So Keir, where did it all go wrong? – politicalbetting.com
So Keir, where did it all go wrong? – politicalbetting.com
This polling from Ipsos lays out very clearly how quickly Sir Keir Starmer became unpopular when he became Prime Minister. My two takeaways is that
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Hegseth's reaction is as fucking stupid and shit as you'd expect. He's undermining the safety culture and is going to get people killed.
Good morning, everyone.
F1: 10 place grid penalty for Norris for exceeding parts' limits.
https://www.bbc.com/sport/formula1/articles/cj038y0levyo
On-topic: it went wrong with the Ming vase nonsense when facing an unpopular government that had been there for many years. Pretending the Conservatives were unnecessarily spending less because they're mean rather than because of economic constraints also wasn't terribly smart (but then, neither is hiking NI to fling it away on benefits while Defence gets promises but not funds).
A leader like Tony Blair or David Cameron, carefully preparing the ground, could easily have cut back on WFA, although they'd still have experienced the screams and howls of utterly self-entitled pensioners, they could have weathered them.
I'd like to say it is because I am on holiday but....
A reform of old age benefits which reworked them to be targeted at the actual poorest, would have been perfectly possible to sell to Labour MPs and the country.
Put the whole lot in a blender, create something that uses taxation (means testing as a last resort) to do the clawback.
Either way very early on SKS and Reeves were found to not be good enough as they messed around at the edges rather than actually trying to fix things.
Thats at the level of the Argentine “gammon flag shaggers” who bang on about the Malvinas all the time.
Blair did the same in 1997, and got away with it, but was blessed with a fawning media that would make the North Koreans blush, a dream economic legacy from the Conservatives, and once-in-a-generation political skills.
Starmer had none of those. And, once people realised what he was going to do, his support collapsed pretty quickly.
Becoming unpopular is what has always happened to Prime Ministers.
Becoming very unpopular very quickly is what tends to happen to Prime Ministers these days. Partly because it's a difficult country to run, partly because the modern media environment means that your opponents become your sworn enemies.
I'm reminded of that long-run American polling on how well voters think the economy is doing, and how the partisan split flips on a dime whenever there's a change of presidency. It's too rapid to be policy, so it must be vibes. Fortunately for us, this isn't the USA, but some of those vibe issues have made it across the Atlantic.
Starmer (not really a politician) was broken by that. Burnham is a politician, and has craved this job forever. Surely that will make him more resilient against the headwinds, but it won't make them go away.
Good luck, sir. You are going to need it.
Freebies from Lord Alli made Sir Keir look bad. If a pair of glasses and some other minor freebies can destroy Starmer’s reputation then no wonder why Nigel Farage is in a panic over his £5 million donation from Christopher Harbone which looks bad to the 64th power. We can see Farage’s ratings tumbling, this isn’t a surprise.
Starmer's problem was 2-tier Keir over Southport not free gear Keir over some glasses.
Farage we might have got wrong too. It is not taking the £5 million that is the problem, but taking the £5 million and yet continuing all his other grifts that Harborne's money should have let him stop: the Cameos, hawking gold and so on. As for consequences, it is not Harborne but Posh George that will land him in it.
Its just like when people are promoted for being good at their current job, rather than because they'll be good at the next one
Farage is possibly less damageable in this sense because being seen as clean was never really one of his selling points.
For me Starmer's original sin back in summer 2024 was Chagos, but I'd say that only hurt him among people suspicious of Labour anyway, and was complex in a way that Alligate (or - because I do agree with DJL here - 2-tier-Keir) wasn't.
But I no longer think it's only pensioners who disapproved of the WFA cuts. I noted recently that although working age people do tend to view pensioners as taking more than their fair share, they are still very supportive of measures that reduce death by natural causes for the elderly.
The last PM with both the relevant qualities and the good luck being PM at a time when it was possible to do it for long was Cameron, who blew it away by the fatal flaw of being unprepared for 50% of the possible outcomes of his key policy.
Since then we have had:
May - not PM material
Boris - morally not the right material
Truss - no good
Rishi - circumstances rendered the job impossible because his party was busted
Starmer - golden opportunity but his personality made it impossible. + a series of elementary errors.
I think Burnham has the best combination of personal qualities and situation since Cameron. Reform are on the run and exposed as morally flawed and tawdry; Tory recovery is way off. No-one but Labour is ready to govern.
Tentative prediction: Burnham to survive, see off Reform, lead the government (majority or deal with LDs) after the next election in 28/29 and to be good for about 5 or 6 years.
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/farage-taxpayer-funded-security-after-accepting-5m-gift-4644638
Which is happening right now.
Maybe we should automatically debank all political refugees. They have broken their countries laws, pretty much by definition.
The tv series with coogan - Legends has the backdrop of them doing (as civil servants) the new and hard work of going after drug dealers and organised crime because Thatcher said she wanted them to . Starmer would be waiting in somebody to be the thatcher to tell him what to do .
The tv series with coogan - Legends has the backdrop of them doing (as civil servants) the new and hard work of going after drug dealers and organised crime because Thatcher said she wanted them to . Starmer would be waiting in somebody to be the thatcher to tell him what to do .
Without it, each of the other things on the IPSOS chart, from winter fuel, to Lord Alli, is a smaller hit and a serious downwards turn possibly would have been delayed until Mandelson. That doesn't negate all those missteps and compromises, that doesn't negate that Starmer was something of an ideological vacuum.
What that does say is that it put Starmer on a fast track rather than a slower track to removal, and it affected this government more than it affected his predecessors who, admittedly, got some similar flack but nowhere near at the level of viciousness that jumped at Starmer from the outset.
Labour must learn how to deal with the more aggressively misinformational corners of X, Burnham is very good at the online celebrity quiz type interviews, but that alone will only be a part of the fightback story.
I hadn't realised the true genius of Nigel Lawson, triggering a house price spike, by not phasing the abolition of double MIRAS for unmarried couples, and then the inevitable price crash pitching the same couples into negative equity.
I hope, for the sake of the country, Burnham learns from this; that he has clear objectives and makes the argument in the country for them so that a consensus will build. His choice of Chancellor is likely to be key to his success in that area but Burnham himself is far more relatable than Starmer ever was.
This, as we shall soon find out, covers whatever Burnham and his government wants it to cover. There is no such thing as a government policy which cannot be said to be part of the non-negotiable political direction. Did no-one notice this?
And yes, her lack of majority is partly her own fault. She was a terrible campaigner. But if she lost the election on the dementia tax she was at least trying to do the right thing having spotted the opportunity of an apparently unloseable election. She deserves some credit at least here.
Johnson benefited from two big boosts (COVID flag effect, then vaccination), but since Dave left, the big picture has always been the same.
It's always interesting to look at specific weather events, but it's the climate that matters, even if a rotten climate can have some nice days in it.
Red Bull have removed the turning rear wing system, after it dumped Mr Verstappen in the cat litter two weekends running.
The Mail and others were unremittingly hostile to Blair throughout his tenure but the problem was, as Brown was following Clarke's spending plans for the first two years, they couldn't put a glove on him. There was also a sense of profound shock and disbelief after the scale of the 1997 disaster - I think most Tories thought they might lose by 30-50 seats not 160.
Back to Starmer - again, I don't wholly agree. The overarching sentiment was "change" but from what and especially to what wasn't made clear. In 1997, Blair basically won by promising to do post-Thatcherism better than Major and his disunited, quarrelling rabble.
In 2024, Starmer had the same message - Continuity Sunak which of course was being roundly rejected by the electorate.
There was an opportunity for a radical message - perhaps more Wilson than Attlee or Thatcher - but the shadow of 1992 still looms large over Labour thinking (and you can add the shadow of 2019 as a lesson of how "radical" policies go down and that's why the Triple Lock remains the problem).
As others have pointed out, the "freebies" set a discordant tone from the start - to be honest, in the cosmic scheme of things, absolutely trivial but there is a hyper-sensitivity to politicians receiving anything from "friends" and there's a sense of you get them and we don't.
The Winter Fuel Allowance was the policy disaster - this reeked of a sense of "something" needing to be done. In essence, not a bad idea and properly and thoughtfully implemented, it could have worked very well. WFA was being paid to people who didn't need it and removing it from higher rate tax payers (with appropriate tapering) would have led to grumbling but not much more.
If you have a big majority you can do a lot and often things that are very unpopular initially but whose benefit can be seen 3-4 years down the road. If all that matters is popularity, you'll end unpopular by virtue of inertia. Doing unpopular stuff requires party discipline and strength - the backbenches walked away from challenges to the welfare budget. Governing continually looking over your shoulder means you bump into things.
I'm not angry with Starmer and I don't "hate" him but I am disappointed by him and his failure to take the opportunity to do something really radical and significant for the country.
And the last few months have shown how ruthless Team Burnham can be. Now we have to see how well that holds up in government.
On Thursday, the UK government said that taking the loss-making firm into public hands would protect jobs and safeguard a "vital national capability".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjd4kvxpd3do
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2k9wvv5wyo
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/britain-s-smallest-county-swallowed-up-again/ar-AA285bmD?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=6a59dca22d3248c9ae3c12b6ee034d74&ei=31
I'm quite a traditionalist when it comes to county geography. But I can completely see the reason for this: Rutland is far too tiny a population for the services a county is expected to provide.
What I think is needed is one of two things - either:
- a way of disassociating county identity from administrative geography - this really shouldn't be that hard to do: a few signs in the right places, institutional continuity, etc - so I could say 'I live in Cheshire' while having my bins collected by Trafford Council. This isn't the snobbery it's often perceived as; it's just a desire for continuity and local identity. I want to be able to aske a question like 'how many league football clubs have ever played home games in Cheshire' without a long footnote explaining what I mean by 'Cheshire'. I want to be able to answer 'where is Kirkby Lonsdale' with the same answer I would have given 20 or 50 or 100 years ago.
Or:
- a complete year zero where we abandon the old and have completely new administrative units for the half-a-million-to-three-million population units of territory. I could draw you up dozens of these right now. But we'd then have to agree to stick with them completely a la American states for the next 500 years at least and stop fucking tinkering.
However, yes, you're right- he didn't touch pensioners, and even majored on protecting the free bus pass in the debates, which shows what a gerontocracy we've become.
Her approach was to sit saying nothing in silence for months, and then act as a dictator when she'd decided.
He’s done no campaigning, no serious interviews, we have no real idea what he believes in or what his plans are for the country.
He also didn’t stand under that thin 2024 manifesto, so will he feel bound by it, or will he go to the country next year to receive a mandate for more significant policy change, so that he doesn’t feel bound by left-wing backbenchers blocking everything with which they disagree?
There is a strong suspicion among the more thinking people in banking, that debanking has been weaponised by Russia, China and others.
There is a pattern of reports on people hostile to such states having accounts blocked.
Stan Collymore is having an epic bad loser's meltdown.
https://x.com/_JC1971/status/2077806503335964854?s=20
In May we said Nigel Farage probably didn't owe tax on his £5m gift.
The Guardian now reports the gift followed talks where Farage said he'd need £5m to return to frontline politics.
*If* that's right, we think there's a high risk of a £3m tax bill - payable by Reform.
https://bsky.app/profile/danneidle.bsky.social/post/3mqtdpnasto2j
They also discovered that it’s really easy to buy either at scale, but somewhat more difficult to sell large quantities into a country with banking regulations! They was one story of a guy who bought a house in Dubai with Bitcoin, presumably from a seller who was happy to accept the crypto rather than dirhams!
Being PM requires inventing policy and managing a vast range of relationships, most of which are not direct subordinates.
Both had a better grasp of the shittiness of their in-tray than their detractors, which didn't help them communicate why they were doing what they were doing. (Starmer failed to communicate to his MPs that not all the stuff they didn't like could be unwound instantly, May could never get the Brexit right to see that their unicorns were donkeys with ice cream.cones on their noses. Communication is a two way thing.)
I'd put Year 1 Sunak in a similar space, but he rather spoiled it in the run-up to the election.
The committee, in Chinese Intelligence, that decides the budget for the biscuits for the committee that decides the budget for decorating with flowers, the room where the committee to decide on interfering with the American election failed to meet.
Because the committee....
You know that makes sense.
Aaron Rupar
@atrupar
·
20h
Massie: "I don't think the problem is that our elections aren't secure because we control the House, Senate, White House, and to some degree we control the Supreme Court. So I ask my Republican colleagues, why are you complaining about election fraud? We won all the damn elections!"
https://x.com/atrupar/status/2077735995210883522?s=20
That tells you everything you need to know about the state America is in and why we can never ever trust the USA again.
By all means cooperate with a sane successor but insulate ourselves from the US as best we can because as sure as night follows day the US will elect another lunatic within the next decade. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become.
It's not about this pilot, although there is now no meaningful sanction that can be applied. Hegseth and that c-nt who is SECNAV (can't remember his name) have completely undermined the CO of the unit just they did with the AH-64 ANG crew. The message is that anything goes as long as it looks cool. How do you think aviators, particularly the young and inexperienced, are going to react to this?
Even his ministers must have been infuriated, being sent out to defend what everyone already knew would be abandoned a week later.
A slogan
Taking back control of the buses and transport integration
Caving on the Manchester LEZ (maybe irrelevant in medium term with increased vehicle electrification)
City centre development, mainly high rises
I hope it isn't so, but it looks like his advantages over Starmer are that he's more personable and media-friendly (for now) but that he's demonstrated as much if not more political cowardice.
I expect him to be more appeasing of the right wing media than Starmer, neither have demonstrated the steadfastness of Sadiq Khan when confronted with media hostility.
This comes to mind
But I think you overestimate the extent to which people are attached. I am. But I know very few other people who understand or care. My quite-intelligent sister-in-law (I understate - she has a degree from Oxford and a masters from Cambridge and came in the 'just-about-top-of-the-year' category in both and is something terribly senior at somewhere quite large) cannot understand why Lancashire play at Old Trafford (for example).
China should be thanking Ed Miliband for making every other heavy industry shut down, not complaining about the last remaining steel works in the country being nationalised for national security reasons because they couldn’t afford the powere bill.
I have to admit astonishment at a change of leadership with so little discussion or debate.