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Polling Matters is an independent, non partisan podcast providing expert polling news and political analysis in the aftermath of the 2015 General Election.
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Given their incompetence we may never know.
Guardian leading on "thousands to be plunged into poverty by benefits cut".
Is a max £23k (tax free), the take home equivalent of a salary of £29,500 now 'poverty'?
According to www.globalrichlist.net a £29,500 income puts you in the top 0.66% of the worlds income, and the equivalent of £15.36 an hour.
Not many people in my town earn £15 an hour.
"Why is a young man like you concerned about Northern Ireland? What about Vietnam? What about Rhodesia?"
- Barbara Castle to Paul Rose, MP in 1967.
Any sane reading of the 2015 election shows Labour was hurt by UKIP and they clearly have a potential to lose more. The danger is they again become an irrelevance. As for this nonsense of claiming poll numbers please show a single post 2015 opinion poll giving a breakdown of what 2015 voters think. Any pre 2015 polls are moot now.
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/05/24/low-expectations-eu-negotiations/
Plus many parties operate successfully as broad churches. So long as Cameron allows Hannan and other sceptics to campaign for Out there's no reason to need to jump ship. Labour though are less likely to have any real outlet for Out frustrations especially over immigration. They'll also not buy into any renegotiation.
What CHANGE do you foresee that hasn't already happened to make the party more divided?
Labour should NOT campaign alongside Cameron / Tories. There is nothing to gain for Labour.
The big changes from IDS have been in aligning the world of work and the world of benefits.
The crash seemed to impact everyone, public and private sector workers, even pensioners dependent on investment income took a hit as the collective wealth of the nation dropped. The only people completely isolated from the changes were those on welfare.
The recession was something that happened to everyone else, except them.
During our lives we make decisions on many things. One of the biggest decisions we make is on the size of our home. We combine what we can afford, what we need and what we would like. As a private renter or a homeowner we make this decision. We want a nice area we compromise on the size, we want a bigger size we compromise on the area.
A social renter on housing benefit though, this notion seems to be alien. For some reason basing your housing needs on what you can afford and and need is an alien concept. A great affront to common decency.
What is frustrating is that while the welfare system creates perverted largesse in many cases for families with the way that multiple of children create significant residual incomes which are far higher than the recipient could ever command in the work place, but to single applicants on bog standard jsa and housing benefit, it is anything but largesse.
I would have very great difficulty surviving on the amount of money you get on JSA.
I was bored, so I used Google Translate to translate some words.
(You can use a normal dikshunry, if you want to).
I translated "pompous" into German:
POMPOUS: pompös, aufgeblasen, hochtrabend, wichtigtuerisch, schwülstig, geschwollen, hochgestochen
Then I translated the various options given back into English:
POMPÖS: pompous, ostentatious, pretentious, grandiose, vainglorious
AUFGEBLASEN: inflated, pompous, bumptious, puffed-up
HOCHTRABEND: pompous, overblown, pretentious, highfalutin, turgid, purple, rotund, inflated
WICHTIGTUERISCH: pompous, bumptious, consequential
SCHWÜLSTIG: bombastic, pompous, overblown, grandiloquent, fustian, grandiose, prosy
HOCHGESTOCHEN: highbrow, highfalutin, pretentious, pompous, purple, stuck-up
GESCHWOLLEN: swollen, puffy, turgid, thick, pompous, inflated
Removing duplicated words from the list, this gives 23 different words when "pompous" is translated into German and back again:
pompous, ostentatious, pretentious, grandiose, vainglorious, inflated, bumptious, puffed-up, overblown, highfalutin, turgid, purple, rotund, consequential, bombastic, grandiloquent, fustian, prosy, swollen, puffy, thick, highbrow, stuck-up.
Why did I do this? Because I was inspired by this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJC-fMzBzVs
"No message". "Need to win back image of competency."
The class structure is changing, with far fewer people working in large industries, and Labour has been historically too centered on these and on public sector workers.
Anyone who has had much to do with people dependent on benefits knows that there's a range from people who are struggling honestly and desperately to outright scroungers, but the typical case is people who would like to work or get better work but have objective reasons why it's difficult - limited education, intermittent illness, minor convictions, or other reasons. Merely punishing them doesn't address the problem seriously. I think even people on benefits would be up for a lower cap if it was linked to more proactive help, including subsidised work experience, but with working tax credit also under pressure the impression given is that they're just seen as a group to be squeezed.
Electorally, this has few consequences, since they are a minority who in any case tend not to vote. But as a largely stand-alone initiative it's not a decent policy.
But the average family that owns a house and falls on hard times eventually has to downsize. Why should it be different for those on benefits?
Underlying this with some on the left is an implicit acceptance of benefits as a lifestyle choice. That is what the majority don't like and what the Tories have been so much more effective at tapping in to. The reality of course is that those who think it is a valid choice tend to be middle class intellectuals with little or no experience of life on benefits. Those that have tend to a different view.
Unless the Tories lose the reputation for fiscal prudence, Labour are going to be out of power for a good few yrs, in fact I doubt they could get back to majority status, their best hope will be the dreaded Labour/SNP join up.. and that was enough to frighten voters into the Tory camp
Its going to be a long road back, and none of the current leadership candidates inspires.
Indeed, and what was once a strength is becoming a liability. Some Labour voters are beginning to think that they are despised by these posh know-it-alls.
The Tories may eat babies and call them oiks but they don't spend all their time sneering at them. Some in Labour are aware of this - hence the reaction to Mrs Duffy and Ms Thornberry.
These are big numbers and I expect there to be more big numbers in this Parliament. There may well be another 1m gouged out of the public sector. There will almost certainly be more self employed. Hopefully the trends on overall employment will continue. There will be many fewer families entitled to in work benefits and they will taper more sharply on earnings.
By 2020 the electorate will have changed again and not in a way that would favour the current Labour party. They need to get ahead of the curve on this and start thinking about how they are going to appeal to the electorate then, not what it was in 2010.
The reason Labour kicked up a fuss when the Con-LD coalition extended and equalised the benefit's rules is the massive preponderance of middle-class articulate Labour supporters on the boards of housing associations who kicked off about it; people who carry far more weight within the Labour movement than their raw numbers would indicate.
But overall, it's not an unpopular move: those who don't pay it see an element of fairness, those in the private sector see their discrimination being ended, and those not benefitting from it in the public sector saw people living in larger accommodation than them having to start paying for it.
In any case, there'll be new benefit cuts to come. Labour would be much better advised to campaign on those.
But the longer it exists the less of an issue that becomes as the adjustments are painfully made. I hope lessons have been learned for the application of benefit cuts to come.
It might just end the Benefits Trap. A pernicious, frustrating and life sucking experience.
The other changes we have had over the last five years (many of them built on existing policies introduced towards the end of the labour government) have had an enormous impact on attitudes to benefits from the recipients themselves.
There is a resigned acceptance that if you can work you probably will have to. This is a real turn around. It might seem that the extensive and expansive use of sanctions is unfair, but the tough love has worked.
The government has successfully aligned benefits with the world of work. When you work you are held responsible for your actions. If you are late, or just dont turn up you can lose your job, ditto if you make no effort. When you work you pay your rent/mortgage from your income. If you want a bigger place you pay more for it.
Welcome anyway! You'll fit right in.
Just checked Betfair's tennis offering. They now have stats back up (huzzah) but they're inferior to the old page (boo).
Instead of one big stats page, you get a smaller offering on each individual match. The detail is somewhat, but importantly, decreased, so you get a head-to-head comparison but you only get raw numbers (1:5, say) rather than who won on what surface by what margin, which used to be available.
It is both significantly better than nothing and significantly worse than it was.
Edited extra bit: welcome to pb.com, Mr. Reestev.
It is an old political joke that what the party needs is to change the electorate; both of these have seen the truth behind the joke.
The same applies to Labour.
thanks. Im reading it now...
That's the quickest route to irrelevance, my friend
http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/RE0Y2L423P1S3
I've not read The Door Wherein I Went but if it's half as good as A Sparrow's Flight it'll still be worth it.
To quote her:
"There are so many in the world who view sick and disabled people as sub-human; parasites on our economy. "
Erm no, there arent. In fact I dont think I have ever met anyone who expresses that view.
And every time, rather than take responsibility for its actions, say sorry to those they hurt, Labour just blames the evil, baby-eating Tories, rather than accept the pain is theirs alone. It is the inevitable consequence of market forces.
Trouble is, Labour, the electorate is wising up to you.
They see you as being anti-business - the very business that is going to create them jobs. They see through the cynical raising of top income tax rates to 50% in the dying days of a 13 year regime, just to rant about an incoming Govt. making "tax cuts for millionaires" - seemingly unaware of the irony of that claim being made by a front bench made up of people who are themselves millionaires. The electorate sees the cynical "weaponising" of the NHS. A party less interested in medical outcomes than in political advantage. They see a Labour party that sells mugs to itself proclaiming how it will control immigration, whilst having overseen - without asking the voters - the biggest change in the make-up of our population since the Norman conquests.
In short, they see the only thing about Labour that is world-class: its hypocrisy.
The In Campaign needs most of all to get the youngsters engaged, there is a decisive majority for In in the under 40's; so high levels of engagement would be helpful. Interesting to see that in the over 65's there was a slight majority for Out, but not by much.
Young people have a much more positive attitude to Europe, and see the advantages of freedom of movement, continent wide environmental protection, and an independent court of human rights that the government of the day cannot overrule.
In the private rental market getting house shares and single bedroom accommodation is pretty easy, in fact the early changes that the government made about single room/shared room rate for single people right up to 35 created a big demand in the private sector, which it met pretty darn quickly.
The Door Wherein I Went is, for me personally. much more interesting because it's focused on his spiritual journey and faith rather than "the facts of his life". But it was written in the 70s, so only at the end of Act 2 of his political career.
The Sparrow's Flight (taken from the phrase in Mark) is a more conventional autobiography and was written in the late 80s, I believe, so more comprehensive.
Geoffrey Lewis's biography is also good, and written with the co-operation of Hailsham so pretty comprehensive
http://www.randomhouse.com.au/books/geoffrey-m-lewis/lord-hailsham-a-life-9780712666251.aspx
http://www.lizkendall.org/liz-kendalls-speech-at-de-montfort-university-29-may-2015/
Benefits do not remedy child poverty, they remedy parental poverty. The better way out of Child poverty is Kendalls approach as described in the speech yesterday.
It is an area that enrages passions for those impacted. But I repeat, I have never met anyone who meets the caricature she paints.
Betting PostNot one but two health warnings: my tennis tips have always been patchier than a pirate's eye, and I've had rotten luck in F1 this year, so the following tips should be treated with the same caution as a half-starved crocodile.
Excepting the last, these French Open Betfair tips are all Third Round matches in the Men's Tournament, and play [I think] today.
Anderson to beat Gasquet at 3.9. The Frenchman's very good but I feel this is more a 2.2-2.5 shot, and Anderson's underestimated.
Goffin to beat Chardy at 1.58. Short odds for me, but I think Goffin's got a great chance and his odds are too long.
Coric to beat Sock 2.98. Again, more of a 50/50, I think.
Final tip plays tomorrow and is a Ladies' Tournament Fourth Round Match:
Sharapova to beat Safarova in straight sets, 2.2. Sharapova's been playing well and has a 5:1 head-to-head advantage over her opponent.
This is a great organisation that we helped scale up from a concept being trialled in a single school
Liz is not statist, she wants public services shaped by their users to a much greater extent than either Tories or Labour have envisaged in the past.
Identifying quality education as a key need is easy, I'm not sure that she has shown any indication she knows how to achieve it.
Fix the real problem of workhouse wages at the bottom , enable people to be able to live and not require / depend on benefits.
It suits the Tories and/or their clones Labour to keep the system as it is. Neither of them want to fix it really, just tinker with it to suit their respective audiences. hard to blame anyone for not working when choice is £30K for lying in bed or £12K for minimum wage job.
I don't see these voters as the natural constituency of either of the main parties, but you can see why aspiration might be important to them.
The state is not society.
If out want to win, they should contrive a campaign that disengages people (rather than riles them into voting), with as much boredom and as little passion as possible. The best chance for BOOers is a low turnout election where only older kippers vote.
Our problem is that someone at the 50th or 80th percentile point on the education spectrum is much less trained than someone at the same point in Germany or Sweden on Korea. If you go to a MacDonalds in Sweden, the guy behind the counter will speak perfect English. The man sweeping the street will speak perfect English too. Yet virtually no-one not in the top 10% most educated in the UK will speak anything other than pretty awful French. Likewise, the German apprenticeship system produces people who leave school and vocational training at 20 with very good marketable skills.
In a globalised world, where none of us are going to get paid more than our skills command on the world stage, perhaps we be worrying more about the skills of the 80%.
Perhaps it's wishful thinking on my part but for lots of reasons I believe the Labour Party will never get near power again, it has completely lost its sense of purpose and I don't see anybody in the party capable of leading them to an election victory.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/thunderer/article4455525.ece