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The Trump legacy, the UK chooses Europe over the open sea? – politicalbetting.com
The Trump legacy, the UK chooses Europe over the open sea? – politicalbetting.com
Despite being potentially four and a half years away from the next election some people, particularly on social media, are calling the next election for Reform which seem a courageous call and may turn out to be as ridiculous as those who in early September 2022 thought Liz Truss would make for an excellent Prime Minister.
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Which genuinely surprises me.
If the Trump revolution, as more likely, crashes the world economy, British voters will be poorer and looking to back the anti-establishment option.
Heads the billionaire puppets win, tails the voters lose.
I think it's called geography.
The reality remains we need strong relationships with both, they are our two biggest export destinations and while in the Trump era we will need closer European links on defence to defend our continent, the US is still the biggest counterweight to China and has the best anti terrorism network to combat jihadism
Though the largest remaining ones that do ie Canada, Australia and New Zealand also tend to be the foreign nations polls show most British voters feel closest to
Presumably if the Americans spoke French or German they'd be ignored too.
Trump's FBI pick, Kash Patel, won't divest himself of shares in Chinese company that represent a conflict of interest.
The idea that Con+Ref = 50% and a deal is therefore all that is needed to win them an election handsomely is for the birds. I'm not sure how many Reform voters would desert if they thought their preferred party were morphing back into Tories, but a large chunk of what's left of the Conservative vote would sit on its hands or go Liberal Democrat.
Not particularly envisaging a by-election here, but with Reform just on their national average vote and 24.5% Green-Left vote, a single candidate from the latter could be the most credible challenge, if it could be brought about.
Liz Truss may have fallen short in the excellence department but she did make Prime Minister and that was what the bookies paid out on. Same with Big Nige.
I think there is a prevailing acceptance that Brexit hasn’t delivered what people expected it to. Beyond that I think there’s a range of opinions - some want to rejoin the EU, some want to be closer to Europe in some areas but not others, some think we need to make Brexit work better. I am not sure that the public are coalescing around any one approach right now, and I think it will be some time before they do (if ever!). However, I do think that gives both Reform on one side and the LDs an opportunity to set out their stalls on this - people are in the mood for a change of approach. Those parties can offer that, on opposing ends of the spectrum.
Re Trump and Farage - I am not quite sure I see as big a correlation between what Trump does and Farage’s fortunes here. There are a lot of reasons for this, but essentially I think it boils down to the fact that Farage speaks to specific British concerns, which are often similar to those in America but not identical.
If Farage comes unstuck, it will be because the Labour Party in particular manages to skewer him on his rather Thatcherite-on-steroids economics and approach to things like the NHS.
https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/uk/calls-reinvestigate-parish-councillor-blew-up-neighbours-cat-police/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl9aaCDSOzs&t=506s
Interesting how sloppy the Russians were in creating his identity. The detail that they almost always keep the same Zodiac sign because this is asked for constantly in Russia was interesting.
Mysteriously, my youtube kept buffering while I tried to watch it.
On topic, I can't believe Russia wasn't given as an option in those polls. Who in their right mind wouldn't want to cooperate with a country of assassins and war criminals?
Typical biased pollsters.
I think that’s true more broadly. Disliking Trump and regretting Brexit may not, paradoxically, necessarily be a bar to supporting Farage.
The Sunday Rawnsley:
Voters indicating that they are backing Reform are telling us that they don’t like either Labour or the Tories. That is not the same as saying that they all want Nigel Farage to be the next prime minister.
“Reform is not great for Labour, but it is an existential threat to the Tories,” remarks one Labour strategist, noting that last week’s YouGov poll reported that one in five of Tory voters in 2024 said they would now back Reform. [But] one Labour veteran, usually a phlegmatic sort, recently remarked to me that both his party and the Conservatives “are living in the last chance saloon”.
Labour staffers and campaign groups are now spending a lot of time trying to devise strategies to combat Reform. The topic was on the agenda of the cabinet when it met for a six-hour “away day” at Lancaster House on Friday. One minister present told me afterwards that there was no single “killer” tactic that will do the trick. “I don’t think we’ve figured this out yet, if I’m being entirely honest.”
One school of thought within Sir Keir’s ranks argues that Labour should present itself as the more authentic enemy of the status quo and project the government as the insurgents. The snag with trying to be an “insurgent government” is that it is really hard not to look like the establishment when you are in power and the prime minister is a knighted lawyer who used to run the crown prosecution service.
A potentially promising approach is to subject [Farage's] beliefs and policies to the scrutiny that he is unaccustomed to. Labour has belatedly started to draw attention to his view that we should move to an insurance-based system of healthcare. Sir Keir won a lusty cheer from his MPs at the most recent session of PMQs when he took on the leader of Reform by walloping him for wanting “to charge them (his constituents) for using the NHS”. [Farage's] signature theme is hostility to immigration and this raises the most vexed questions about the lengths to which Labour should go. A new pressure group of Labour MPs, drawn from those 89 seats that are potentially most vulnerable, is urging Sir Keir to toughen up the government’s stance on immigration and be noisy about it.
If Labour is to beat back Reform, the job won’t be done simply by coming up with some sharper attack lines. Mr Farage is thriving now, just as he did in the years running up to the Brexit referendum, because he is tapping into high levels of voter discontent about the quality of their lives in a country with a stagnant economy and dilapidated public services. Immigration is one of the factors, but so is the cost of living and the condition of the health service. Sorting that is critical to seeing him off. It is not enough to say that Reform has bad ideas. Labour must demonstrate that it can deliver good results.
I'm not sure I'd want to predict where those voters end up going.
What could possibly go wrong?
Down down, deeper and down....
Besides, at some level, they still think they can control him.
Reform are currently the "against everything" option.
Once in Government, you have to start being for some things.
If Labour want to win the next GE then they are best sticking to a plan of trying to score wins on the economy and public services and making the case that things are getting better. We all have our views on whether or not they can achieve that, but that surely is the road to a second term, not trying to go toe-to-toe with Farage.
Sky News were all over Trump's press conference with pm of Japan. They called it breaking news FFS. What on earth had that to do with us?
He is a media creation. Same in many ways as Farage.
If you're just angry at everything and the state of the country there's a distinct possibility you'll view Brexit as having been a dreadful failure but still attracted to the populist who wants to smash things up and see where the pieces land.
Cunningly, I was planning to avoid getting it anyway. Time/money etc (if I had more, I'd be getting Kingdom Come Deliverance 2).
It needs chutzpah to pull off, but it's possible. And I agree with Rawnsley that the charisma-free, left-liberal Establishment Starmer is about the last person who could pull it off.
It's still not obvious whether they have a coherent legislative programme for the next two to four years?
A PR system is slightly more likely to avoid such nonsense. If you're not MAGA, or 'uber-liberal' (whatever that might mean), you have other options to make your electoral voice heard.
Like pounds/pence instead of £sd.
It's just lazy journalism.
It's a bit like military personnel who insist on using their ranks after they've left the military. It annoys me, and I find it slightly bemusing, but it's harmless. It's more my issue than theirs.
How's that going down with Musk?
Pinocchio fans please explain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election
Mind you, Civ does get some things wrong. Having Victoria as Queen of England (nope, Britain), or Saladin as an Arabic leader (he was a Kurd) springs to mind.
Ezra Klein:
Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.
The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already.
@ianbetteridge.com
Another thing about regulation: everyone – even me – is in favour of simplifying things. Then you get to the details and have to ask "well, should we get rid of this one about fire testing cladding?" And all of a sudden, you have the same number of regulations, because they're all there for a reason
But Rawnsley is right. Farage and Reform are NOTA and if Britain remains as it is, they will win. Labour needs to fix the country, to create jobs paying good money; affordable housing; less crime, especially kids stabbing each other and nicking phones. People should be able to see their doctor, and even registration with a dentist would be a start in some parts of the country. Even the weather's rubbish: too cold; too wet; too windy; and come summer, too hot and humid.
If not, then Tories broke the country, Labour made it worse, so why not try this new lot? What is there to lose?
Besides, we should all be using Julian dates...
And of course Orwell more or less predicted that too.
...Julia was twenty-six years old... and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department...
"what did you do then"
"what did you see?"
"Did you say anything at that point"
etc etc
I can't use their own name.
"You" is a fantastically ubiquitous word in English. Its single, its plural, its masculine, its feminine, but is it "other"? I don't know an alternative but is there one and should I be using it?
LAB 24.67%
CON 22.44%
REF 25.22%
More than 72% voting for extreme right wing policies
Come all ye faithful.
But they can do the work of millions, if directed.
Most people can't compose a crossword. You could probably train an AI to do so without massive effort.
Musk probably has an AI writing his social media posts. Some selection of the output would be required, but it would explain his 300 tweets per day.
Doing that for Trump would be even easier, given his tiny vocabulary and copious public archive of bullshit.
On the header: encouraging to see an outbreak of sanity and an accurate reflection of where the USA is going.
But BC/AD to BCE/CE changes only the label, not the date. Dates stay exactly as they were. That is why complaining about it is stupid. The Battle of Hastings was in 1066 CE or AD. We have not taken Christ out of the calendar, just off the badge. A change would have been adopting the Hebrew calendar, where this is year 5785 or the Islamic calendar (1446). That did not happen and no-one advocates it because the PTB made the smallest possible compromise on the name.
You is second party.
You applies to everyone and has no gender or identity connotations.
A bad 'un. A further comment he made wrt to someone who asked for more cycle lanes. This came via a report to a (very effective) activist group in the area called Walk Ride GM:
“Another outrageous exchange came after a councillor mentions a constituent called 'Nick' who asked for more cycle lanes and comments: 'That Nick is something else.'
Mr Gwynne, who represents the Gorton and Denton constituency, replies: 'I had positive visions of him getting mown down by an Elsa Waste HGV while he's cycling to the Fallowfield Loop [cycle lane]. We couldn't be that lucky!'”
https://bsky.app/profile/walkridegm.org.uk/post/3lhqckonbcc2z
Or you could go Derbyshire / Yorkshire, and say "thou"
That latter works better if they are called Ada or Eli.
His comments are nothing compared to those of the SoS for Health
Those two sets of people probably overlap considerably. You might be able to think of an odd example on PB.
(I once specced out a calendar system designed to keep track of days/time over a very long period. It soon becomes immensely complex, especially if you have to account for different locales and you want granularity to include stuff like leap seconds. The core of it use Julian Dates.)
If David is feeling informal, he could try "y'all".
If the trial is in Glasgow of course 'youse' must be used at all times, eg 'Where were youse on the night of the 25th' etc.
https://x.com/JohnBent11/status/1888413899566817631/photo/1
https://x.com/JohnBent11/status/1888413899566817631/photo/2
https://x.com/JohnBent11/status/1888413899566817631/photo/3
https://x.com/SteveLuke1968/status/1823762219366027440/photo/1
Not sure who Matt is or the breed of dogs involved.
I’ve surely said worse myself, maybe even on Pb.
The only alternative to Julian calendar that I'd appreciate is the Babylonian administrative calendar of 360 days a year, with 30 days in every month.
360 is such a great number as it has almost every low number as a factor of it (why we use it for degrees in a circle).
Sure it means we'd eventually have summer in December and winter in June, but it would also work in a different way.
Whilst he was on trial he spent his time personally attacking neutral officials such as Court Clerks, to the extent that swathes of them had to have 24/7 security and were threatened by Trump's supporters (and "swatted" - fake calls which get armed police sent to your home).
Now he is going after all the neutral officials who even touched on the prosecution process. It's an ideologcal cleansing of the system as we see in eg former European dictatorships or 3rd world countries run by despots.
As in eg Uganda under Amin, the independent judiciary, and independent institutions such as churches, will be the last bulwarks of a free society that can continue to exist.
On the Andrew Gwynne story and his outrageous and unacceptable comments, who else was privy to them and who leaked the story to the Daily Mail ?