosting growth, but it also warned: “The markets are nervous … if immediate economic policy announcements are handled badly then a market crash is possible.” Truss ignored the caveats. One conviction they did reinforce — particularly Lyons — was Truss’s decision not to ask the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) to do a formal forecast of the public finances ahead of the mini-budget.
Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, and senior Treasury officials Cat Little, the acting permanent secretary at the Treasury, Beth Russell, the director-general of tax and welfare, and Philip Duffy, the director-general of growth and productivity, “made clear there was a risk” in not using the OBR, a Tory said.
Truss’s original plan had been for a three-year spending review to identify cuts in Whitehall budgets to balance out the tax cuts Truss wanted. Kwarteng, Clarke and Philp all saw them as a package. The need for spending cuts was Kwarteng’s one clear disagreement with Truss before the mini-budget. His adviser Celia McSwaine recalled: “He raised that point repeatedly, but unfortunately just lost the battle.” A cabinet minister observed: “She wasn’t interested in spending reductions at all. She literally wouldn’t talk about it, in a way that was quite weird. I think she thought it would be unpopular.”
Clare Lombardelli, the Treasury’s chief economist, was “unbelievably nervous” about the issue, a political aide recalled — “sweating spinal fluids”. In one meeting Case said: “Shouldn’t we have a conversation about spending cuts? Otherwise, people will see through it instantly.” Truss appeared to concede the point, suggesting a list of potential cuts was drawn up, but nothing came of it. Another aide said: “Simon Case was really pissed off.” The cabinet secretary told a colleague “this is economically illiterate” and described Truss as “completely mad”
One of Truss’s team suggested that what came over her was effectively the manic state of a mental breakdown: “She wasn’t depressed, but she had a breakdown. She was giddy with expectations. She developed a serious detachment from reality, she was more demanding and intolerant of people. She didn’t want to be challenged. Two things change people — power and money. Those are the two torches of life which tell you what a person is about. At the start of the leadership campaign, she listened to a lot of people because she was unsure of herself. When it dawned on her she was going to win, she jettisoned this approach and it made her psychologically unfit to be prime minister.”
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/liz-truss-psychologically-unfit-to-be-pm-say-aides-ttqgdfz8b
Public policy as a means to manage the psychological state of the PM. Imagine cancelling a decades-long infrastructure project in an attempt to gee up the Prime Minister.
The short answer then is that Sunak called an early election because he fundamentally doesn't understand politics.
I do have to give him credit for sticking around as Tory leader for an extended leadership election despite obviously being beyond sick of the whole thing.
Rebalance things a bit sure, but of course you can't have London style buses in every corner of the country, you have more frequent and regular buses where there are more people looking to travel! Absurd.
The French are lucky I didn't choose a career in politics.
What the war and Biden's dithering has done is demonstrate to democracies like Ukraine, but perhaps also South Korea, Taiwan, Poland, Japan and others, that they can't rely on the US shield. Again, some have been realising that since 2016 or before - Ukraine is not the only example of America's chronic unreliability as an ally. That is where the true damage to the nuclear proliferation framework lies.
And FPT: What direct evidence I have contradicts your perception: NEU balloted teacher members, recommending we accept the 5.5% recommended pay rise this as a reasonable compromise after settlements last year. I was quite relieved by this as I think teachers pay has caught up (a bit) with the cost of living.
I don't doubt that some union activists were outraged by this (in fact our local NEU branch recommended that we reject it), but if you think of a union as a bunch of normal-ish members with agency rather than the sometimes-crazies at the
top, you get a better picture of its behaviour.
And that's why it's so dangerous. It isn't classic MAD deterrence; it's "let me do what I want" deterrence.
I pretty much agree with your second.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14091119/Geology-racist-linked-white-supremacy-claims-Queen-Mary-University-London-professor.html?ico=article_preview_xp_mobile
https://x.com/mrjamesob/status/1857714581361066350
James O'Brien
@mrjamesob
Don't think I'll be here much longer.
And I *never* read replies.
For all his faults Starmer was the far better option in July, though not one that the voters were enthused by.
You seem to think that nuking France is a less than optimal policy.
When did you become a cheese eating surrender monkey?
Falling donations have left the party’s HQ short of cash, prompting voluntary redundancy scheme to lose more than a third of staff
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/snp-staff-to-lose-jobs-a-week-before-christmas-2rrr8jqft
Sunak was right- the government was running on a "hold it in until we reach the toilets at the service station election" strategy, but that was clearly about to fail, leading to unpleasant bodily fluids everywhere.
The Conservatives would have had to climb down on public sector pay. Rwanda flights would have happened and achieved nothing. The sugar rush of the NI reductions would have worn off. Most importantly, a Conservative government would have had to release prisoners early. All of those things were completely predictable.
They would have been utterly doomed.
However he doesn't have the "swat the Opposition BS-artists", and his own marketing, in place, I don't think, yet.
That concerns me a little - he could end up with a trajectory like Biden where much is achieved but is swallowed up in a fog of misleading, oppositionalist waffle.
In the USA, the people who fell for Trump's shtick are about to get bent over and Trumped good and proper, by the look of it so far. Afaics Trump is appointing some of the nutters to his own cabinet completely over the head of his Chief of Staff.
One thing that surprises me is how soft Mr Starmer is being on the previous not-a-Government, and not specifically identifying all the sticky-plaster things he is having to do to cover the gaping wounds they left.
An example are that Tuition fees were cut by inflation in real terms between 2018 and 2024 - that is, 13%. Another is the scores of local authorities in financial trouble, largely because an institutionalisation of significant funding cuts for year after year after year.
We see that latter in the public realm - even things as simple as white lines markings on roads which have not been maintained, or weeds growing across pavements compared with how it was on Streetview in 2009..
Plus obviously, unfunded tax breaks which fell straight through onto increasing the national debt.
Politically, I think they need far stronger on holding the Opposition responsible for the wreckage they created. Even though the Conservative itself is reduced to a collection of pygmies balanced atop a pile of rubble.
Which got him labelled a warmonger by the Disarm! Now! types
Also, what use is financial math if the professor cannot even count how many maths there are?
Chalk [the impending Scholz loss] up to another lash of the anti-incumbent fury that has been raging around the world in this year of many elections. The trend is so unmistakable that you can probably see it from outer space. It is certainly visible to, and being twitched over, by Number 10. Labour was the happy beneficiary of anti-incumbency at the July election when the intensity of the loathing for the Conservatives buried them under a landslide defeat. After barely four months in the saddle, now public opinion is bucking like a bronco against Labour.
Phobia towards incumbents in the western democracies is connected to the stagnation in living standards that has persisted in most developed countries since the financial crisis. Politicians find it very hard to persuade people to feel well disposed towards government when they are not feeling happy about their own circumstances. Discontent has been exacerbated by the post-pandemic spike in inflation.
Borders are a big obsession with the recast team in Downing Street. So is another b-word, “bills”. One of Number 10’s responses to anti-incumbency will be to talk less about the “five missions”, a concept that Labour MPs complain has never caught the imagination of voters, and focus more intensely on living standards. The improvement in median incomes in the UK has been so meagre since 2009 that earnings growth over the past quarter of a century was probably the slowest in more than 200 years. If you want a core explanation for why so many voters have been feeling so down on politicians for such a long time, then this is good place to look.
In the first flush of victory in July, many Labour people thought they had time on their side because the size of the parliamentary majority could be interpreted as a 10-year mandate for Sir Keir’s “decade of national renewal”. The paucity of the vote share was a warning against that kind of complacent thinking. Some, even from within the party’s own ranks, are already catastrophising that this is doomed to be a one-term administration. It is way too early to forecast that the Starmer government is destined to suffer that fate. But the Labour leader and his cabinet must try to learn from the growing heap of cast-aside incumbents if they are not to be added to it.
Clearly money was going to be needed to repair the dilapidated public realm, and it would have been so much better to have more flexibility. Instead we had a budget of stealth taxes that distort economic activity.
Not sure that's much of an insight and did he really need 389 words to tell us that?
Will Hutton has a look at IHT.
And - why do people keep going on about family farms? The IHT rule in question applies to the owner not the farmer. Just so long as *someone* is using it for farming. I inherited a very small field (of historic/landscape and sentimental value) and was surprised to find it was IHT free just because it was rented out to the local farmer.
And this also applies to agribusiness shares.
To be more precise, one needed to meet certain conditions to get 100% relief, but they aren't that onerous.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/agricultural-relief-on-inheritance-tax
Mr. Fishing, sometimes I've had to write stuff that could be very concise but to hit a word count threshold had to elaborate far beyond that.
A column that's a sentence might involve some sort of pay reduction.
Incumbent governments are unpopular
There are reasons for this that everyone knows
Something must be done to reverse this/help Labour win next time
I have not the tiniest idea what that is.
All true in a way but getting boring.
I would provide the buses and driver training to LA-owned but arms-length independent bus companies, with a condition that they must achieve an operating profit within 5 years or have the buses reallocated to those that are profitable. Any surplus cash cannot be extracted by councils and must be invested in more bus services.
Separately, a rural service that is subsidised on an ongoing basis.
I’d further suggest that we’ve been seeing a massive decrease in tribal loyalty to parties, in countries where this is a thing.
The American election actually fits into that pattern, when you realise that since the Republican / Democrat duopoly emerged, change has happened by takeover of the parties.
MAGA took over the Republicans and expelled the existing hierarchy.
And, like so many left of centre people, he agrees with the former UK political editor for the "impartial" BBC, Andrew Marr, who said many years ago that he couldn't understand how a nice person could be a Conservative. So he can't really understand or empathise with them.
However, I don't think they'd have done worse than 120 seats had they waited another 3 months - and the economy would have certainly improved.
In response to @Leon 's enquiry yesterday about Bluesky.
I've just dropped a toe in the water for the last few weeks, and just tipped over 100 followers. For those familiar with the Twitter timeline, I'd say it is in roughly autumn 2007 by comparison. UK politicos going onto Twitter started in about spring 2007 with early adopters or media tarts, and the process was largely done by about autumn 2008.
I like there being an absence of deliberate manipulation by Musk and the Muskovites.
I have a decent Twitter community of a little under 5k followers, since I have been cross-partisan and cross-cutting by design since I started my blog in 2007, and I have maintained my community by trimming dormant follows and followers every year or so. It's going to take some effort to rebuild on Bluesky, but that is currently possible - with lots of new people around. I get follow backs from most.
On Twitter strategy-type people (eg Mark Pack) are putting in the plumbing interconnection and future influence for their communities. A different set of hub / distributor accounts will emerge from Twitter.
Automated and ease-of-use tools are not so available. Remember the difference made by Tweetdeck and Hootsuite? I'm not sure how this will go.
I'm also not sure about Bluesky's future business model.
One test will be what happens when people who have other platforms to cross-promote from start feeling they have to be on Bluesky, and take their followers with them.
For me, a couple of my current core niches are shifting to Bluesky - active travel and disabled. Which makes the decision to transfer more likely.
From my point of view, if I lose the "patriots" and the trolls I won't miss them. Nor the Pfaffers - people focused on football, autos, flags and the far right, which seem to go together, including the Usonian types who have never left Alabama and think their laws rule everywhere. Reform UK can have them.
An absence of drive by abuse artists posting "the pedestrian should have got out of the way" (tbf I don't get that many), every time someone is run down on a zebra crossing, will be welcome. And they are irrelevant in the UK for the next several years, as in my niche it is all about delivery not diversionary debates.
Equally, an account with a small number of followers is great for self-expression, just like a blog which only gets 100 readers a week.
What do you want from it ,and what do you want to put in?
This is why it was picked as a tax to raise.
And, once again, we have the amusing populism of “they will just have to take it out of profits”.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/coAnaLQtNh0
Agreed but personally I am relieved we have moved on and it must be remembered that Labour’s landslide is based on 33.7% and they are far from popular
Trump is going to be the story in 2025 and how Starmer handles events and indeed everyone, will be interesting
The much bigger impact will be on those who work at the minimum wage which is 1) quite high compared with the median wage, with a slow convergence over time 2) cannot be squeezed by employers in the same way other salaries can be. I'd expect lower employment rates and lower hour contracts in this part of the market.
The other interesting thing is how progressive the change is. People in the lowest income deciles tend to have lower earnings from employment, so in general it is progressive. However, at the top you have lots of very high earners who are self-employed, and are therefore immune to the change.
Reasons: 1. our aging demographics, 2. the rest of the world can do anything we can but (currently) much cheaper, 3. finite resources.
A married couple leaving a house worth £800k and £200k savings to their children will have no tax on their estates. A divorced man without children, who leaves the same assets to siblings will have a tax charge of £290k.
Some assets are untaxed. Others taxed at 40%.
The fairest solution I read here was taxing everything at 20% above £150k in the hands of the beneficiaries.
I would rather be the Englishman’s enemy than their friend. For they buy their enemies and sell their friends.
Wonder if the two organisations have something of the same underlying problem. Namely, the generation gap between the supporters (mostly retired in both cases) and the staff/leadership (mostly not retired). If you are a post-boomer, you tend to look at both institutions as fundamentally strange.
That leads to a couple of questions which neither institution seems to be answering convincingly.
First is what to do about that- go all-in on serving the minority that you do get (red meat Conservatism, or full-on evangelism or traditional Anglo catholicism), or think about the ninety five percent who never darken your door?
The other is what's the right attitude to the future? Aim to pass on a functional institution or society, or spend it all on us now?
For people who feel somewhat marginal on Twitter, and want to build a community, now is probably a creative time to be starting on Bluesky; I have one friend working for a charity I support who has built her followers from 500 to nearly 2k+ in the time I have gone from 0 to 100+. She is well-respected with a platform, high quality material, and separate network via the small charity, but has clearly been doing some deliberate promotion to put herself in a position to get things into the more general debate beyond her niche more effectively. In 12 months time that will be more difficult to build die to the sheer number of accounts - if Bluesky gets traction.
If I were someone like @RochdalePioneers , who I think is trying to build himself up as a local influencer / community hub person (who also happens to be a LibDem) in order to be a 'semi-independent' local councillor with a strong personal mandate, I would take a careful look at this point. It's like people who created Internet Forums (Grant Shapps), Facebook Groups, Blogs, or Twitter Accounts early received some advantage from being a first mover; they get to help write the agenda.
On numbers, aiui Twitter is smaller than we might think - 300m to 400m monthly active users. Threads is about 250 million, driven by the Meta ecosystem. Bluesky is currently heading towards 20m, so has some way to go in weight. Compare those numbers again in a fortnight or on Christmas day.
Bluesky's account counter is here (different metric, but not that different):
https://bsky-users.theo.io/
There may also be differences by geographical territory, depending on what happens to Twitter. eg Twitter was clamped down on by Brazil. Could it happen in Europe?
HTH.
Strangely, this news,if correct,makes me think better of Sunak (and I've always had a soft spot for him.) It confirms my impression that he was both genuine and independent in his thinking. That doesn't always work, but then he was handed an extreme hospital pass and I don't think he did much to make mattes worse for the country, if not the Party.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/nov/17/mystery-surrounds-800-year-old-leicester-burial-pit-containing-123-bodies
Dumped in three cartloads apparently, which points to some very careful excavation and recording.
39% voted for right of centre parties in July, and polling suggests their support is about 45% now. Neither immigration, nor death, is destroying popular support for the right.
But, a lot of Conservative MP’s give the impression of being uneasy about trying to appeal to that body of support.
I think it’s mostly due to growing up in an era where upper middle class people and graduates still tended to vote right, and quite abruptly finding that is not the case. They find that many of their peers thoroughly disapprove of them and their supporters.
Political loyalty now runs vertically, through social classes, rather than horizontally, across them.
As a political campaigner however Rishi was hopeless, arguably even Truss was a better campaigner given she beat him in the 2022 party leadership election. His lack of political instinct also meant he went for a summer rather than autumn election despite the advice of the likes of Levido against that. Rishi was simply not in the same league as the best vote winning campaigners and party leaders like Blair, Cameron and Boris, indeed even Corbyn was a better campaigner than Rishi was.
I was very surprised that the employer NI change didn't impact dividend tax which shows that HMRC remembers that the last time they cut Employer NI they didn't cut the dividend tax increase they implemented at the same time as the last increase...
It's basically designed to be a modern day usenet
I'm a Millennial, am mildly interested in some aspects of traditional services, and feel alienated by CofE leadership that seems to be embarrassed by the institution, and its history, and has totally different values to me.
So there is that.
https://nation.cymru/news/welsh-lib-dem-leader-committed-grave-error-of-judgement-in-handling-of-sex-abuse-case/
Seat by seat electoral arrangements between Farage and Badenoch on the other hand could well eviscerate an unpopular Labour Party. However you can't guarantee which of Farage or Badenoch will be in the driving seat after such an event.
However again with the C of E like the Tories their upper middle class often Oxbridge and private school educated senior leadership are somewhat suspicious of the growth in their area. With the right the biggest growth in support in the UK is amongst white working class ex Labour Leave voters who are ferociously anti immigration and couldn't give a toss about reaching net zero (and now often voting Reform having voted for Boris in 2019 and often pro Trump). With Christianity the biggest growth in the UK is amongst hardline evangelica,l very informal Pentecostal and charismatic independent evangelical churches with multi ethnic congregations but which often take a hard line in opposing same sex marriage etc.
However most of the peers of senior Tory MPs and frontbenchers and Anglican Bishops will be upper middle class Remainers, open to immigration and concerned about climate change and liberal on LGBT issues and pro same sex marriage and who despise Trump and everything he stands for. So their snobbery holds them back from appealing to the growth area in their core market
Though finding his way to Clacton is more challenging.
Mastadon also meant you could only see people on the sites your mastadon server was federated with (and most people had do choice over the servers that were connected together) which meant if you have widely different interests you needed to be on multiple servers...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqq0AmnGwqI
I guess we'll have to wait for the wisdom of @StillWaters to enlighten us.
Sunak never really articulated why he wanted to be Prime Minister - there was no positive vision for the country that people could aspire to. The most successful politicians do that, but Sunak, for some baffling reason, hadn't grasped that a bit of technocratic competence isn't a substitute for inspirational leadership. Of course, as the electorate are now discovering, Starmer doesn't have either of those.
However successfully Labour handle the small boats it won't be good enough for Farage. Even if Labour bring arrival numbers down considerably that doesn't resolve the issue that vexes Farage and his racist chums, namely "foreigners" who are already here. Although that doesn't necessarily assist the Tories.
Perhaps when it comes down to immigration ("foreigners") the Tories need to out Farage, Farage. Is Badenoch capable of such performative cruelty? If she is not we have Jenrick, who would be quite comfortable with rounding "foreigners" up and packing them on buses to Dundalk, patiently waiting for his moment.
Firstly, and to be fair to you, it’s hard to compute how having an election was a reset on the mood. Things like record boat crossings, covid reports, murders in kindergarten by terrorist, are a counterfactual how they would have been received by an electorate and played out by fever pitched media on war footing awaiting an imminent General Election. But it’s likely the election and government change a reset button was pressed on mood - meaning Labour didn’t get the degree of flak for these bad news stories Sunak’s government would have done.
To be unfair to you, you should realise the economy didn’t leap into election saving sunlit uplands, it was never going to, and the way people were going to vote the Tories down to 120 MPs was already baked in and decided a long time ago, regardless of little ticks in economic upturn.
Inflation in US is lower on November 1st 2024 was lower, nearly halved from what Trump left Biden, but people didn’t rejoice at that news. To laugh at the highly paid Spad who wrote that memo, if they couldn’t see there would be no second hand punching due to fantastic news in economy, then they shouldn’t have been highly paid in first place. Alternatively they created the memo simply to cover their own professional arse - we shouldn’t listen to it but know they were actually pleased to cash the cheque and move on from a shit hole that theoretically could still be in place this week and everyday since July 4th.
At turn of year it should have been obvious to all political bettors, the election was never going to be this side of the summer recess.