Could the World Cup cost Labour the Makerfield by-election? – politicalbetting.com
Could the World Cup cost Labour the Makerfield by-election? – politicalbetting.com
Yesterday I was scheduling my availability next week for work, editing PB, and watching the World Cup next week and I realised that England’s first match at the World Cup is against Croatia the night before the Makerfield by-election.
1
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Much easier to blame a football match than admit the reality - they were not popular enough to win because they had overseen a total mess up of the economy. (Which was, in fairness, not entirely their fault.)
Just as the Labour left constantly blame the Falklands War for 1983, when actually it was mostly due to their own terrible mistakes.
Good morning as well.
That is not going to be good for them. As Starmer can attest.
*Yes, I know, but let’s speculate a bit.
I remember, as a child, a trade union activist on stage at the (televised) Labour conference arguing that the U.K. should leave NATO and the EEC and join COMECON and the Warsaw Pact.
The Falklands War made the Conservative majority a bit bigger.
Oh, you meant their candidate in Makerfield?
(But seriously, folks... the question of why Reform keep picking terrible people as candidates isn't just down to bad luck or poor vetting. Something about the party systematically attracts a certain sort of worst person.
No, not every Reformer is awful, and other parties have awful people as well. But there's a definite pattern in the data.)
Immigration and economics drove it. And the inaccurate opinion polls probably depressed Labour voter turnout a little bit.
Thatcher actually governed using opinion polls. Her method was to front load the unpopular stuff at the start, and then build up to the next election.
That is using opinion polls as a tool.
The problem we have, is politicians trying to do populism by opinion poll, tactically.
In what the party says is the first step in a wider programme to "restore common sense", Badenoch will argue that the Public Sector Equality Duty has been used to promote "dangerous and divisive agendas".
She will say it has "become a minefield that exposes almost every significant public decision to legal challenge.
Badenoch's speech comes after the murder of Henry Nowak and the police's response fuelled questions about equality policies and laws.
The Conservatives are trying to forge a distinct response from both Labour, who have strengthened equality protections, and Reform UK, who want to go further than the Tories and scrap the Equality Act altogether.'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy5vyqykpx5o
We get comfort from people who think like us and get frustrated by people who don't.
We all look for evidence that supports our views and ignore evidence that doesn't.
We all do.
The remedy is to be aware of that behaviour and actively manage it when it comes to evidence.
But our opinions also depend on our values and these are not evidence based but deeply and emotionally ingrained. It takes a lot to shift them.
So we can amicably disagree when it comes to values, but we shouldn't accept "alternative facts" when the evidence contradicts them.
The baffling bit? Somewhere in Nige's head he must think these are the Best People to attract votes, which tells you what he really thinks about the voters.
The article goes on: “By often claiming to represent the authentic will of the people, populists—particularly those aligned with right-wing movements—may ease executive power concentration and bypass or actively undermine liberal democratic institutions designed to safeguard minority rights, most notably the judiciary and the media, often portrayed as disconnected from the populace.”
A bit more humility wouldn't go amiss.
Discuss!
https://socialistworker.co.uk/in-depth/why-britain-should-leave-nato/
The catcalls came after frustrated ticketholders waited for hours in lines that stretched more than two blocks outside Madison Square Garden on Monday due to the intense security restrictions that came with the president's appearance.'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czj89mz3mzzo
It could be many years before Tory hypocrisy is not being called out- the gap between what they actually did in office and what they now say is the best policy is not just wide, it is oceanic, and they just lose all credibility when they try and play the populist song.
The Labour Party is outraged that newly-elected Green leader Zack Polanski “seeks to undermine our membership of Nato”. Here’s hoping he does.
Nothing like having to engage with physical reality all the time to keep you humble.
Yes, I did do physical sciences; why do you ask?
It could happen to anyone.
I'm amazed that we seem to be poised to throw that away over an issue with alcohol.
Engineers like lawyers make the world work.
To cap it all he fell asleep during the game.
The right used to think of themselves as patriots and now they are traitors.
His opposition is largely driven by Donald Trump's presidency. Polanski argues that the US dominates the alliance to a degree that makes NATO impossible to reform from within, making heavy reliance on an unpredictable US a national security risk. He's not wrong. Though Trump won't last forever.
The last national Survation poll (in March!) had Labour behind Reform by 11.3pp with men and 4.5pp with women, so the gap is twice as large in the by-election poll.
Hence the SDP.
The main opposition party self destructing was the reason the main opposition party got a rather low vote in the general election.
The official in question almost certainly wasn’t paid by Moscow. The KGB called such people Useful Idiots. They would do whatever Moscow wanted, without instruction or pay.
Full story on Stokes-Saracens incident
* Rugby player understood to have thrown a punch at Gus Atkinson but connected with ECB security guard supervising the players
* ECB sources are adamant the cricketers were “not the aggressors” at Chelsea nightclub
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2026/06/08/ben-stokes-gus-atkinson-nightclub-incident-new-zealand-test/
It would be terrible to have a Useful Idiot running a powerful country.
With a guard which begs some rather odd questions.
That too involved New York City.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ceqpd7pr9yjo
The anecdotes in the header suggest a naive (or in Jenkin's case, arrogant) belief about how interested the average person is in politics:
..On the Monday morning Howell and home secretary and aesthete Roy Jenkins, held a massed factory-gate meeting in Birmingham: “Roy was totally bemused that no question concerned either trade figures nor immigration, but solely the football..
People generally do not make decisions or choices on the basis of a rational evaluation of well-attested facts. They make a judgement, based on part on facts, or perceptions of them, at least, but in a greater part on other factors. On feelings, values and belief.
One of the corrosive impacts on political disorder has been the attempt but politicians to frame debate in terms of fact so that disagreement with them is impossible. But it's rare that the facts are such that a specific policy response is unavoidable. There are almost always choices based on values, or some degree of a guess about how the future might unfold.
It’s not a choice between unfettered capitalism and East Germany. As large numbers of social democratic parties have proved, around the world.
If the Labour Party had been selling the politics of, say, the German SPD, in 1983, them there would have been no split. And they might well have won a majority at the election.
Instead they chose East Germany.
The latter definitely had an effect on quite a few people I knew. Were you around at the time ?
The former is harder to assess; it certainly boosted the morale of those who supported the government, and called into question the judgment of those who pronounced it a reckless gamble.
Twentieth century short stories i think.
And you know it.
Not a few countries which fall into that category backed Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
There's a case for a European defence strategy, but his ideas sound like nebulous nonsense to me.
Lots of decent people support Reform. Most of them have the limited sense required to do so at a substantial distance with a wary eye on the the exit. Potential candidates they are not.
I've never met anyone who casts their vote on it.
I'd say he's very useful indeed, if a little unreliable.
Though I'm not entirely sure you do.
The people this relates to are very quickly self-identifying themselves on this thread.
It is for many based on "how do I feel they are doing", which is heavily influenced by things in the background, and football feelings can be one of those. That is imo why Mr Starmer's absent communications is so important - there are good stories to tell, but particularly for a Labour Government very few will tell them if the Government do not make sure it happens; and they are entirely AWOL on that score.
"Why Building AI Data Centres Isn’t Working Anymore", ColdFusion, 27minutes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXXwN_TDdLU
Slightly different point but political choices are essentially trade-offs. The public doesn't generally engage with the trade-offs and politicians are poor at explaining the trade-offs and why they make the choices they do. So governments have tended to favour high immigration because it's an easy way to get more money into the country but they're not going to admit that. There's a public backlash and they reduce immigration but this has consequences the public don't like, that they blame politicians for, and which they don't understand is actually part of a trade-off. Whereas good policy making would present the plusses and minuses of each option and people could choose what matters most to them
I won't be doing that again.
So, for example, a decent person might hear what Farage has said about ILR and be able to apply it to some notional group of benefits junkies and crooks, but not apply it to surgeons and engineers.
Politics is not most people's career or hobby. It is the job of those who seek power to communicate brilliantly to the non-political so as to keep the fanatics and extremes at bay. Which is why those in Labour who prefer power to opposition are clutching at the straw which is Burnham.
As to MAGA. No idea. Words fail me.
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/defense/20260609/s-korea-us-align-on-nuclear-submarines-as-seoul-takes-lead-on-peninsula-defense
S Korea seem to be slowly preparing to become a nuclear power, While this agreement includes their purchasing enriched uranium from the US, rather than allowing them to set up domestic production, the threshold is steadily being lowered.
Shocking story. The new proposed law against drug gang cuckooing has a maximum sentence of 5 years - that is way too low, should be more, at least 20, if not life. I don't see a substantial difference to kidnapping which comes with maximum life sentencing.
It's easy to think of football as the only sport but next week has something far more important - Royal Ascot, the greatest five days of racing in the entire year.
How does it influence politics, you might ask?
Well if you've had a poor first two days at the Royal meeting, you might head to the Polling Station and muse on the Makerfield By-Election Handicap, open to 3-y-o of all ages. A big field and if you've backed a lot of losers already at Ascot, why not back another one here - and so many from which to choose.....the Labour loser, the Reform loser, the Restore loser etc, etc.
Contempt for the conman, compassion for the conned?
To put it in stark terms, the ideological divide between USA white evangelicals, and UK white evangelicals, is historical and still in place in attitudes to social action. That is a tension for him in a party where the leadership look to Trump, and have a similar "centre dominated by rich businessmen, with various other pieces attached" polity.
In the USA they founded their largest protestant denomination - Southern Baptists - to protect the institution of slavery, in 1845.
In the UK it was a group of campaigning evangelicals around Wilberforce and many others, many of whom lived around Clapham Common ("The Clapham Sect") who spent 50 years campaigning against slavery, and the church of Holy Trinity, Clapham.
That is a basic tension - UK evangelicalism around the Evangelical Alliance has social action as a core feature. In the US it is less so. We saw it in equally stark terms when Hegseth was speaking at D-Day - in my view he was trying to shoehorn his essentially Axis position into an Allied memorial event.
These days, Holy Trinity Clapham is known as HTC. It is a typical Georgian, relatively small for London, preaching box, currently gearing up for renovation.