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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » How whether Scotland remains part of the UK is totally dominating the political betting markets at the moment
Very few political markets ever top the £1m mark on Betfair and my guess, based on other elections, more than £5m will be at stake on the referendum on Betfair alone.
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Is OGH a member of the temperance movement?
I would guess not many people were ordering a hot cocoa...
It was a reference to the other thread. OGH's face shows he is no stranger to a drop or two ;-)
@OblitusSumMe
The Sussex PB Meet was NOT held in a pub, we wouldn't do anything so common. It was held in a curry house.
European Court of Human Rights gets a pasting from Diane James.
Ukraine rejects Russian aid: says no agreement to let Russian trucks into Ukraine territory.
On the subject of the temperance movement there was a strong Salvationist streak in my father's family before WWI and between the wars. He was born and brought up in Shoreditch and Bethnal Green, so you can imagine the pressures. As a result, as a teenager he signed the pledge and was awarded his Band of Hope Medal.
In his later years the Old Boy took particular pride in wearing his Band of Hope along with his WW2 medals on formal occasions. He claimed that only one person ever picked him up on it, a Royal Duke at a big piss-up in Great Queen Street. The Duke knew exactly what the medal was and thought it very funny that someone should wear it to such an occasion.
http://thingsthatwegoogleatwork.tumblr.com/post/34225790889
Dan Hodges @DPJHodges · 35m
Miliband won't call for intervention in Iraq till he thinks it's politically safe. Cameron won't till EM does. Leadership. Britain. 2014.
What's Nigel's position? nothing but silence from UKIP since the whole thing blew up.
And here's the thing.
Captured British servicemen wouldn't be corralled into camps or beaten up and paraded on television with ISIS.
They would be filmed being beheaded.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21236690
Those deriding Mr. Crosby might recall his 2010 prediction proved a lot more accurate than most people here.
Mr. K, I couldn't be less surprised if you'd posted Ed Miliband had called for an independent judge-led inquiry. Which is really rather depressing.
Fair enough, point taken, but 2008 was six years ago, Mr Mike K.
I couldn't find anything on UKIP's website on what official policy is now, however, on Gaza/Syria/Iraq etc. Or even on ISIS flags in Poplar. Or on arming kurds etc.
On Monday night, RAF crews dropped supplies including 3,180 reusable water purification containers containing a total of 15,900 litres of clean water, and 816 solar lamps that can also be used to charge mobile phones.
The first drop took place on Saturday, delivering 1,200 water containers and 240 solar lanterns.
http://www.doncaster.ukipbranch.org/ge-2015/dn-candidate
Other UKIP selections in Doncaster:
Don Valley: Guy Aston.
http://www.guyastonukip.net/
UKIP, Doncaster Central: Chris Hodgson
http://www.doncaster.ukipbranch.org/ge-2015/central
In all three constituencies no other candidates have been officially selected or reselected according to my information.
O'Flynn has tweeted the identity of his constituency will be revealed in the next few days.
The Americans might have already done the shelter and food bit?
Appeasement on freedom of speech and self-censorship over cartoons (both Danish 2005 and Jesus and Mo) have contributed to extremist and backward aspects of Islam in the UK. It's bloody depressing.
Or better still COMBAT STRESS.
Not every person in the armed forces who has been damaged by fighting was a hero.
If pushed the first thing with intervening is having something to intervene with - so that's a safe bet i'd have thought.
http://labourlist.org/2014/08/labour-would-immediately-halt-goves-a-level-reforms/
And I've done it for a very important reason. It shows that Tristram Hunt is - and I would willingly have sworn this was impossible - actually as stupid as he sounds.
I'm a teacher. I've just been made head of department. Gove exasperated me, because he was always so confrontational, but I got the feeling he was passably sane and had some idea of what he was doing and why he was doing it. Hunt has just proven he doesn't understand education, doesn't understand administration and doesn't understand politics. Because this is a shockingly bad announcement on all levels.
Education: the AS is not a good qualification. In fact, it's a bad one. It isn't much more rigorous or intellectually demanding than a GCSE (at least in history - it may be in say maths or physics, but I doubt it) and I see no evidence that it provides a useful introduction to what is, in fairness, a much more rigorous A2. What is more demanding is the sheer volume of content. Trying to cram all the information needed for an AS exam into two terms nearly killed me last year (literally - with the extra sessions I had to run, and the extra materials I had to produce from scratch, I became so exhausted I had heart trouble). My students looked even more ill than I did by the end of the year, but it goes deeper than that. With AS exams, they are heavily examined for three consecutive years. By the time they get to uni (I used to be a lecturer some years ago) they are brain dead and have had all the enthusiasm sucked out of them. Getting rid of the AS will relieve a lot of that pressure and give them a year to recover. Five years ago, teachers hated AS levels and wanted rid of them. The only reason there is support for them now is because Gove was trying to rid of them and they wanted to be obstreperous.
(continued)
Administration: if new A-levels are to go ahead, or not to go ahead, a decision has to be made now. In terms of production of resources, allocation of materials, preparation of teaching schedules (schemes of work) and in devising timetables, 90% of the work will be done by next May. It will, realistically, be too late to stop it. Attempting to stop it would plunge the entire further education system into chaos. At best, it would mean a lot of wasted work and money to preserve a system that most teachers are privately happy to see scrapped. At worst, it could actually mean a year's delay in students starting their A-levels. (Yes - that's a serious warning. They will be unable to start unless we know what qualifications and topics to teach them, even though for financial reasons the new A-level is as similar in content to the old AS/A2 as possible.) With that knock-on effect, visualise the impact on universities in 2017. Further, imagine how much it will cost to educate two cohorts of students at once in 2016.
Politics: if he doesn't retract this soon, every teacher in the land, and every parent with 16 year old children, will panic and vote Conservative so that they know that chaos will be avoided. Even the NUT might come out against him. That would indeed shift the opinion polls!
Tristram Hunt has always struck me as the worst sort of braying, patronising, not very intelligent public school and Oxbridge type who owes his situation in life to his family wealth and connections despite his evident lack of innate merit. But I didn't realise he was actually batshit crazy. If he were - God forbid - to become Minister and behave in the way he's threatening to, he would become the most reviled, most inept and most disastrous of all Secretaries of State for Education - and looking at the list of competitors, that's saying quite something.
They certainly weren't heroes doing eg. overwatches in Co. Fermanagh, etc which is strange as people are now happy to blame the govt not the squaddie whereas then the squaddies were the baddies in many peoples' eyes.
Its ultimately up to the iraqi govt to defend their own country and replacing the current PM who has been overtly sectarian is a good start for them... an essential one.
We are entering, in the words of the man, a new paradigm. We have the Islamic State intent on recreating the caliphate in a manner which would have been familiar in Hannibal's time; we have Alawite Assad fighting Sunnis (and I'm with @JosiasJessop on this one in terms of intervention way back when); and we have at the same time the legacy of Labour who have poisoned the concept of intervention for generations to come.
Unless you think we should never intervene (a perfectly understandable position) in which case it is craven to voice the platitude "it's up to them to sort it out".
Sounds like good fun. Maybe we should sing the Horst Wesel Lied at the same time.
Interesting post. I think Hunt has previously been against AS-Levels
"Personally, I’d get rid of AS Levels – they've been a waste of time. You don’t need the relentless examination system; when kids leave at the age of 18, they’re 'exam trauma victims'"
http://www.totalpolitics.com/print/298797/in-conversation-with-chris-skidmore-mp-and-tristram-hunt-mp.thtml
So the change of tone is weird.
Couple of thoughts - on inactivity in the Party leader's markets. Had anyone in August 1996 suggested William Hague would be the next Conservative leader, I suspect they would have been widely ridiculed. Yes, Hague could be a future leader but not yet would have been the response. The scale of the 1997 defeat, especially the loss of Portillo, and the realisation the Party faced a minimum of ten years in Opposition, gave Hague his opportunity.
Attitudes to the armed forces - I think the change happened with the Falklands conflict. The involvement in Ulster was not viewed heroically and the forces stationed in West Germany (as it was) were a reminder of the unthinkable. The very fact they did nothing was a relief - had they been compelled to fight to defend West Germany and Western Europe from a Warsaw Pact invasion, the national mood would have been very different.
Those who fought in the Falklands were the first in a generation to actually fight against a foreign power to defend British territory - we weren't involved in Vietnam, Suez had been a misguided disaster and Korea was a long time ago. After 1982, we had within communities and society people who had fought for us as it was portrayed.
Also, the 7th century Caliphate was a good deal more civilised than that of the 21st century.
Mr. 565, normally I subscribe to the 'there's always something worse' school of thought.
With ISIS, I'm not sure that's true.
1) humanitarian air drops / air lift
2) creating safe havens for refugees by reinforcing a local friendly force
3) various other options that usually makes things worse
A viable UKIP line might be that UK should have the ability to do (1) and (2) on tap but doesn't because the political class suck.
The only viable LibLabCon lines I can see are "yes we suck."
hundreds of thousands of troops to subordinate, sterilise and rebuild the country within a framework of the rule of law, property rights and democratic government.
We didn't have the will or commitment to do it then; to think that we would have it now is laughable.
In the absence of that then perhaps a focused campaign to degrade ISIS assets? But I don't know really.
Although I used to smile (!) when, for example, in Livy one read that after one particular battle or another "...they devastated the lands.." which seems so clean and anodyne on paper whereas it was presumably quite traumatic for those being devastated...
Each article starts-"This is very bad news for David Cameron....
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again hoping for a different result.
Often a mistake is made and the reaction is to jump so far in the other direction a mistake of the exact opposite nature occurs. Do you suppose a caliphate stretching across all Syria and Iraq would stop there and not attempt further atrocity, both nearby and further afield?
That, I believe, happened in Iraq around 10 years ago when all of a sudden *a lot* of soldiers were away fighting. In Gulf I many people were touched but the conflict was over quickly. This time, many families have been touched by Iraq and then round 2 in Afghan. That, coupled with the instant relaying of eg. firefights set to the Kaiser Chiefs on Youtube, and all of a sudden the war invaded (!) peoples' lives in a way that no other had post-Korea. That and the hoo-hah about the Military Covenant.
If you remember they actually did away with the Royal Tournament some years ago before having to bring back similar events to honour our "heroes".
(Edit: after googling, The Royal Tournament was ended in 1999, while the British Military Tournament was established in 2010, and ended last year - to coincide both with the height of the "heroism" and the withdrawal of HMF from the various theatres of war.)
We are getting better at looking after veterans with problems, mainly due to private charities and not HMG, but there is a long way to go and most of the problems generated by Blair's wars (I'd like that man to receive his just rewards, maybe God will oblige) are yet to materialise. If anyone has a spare few quid after a winning bet I would urge them to donate it to the Ex-Services Mental Welfare Society (recently renamed Combat Stress). They have been looking after veterans with invisible injuries for 95 years and they will use the money wisely and to a good end, I promise.
To suggest that it's not getting the numbers because it's badly taught or uninspiring is simply nonsensical. That could only have been said by somebody who has never investigated how it's taught. It's not getting the numbers because it's being crowded out by the likes of sociology and business studies. They are 'new' and 'different' and there's this odd feeling among teenagers (who are mostly pretty hormonal and rebellious at that stage) that they've 'done' history and would like to do something the haven't tried before (and annoy their parents by boasting about how much better these things are than boring old subjects that might actually have intellectual kudos).
History is also about WAY more than the study of past politics (I know it was Skidmore and not Hunt that said that)! It's about the past, full stop. I always point out that the beauty of history is that it's the only subject that contains a little of every other subject - geography, maths, science, literature, sport, politics, languages...and that's arguably the best possible reason for studying it, far ahead of any Shadow Chacellor's surname about
'transferable skills.'
I was particularly incensed by this exchange: All said apparently without irony...
Mind you, in that article as you said, he was right, both about the AS and the GCSE - but since I assume he would scrap the new, much improved GCSE as well (due for introduction in 2016) that merely proves that he's either a shameless opportunist or he has no clue what he's doing - or of course, both.
The more you think about that cliche the dumber it looks.
Their view is that radical Islam is never going to be won over by softly softly hearts and minds stuff, it has to be an all out war, with occupation for decades after victory. The local population tend to just want to live in peace, with opportunities to improve life, but don't want our sort of western democracy, something that our leaders don't seem to want to acknowledge.
My friends don't think this crisis is going to end, unless we put big, heavy boots on the ground, and lots of 'em.
Einstein was amazingly dumb?
Mind you, in that article as you said, he was right, both about the AS and the GCSE - but since I assume he would scrap the new, much improved GCSE as well (due for introduction in 2016) that merely proves that he's either a shameless opportunist or he has no clue what he's doing - or of course, both.
History and chemistry were my two favourite subjects at school. But I chose to do three sciences at A-level.
Has Shadsy's bonus gone up in smoke?
This morning The Daily Telegraph reported that:
" Not much of a Glorious Twelfth for Richard Glynn at Ladbrokes. The chief executive was shooting for interims that proved his turnaround plans were paying off but today's results - which show first half pre-tax profits have halved - could put him in the firing line instead. The bookmaker has reported pre-tax profits of £27.7m, down from £55.1m last year, despite insisting that it had a "good World Cup." The bookmaker had warned that its interim results would miss their targets after a digital overhaul at the business which took longer than expected to implement. Today Ladbrokes has said that the focus on operational improvements meant that "financial performance would inevitably lag behind."
The Magic Sign is on the point of being overtaken in terms of market capitalisation by Betfair - who'd have thought that was possible even a couple of years ago?
Maybe Shadsy should move to Betfair and show them how to offer a decent range of political markets.
Boots on the ground would depend on the US, but Obama will never go for that.
Incidentally, if a prisoner is released on licence, or a tag, does he or she recover the right to vote?
Seems about right. It's crazy to think that the whole cultural attitude of a country will be changed by just a few years of Westerners keeping the peace. It would take a whole generation for any real change to occur. After all, the US still have troops in Germany and Japan 70 years after the War.
What must be truly sad for any American family who lost a member in North Iraq during the 2006-2010 surge is that their death now counts for nothing as there will be no way to rebuild the communities that have been forced apart.
(I give you that misquote though)
Medyan Dairieh has gone and embedded himself with ISIS - www.vicenews.com is releasing the documentary in 5 parts it seems.
I won't link here as there are gruesome images in the videos, but bloody hell give that man a medal for embedding himself with those psychos. Whatever he's earnt from doing this it isn't enough.
While hospital and nursing services improved immeasurably over the years for serving personnel, the ex servicemen was left to fend for himself immediately on discharge. Pensions were and are abysmally low and the NHS were not competent to deal with battle stress illnesses.
It's only now that special units are being set up to treat ex-servicemen suffering from all sorts of disorders, be it for amputees, plastic surgery or psychological stress. However it is still vague who will take charge of these units, military or civilian
That event, coming at the time when Britain was the sick man of Europe, had an incredible effect on the morale of the country, and engendered an almost fanatical respect for the armed forces which exists to this day.
Who dares wins became the motto of the man who symbolised the 80s in Britain more than any other - Del Boy Trotter.
Mr. Smarmeron, lots of wars are random, happen over misunderstandings or are intended to be very small and become far more prolonged. The Third Punic War was meant to be over very swiftly and lasted a few years. Alp Arslan did not want war with Byzantium but was forced into it by circumstance (and it led to a crippling strategic defeat for the empire).
It also takes one to make war, and two to make peace.