But haven't we been told that the Eurozones problem has been an overvalued currency? Surely a Euro-devaluation is what is needed? Eurozone exports getting cheaper etc.
Certainly my summer holiday is looking better value...
It's not an overvalued currency. It's just overvalued for some nations (the PIGS). Yes, it's now dropped for them, but it's dropping due to to increasing risk, so the risk-adjusted value, which is what matters for economic growth, hasn't changed much.
Four hospitals in England have now declared "major incidents" because of demand at A&E
Once upon a time, a 'Major Incident' was a plane crash or Godzilla stalking an oil refinery. Now it's merely a short staffed casualty unit overloaded with drunks.
I shouldn't think that is Drunks on monday afternoon in Gloucester!
Probably just a shortage of immigrant Doctors and Nurses to staff A and E...
Well, that is news to me: but all it seems to show is that the Scots had the sense not to confuse everyone by changing the road numbers. The M74 had been known by that name for a long time, as was implicit in my comment, with a long and independent existence, and there was no sense in changing its name to the M6 just cos it got plugged up to the M6.
PS If anything, it was the Tories who wanted to change the name for petty nationalist reasons and ended up wasting money on it.
Seems entirely logical to me to have the M6 running up to the M8, its one of the most important routes in the UK so deserves a single digit number. After all the A1 runs to Edinburgh and dosen't change to A9 or A8 on the border.
Even Ireland has managed to use the same number for the Belfast to Dublin road on both sides of the border. M1/A1/N1/M1
The falling oil price will: Have a negative effect on public borrowing figures. Even if we all spend the savings on other VATed goods we will probably not be paying a lot of duty as well (unless we all take up Malcolm's excellent recommendation of Glenfarclas).
Eh? Duty increases as sales volume increases - it's per litre, not a percentage of price.
Therefore cheap oil = higher consumption of petrol/diesel = more revenue = positive effect on borrowing. This ignores the impact on Treasury income from oil industry profits, of course. And Joe Public still has more moolah in his pocket for buying a new TV, etc.
Also: Glanfarclas is magical - my lovely wife bought me a bottle for my 40th, aged since the year of my birth
Duty is indeed a fixed price - currently just under 58p a litre. But there is then VAT on top of that and the VAT take will be dropping as the petrol price drops. More importantly the Government take on every barrel of oil will be dropping as this is about 70% of the price of every barrel of crude.
Well, nuts. Forgot that VAT was on top.
Still not convinced that cheaper energy and transport costs are unremittingly bad for the UK, despite the pain being inflicted on our oil industry. There are several substantial and important mitigants.
It's good news for anyone involved in road transport
Well, that is news to me: but all it seems to show is that the Scots had the sense not to confuse everyone by changing the road numbers. The M74 had been known by that name for a long time, as was implicit in my comment, with a long and independent existence, and there was no sense in changing its name to the M6 just cos it got plugged up to the M6.
PS If anything, it was the Tories who wanted to change the name for petty nationalist reasons and ended up wasting money on it.
PMB: Seems entirely logical to me to have the M6 running up to the M8, its one of the most important routes in the UK so deserves a single digit number. After all the A1 runs to Edinburgh and dosen't change to A9 or A8 on the border.
Even Ireland has managed to use the same number for the Belfast to Dublin road on both sides of the border. M1/A1/N1/M1
C: in response ... The A1 was always the A1 ab initio - but changing the pre-existing M74 to M6 would have cost a fortune in road signs all over west central and south Scotland up to Edinburgh, as well as making road atlases out of date, and still would if done today. Dangerously confusing. To do it, to satisfy some petty British nationalist fantasy, would have caused considerable public criticism. And be dangerous, because the so-called greater M6 would not have been continuous.
Blimey. How many times can Labour spend the 'Mansion Tax'?
If the bankers bonus tax is anything to go by they have barely warmed up yet.
Are they hoping to raise a £million a house?
Actually they claim that they will raise £1.2bn a year on houses worth more than £2m.
Hmm... £1.2 bn a year means the Scottish share is £96m (8%). Is that really enough to equip, clothe, manage and provide the medication for 1,000 nurses? I think not.
The Telegraph says that the £250m cost of nurses relates to the full £2.5bn extra Labour has pledged (of which £1.2m comes from the mansion tax)
Those hollowed out values will be filled by something else - much nastier - if those of us who do believe in muscular liberal values don't fight to preserve and enhance them.
You'd have though that the 20th century should have taught Europeans that, if nothing else.
But haven't we been told that the Eurozones problem has been an overvalued currency? Surely a Euro-devaluation is what is needed? Eurozone exports getting cheaper etc.
Certainly my summer holiday is looking better value...
It's not an overvalued currency. It's just overvalued for some nations (the PIGS). Yes, it's now dropped for them, but it's dropping due to to increasing risk, so the risk-adjusted value, which is what matters for economic growth, hasn't changed much.
And within the Eurozone, by definition there is no change so that Germany is still undervalued relative to (say) Greece, which is good for Germany and German exports but bad for the Greeks.
The falling oil price will: Have a negative effect on public borrowing figures. Even if we all spend the savings on other VATed goods we will probably not be paying a lot of duty as well (unless we all take up Malcolm's excellent recommendation of Glenfarclas).
Eh? Duty increases as sales volume increases - it's per litre, not a percentage of price.
Therefore cheap oil = higher consumption of petrol/diesel = more revenue = positive effect on borrowing. This ignores the impact on Treasury income from oil industry profits, of course. And Joe Public still has more moolah in his pocket for buying a new TV, etc.
Also: Glanfarclas is magical - my lovely wife bought me a bottle for my 40th, aged since the year of my birth
Duty is indeed a fixed price - currently just under 58p a litre. But there is then VAT on top of that and the VAT take will be dropping as the petrol price drops. More importantly the Government take on every barrel of oil will be dropping as this is about 70% of the price of every barrel of crude.
Well, nuts. Forgot that VAT was on top.
Still not convinced that cheaper energy and transport costs are unremittingly bad for the UK, despite the pain being inflicted on our oil industry. There are several substantial and important mitigants.
At some stage the relatively high cost of developing and extracting North Sea oil will mitigate against its profitability compared to the high volume low cost of established land based oil fields. To continue the development and employment then the conclusion must be that tax on the oil at source would have to be lowered to nothing. Petroleum Revenue Tax raises £1.1 billion so abolishing it - or reinvesting it directly in subsidies - might be a good thing.
Since when was it the business of the Treasury to churn out party political material for the current incumbents. Whatever happened to the neutrality of the civil service? Twenty years ago, no permanent secretary would have allowed that to happen. Seems like they're all stooges now.
What on earth is this Canadians thing all about? Is it a reference to the latest group of people meant to save Rangers from insolvency?
The Canadian pollsters
Canadian pollsters - about as successful as French military strategists?
You mean like at Yorktown? Austerlitz? Wagram?
Without the French at the Battle of Yorktown, Americans would be singing God Save The Queen before baseball games.
Wagram was bloody nearly Cannae with Napoleon as Varro!
Jena-Auerstadt
I'll see your Jena-Auerstadt and I'll raise you the Six Days' Campaign (the successive battles of Champaubert, Montmirail, Chateau-Thierry, Vauchamps) - four victories between 10 and 15 February 1814!
There was also Friedland!
The man was class.
The best thing about the 1814 campaign is that it makes Wellington look better in 1815. If Napoleon had been crap for 10 years before Waterloo it would be easier for the diehards to claim that Wellington survived only because Napoleon was past it. In fact the dodgy Eyetie was clearly well on top of "it" as recently as 16 months before, since when he'd had a nice long rest!
Even after Waterloo he had about 150,000 troops in barracks in Paris plus about 500,000 more elsewhere (plus Grouchy's 30,000). He was far too lax far too trusting and far too easily outmanoeuvred politically in Paris in the end.
A sign of Wellington's political nous was that he knew the campaign was over the moment the Guard was routed. There was not going to be a second 1814 campaign in France to persuade Boney he was beaten.
Could turn out nasty for the guy in charge, if the charge sticks.
Far right party ..... forget which one ...... tried something similar in an area where I was an Agent years ago. Deputy Town Clerk, who did all the work was sharp-eyed enough to make a few enquiries before publishing anything. Result; candidates disqualified. Very unhappy set of right-wingers, but hey-ho!
Four hospitals in England have now declared "major incidents" because of demand at A&E
Once upon a time, a 'Major Incident' was a plane crash or Godzilla stalking an oil refinery. Now it's merely a short staffed casualty unit overloaded with drunks.
I shouldn't think that is Drunks on monday afternoon in Gloucester!
Probably just a shortage of immigrant Doctors and Nurses to staff A and E...
No - just a few politicos trying to embarrass the Coalition (esp the Tory) Government.
My guess is that by the end of the year the low oil price will be causing major economic problems.
For who ? On balance for the Uk it is a huge benefit.
North Sea oil is high cost, our oil and gas industry is dead. Big economic blow.
But we are a net importer of fuel - ok the North Sea takes a punch but the rest of the economy is made up.
all we have are financial services and borrowing, do they use much oil
Whisky will be cheaper to make and transport...
not make a big difference to really good stuff though
PS, who is going to buy the Rangers
3 Bears and King - this Yank is a stalking horse rustled up by the geezers running the show. Ashley is out - just wants to protect his onerous merch contract.
How does Ed imagine this GE is a 'once in a generation choice' ?
It just isn't. He says there are reasons that he's said it and then entirely fails to justify his statement. Politics aside this is bloody annoying stuff (just that bit), but (Politics back on) he then goes on to be even more annoying.
Later on he goes on to make the empty promise of 'balancing the books as soon as possible within the next parliament' - so if it's not 'possible' then they won't balance the books, and we all know that their definition of possible will be their own.
This is dismal stuff, and particularly so when they've had so much time to prepare for the obvious dawn of 2015. It suggests an alarming lack of thought when they're really trying to be elected, and lord knows what awful doom if they actually are.
Could turn out nasty for the guy in charge, if the charge sticks.
Far right party ..... forget which one ...... tried something similar in an area where I was an Agent years ago. Deputy Town Clerk, who did all the work was sharp-eyed enough to make a few enquiries before publishing anything. Result; candidates disqualified. Very unhappy set of right-wingers, but hey-ho!
The local guy in charge was kicked out of UKIP soon after being found out that not was all above board. However it still leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, especially when we've been complaining of fake postal ballots from Labour in certain districts.
Also, From a tendering advertisement for building the motorway
"tendering advertisement for the section from Water of Milk to Ecclefechan published on 23 April 1992. A few days later, in the Edinburgh Gazette of 1 May, 1992, an Explanatory Note was appended to a routine notice announcing the making of the Scheme for a section of the route north and south of Beattock. This read:
EXPLANATORY NOTE The Scheme and associated Appropriation and Side Roads Orders published in draft on 31st August 1990 included reference to the Glasgow-Carlisle Special Road (M74). The Secretary of State has decided to change the number of the upgraded sections of the Glasgow-Carlisle Trunk Road (A74) lying to the south of where the existing M74 ends at Nether Abington. Each section, on completion of upgrading, will be renumbered A74(M). Once all the sections of the A74 between Carlisle and Nether Abington have been upgraded, the entire length of the M74 and the A74(M) from Glasgow to Carlisle will be renumbered, and form part of, the M6. The Scheme and associated Orders have been amended to reflect these changes, where necessary.
However by the time the scheme was finished numbering had been devolved from the Department for Transport to the Scottish Government and they refused to do it.
Well, that is news to me: but all it seems to show is that the Scots had the sense not to confuse everyone by changing the road numbers. The M74 had been known by that name for a long time, as was implicit in my comment, with a long and independent existence, and there was no sense in changing its name to the M6 just cos it got plugged up to the M6.
PS If anything, it was the Tories who wanted to change the name for petty nationalist reasons and ended up wasting money on it.
I don't see how changing the name of a newly continuous road following upgrading is petty or nationalist. Its logical. Its quite clear how petty the nationalism of the Scottish govt is and how weak it feels itself to be. Tell me - does the A1 suddenly morph into something else when it crosses the border. What do the road signs say as you leave Edinburgh for Newcastle? I'll give you a clue - the road number of Princess St is the A1. You will find that Moira Terrace is the A1140. The A7 goes direct to Carlisle. Is there anything so terrible in having a Birmingham to Glasgow motorway named the M6?
Tom Newton Dunn @tnewtondunn · 1m1 minute ago A methodology change in our 1st @YouGov poll of the year tonight - UKIP prompted in the initial list of main parties for the first time.
The falling oil price will: Have a negative effect on public borrowing figures. Even if we all spend the savings on other VATed goods we will probably not be paying a lot of duty as well (unless we all take up Malcolm's excellent recommendation of Glenfarclas).
Eh? Duty increases as sales volume increases - it's per litre, not a percentage of price.
Therefore cheap oil = higher consumption of petrol/diesel = more revenue = positive effect on borrowing. This ignores the impact on Treasury income from oil industry profits, of course. And Joe Public still has more moolah in his pocket for buying a new TV, etc.
Also: Glanfarclas is magical - my lovely wife bought me a bottle for my 40th, aged since the year of my birth
Duty is indeed a fixed price - currently just under 58p a litre. But there is then VAT on top of that and the VAT take will be dropping as the petrol price drops. More importantly the Government take on every barrel of oil will be dropping as this is about 70% of the price of every barrel of crude.
Well, nuts. Forgot that VAT was on top.
Still not convinced that cheaper energy and transport costs are unremittingly bad for the UK, despite the pain being inflicted on our oil industry. There are several substantial and important mitigants.
At some stage the relatively high cost of developing and extracting North Sea oil will mitigate against its profitability compared to the high volume low cost of established land based oil fields. To continue the development and employment then the conclusion must be that tax on the oil at source would have to be lowered to nothing. Petroleum Revenue Tax raises £1.1 billion so abolishing it - or reinvesting it directly in subsidies - might be a good thing.
Unfortunately those land based fields produce a very small fraction of the oil that comes from the offshore fields so in effect you are saying that we should in future import practically all our oil.
Personally I think it is as well to let the markets do their stuff. The North Sea will bounce back not least because it is such high quality oil for petrochemicals and is frankly rather too good to burn. But I am not sure any future government should be looking at it as any significant source of revenue.
Tom Newton Dunn @tnewtondunn · 1m1 minute ago A methodology change in our 1st @YouGov poll of the year tonight - UKIP prompted in the initial list of main parties for the first time.
Thats interesting. Lets see if it makes much difference.
Dodgy Osborne at work again. The Straight, true tory party, and I don't think.
Cheeky Osborne maybe. I think the Treasury 'Red Book' is rather well known. Pretty desperate of you do apologise for Labour Party lies. A red ring-bound doc which nowhere says 'Treasury' etc... But thanks for letting us see that Guido says ''Still brave of Labour to use the expression “dodgy dossier”… '', something which suggests they have not so much rewritten their history but rather forgotten it. I find that really rather dangerous.
Tom Newton Dunn @tnewtondunn · 1m1 minute ago A methodology change in our 1st @YouGov poll of the year tonight - UKIP prompted in the initial list of main parties for the first time.
The LDs to fall yet further as as result? I tend to assume that will be the result of any change, regardless of whether I can see a connection or not thesedays.
I don't see how changing the name of a newly continuous road following upgrading is petty or nationalist. Its logical. Its quite clear how petty the nationalism of the Scottish govt is and how weak it feels itself to be. Tell me - does the A1 suddenly morph into something else when it crosses the border. What do the road signs say as you leave Edinburgh for Newcastle? I'll give you a clue - the road number of Princess St is the A1. You will find that Moira Terrace is the A1140. The A7 goes direct to Carlisle. Is there anything so terrible in having a Birmingham to Glasgow motorway named the M6?
See my reply to Mr Beds.
Also - fair enough if it is a new name but that isn't the case here.
The point is that the A1 has always been called that - I know very well what it is - but that the A7 has always been called the A7, as has - crucially - the M74. If the M74 had been built de novo from the south northwards, fair enough: it could have been called the M6: the signs to it would be changed as and when new sections opened and be fine thereafter: but the M74 had a long and separate existence with its own related road sign infrastructure all over S Scotland, so renaming it would have been insane, expensive and dangerous. Just as would be renaming the A1 north of Lamberton Toll.
IIRC, the M74 name originated simply because of the slow and dilatory upgrading of the A74 and its piecemeal evolution from A74 to A74(m) to M74.
Dodgy Osborne at work again. The Straight, true tory party, and I don't think.
Cheeky Osborne maybe. I think the Treasury 'Red Book' is rather well known. Pretty desperate of you do apologise for Labour Party lies. A red ring-bound doc which nowhere says 'Treasury' etc... But thanks for letting us see that Guido says ''Still brave of Labour to use the expression “dodgy dossier”… '', something which suggests they have not so much rewritten their history but rather forgotten it. I find that really rather dangerous.
You really don't get it, do you Flightpath. I'm not apologising for Labour in any way. I think both the Tories and Labour are equally vapid and vile liars and really couldn't govern a tent; as their equally bad governments since 1945 show.
Dodgy Osborne at work again. The Straight, true tory party, and I don't think.
Cheeky Osborne maybe. I think the Treasury 'Red Book' is rather well known. Pretty desperate of you do apologise for Labour Party lies. A red ring-bound doc which nowhere says 'Treasury' etc... But thanks for letting us see that Guido says ''Still brave of Labour to use the expression “dodgy dossier”… '', something which suggests they have not so much rewritten their history but rather forgotten it. I find that really rather dangerous.
Yes, it's not as if it says HM Treasury on the front, or has the coat of arms. All these kind of comments do are distract from the content, which is what Labour wants!
Tom Newton Dunn @tnewtondunn · 1m1 minute ago A methodology change in our 1st @YouGov poll of the year tonight - UKIP prompted in the initial list of main parties for the first time.
Do you know if the Greens are prompted for? They should conduct the poll by having a virtual ballot paper similar to what you'd see in the election. If they knew the postcode of the person being polled, they could also tailor it with the candidate's names, and correct order.
YouGov must have some data to suggest that they may be underestimating the UKIP total by not prompting for them, which is a bit odd as their average is pretty much in line with other pollsters.
Four hospitals in England have now declared "major incidents" because of demand at A&E
Four, out of approx 2,300 hospitals in the UK. Thats approximately 0.1% of hospitals.
Ed is going to need to do better than shroud waving, especially given whats been going on in Wales.
There are only 230 Acute Trusts in the country, and many do not run Emergency departments. So it is probably 2-3% of the country.
As one of the 4 acute Trusts Declaring an incident covers all of Lincolnshire then we have a significant NHS problem on the Purple shore of Boston and Skegness. It seems to be the elderly rather than Portuguese farm workers. Their ambulances may be heading the way of Leicester and Kings Lynn with a domino effect:
Tom Newton Dunn @tnewtondunn · 1m1 minute ago A methodology change in our 1st @YouGov poll of the year tonight - UKIP prompted in the initial list of main parties for the first time.
Do you know if the Greens are prompted for? They should conduct the poll by having a virtual ballot paper similar to what you'd see in the election. If they knew the postcode of the person being polled, they could also tailor it with the candidate's names, and correct order.
No they don't. That approach has been tried in the past and even though it seems 'fair', it hasn't always been more accurate, eg Lib Dems in the 1980s. Still an open (and sometimes heated) debate...
Wwe'll see what difference it makes (to UKIP's VI, obviously, but also LAB and CON) - for reference YouGov's Dec range for UKIP was a very stable 14-17%.
I’ve been looking for other crossbreaks to analyse, (in addition to Scotland). There seems to have been increased interest in the youth vote recently (including the poll of first-time voters from Opinium) which makes this an obvious candidate.
For YouGov’s 18-24 crosstabs, the weighting bias – the difference in voting intention taken from an aggregation of crosstabs of a poll weighted at GB level and that of a bespoke, weighted poll of that age group – seems quite a lot larger than it is for geographic crossbreaks. So I’ve come up with a way of adjusting for the bias…
From these numbers, we can see that December saw a continuation of the trend in prior months for all parties, with (on a like-for-like basis) declining VI shares for Labour (33%, down 2 points) and the Lib Dems (down a point to 5%) and gains for the Greens (up a point to 19%), UKIP (up a point to 12%) and the Tories (up less than a point – their rounded VI remains 24%).
I’ll post updates on this going forward, probably weekly.
Strange that the outrageous misogny of this Liberal Democrat council leader doesn't get the wall to wall coverage a UKIP candidate would get for a far smaller misstep:
Strange that the outrageous misogny of this Liberal Democrat council leader doesn't get the wall to wall coverage a UKIP candidate would get for a far smaller misstep:
Have the LibDems ever made as big a play as Farage when he said UKIP weren't like the other parties, and were doing things differently with a new kind of politics?
Four hospitals in England have now declared "major incidents" because of demand at A&E
Once upon a time, a 'Major Incident' was a plane crash or Godzilla stalking an oil refinery. Now it's merely a short staffed casualty unit overloaded with drunks.
I shouldn't think that is Drunks on monday afternoon in Gloucester!
Probably just a shortage of immigrant Doctors and Nurses to staff A and E...
No - just a few politicos trying to embarrass the Coalition (esp the Tory) Government.
I wonder how easy it would be to engineer a 'crisis' if you were so inclined?
Tom Newton Dunn @tnewtondunn · 1m1 minute ago A methodology change in our 1st @YouGov poll of the year tonight - UKIP prompted in the initial list of main parties for the first time.
Do you know if the Greens are prompted for? They should conduct the poll by having a virtual ballot paper similar to what you'd see in the election. If they knew the postcode of the person being polled, they could also tailor it with the candidate's names, and correct order.
Well the Greens have had lots of prompting in council by elections since last June and their vote has fallen in every seat contested .
I’ll post updates on this going forward, probably weekly.
numbercruncher, I've yet to read what you've written, but that is an amazingly well formatted post. Really rather wonderful.
Thanks, although all you have to do is paste in the url of a tweet (which contains the chart). By far the easiest way to post anything graphical on here.
Oh and totally OT but... I love cycling! (I assume that's what your username refers to?!)
Strange that the outrageous misogny of this Liberal Democrat council leader doesn't get the wall to wall coverage a UKIP candidate would get for a far smaller misstep:
Not surprising, really. The LibDems are old news, and seen as largely irrelevant. If the story had appeared at the time of the Cleggasm, it would have been big news.
Strange that the outrageous misogny of this Liberal Democrat council leader doesn't get the wall to wall coverage a UKIP candidate would get for a far smaller misstep:
Have the LibDems ever made as big a play as Farage when he said UKIP weren't like the other parties, and were doing things differently with a new kind of politics?
And of course in your bigoted eyes that excuses such behaviour in any other party. Another Tory hypocrite.
A bit more colour re prompting for UKIP. YouGov's Anthony Wells just wrote:
I’d forgotten I’d said [that it didn't make much difference in testing], but yes, that is now the case. I’ll post more later when the results come out, but that’s essentially my thinking.
Think of it this way. We know that for a small party (and I don’t want to define small here – I don’t necessarily mean low support, it could be about awareness, or media coverage, or simply public consciousness) prompting for a party risks overestimating their support. We’ve made that mistake before and learnt from it.
However, we also know from the 1980s that you can get it wrong in the opposite direction too. Above a certain level or support (or awareness, or coverage, or consciousness), if you don’t prompt for a party you end up underestimating their support. That used to happen to the SDP/Liberal Alliance in the 1980s.
Now, with these two known phenomenon, it struck me that there should come a point somewhere in the middle where they crossed over, and that whether a party is prompted or not shouldn’t make any difference… and that would probably be rather a good point to make the switch. If not, at least it wouldn’t do any harm and would be easier for respondents who don’t have to answer an extra question! It was only a hypothesis and might never have happened, but in our recent tests it’s been making hardly any difference, so it made a very difficult decision far easier.
We'll have something to talk about in a couple of hours...
Strange that the outrageous misogny of this Liberal Democrat council leader doesn't get the wall to wall coverage a UKIP candidate would get for a far smaller misstep:
Have the LibDems ever made as big a play as Farage when he said UKIP weren't like the other parties, and were doing things differently with a new kind of politics?
And of course in your bigoted eyes that excuses such behaviour in any other party. Another Tory hypocrite.
Unlike Farage, I've never suggested politicians can be angels.
Four hospitals in England have now declared "major incidents" because of demand at A&E
Once upon a time, a 'Major Incident' was a plane crash or Godzilla stalking an oil refinery. Now it's merely a short staffed casualty unit overloaded with drunks.
I shouldn't think that is Drunks on monday afternoon in Gloucester!
Probably just a shortage of immigrant Doctors and Nurses to staff A and E...
No - just a few politicos trying to embarrass the Coalition (esp the Tory) Government.
I wonder how easy it would be to engineer a 'crisis' if you were so inclined?
Dead easy - I read an article in the Reader's Digest many years ago about a sudden crime wave in an American Town. It turned out that there wasn't a crime wave, just two local reporters trying to outdo each other in reporting crimes in their rival papers.
Of course if you have the BBC ready to jump in and create a crisis (like they tried last year - and got their fingers burnt) then it will be no problem at all. I am half expecting Labour and the BBC to attack the coalition's cuts on bringing Ebola into the country.
Dodgy Osborne at work again. The Straight, true tory party, and I don't think.
Cheeky Osborne maybe. I think the Treasury 'Red Book' is rather well known. Pretty desperate of you do apologise for Labour Party lies. A red ring-bound doc which nowhere says 'Treasury' etc... But thanks for letting us see that Guido says ''Still brave of Labour to use the expression “dodgy dossier”… '', something which suggests they have not so much rewritten their history but rather forgotten it. I find that really rather dangerous.
You really don't get it, do you Flightpath. I'm not apologising for Labour in any way. I think both the Tories and Labour are equally vapid and vile liars and really couldn't govern a tent; as their equally bad governments since 1945 show.
The booklet exposes labour lies - you complain about the booklet - which is plainly not a govt treasury document.
Comments
Ed is going to need to do better than shroud waving, especially given whats been going on in Wales.
Probably just a shortage of immigrant Doctors and Nurses to staff A and E...
Seems entirely logical to me to have the M6 running up to the M8, its one of the most important routes in the UK so deserves a single digit number. After all the A1 runs to Edinburgh and dosen't change to A9 or A8 on the border.
Even Ireland has managed to use the same number for the Belfast to Dublin road on both sides of the border. M1/A1/N1/M1
Even Ireland has managed to use the same number for the Belfast to Dublin road on both sides of the border. M1/A1/N1/M1
C: in response ... The A1 was always the A1 ab initio - but changing the pre-existing M74 to M6 would have cost a fortune in road signs all over west central and south Scotland up to Edinburgh, as well as making road atlases out of date, and still would if done today. Dangerously confusing. To do it, to satisfy some petty British nationalist fantasy, would have caused considerable public criticism. And be dangerous, because the so-called greater M6 would not have been continuous.
Those hollowed out values will be filled by something else - much nastier - if those of us who do believe in muscular liberal values don't fight to preserve and enhance them.
You'd have though that the 20th century should have taught Europeans that, if nothing else.
It isn't an official treasury document. Someone decided to print is so it "looks" like one.
Far right party ..... forget which one ...... tried something similar in an area where I was an Agent years ago. Deputy Town Clerk, who did all the work was sharp-eyed enough to make a few enquiries before publishing anything. Result; candidates disqualified.
Very unhappy set of right-wingers, but hey-ho!
It just isn't. He says there are reasons that he's said it and then entirely fails to justify his statement. Politics aside this is bloody annoying stuff (just that bit), but (Politics back on) he then goes on to be even more annoying.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30677112
Later on he goes on to make the empty promise of 'balancing the books as soon as possible within the next parliament' - so if it's not 'possible' then they won't balance the books, and we all know that their definition of possible will be their own.
This is dismal stuff, and particularly so when they've had so much time to prepare for the obvious dawn of 2015. It suggests an alarming lack of thought when they're really trying to be elected, and lord knows what awful doom if they actually are.
Tell me - does the A1 suddenly morph into something else when it crosses the border. What do the road signs say as you leave Edinburgh for Newcastle? I'll give you a clue - the road number of Princess St is the A1. You will find that Moira Terrace is the A1140. The A7 goes direct to Carlisle.
Is there anything so terrible in having a Birmingham to Glasgow motorway named the M6?
Tom Newton Dunn @tnewtondunn · 1m1 minute ago
A methodology change in our 1st @YouGov poll of the year tonight - UKIP prompted in the initial list of main parties for the first time.
Personally I think it is as well to let the markets do their stuff. The North Sea will bounce back not least because it is such high quality oil for petrochemicals and is frankly rather too good to burn. But I am not sure any future government should be looking at it as any significant source of revenue.
Pretty desperate of you do apologise for Labour Party lies. A red ring-bound doc which nowhere says 'Treasury' etc... But thanks for letting us see that Guido says ''Still brave of Labour to use the expression “dodgy dossier”… '', something which suggests they have not so much rewritten their history but rather forgotten it. I find that really rather dangerous.
Also - fair enough if it is a new name but that isn't the case here.
The point is that the A1 has always been called that - I know very well what it is - but that the A7 has always been called the A7, as has - crucially - the M74. If the M74 had been built de novo from the south northwards, fair enough: it could have been called the M6: the signs to it would be changed as and when new sections opened and be fine thereafter: but the M74 had a long and separate existence with its own related road sign infrastructure all over S Scotland, so renaming it would have been insane, expensive and dangerous. Just as would be renaming the A1 north of Lamberton Toll.
IIRC, the M74 name originated simply because of the slow and dilatory upgrading of the A74 and its piecemeal evolution from A74 to A74(m) to M74.
http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-30655444
As one of the 4 acute Trusts Declaring an incident covers all of Lincolnshire then we have a significant NHS problem on the Purple shore of Boston and Skegness. It seems to be the elderly rather than Portuguese farm workers. Their ambulances may be heading the way of Leicester and Kings Lynn with a domino effect:
http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-30687347
Wwe'll see what difference it makes (to UKIP's VI, obviously, but also LAB and CON) - for reference YouGov's Dec range for UKIP was a very stable 14-17%.
That would tell all IMHO..
I’ve been looking for other crossbreaks to analyse, (in addition to Scotland). There seems to have been increased interest in the youth vote recently (including the poll of first-time voters from Opinium) which makes this an obvious candidate.
For YouGov’s 18-24 crosstabs, the weighting bias – the difference in voting intention taken from an aggregation of crosstabs of a poll weighted at GB level and that of a bespoke, weighted poll of that age group – seems quite a lot larger than it is for geographic crossbreaks. So I’ve come up with a way of adjusting for the bias…
https://twitter.com/ncpoliticsuk/status/552191353174900736
From these numbers, we can see that December saw a continuation of the trend in prior months for all parties, with (on a like-for-like basis) declining VI shares for Labour (33%, down 2 points) and the Lib Dems (down a point to 5%) and gains for the Greens (up a point to 19%), UKIP (up a point to 12%) and the Tories (up less than a point – their rounded VI remains 24%).
I’ll post updates on this going forward, probably weekly.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/lib-dem-council-leader-quits-after-saying-woman-was-too-ugly-to-be-rape-victim-9957118.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-30679132
43 mins gone and neither Spurs OR Burnley has managed a shot on target....
Actually they haven't managed one off target either.... no shots at all!!!
An armistice?
Oh and totally OT but... I love cycling! (I assume that's what your username refers to?!)
I’d forgotten I’d said [that it didn't make much difference in testing], but yes, that is now the case. I’ll post more later when the results come out, but that’s essentially my thinking.
Think of it this way. We know that for a small party (and I don’t want to define small here – I don’t necessarily mean low support, it could be about awareness, or media coverage, or simply public consciousness) prompting for a party risks overestimating their support. We’ve made that mistake before and learnt from it.
However, we also know from the 1980s that you can get it wrong in the opposite direction too. Above a certain level or support (or awareness, or coverage, or consciousness), if you don’t prompt for a party you end up underestimating their support. That used to happen to the SDP/Liberal Alliance in the 1980s.
Now, with these two known phenomenon, it struck me that there should come a point somewhere in the middle where they crossed over, and that whether a party is prompted or not shouldn’t make any difference… and that would probably be rather a good point to make the switch. If not, at least it wouldn’t do any harm and would be easier for respondents who don’t have to answer an extra question! It was only a hypothesis and might never have happened, but in our recent tests it’s been making hardly any difference, so it made a very difficult decision far easier.
We'll have something to talk about in a couple of hours...
Of course if you have the BBC ready to jump in and create a crisis (like they tried last year - and got their fingers burnt) then it will be no problem at all. I am half expecting Labour and the BBC to attack the coalition's cuts on bringing Ebola into the country.