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An interesting observation – politicalbetting.com
An interesting observation – politicalbetting.com
Wrote about this in @thesun in December https://t.co/FMTa3YF196
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Wrote about this in @thesun in December https://t.co/FMTa3YF196
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My photo quota today is in pursuit of my contention that Local Highways Authorities need their remit recreated from scratch to reflect the legal duty to treat all modes of travel equally, and adequate budget after 20 years of slashing the public realm.
I've seen this sort of "cleanup" Youtube channel in the USA, but never here - except for a few people * who keep their local cycle tracks trimmed because their LHAs are butt-sitters.
A passing cyclist mentioned that it had been like this for 6 years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuWwOsMmN54
* eg, Belfast: https://x.com/BelfastCyclist1/status/1853117533643051140
*if* Farage or Badenoch is on -15% in 2029, and Starmer is on -45%, (a big if), Labour will lose and it won’t be close.
Several caveats, though.
In multiparty FPTP, the winning post can be somewhere in the low thirties percent. As we've seen.
The efficiency matters more than the number of voters- I suspect that's what dooms Conservatives and Reform next time
As for JJ's point- Farage doesn't have three electoral cycles left in his career. (Personally, I'm doubtful that he has one before tempus fugits.)
I think it’s more like punctuated equilibrium. Within a set of “bands” (the current state of affairs) parties drift over time.
The current status is that there are three, roughly equal parties. With ~25% of the vote each.
What we are really waiting for, is the next punctuation. To change the current state of affairs.
Look at the trends and extrapolate
But if Labourites seize on this and get even more complacent, all good
I note in Northern Ireland, where the parties compete under FPTP for Westminster elections, but otherwise experience STV, the parties have learnt to stand aside for each other often, or voters learn to vote tactically. In GB, will we see the same?
Podbean: https://undercutters.podbean.com/e/f1-2025-ranking-the-rookies/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7GQpzSWO363h6OiPSW6k5s
Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/bcfe213b-55fb-408a-a823-dc6693ee9f78/episodes/566e3ec1-0943-462a-8896-ac87ea932c81/undercutters---f1-podcast-f1-2025-ranking-the-rookies
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/f1-2025-ranking-the-rookies/id1786574257?i=1000687784862
Transcript: https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2025/02/f1-2025-ranking-rookies-undercutters.html
ON CURRENT TRENDS Reform are rising, and the Tories and Labour are declining, the Tories perhaps somewhat faster
That's the trend, whether you map it for this year or from the election. THAT IS IN THE GRAPH, UP THERE
So on current trends Labour are headed for a bad defeat and Reform are going to be the next government. That is the "current trend", and that is what you need to change. You need the current trend to change
That must be it? I cannot think of anything else
I can’t think of an election where you could actually predict the outcome in the first year of the preceding term.
This time, last time, we were reliably informed that Boris had 10-15 years. In 2015 Cameron was triumphant, yet was gone in two years.
And this week's does flytipping - there's something about what happens when waste disposal is charged for too heavily.
Entries to the PB Prediction Competition are now closed.
I will make the spreadsheet of entries available in the not too distant future (that's a prediction!) but in the meantime I have recorded entries from the following people. If you think you have entered but are not listed below please PM me or post a comment with the word 'competition' in and I'll try to find your entry. (One person was so enthusiastic they entered twice, I assume by mistake, I'll be taking their second entry as the official one.)
Entries received from:
algarkirk
Barnesian
BartholomewRoberts
BatteryCorrectHorse
Benpointer
Big_G_NorthWales
CharlieShark
Cookie
DoctorG
Driver
Eabhal
Essexit
Fairliered
FF43
Foss
Foxy
Gingray
hamiltonace
HYUFD
IanB2
kinabalu
Lennon
madmacs
malcolmg
Malmesbury
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MattW
Maxh
Morris_Dancer
MrBristol
NickPalmer
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No_Offence_Alan
Northern_Al
OldKingCole
Omnium
OnlyLivingBoy
Pagan2
paulo
Pro_Rata
Pulpstar
rkrkrk
rottenborough
SandyRentool
sarissa
Sean_F
Selebian
Shecorns88
Stuartinromford
Sunil_Prasannan
Taz
turbotubbs
ydoethur
If I've actually got anything right I shall be extremely pissed off.
Yes what they have going for them is a divided opposition but they are at the mercy of what happens to that opposition. A long road to travel on that front before we start thinking of the next GE. Conversely, there’s still plenty of time for them to start improving.
But if it is that too, it's Reform benefitting, not Tories
1.Labour 38, Tories 36, Lib Dem 22, Reform 39.
2. Labour 22, Tories 18, Lib Dem 10, Reform 20.
3.7
4. 2
5. 2
6. 3
7. 142
8. 2.7%
9. £120.5bn
10. 1.1%
11. 2.1%
12 168 Rbl to $
13. 4-0 Australia. :-(
I will check when I did this against my posts. Edit 25th January on a thread headed about the competition.
(Or, just possibly, doesn’t.)
Oh, sorry, misunderstood you there.
(TBF I disbelieved the polls too.)
Rightly or wrongly many people think they know what Reform plans to do, and to some extent how they plan to do it. (I think they are wrong, but it doesn't help me or others on how to vote).
It’s an old (1982) Learjet 55 operating a medical flight, that went down a minute or two after takeoff from Philadelphia, 6 people on board.
There’s some horrible videos around of the crash and the aftermath, which was in a built-up area. There’s likely to be some injured on the ground, but the accident was unsurvivable for those on the plane, it came down fast and at a steep angle.
Likely some sort of mechanical failure, ice on the wings, or related to the very poor visibility in the area at the time.
https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/663941-learjet-nose-dives-philly-31-jan-2025-a-3.html
Unlikely to be any political angle to this one, sadly small private plane crashes still happen quite a bit.
I wonder who will play Corbyn/IDS to her Milliband/Hague
You're in!
WRT UK polling, unless you are SNP with its single issue it is almost impossible to find affirmative reasons for voting for anyone at all. Reform look different in this respect. (Which is not to say that they are).
Fucking Durham council.
Fortunately both times were less than half a mile from home.
It is good to see a change in tone and emphasis to trying to be more positive
Elections are zero sum games. If you are not winning, the other guy will, by default. The other guy in this case is Labour.
The Labour vote turned out where it needed to, hence gaining Truss' seat, but didn't turn out, or went LD/Green/Indy where the Tories looked like toast. When the tide is running the other way, particularly if Reform is still polling strongly then they may well turnout rather more.
I think that Labour will have another term, but possibly as a minority government.
But if she is chicken pox, the alternative remains a rather more intimate pox. Sometimes, your choice is just bad or worse.
It does seem that they have stepped away from that recently.
You can't assemble a right-wing majority in the Commons if you've got the large bulk of the city vote, Scotland and half of Southern England running away from you screaming.
What’s going to be interesting to watch is if they can walk the walk, or if they’re happy for the Process State to do its usual thing and hold everything up past the election.
If they do nothing else, let’s see a major reform of planning law and a streamlining of the process for national infrastructure projects.
Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe. Now They’re Coursing Through Trump’s Washington.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/30/curtis-yarvins-ideas-00201552
On the weekend of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the neo-reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin traveled to Washington, D.C., for the Coronation Ball, a glitzy inaugural gala hosted by the ultraconservative publishing house Passage Press. The gathering, hosted in the ballroom of the Watergate Hotel, was designed to celebrate the ascent of the new conservative counter-elite that has risen to power on the tide of Trump’s reelection — and Yarvin, who has arguably done more than anyone to shape the thinking of that nascent group, was an informal guest of honor.
Even the ball’s name spoke to Yarvin’s outsize influence over the Trumpian right: For over a decade, Yarvin, an ex-computer programmer-turned-blogger, has argued that American democracy is irrevocably broken and ought to be replaced with a monarchy styled after a Silicon Valley tech start-up. According to Yarvin, the time has come to jettison existing democratic institutions and concentrate political power in a single “chief executive” or “dictator.” These ideas — which Yarvin calls “neo-reaction” or “the Dark Enlightenment” — were once confined to the fringes of the internet, but now, with Trump’s reelection, they are finding a newly powerful audience in Washington...
People on here don’t seem to understand that the entire paradigm has shifted
Eg:
Ambulances
Rail from Liverpool to Hull
A and E
GP appointments
Planning law
Ties to EU
Boats/migration
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-aides-lock-government-workers-out-computer-systems-us-agency-sources-say-2025-01-31/
WASHINGTON, Jan 31 (Reuters) - Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials.
Since taking office 11 days ago, President Donald Trump has embarked on a massive government makeover, firing and sidelining hundreds of civil servants in his first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists..
.. The systems include a vast database called Enterprise Human Resources Integration, which contains dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and length of service of government workers, the officials said.
"We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems," one of the officials said. "That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications….
And it is perfectly sensible to categorise them as a centrist left nationalist patriotic Poujadeist 1950s social democratic Gaitskellite party, at least in how they present themselves.
Can I go wildly o/t and seek some help from the historians, especially the legal ones, on here, please.
In my genealogical researches I have come across what seem to me a puzzle. I've found someone who, in the 1880's was practising a solicitor; he is recorded as that in the 1881 and 1891 Censuses and crops up elsewhere as practising commercial law in the City. However in 1892 he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 16 months hard labour, and I can find no reference to a successful appeal. However in the 1901 Census he's again described as a solicitor and in 1911 as 'Secretary to Public Companies'. In 1921 he's a 'retired solicitor'.
Around the turn of 20th Century would someone have been allowed to return to legal practice after such a conviction?
Opinions, advice would be gratefully received.
But I’m not sure that’s going to matter.
https://x.com/front_ukrainian/status/1885429999634710799
Edit: not just O&G facilities, but chemical factories as well.
https://x.com/front_ukrainian/status/1885599105067446492
The next election, whenever it comes, will be decided based on 1. voters' wallets, followed by 2. public services, mainly health. If Labour is making tangible improvements in these areas by 2028, it wins easily. If things are still a complete mess, on the other hand, then what? Is either flavour of the Right going to be able to offer anything other than the same old tired formula of dismantling the state to fund tax giveaways, and blaming immigrants/Europe for stuff that goes wrong? There's precious little sign of it, and that approach won't win anything remotely close to the necessary number of seats.
Most people I know voted for Starmer. They're furious already....!
The population is increasing in the fashion of a developing country. Yet we have people applauding because the government says one new runway on airport will take ten years.
If you look at GDP per head, it’s pretty stark.
I don't know how things are in other areas, but if Labour are to be judged on delivery, then we do need up to date figures.
Whether "deliverism" will be good enough to deliver a second term for Labour over anecdote and bad first impression is too early to tell. I think that it will require a change of leadership to a more positive and charismatic leader in 2028 too.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/timeseries/mwb6/ukea
That’s before you remember that the inflation measure doesn’t include housing costs, and that the lowest income quartile sees significantly higher inflation than the headline number suggests.
The country is rotting. Repairing and rebuilding it is going to cost a lot of money, and that can't all be magically put right without public sector investment, which means tax. The Right has no good response to this.
https://bsky.app/profile/roadscholar.bsky.social/post/3lh456jms7c2w
It’s much more difficult in the UK though, there’s simply not the bureaucratic overhead that there is in the US, nor the thousands of ‘programmes’ that appear to little except enrich those working for them, and the overlap between Federal and State programmes.
But yes, by the next Election Badenoch is going to have to articulate an argument for reducing the scope of the State if she wants to see tax cuts.
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
https://x.com/GideonSkinner/status/1884199390463799730/photo/1
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I predict that the party which most convincingly argues that it will curtail immigration in 2028 will do very well, and will likely win. Labour cannot do that, the Tories can't, not any more, so we are left with Reform
https://shop.nationalarchives.gov.uk/search?type=product&q=tracing ancestors law*
Happened to a college friend of mine.
More and more frequently I hear those in the middle class deciding upon funding their own private healthcare, bemoaning the tax on private education etc.
The state's inability doesn't come from shortage of funds, but from a poverty of expectation, and what seems like a boundless desire to stifle innovation and progress with regulation and overcaution.
She needs to show the voters
1. She's serious
2. She's ruthless
3. She's entirely sincere in her apology for the Boriswave
4. The Tories are genuinely moving on
Sack Patel
Eh? Surely that's not true.
(Being a SSSI means IIRC that advice has to be taken from the rselevant agency, and fed into planning. But it's not a total ban.)
Ed Miliband’s Department for Energy, Security and Net Zero signed off last week on Heckington Fen Solar Park, a 524-hectare solar farm in Lincolnshire owned by Dale Vince’s green energy company, Ecotricity.
Mr Vince’s Ecotricity has donated £5.4 million to Labour since 2021, making him one of the party’s most generous business backers.
There is clearly no connection between these two facts.
Andrew Neil. https://x.com/afneil/status/1885498005664457001
Someone has to do the hard work.
To what extent our mediocre economic performance can be attributed to imported labour suppressing wages and discouraging businesses from investing in skills and automation, and to what extent it's down to the immense problem of an ever-growing percentage of unproductive and expensive to support elderly people in society (for which drafting in immigrants is a cheap quick fix), is evidently a matter for debate.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
But I think DJL is right, he was probably either not struck off or reinstated.
Or, of course, he may have been employed privately as a legal adviser to an estate or something (speculating here) and still called himself ‘solicitor’ in consequence despite not practising?