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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Ladbrokes make Salmond the favourite to “win” tonight’s deb
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Ladbrokes make Salmond the favourite to “win” tonight’s debate
Tonight’s the big one in the the IndyRef campaign. With postal packs due to go out by the end of the week large numbers of Scottish voters could have cast their votes a week today.
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Ta'
http://enormo-haddock.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/belgium-post-race-analysis.html
Meanwhile, I see that François Hollande is continuing to give us a master-class in what a Miliband government would be like.
DYOR.
Good luck with that – but as far as I’m aware, Salmond still has no answers to the currency union question, no post indy business analysis report, no legal advice on joining the EU etc.
Can’t see what prep he can do apart from toning down the ad-hominem and manufacturing fallacious attacks, ie NHS privatisation.
ALEX Salmond is under pressure to secure a clear win in tonight’s TV showdown with Alistair Darling to boost the chances of a Yes victory in the referendum.
The First Minister was widely judged to have come off worse in the first televised debate on August 5, but the second head-to-head clash is seen as a crucial test for both men.
http://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/scottish-independence-debate-salmond-needs-win-1-3519807
http://www.paddypower.com/bet/other-politics/scottish-politics?ev_oc_grp_ids=1219044
:off-to-al-beeb-hys:
It will be a test of how well he learns from experience. One assumes he was well-prepared for the first debate, just in the wrong way.
If you're right Mike and I believe you are, that ~ 15%-20% lead in the polls enjoyed by the NOs gives Darling a terrific head start and makes Ladbrokes' even money odds on him look quite tasty imho, especially if Salmond again engages in "ridiculous" (go on ... say the word one of you!) gimmicks like prancing about in front of his lectern.
DYOR
Although I think Salmond will be more aggressive he has the problem of a series of completely indefensible positions any one of which risks ridicule. My guess is that in recognition of the WW1 memorials he will follow the line of Foch:
"My centre is giving way, my right is in retreat, situation excellent. I attack.”
It shouldn't be dull.
The Catalan Parliament is certainly driving hard towards a maximum devomax whereby they have more tax-raising powers and in return less money goes to Madrid. AFIK, a separate currency is not the focus at present.
As the BEEB is now using a new satellite with a tighter focus, it is harder now to pick up the BBC transmission there, so I have been asked to record the debate and email it to them.
Dr Philippa Whitford has become the public face of the SNP’s campaign to convince voters the NHS is under threat of privatisation.
But medical staff at one of the UK’s top cancer hospitals in Newcastle are furious with her - after she wrongly claimed a privatisation agenda is forcing them to consider cancelling cancer operations.
The furious boss of the hospital yesterday condemned her claims as “codswallop” and “a load of crap”.
“Whatever happens in a referendum, that is up to the people of Scotland, but it is outrageous to mislead the public at large with these kinds of claims.” Yesterday, breast cancer surgeon Dr Whitford, 55, from Ayrshire, admitted she had no proof of her allegations and hadn’t checked them out before making them.
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/surgeon-exposed-spreading-bogus-claims-4103150
Some new medical terms there.....
They laugh like the donkeys they are.
Your little helpers in Labour are not so happy in England though, but able to face two ways at the same time. LIARS.
Andy Burnham
“If this goes through it will mean that any Clinical Commissioning Group anywhere in England could be [sued] by a US private healthcare company.
“It’s a question of control – the NHS used to be able to plan these things. If it wanted to run a particular service then it could… plan which contracts would go out and which wouldn’t – it doesn’t hold the cards any more.
“There’s no doubt the Health and Social Care Act opens up the NHS to full competition – that was always the hidden agenda in my view and [TTIP] puts the rocket boosters on it.
“If it goes through the genie would be out of the bottle and it would be irreversible. The stakes couldn’t be higher.”
Andy Burnham, Labour Health: "Five more years of NHS privatisation would push the NHS [in rUK]] off the cliff edge”
:nuff-zed:
http://fantasticalreads.wordpress.com/2014/08/25/featured-author-thaddeus-white/
F1: early days, but when the Monza markets go up I'll be checking the odds on Williams top scoring. Ricciardo's win at Spa should help to depress the Red Bull price, hopefully increase the odds on Williams (also aided by Massa leaving the handbrake on for the whole race).
I see Boris has piped up in the extremism debate. It's not enough in my view to talk about dealing with extremist preachers, those who preach 'hate' and so on. I saw a recent video on youtube with a young lady in Luton challenging Anjem Choudary who was in his usual fashion claiming that unbelievers will all burn in hell for eternity. The young lady responded by saying that wasn't that all hateful and nasty and unpleasant. Fair enough but it rather missed the point to my mind. Because what he was saying was truly ridiculous. There is no evidence to support what he was saying so it should have been dismissed as irrelevant. And yet we don't seem to have the courage or inclination to do that.
Let me go further. Many of the people that Choudary and others wish to radicalise will have spent at least 11 years in compulsory, expensive state education in this country. Why won't that have inoculated them against the absurdities they preach? Ultimately because our education system is not fit for purpose or if it is then it pulls its' punches too often when dealing with religion. A system that allows religious doctrine to be taught as fact is not good enough. Just because something was written in a religious book it doesn't make it historically accurate. Any education system that was serious about 'rigour' (notice how politicians love that word) would make that plain. Yet we allow a great many of our schools to be faith based. Not all these schools will indoctrinate children but some of them do. Are we going to do anything about this? Are we ever going to put reason and rationality at the heart of the syllabus or will we just continue to think that all that matters is kids being able to read write and count properly so they can help promote economic growth in the future. Unenlightened people who go and fight wars of jihad are often the products of an unenlightened culture. It's time we switched the lights back on.
@Scrapheap_as_was,My Condolences.
Is there no end to the threads on Scotland?
I suggest that the next Thursdays thread should be about Snails, because the way this blog is trending we'll have nothing but Scotland for the rest of the month; and at least with certain species of snail, we can cook them.
And that I think is the problem with the NO campaign generally. Their arguments are a lot sounder, a lot more defensible than the assertions of the other side, but they seem unable to knit it all together into a narrative that hits home. I am pretty sure that a large part of the YES vote would switch their choices if they realised the immediate consequences of change. While we don't know the long term, which may be positive, we can be sure of the short term, which will be extremely negative. It's not easy to vote for years of high unemployment and severely restricted public services in the hope that things might be better later on, particularly when the situation is reasonably good for most Scot right now.
And yet the YES team can still witter on about austerity under the Union....
It's not a case of "teaching" an identity to newcomers to any country, that has never and will never work. You only allow in the amount that will have a chance to assimilate naturally. That means tight controls, which we dismissed long long ago.
Imagine a birthday party with 50 family and friends invited.
If you allowed in two people off the street who knew no one else in the room, they would make small talk with the other guests at first and eventually make new friends rather than just talk to each other all night.
If you then allowed in 20 people who knew each other and no one else at the party, those 20 would have no need to try and integrate with the other 52 guests. Why would they? They have 19 mates there already
#malcolmg will then become like everyone else; either for or against.
I think that a good education system would encourage people to think critically about religion, as about anything else.
I do wonder if Blair will go down as the worst PM of the 20th century. He can match Eden's Suez, he may end up having lost us Scotland, the immigration splurge has caused untold difficulty regarding integration and provision of services, the pensions system was wrecked, we had a boom which included a deficit and then the worst recession in history.
Rightwingers won't defend him and lefties loathe him as well. And yet he won three elections including two landslides.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/scottish-independence-referendum-salmond-described-as-arrogant-ambitious-and-dishonest-by-scottish-women-9671833.html
Women can kick a hell of a lot better than they used to and the skills on show are much improved.
http://www.pewforum.org/files/2013/04/worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-full-report.pdf
Only two Muslim nations out of nearly 40 countries polled have a majority comfortable with their daughter marrying a Christian.
However, the mere fact of his electoral success being so apparent will ensure his reputation will be revived frequently I suspect
I'm not sure winning the debate will be that important.
Darling won the last debate and the majority of pollsters have seen No's lead cut.
NO guarantees more cuts and poverty in the short and long term, your thinking seems to be a bit mixed up.
Moreover, in terms of young British people being turned to extremist paths that lead to terrorism and murder, what are we talking about? Baptists? Methodists? The Plymouth Brethren? Buddhists? Papists? The Church of England? So actually closing down schools such as Ampleforth or Worth would not make a ha'penny worth of difference. There isn't a problem with faith schools. There is a problem with some people who profess one version of one faith.
I believe in the 70s it was high as 80 per cent.
http://news.sky.com/story/1023609/mixed-marriage-more-accepted-in-britain
Likewise, as far as I'm aware there was no problem amongst Mrs J's scattered religious Islamic family at the fact she married a nominally-Christian Englishman.
Perhaps our families were not typical, or perhaps things are very different in Pakistan ...
Anyway, I'm off for a bit.
Yes and No are both trying to have a simple and emotionally resonate pitch to voters, as if they can get that to work the facts and claims on detail by both sides are less important even if they are clearly favouring one side over the other. I still think Yes has the easier job when it comes to making that pitch it seems, so I can only hope the difficult reality of any move to independence mobilizes the natural conservatives of voters who dislike change even when they are not enamoured of the current system.
Decent pies yes, but banning those "fat and saltpeter" budget ones would not worry me. (I get terrible indigestion from them)
The Bell, the Bell; it's ringing! Get rid off [Ian] Bell!
:tumbleweed:
:muppet-watch:
Independence is essentially a political project. It has little to do with cultural identity or economic realities. I suspect most Scots don't care a lot about the politics and would be happy for Westminster to keep its role if it means we keep our jobs and don't have to pay for hospital treatments etc, as they do in Ireland.
So the YES team present independence as a no cost non-choice. In my estimation support for independence is shallow outside the committed core. However, a shallow YES vote is as good as a committed YES vote and there may be enough of them to get over the line.
:comprehension-not-on-Scots-curriculum: